Land Acknowledgment

SONI BROWN: Each night right after dinner, my husband and I pack the two young ones in our pull-along wagon for a walk. The traffic is light on Hualapai Way. Sometimes we wheel the wagon from the sidewalk into the double lanes of the road. We used to be able to walk across big plots of land, but new tract houses have sprung up on them. In the near distance, there’s another new feature of our neighborhood—the Las Vegas Ikea.

[Sounds of Suburbia]

Where we live, people keep to themselves. I catch glimpses of my neighbors as they drive into their garages. I catch glimpses through open blinds, as they watch TV with a drink in hand. I catch glimpses on Thursday nights when they take their trash cans to the curb. I wonder who on my street can call this home? Who can say this piece of ground is the same place their ancestors walked and lived on? Who carries knowledge of this place in their bones from before Ikea blocked the view of Red Rock Canyon? Before the strip mall with the Dollar Loan center and Tide Cleaners. 

How do we connect to, and give respect to, what came before us? If you’ve been to a cultural or academic event in recent years, you’ve probably heard what’s called a Land Acknowledgment—a formal statement to acknowledge the Indigenous Peoples on whose land the event is taking place. Here’s Cody Gambino, introducing a program called Neon Lit at the Writers’ Block in downtown Las Vegas.

[audience applause]

CODY GAMBINO: Hi everyone, welcome to tonight’s reading. Before we get started, I would like to take a moment and acknowledge that we are on the stolen and unseated land of the Southern Paiute nation.

BROWN: Land acknowledgements are meant to connect us to a place and the people who came before. I don’t feel settled here because I am not from here. I want to know more about this recognition, and to see what promise it might hold to stimulate deeper connections. But I wasn’t surprised to learn it’s not that easy.

TONI JENSEN: I'm Toni Jensen, author of Carry: Survival on Stolen Land.BROWN: Toni Jensen is an author and educator. Her book, Carry came out the week before our interview. 

JENSEN: Well, I think they started from a really good place and for a really good purpose, which is of course, just to simply acknowledge whose land we're sitting on at any given moment. About 15 years ago, you started to hear more and more of them, especially in Canada and New Zealand and Australia, they become really common there. In the States, it's still a little hit or miss. It seems like in intellectual or academic circles you hear more land acknowledgements than you do in rural spaces. I doubt that at the Walmart shareholders’ meeting they're doing land acknowledgements, for example, although maybe they would surprise me. 

BROWN: Toni makes a good point. I’ve only heard land acknowledgements in academic circles. At first, it felt a lot like performative wokeness; like a chore.

BROWN: Sponsorship message. Check. Social media shout out. Check. Land acknowledgement. Check, check!

JENSEN: I think most land acknowledgements though, fall slightly short of that and perform kind of lip service in a performa sort of way by just saying ‘some Cherokee people used to live here’ or ‘hey, the Paiute used to be here,’ and the ‘used to’  implies a past tenseness that is problematic because, of course, the Native people often from those tribes still live in all of those areas. 

[sound of land acknowledgment being recited in Chicago]

I think that gets lost a little bit and it applies a past tenseness. It also sometimes can seem so performa in academic circles as to be almost a mockery of what it was originally intended to do.

[sound of speaker struggling to pronounce Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi Nations]

Someone stumbles and kind of just, mispronounces sometimes the name of the tribe and then moves on hastily and seems to be embarrassed. I'm not sure what purpose that serves if it's done in kind of that quick, ‘I know we're supposed to do this, but I don't really understand why it's meaningful,’ sort of way, I don't really know what that's accomplishing.

BROWN: How should people craft land acknowledgements?

JENSEN: Yeah, I've heard a couple non-indigenous friends who've given really good land acknowledgements. I think part of what made them so good was that they mentioned people who are from the land specifically—living people. So this notion then that it's not a pastness. If you're talking about a friend's work or a contemporary writer's work, then you're citing someone who's living. Maybe if everyone acknowledges the land we live on formally like that long enough in every single space, people will just start every day to think more about the native people whose land this was before they moved into it. It's possible.

BROWN: The only member of my family who can call Las Vegas her birthplace is my daughter Lucy. We kept her umbilical cord to plant in Red Rock Canyon because that is what we traditionally do in my home country of Jamaica. Old timers there tell you it’s the only way to stay connected to the land and its people. And after talking to Toni, I wanted to connect, not just talk to, but walk the land with someone who has that experience. 

[walking sounds]

FAWN DOUGLAS: This is a part of my story, a part of my history. I say it as mine as in I’m not the voice of my entire tribe. Our tribal council, our elected officials, are. 

BROWN: Fawn Douglas is a Las Vegas-based artist and member of the local Paiute Tribe. She has used art to represent visual land acknowledgements. 

DOUGLAS: There's a certain method people use to take a whole rock part out of the side of a mountain, or the side of the hill, or wherever these etchings are. I wanted to preserve that within my art.

BROWN: Fawn and I walk the land at the Old Mormon Fort near Downtown Las Vegas. Except she calls it the Old Fort, dropping the Mormon part. 

DOUGLAS: We're at the Old Fort, formerly known as the Old Mormon Fort here in Las Vegas, Nevada. It's basically on the corner of Washington and Las Vegas Boulevard. This was an ancestral—well all of Vegas is—but this was a traditional ancestral homelands of our Southern Paiute people.

BROWN: Fawn wears her hair bone-straight and loose under a broad brim-hat. We walk to the shade by the gurgling stream and I ask her how it feels to be under the same sky as her ancestors or walking along the spring that encouraged settlers to the Las Vegas valley. She looks up. I watch her gaze at the replica of the settler’s fort, then the cottonwood trees by the stream. There is not much here outside of the visitor center that represents the Paiute’s way of life. Some of the trees, Fawn says, have been here long before the settlers.

[Running water]

DOUGLAS: It's kind of like one of those bittersweet things, because it feels good to be here knowing this is a place of my ancestors, but it's called the old Mormon Fort and you could see a recreation of the old Adobe bricks. They have a workshop where they actually make the bricks here and they keep restructuring it.

BROWN: We walk to the visitor center. A statue of settler and rancher, Helen Stewart stands guard. She is a tiny woman. Fawn points out Helen’s beaded vest, something Fawn thinks Helen got from the Paiutes. The plaque by the statue says Helen deeded 10 acres of land in 1911 to establish the Las Vegas Paiute Colony. A gift from the Mother of Las Vegas.

DOUGLAS: Well, she was actually paid for that. Yes, I  read that she is definitely a friend of the Paiutes and she employed some, she was a collector of our basketry and such but you know, she was paid for that. It wasn't like ‘kindness of your heart, give this land.’ It's just like, ‘actually how much should I get for that kind of thing?’ And she was paid $500.

[Sound of weed whacker]

DOUGLAS: This is a part of the original springs areas in Las Vegas. We have many differences— [laughs]. This guy. Colonizers always taking space, even when they're not trying to. It's like, ‘oh, you're doing an interview over there? Let me turn on my weed whacker. You know, there's several thousand acres here, but let me actually just weed whack that one spot where you are sitting.’

[Laughs]

BROWN: That is an exaggeration. There aren’t several thousand acres but the man did interrupt our interview twice with small talk while turning on his weed wacker to cut a barely-there patch of grass. I ask Fawn what land acknowledgments are supposed to inspire.  

DOUGLAS: I guess how to care for it. How to be a better human.  You know what, these are things that I'm also learning, too. We're learning about protecting the water, protecting the lands, and people are rising up all over the world really for this message of protection. We need to protect our mother earth and we're all her children. 

BROWN: My conversation with Fawn was in English, as you’ve heard, yet I couldn’t help but think as we talked how limited English often feels to me. In Jamaica, I grew up speaking patois, which is influenced by English, Spanish and West African dialects. I miss so many of its nuances, but I also know they only make sense in Jamaica. I wanted to think not just about the meaning of land acknowledgment, but also about the very words and rhythms we use.

endawnis is an inter-Tribal woman who often navigates land acknowledgements using the limitations of the English language. 

ENDAWNIS SPEARS: My name is endawnis Spears. endawnis is a Ojibwe word. I am the director of programming and outreach and one of the cofounders of the Akomawt Educational Initiative, which is a majority Indigenously owned consultancy that works with places of knowledge to incorporate indigenous perspectives into their work. 

BROWN: endawnis thing the language we use is a big part of connecting to a place.

SPEARS: The land gave us our languages. Our languages were not developed in England and our languages were not developed in any European country. Our languages best reflect the landscape we live on, and so acknowledging that English is an imported good—that English is an imported language that was not born here. English does a great job of reflecting England. It does a great job of reflecting the landscape of England and the values of that culture, but it does not reflect our values here and it will never accurately reflect this landscape that we live on because it wasn't born here.

BROWN: endawnis isn’t saying English is hard to use, just inadequate. 

SPEARS: The word for dirt has a negative connotation.

BROWN: endawnis credits this idea of dirt to Chris Newell, the executive director of the Abbe Museum in Maine.

SPEARS: And I’m going to go ahead and borrow it from him. In English, if you call someone dirty, then that's a negative thing. That's an insult. This dirty thing from the earth. But in Passamaquoddy, in his language, the literal translation for soil are “the molecules of our ancestors.” So when you have an understanding of this landscape as being part of your kin, as your ancestors are buried in this place, and for us as Dine people, as Navajo people, our umbilical cords after we are born are buried in these places. Then we are tied to this container that in English we referred to as land, but in our tribal languages, we refer to as these containers of ceremony. 

BROWN: The ritual of planting the umbilical cord naturally came up in conversation. Fawn told me she climbed high into Red Rock Canyon to bury her daughter’s umbilical cord deep into the dirt. This way, animals can’t dig it up. If they dug it up, then her daughter would wander far from home. I began my conversation with David, the author of The Heartbeat at Wounded Knee, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, by telling him about this tradition in Jamaica, too.

DAVID TREUER: It's really cool that you guys do that with your umbilical cords; we do the same exact thing. Just this summer, when I was back home on the rez with my kids, we were out in the woods doing some family stuff and I pointed to this tree and I'm like, ‘hey guys, guess what? All of your umbilical cords are buried under that tree.’ Right under that stump, because I put that stump on top so animals wouldn't dig it up—and that's powerful. 

My name is David Treuer. I’m Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation, and in terms of occupation, I mean, take your pick: writer, professor, father, warrior, you know, all of the above. 

BROWN: For many Indigenous people, land relates to all aspects of existence—culture, spirituality, language, law, family, and identity. I don’t live in my home country any more and probably never will. I want what land acknowledgments implores us to do, which is to be the person entrusted to care for the land. To remember those who came before and still live, love and learn on these lands. To continue providing a deep sense of identity, purpose, and belonging. I ask David if land acknowledgment could bind nonindigenous people to the land.

TREUER: I've never heard a land acknowledgement that actually acknowledges the land for its own sake which might create an awareness that we all have to live on it now. With climate change and other things, that's getting increasingly difficult—that would be pretty cool.

I don't know. Maybe the best thing to do is like a reverse land acknowledgement. It's like, ‘hi, I'm David Treuer. I'm really happy to be speaking to you here today. I'd like to acknowledge all of the non-Indians, who've decided to fuck with us and make your homes here without our permission. I'd like to acknowledge your bullshit. And I'd like to acknowledge your sort of greed and rapacity and your desire to make a better life at our expense. So thank you for that and enjoy the show.’

BROWN: This is not an uplifting way to end the piece. But this is not an uplifting piece to begin with. I came to feel, talking with Toni, Fawn, endawnis, and David, just how much distance there is, how much there is to grieve and how land acknowledgement barely touches upon it. Perhaps recognizing the grief is the way we cleave to the land. 

When Fawn and I walked side by side, I thought of our ancestors. Fawn and I are the descendants of two continents ravaged by others for profit and power. Then those people asked us to forget, as a nation was created. What keeps me connected is remembering whose land this really belongs to. My daughter’s umbilical cord is in a box within boxes in the garage. It doesn’t feel right to plant it yet. I think my ancestors would understand.