Their land acknowledgment is a cynical move to innocence

(Nick, , 12-7)

On the topic of lip service, what do you think of land acknowledgements? I recently came across one on the website of Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet subsidiary that’s spending $900 million to build a “smart city” on the Toronto waterfront. Here’s what I think about land acknowledgements. I ride a bike to work. Imagine I wake up one day and my bike is gone. I’m late for work. Maybe I’m going to get fired and I won’t be able to feed my family, but I’m shit out of luck. And then some guy rolls by on my bike and is like, “Hey. I want to acknowledge that I’m riding your bike. I know it’s really bad that I stole it, but I hope we can work towards reconciliation.” And then he cruises away on my bike! I guess it’s not that land acknowledgements shouldn’t happen, but they just make me think, “Uh, okay. Great.” But this kind of gesture isn’t limited to land acknowledgements. People often use the language of decolonization when they’re not actually talking about giving back our land. What they’re actually talking about is indigenization. That’s an inclusion framework: let’s include Indigenous people in their own dispossession. Let’s have more Indigenous clergy! Let’s have more Indigenous people in the police, in the military, in the forces that occupy our land!