“The University of Massachusetts Amherst acknowledges that it was founded and built on the unceded homelands of the Pocumtuc Nation on the land of the Norrwutuck community….We begin with gratitude for nearby waters and lands, including the Kwinitekw — the southern portion of what’s now called the Connecticut River. We recognize these lands and waters as important Relations with which we are all interconnected and depend on to sustain life and wellbeing.”
So begins the official land acknowledgment statement of my university, the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Colleges, universities, and other social institutions are increasingly posting similar declarations to call attention to the taking (theft) of unceded native lands, which, according to UMass. Amherst:
“…recognizes and respects Indigenous Peoples as traditional stewards of this land and the enduring relationship that exists between Indigenous Peoples and their traditional territories.”
As important and necessary as is this first step, it is not without its critics.
The University of Washington investigated Stuart Reges, a computer-science professor for including his land acknowledgment statement in a course syllabus.
“I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property, the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.”
An administrator termed Professor Reges’ statement “offensive.” “Offensive,” though, to whom?
Reges is suing the university for violating his First Amendment rights to freedom of speech.
We are witnessing throughout the country a contrived controversy over the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the schools, even into the university years. National and state legislators and some parents groups oppose age-appropriate discussions of our collective history that contradicts the glorious image of the U.S. as the “shining city on a hill.”
Unless one is a member of a tribal nation who continues to live upon their tribal lands, the land on which they reside has been stolen by white European-heritage primarily Christian men for their personal use and financial advantage.
A concept that some people find extremely difficult to understand is that the notions of “American exceptionalism” and “meritocracy” are lies, myths perpetuated by the white supremacist male Christian ruling capitalist elite to erase the foundational racist hierarchy of power and privilege on which the country was founded and continues for “function.”
While literally millions of First Nations people inhabit what is today known as the United States, they as a group remain largely invisible to most other U.S.-Americans. The image of so-called noble “Redskins” in football and “Braves” in baseball, and countless other sports teams were constructed through a historically capitalist revisionist and romanticized lens, back to some fairy-tale time and place when the European “settlers” (a.k.a. “invaders,” “thieves,” “murderers”) broke bread in some mythical first Thanksgiving with “the natives,” where all was fine forevermore.
Historian Joel Spring refers to “cultural genocide” defined as “the attempt to destroy other cultures” through forced acquiescence and assimilation to majority rule and standards. This cultural genocide works through the process of “deculturalization,” which Spring describes as “the educational process of destroying a people’s culture and replacing it with a new culture.”
An example of “cultural genocide” and “decentralization” is evident in the case of Christian European American domination over Native American Indians (First Nations people, Indigenous peoples], whom European Americans viewed as “uncivilized,” “godless heathens,” “barbarians,” and “devil worshipers.”
White Christian European Americans decentralized indigenous peoples through many means: confiscation of land, forced relocation, undermining of their languages, cultures, and identities, forced conversion to Christianity, and the establishment of Christian day schools and off-reservation boarding schools far away from their people.
The expansion of the republic and movement west, in part, they justified by overriding philosophical underpinnings since the American Revolution. Called “Manifest Destiny,” it was based on the belief that God intended the United States to extend its holdings and its power across the wide continent of North America over indigenous peoples from east coast to west. The doctrine of “manifest destiny” embraced a belief in American Christian Anglo-Saxon superiority.
A definition of “settler” is “a person who settles in an area, typically one with no or few previous inhabitants.” I would add an essential condition that for this person to settle, the area must not have had prior claim by others who call it their home.
How could Columbus have discovered what would later be called “the Americas” when people lived on this land for an estimated 12,000 years after coming over the Bering Isthmus during a glacial age when sea levels dropped? How can one “discover” people who have been here so long? Actually, First Nation people discovered Columbus on their land!
We must critically interrogate (analyze) the concept of “settler,” of “discovery,” of “the New World” as distinguished from “the Old World.”
Land Grant Universities
Several universities have begun to acknowledge the people of the lands taken to establish their campuses. Most of these land acknowledgment statements, though, do not “acknowledge” the reasons compelling tribal nations to vacate their lands to white people who overhunted indigenous peoples’ food sources and invaded neighboring territories squeezing native peoples onto smaller and less productive parcels.
Today, only 0.109% of the student population at the University of Massachusetts identify as American Indian or Alaska Native heritage.
The notion of ceding state or national lands stolen from First Nations people was introduced in the U.S. Congress by Representative Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont in 1857 as his “Land Grant Act.” It was, however, vetoed by President James Buchanan.
Morrill resubmitted the measure in 1861, and the new President, Abraham Lincoln, signed the Morrill Act into law in 1862. Following its passage, the government granted lands to railroads companies, as old-age pensions, homesteads to farmers, and to colleges and universities.
These “land-grants” were given federally to the states for them to sell for the purpose of raising funds or to endow to “land-grant” colleges and universities. As stated in the provisions of the 1862 Act, the mission of these institutions of higher education was to focus on the teaching of practical agriculture, science, military science, and engineering without excluding the humanities in response to the expanding industrial revolution.
As an afterthought, not until 1994 with an expansion of the Land Grant Act, tribal colleges and universities were “given” land-grant status by the federal government.
While land acknowledgment statements have become a good first step in the longer process of coming to terms with the “hard” history of European-heritage domination and control over the original human inhabitants upon “the Americas,” we must go further if we as a nation are to heal from the deep wounds of colonialism resulting in land theft, and human and cultural genocide.
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