Defy the nonsense of indigenous land acknowledgments

How do you make the progressives on campus so “horrified” that they spring into action to defend their sacred ideology? Make an indigenous land acknowledgment that doesn’t match their view of history and watch them lose their minds. Let me describe how that happened to me.

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As the university says on its web page, explaining its suggested version:

"This language template is spoken by UW leadership during events to acknowledge that our campus sits on occupied land. We recognize that this is a difficult, painful and long history, and we thank the original caretakers of this land."

This is a blatantly political statement. My office and classroom are on occupied land? Then why don’t we give it back to the rightful owners? And if we’re not going to give it back, then why bother acknowledging them? Activists often say that making such an acknowledgment is a way to counter the erasure from our collective memory of the awful treatment Native Americans have suffered at the hands of European settlers.

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There’s just one problem. What if you don’t agree with them? After all, if we are making an “acknowledgment,” wouldn’t you want us to say what we really believe? They can’t possibly be asking us to affirm something that we believe is false, can they? I decided to test this by crafting my own version of the land acknowledgment:

"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."

I don’t claim that this represents ultimate truth, but it is an alternative viewpoint that I value based on John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. I included this on my course syllabus for the winter quarter, and the reaction has been extreme. Allen School officials declared this to be “offensive” and said that they were “horrified” and promised to have it removed immediately. Our director said that it creates “a toxic environment” in my course. I have written elsewhere about how the school censored my syllabus, apologized to my students, and created an alternate section of the course so that offended students could be taught by a different instructor.