Land acknowledgement statements.

Like all Oregon schoolchildren, I learned the state song "Oregon, my Oregon" in third grade. It begins:

"Land of the Empire Builders
Land of the Golden West
Conquered and held by free men
Fairest and the best."

In recent decades these words make people uncomfortable. It is nicer to think that the indigenous people here welcomed White settlers, so they weren't conquered, just outnumbered. And "free men" reminds people that Oregon took an anti-slavery position in 1859; the state constitution forbade Black people to live in the state -- not so good. And "fairest" meant Whitest, not the most committed to equal justice.

The problem with the song isn't that it is wrong. It is that it was all too true, and an embarrassment.

I find arrowheads on my farm on tilled land after a rain. The shiny obsidian bits glisten. Indigenous people lived here before gold miners and farmers began arriving after 1850. The Rogue River provided salmon; the native oak savannah provided acorns. White settlers clashed with Indians, with surprise attacks and retaliatory attacks. There were more White settlers and soldiers than local Indians, and they were better provisioned. The surviving Indians were moved 200 miles to the north, which ended the Rogue River Indian Wars of 1855-56. Ugly history.

In 1883 my great-grandfather bought 180 acres of that fought-over land from a man who acquired it under the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850. This Act was an effort by the U.S. government to encourage settlement of the Oregon Territory, which is to say White settlement. It gave 320 acres to every unmarried White male -- and 640 acres to a husband and wife -- if they settled on and farmed the land. The land was fertile and farmable, so people came.

Public meetings in recent years have been offering up "land acknowledgement statements." Here is a sample, suggested by a guide to these statements:

"We honor and pay respect to their elders and descendants─past, present, and emerging─as they continue their stewardship of these lands and waters. We acknowledge that settler colonization resulted in land seizure, disease, subjugation, slavery, relocation, broken promises, genocide, and multigenerational trauma."

I wish people would not do these statements, although I suspect no one wants to be the one to suggest it to a group of well-meaning conscientious people. So I will be the one.

They do more harm than good. They feed the narrative that over-educated guilty White liberals hate America, and are doing virtue performance theater with no real practical intent to do anything. The statements are a critique of the very process that built the country -- westward expansion. There is no limiting factor on guilt one should feel. Every American has a basis for feeling that he or she, too, deserves recognition for an injustice. Blacks for slavery and Jim Crow; Jews for antisemitism; Irish immigrants for discrimination; Catholics for the Ku Klux Klan; German immigrants for discrimination during World War I; the Japanese for internment in World War II; Chinese for the Exclusion Act, women for centuries of second class citizenship. It doesn't stop. Everyone through their ancestry has been an oppressor and oppressed. Today White male millionaires and billionaires feel aggrieved. They know they pay more taxes and at a higher marginal rate than do others. They consider themselves the Atlas, carrying the world, amid the 47% who are "takers."

Land acknowledgment statements sentimentalize an idealized past that never existed. Humans have been conquering and replacing each other since the beginning of time. The records are scarce here in Southern Oregon but a variety of tribes overlap and struggled and displaced one another. Modoc. Takelma. Siletz. Latgawa. Klamath. Chinook. Shasta.

Fight over turf continues to this day. The Cow Creek Band of the Umpqua Indians and the Coquille Tribe are rivals over who has local "hunting rights", now in the modern form of the right to build a casino in Medford to profit off local gamblers.

There is no original owner to acknowledge. The land is "conquered and held" until a new conquerer comes along. It is the bloody reality of human history.

The history of Poland for the past 2000 years is better recorded than is the history of indigenous people at my farm, and it makes my point.

From 100 to 400 Current Era, that land was settled by people from the west, by Germanic people. Then the Huns. Then the Avars. Then the Magyars. Then the Vikings. Then the Bohemians. Then the Mongols. Then the Swedes. Then the Austrians, Germans, and Russians. In the 20th Century, the Germans and Russians divided it, occupied it, and committed genocide on it.

To whom would a land acknowledgement be made in Poland? To whom should we make it in Southern Oregon?

If Americans feel the need to have a moment of quiet reflection on the brutality of war or of the debt we owe previous generations, it be better to settle for the Pledge of Allegiance. As Abraham Lincoln said, it is for us, the living, to dedicate ourselves to our ideals. We are all the descendants of brutal conquerors. There is unfinished work to do. The Pledge reminds us of the aspiration that we are a nation dedicated to liberty and justice for all. Let's go with that.