Land acknowledgement statements: the Indians return.
A war is never really over, not for the loser.
The winner can move on with his life and absorb the new status quo into a day-to-day reality.
The loser cannot forget so easily.
Something is taken from the people who lose a war, and the world is out of joint. The "lost cause" of the American South has survived in various forms for seven generations so far. The Indians who lived at the base of the Table Rocks have never forgotten either.
Yesterday I wrote that land acknowledgment statements are worse than pointless. They backfire. They are virtue-signaling performance theater, with no real practical intent to change anything. They feed the idea that over-educated White progressives hate America because they criticize the very process that built the country -- westward expansion.
Land acknowledgments are said by the wrong people to the wrong people.
It isn't White liberals who need to remember the previous occupants of the land. Land acknowledgements are better when voiced by the fifth and sixth generation of the Indians who were displaced, so that their children know where they came from. Let them feel the tug back to an ancestral home.
I don't feel guilt for owning and caring for a farm built on conquered land, but I recognize that the dependents of the people displaced from it still exist. And I understand the pull they might feel for a place their ancestors lived.
Some Indians returned a decade ago. The Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians bought a 1,500-acre farm nearly adjacent to my farm, on land below the east face of Lower Table Rock. They bought the land for $15 million in a market transaction. They had money from a busy Seven Feathers casino 70 miles up Interstate-5.
The Siletz Tribe, a confederation of multiple tribes that existed in Oregon west of the Cascades, just came home, too. They bought land below the western flank of Lower Table Rock. They wrote that Siletz Tribe history is "inseparably linked" to the Table Rocks. Siletz newsletter.
The Siletz have their story:
As over 2,000,000 acres of our homelands were being taken up in Donation Land Claims by thousands of U.S. citizens, the United States knew it could not guarantee clear title to its settlers unless our people formally ceded those lands to the United States by treaty. It is a pattern that has been repeated over & over across this continent. Indian land was recognized as Indian land only so long as settlers, miners, timber barons or whoever weren’t interested. Once one of the above became interested however, they generally moved in and held it by forced occupation. . . .
The U.S. Army (for the first time) fought our people when they attacked our villages along the Rogue River near Table Rocks (killing about 50 & taking 30 women & children prisoner). At about the same time, Captain Tichenor landed a group at what is now Port Orford with intentions of establishing a town-site near the main village there. About thirty of our people died at “Battle Rock” in the conflict that followed. There had always been tension & skirmishes, but now, our people were threatened by an all-out Extermination movement growing among the settlers – which was especially popular among the miners, who were now invading formerly secluded areas of SW Oregon & NW California by the thousands.
Read more here: Siletz website.
The Siletz Confederation has its own casino in Lincoln City. on the Oregon coast. It is developing another one in Salem. Indians attempted to preserve in their treaties a primary resource of the tribe, by reserving their access to fish in all the usual and accustomed areas. Those treaties were broken. New generations find new resources, in this case gamblers. They are using that resource to come home.
Satellite view: Indians now own land on each side of the horseshoe-shaped Lower Table Rock. The dark green inverted "U" is Lower Table Rock. The Rogue River snakes along the bottom left to right, west to east. My farm is on the right, eastern edge of this photo.
There are, of course, arguments for giving the illegally seized Hawaii back to indigenous Hawaiians, of giving back most of Oklahoma, and so on. Putin argues for Crimea (and all of Ukraine), while Kyiv has arguable supremacy over that late-comer, Moscow.
New Zealand. Australia.
To whom should belong most of Africa? Ther ancestors of all of us came from there; personally, I want the Olduvai Gorge.
I’m not Indian but I have mixed feelings regarding land acknowledgments. I agree it can be performative and when I hear one I often think that if I were Indian I would ask the speaker: “So what are you going to do about it?”. However, I do think it’s a good reminder for those of us who have only been here in the West for 6 or 7 generations that there were (and still are) cultures here that thrived for 100+ generations who had knowledge that we never had.