Updated with information from Thomas Sheridan's book "Arizona: A History."
By now you’ve probably heard a land acknowledgment, even if you weren’t quite sure what it was.
It often happens at the beginning of a meeting or an event, especially at the university. A host starts the program by saying something along the lines of: “I want to acknowledge that we’re on the ancestral lands of the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui people.”
The words might be more formal, more verbose or more edgy — “stolen” or “unceded” are often invoked — but that’s the basic idea.
The University of Arizona formally adopted a land acknowledgment last year, long after they had become common at UA events. The Tucson Unified School District has a student read one before each board meeting. Other institutions, like the Tucson Museum of Art, also have one.
And now the Pima County Board of Supervisors will consider adopting a land acknowledgment at Tuesday’s meeting.
“This is not only a respectful thing for us to do as a board, but I think it’s an acknowledgment of our shared history,” Supervisor Adelita Grijalva said at the first discussion of the idea, at the Dec. 21 board meeting.
Other supervisors seemed inclined to support the idea, which Grijalva proposed, but they simply wanted to land on an agreeable text. Then, the acknowledgment could be recited at each meeting, along with the pledge of allegiance.
What seems simple at first glance, though, is not simple at all. This aspect of our history is fraught with violence, trauma, denial and misunderstanding.
A land acknowledgment can even do more harm than good, especially if it does nothing but lighten people’s guilt. So it’s worth pondering what you should consider when deciding on a land acknowledgment.
What’s the point?
The question that struck me when I first started hearing land acknowledgments at UA events some years ago was, “What’s the point?” It’s one thing to acknowledge that the university, and Tucson itself, sit on land that belonged previously to the Tohono O’odham people.
It’s a fact, yes, and it brings up the ugly truth of our national history: That the country was built on the displacement of Indigenous people from their own homes and lands.
But just saying that doesn’t do much good. That’s the top concern I heard when interviewing a variety of people with an interest in the practice.
“A land acknowledgment is worth whatever time and effort our nonnative allies put into it, and also worth about as much as the action they take after it,” said Wayne Ducheneaux, executive director of the Minnesota-based Native Governance Center. “It’s good to do it, but there has to be action.”
This group, which helps Indigenous nations strength their governance, has tackled the issue in a couple of publications. First they published “A Guide to Indigenous Land Acknowledgment," and a few months ago, “Beyond Land Acknowledgment: A Guide.”
They emphasize that serious research and learning, along with an action plan, should go along with any land acknowledgment.
When I asked Ned Norris, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation, about the idea, he was skeptical but supportive.
“Our ancestors have lived in this region since time immemorial," he said. “The surrounding jurisdictions, governmental entities have been here for quite a few years. I don’t want to sound sarcastic, but it’s kind of interesting that this many years later people want to start acknowledging our existence, or our ancestors’ existence in this area.”
“I do think it’s a good idea,” he went on. “I think it’s a much better idea if we don’t just simply put the words together and make that statement at the beginning of, in this case, every county board meeting session, but that it’s more than just words.”
Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cazares-Kelly, a Tohono O’odham tribal member and the first Indigenous person elected to countywide office here, sent me a statement supporting the idea.
“Land acknowledgments are an important way to learn about and honor the local Indigenous communities in the area,” she said. “Creating a statement pushes organizations, universities and even governments to interact more with the Indigenous community whose traditional lands they occupy. It creates an opportunity to learn more about the true history of the region.”
Words matter, too
History, of course, is also contested terrain that we can stumble over in our word choices.
The University of Arizona’s new land acknowledgment, introduced in July, says:
“We respectfully acknowledge the University of Arizona is on the land and territories of Indigenous peoples. Today, Arizona is home to 22 federally recognized tribes, with Tucson being home to the O’odham and the Yaqui. Committed to diversity and inclusion, the university strives to build sustainable relationships with sovereign Native Nations and Indigenous communities through education offerings, partnerships and community service.”
As these things go, it’s a good statement. For me, though, it brought one question to mind, based on a book I had recently read: What about the Apache people?
That book, by Karl Jacoby, is called “Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History.” In part, it documents the infamous Camp Grant Massacre of more than 100 Apaches carried out by Tucsonans near the confluence of Aravaipa Creek and the San Pedro River. It also reveals the rough and contested character of Tucson and Southern Arizona in the 1800s.
Much of the life of this area revolved around Apache people. There were the so-called “Apaches Mansos,” 486 of whom lived in Tucson in 1835.
"Tucson in the 1830s was as much an Apache as a Mexican community," historian Thomas Sheridan wrote in "Arizona: A History."
And there were the many Apache people living just east of the area, across Redington Pass at the San Pedro River and beyond to the east, north and south.
It’s hard to talk about the Apache history sympathetically, because Apache people are described in accounts from the 1700s and 1800s mostly as raiders and attackers, to be feared and fought. The attackers of 1871, most of whom were Tohono O’odham, justified the attack as a response to Apache attacks against them.
Apache people go unnoticed in local land acknowledgments because they don’t have a reservation near Tucson. The San Carlos Apache reservation is a 90-minute drive to the north. Their historical presence also brings up touchy issues we’d rather ignore altogether.
“Which Indigenous communities you recognize is incredibly complicated,” author Jacoby, a history professor at Columbia University, said when I spoke with him Friday. “That’s one of the many challenges of this.”
“The fact that the Apaches are not close to Tucson now is an artifact of this 19th century history of violence,” he said.
So how do we acknowledge that?
It’s about land
Some people have turned against land acknowledgments altogether. A married couple of anthropologists, Valerie and Mike Lambert of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, wrote an influential piece last year challenging their value.
As members of the Association of Indigenous Anthropologists, they’ve convinced the American Anthropological Association to suspend their land acknowledgment and the use of Indigenous blessings at their professional meetings.
One of their key objections to land acknowledgments, Mike Lambert said: “They did not acknowledge Indian ownership of the land. They’d say Indian ‘stewards’ and ‘custodians’ of the land. ‘Nice of them to take care of it, and now it’s ours.’"
“It’s extremely important in a land acknowledgment that there is an acknowledgment of ownership,” he said. “If you’re going to say it’s a land acknowledgment, it needs to be about the land.”
In addition, repeating over and over that settlers took over the land can have a traumatizing effect, especially if it leads nowhere else.
“The way the land acknowledgments get told, there’s an erasure of the trauma of land dispossession,” Mike Lambert said. “It’s like, ‘Way back when, wonderful people were taking care of the land. Now they’re gone.’ “
When I asked Norris about land acknowledgments opening up generational wounds, he was matter of fact.
“If some folks feel it’s going to bring up a historical trauma, then maybe it needs to. So be it,” he said. “That’s the reality of some of the things our ancestors have faced over the course of time.”
Perhaps that says something about how non-Indigenous people like me should approach land acknowledgments.
They’re awkward at times, but they ought to be. And if they get the facts right while leading to something more, they’re probably worth doing.
