On Native land
Land acknowledgments can do a lot of good—if they’re rooted in solid process and relationships.
Last fall I was invited to teach a course on Native American history for a mainline Protestant church in a Chicago suburb. The invitation came from the congregation’s antiracism task force, which noted that the group had never focused on Native issues and was eager to learn. This proved true.
The course took place over two Zoom sessions during the Omicron surge. About 50 very engaged people attended each one. None of the students were Native (save my mom), and most admitted they had been taught little to none of the history we explored. Some were genuinely shocked to learn about US Indian policy. Others were surprised to learn that sovereign Indian nations still exist within the territory of the United States. (Throughout this piece I will use the term Indian when referring to US policies, which are enacted via the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Some of us refer to ourselves as Indians or American Indians; as Native, Natives, or Native Americans; or as Indigenous. Most of us more regularly refer to ourselves by the name of our particular tribe.)
On the first night I asked the participants to identify the tribal nations upon whose traditional homelands the church and its city stand. No one could do so, which was not a surprise. For the next session I assigned homework: find out. Find out whose homelands these are, where those tribal nations are now and why, and anything you can find about their language and culture.
