Blog #4: Land Acknowledgement

Recognizing the darker aspects of history have been at a crossroad in recent years. I keep noticing people encouraging discussions regarding discrimination and violence while others choose to boldly ignore those parts. With controversies surrounding recognition of cases of displacement, tragic parts of history and culture are being demonstrated to modern audiences. Recognizing displacement has its own problems, as there are many methods of doing so that not every negatively affected agree upon. When researching methods of amends, I noticed that land acknowledgement of land originally resided by Native Americans, while rather simple in definition, often creates wide-ranging discussions regarding history and its censorship and the erasure of Indigenous culture. Upon making that realization, I decided to make it the topic of my essay.

Henry P Huntington's "What Do Land Acknowledgements Acknowledge?" highlights the depths of land acknowledgement. The simplicity of land acknowledgements and how some Native Americans disagree with the practice is mentioned, but the article primarily focuses on the atmosphere and conversations acknowledgements can encourage. Awareness and recognition of displacement is much more preferable to knowing ignorance. Land acknowledge is recognition of an occurrence of displacements centuries and the continuing injustice effecting the descendants of Indigenous people, heavily implying that those who have benefited are determined to fix current discrimination issues and to make sure that such instances do not occur to future generations.

Original Article: What Do Land Acknowledgements Acknowledge?

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