Native lands acknowledged by institutions occupying it today

examples of public recognition of Native lands underlying today's economy, 12/2020

 Since late 2019 there has been the occasional public statement of recognition by event hosts and by institutional organizations that the land presently being used did first belong to native peoples at the time of contact with outsider (non-native) immigrants. What typically was held in common for all generations of that indigenous community in various ways was traded, purchased, deeded by treaty, or simply taken by force of arms or threat of harm. That is not to say that the named society tied to a given landscape was timeless ever since the most recent ice-age retreated 10,000 years ago; or that indigenous groups did not displace each other through agreement, by conflict, or in a slow drift of incremental changes in environment and series of  small events. 

The public acknowledgements that appear footnoted on websites, are declared during an event rollcall of sponsors and thank-yous, or show up in email signature lines since 2019 are part of a growing awareness of the injustice coming from undermining a Commons system of land use incidentally, on purpose, or through carefully calculated design. Infiltrating an individual title holder concept of legal control of land ownership that can be commodified to market values has led to many positive planetary changes (for humans at least), as well as harms to the natural environment and social landscape.

It will be interesting to see if similar practices appear in the corporate sector, in local government (perhaps laying open liability for restoration, for careful reviews of historical treaties), or even at military installations both active and mothballed. As the #BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement expands and strengthens, sparking public awareness of injustice not limited to people of African ancestry, this public acknowledgement of historical abuses of Native people with real-life and ongoing consequence could conceivably come to be normal, expected, and potentially obligatory. In so doing, the risk may be reduced of slipping off track into the tangle of Political Correctness that glibly discounts ideas, words and deeds driven by public image and peer approval instead of motivated by integrity. With public statements to respect the prior cultural landscape of meaning and land uses, light is reflected back to illuminate modern, mechanized, and de-personalized consumer society. If such a change in buying and selling, social relations, and worldview comes to pass, then these early acknowledgements from 2019 will be seen as modest but powerful levers of change - not just in English-speaking countries, but world-wide wherever indigenous ways of life cling to the land and waters.