David Stirrup reflects on the politics of land acknowledgments.
During the Friday night Roundtable at the recent Entangled Modernities Conference, settler historian Professor Coll Thrush threw down a challenge to the audience. Responding to the question “what does it mean to do Indigenous Studies in the UK?”, a provocative enough formulation in itself, he asked “what would a land acknowledgement in the UK look/sound like?” Picking up the challenge, and thinking carefully about the ethical demand of such a statement—that of recognizing the complex histories that precede the gathering—and the inherent positionality implicit in non-Indigenous scholars’ attempts to meet such ethical demands, Michael Falk opened Saturday’s programme with an Acknowledgement of Country.
I thought to begin today, I would take up Coll’s challenge, and do an Acknowledgement of Country here in Kent. I would like to begin by acknowledging my personal connection to Country in Australia. I was born on Guringai land, and later lived and worked on Eora, Darug, Burramadagal and Gundungarra lands around what is now Sydney and the Blue Mountains.
There are also connections here in Canterbury I would like to acknowledge. On the High Street, a few hundred metres from where I am now, stands The Beaney Institute, Canterbury’s central library. It was founded in 1899 with a £10,000 bequest from Charles Beaney, who was born in Canterbury but made his wealth on Wurundjeri, Boonwurung and Wathaurong lands in Melbourne
Up the road from the Beaney stands Canterbury’s famous Cathedral. In the Cathedral is the grave of Sir George Gipps, a Colonial Governor of New South Wales. He is probably most famous today as the namesake of Gippsland, where lie the ancestral lands of the Gunai/Kurnai.
With these connections in mind, I would like to acknowledge the Guringai, Eora, Darug, Barramudagal, Gundungarra, Wurundjeri, Boonwurung, Wathauraong and Gunai/Kurnai peoples, and all Indigenous peoples whose histories and cultures are a subject of this conference. I pay respects to their elders, past and present, and I offer an especial welcome to any Indigenous persons who are with us today.
Neither Coll’s provocation nor Michael’s response were made without knowledge of the rather fraught status of land acknowledgements, particularly in institutional contexts in the US and Canada. For some, the land acknowledgement has become mere lip service to an history that remains otherwise unexamined; what use is a thank you to the people on whose land one’s multi-million dollar institution stands, if the issues they are dealing with are around unemployment, educational attainment, or other structural deprivations that remain unchanged? What good an acknowledgement of land theft without land back? At a more granular level, Nambé Pueblo blogger Debbie Reese notes, among other cautions, that while “you might want to acknowledge one of the 39 tribal nations [in Oklahoma] today, but you know (right?) that many of them are there because of the Indian Removal Act” (https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2019/03/are-you-planning-to-do-land.html). The acknowledgement itself may inadvertently erase the original/rightful (how are we even going to parse the ethical connotations of that?) owners of the land. Anishinaabe scholar Hayden King, meanwhile, notes that “It’s one thing to say, ‘Hey, we’re on the territory of the Mississaugas or the Anishinaabek and the Haudenosaunee.’ It’s another thing to say, ‘We’re on the territory of the Anishinaabek and the Haudenosaunee and here’s what that compels me to do’” (https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4973371). Speaking about the acknowledgement he helped write for Ryerson University in Toronto, King illuminates the gulf between intention and reality when welcoming people into territories in which layers of complex history, including diplomatic histories embodied in treaties between Indigenous and (settler) colonial nations, risk being entirely smoothed over by performative utterances. Acknowledgements of Country in Australia have faced similar criticism by Indigenous leaders, while politicians on the right have long labelled them a politically correct gesture that ultimately means little.
Needless to say, these… concerns… pick up a whole new set of complexities in a British context. At one end of the spectrum, a simple practical problem is self-evident: insofar as a land acknowledgement or Acknowledgement of Country acknowledges and thanks the original people on whose lands we, the gathered, are guests, who do we identify as the hosts? I have, on occasion, heard thanks given to “the original owners” of a given English space—an important nod to a deeply layered history, but one with unspecified referents, and which could be working harder given the several centuries during which the majority of English land has been owned by a handful of aristocrats. I have heard acknowledgements made more specifically to certain Britonic tribes—the Iceni in Norwich, the Dumnonii in Exeter, for instance—but besides invoking a particular kind of British nationalist narrative, this similarly opens up layers of complexity, from the gaps in histories of who preceded these people (the Dumnonii, for instance, like the Cantiaci in Kent, while irrefutably the resident populations when the Romans arrived, almost certainly displaces earlier groups) to the more pressing question of the relationship between contemporary communities and those historical forebears. While the former concern is present in land acknowledgements worldwide, as Reese’s comments above suggest, the latter is far more straightforward. If land acknowledgements serve any political purpose, it is surely to remind all gathered that, in spite of colonialism’s ruptures, Indigenous communities persist, continuities prevail in those spaces. Can the same be said of contemporary Norwich and the Iceni? Turning to the Celtic nations arguably reduces that concern; acknowledging the people of Wales at an event held in Cardiff, in other words, might have clearer purchase. The colonial relationship in that context, of course, is with the English; so what, then, of the histories such an unnuanced address would erase? The complicity and investment of generations of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish people in the building of the British Empire, for instance; or the considerable gulf in economic development and political autonomy between the Celtic nations and Indigenous communities around the world, to give another example. There are, of course, many points of affinity between Indigenous experiences of colonialism and that undergone by the Irish, Welsh, and Scottish, but there are also considerable differences and the occlusion of those differences presents a new set of problems.[1]
Michael’s Acknowledgement of Country largely avoids these concerns, of course, in taking our attention to the relationships between Canterbury—and two men of Canterbury in particular—and Indigenous communities in Australia. In doing so, it reminds us of the ways in which the actions of earlier Britons thousands of miles away resonate in our built environments here in the UK. It reminds us, just as slavery tours in London, Liverpool, and Bristol do, of the ways in which the funds that built that environment were generated, at least in part, from stolen labour and stolen land. Put simply, that wealth, those legacies are impossible to separate from the history of colonial imposition, displacement, and theft. And for those of us who have not grown up in Australia, it is a crucial reminder that Indigenous communities are still there, still identify with ancestral places, still struggle against settler colonial authorities to assert their custodianship and ownership of those lands. Nevertheless, in making this kind of move, an unintended consequence occurs, in that in identifying these specific colonial figures, it arguably centres both Beaney and Gipps. Rather than focusing solely on the Indigenous owners of a given site, it takes us to the moment of colonial perfidy; to colonisation as the start of the story, rather than a moment in a far longer tale. It becomes, potentially, a Welcome to Empire, carrying a whole host of unintended—but no less unwelcome for that lack of intention—freight.
Is that a necessary compromise? Or is the Welcome itself merely a problematic appropriation of Indigenous protocol in a UK setting? Who does it serve, whether it recognises the Iceni, or acknowledges the violence perpetrated against the Gundungarra? Or to be more precise, how do we ensure it is more than a performative utterance, undertaken with good intent by those in the UK who recognise the ongoing harms of colonialism, but ultimately meaningless for the communities it invokes? How do we ensure, for instance, that acknowledging the Gundungarra in Canterbury has some kind of positive impact in New South Wales?
[1] This is, we acknowledge, a can of worms that cannot be adequately addressed in a paragraph. We welcome blog posts by anyone interested in expanding this aspect of the conversation.