Over the last several years, an odd ritual known as a “land acknowledgment” has become the fashionable way to begin academic, arts, and other elite events. Like a woke version of the Pledge of Allegiance, these land acknowledgments involve the public recitation of a prepared script.
But rather than declaring loyalty to the United States, land acknowledgments emphasize the illegitimacy of this country by claiming that the land on which an institution is built rightfully belongs to groups of people who were present before the U.S. was founded.
Land acknowledgments make this general point in a very specific way by declaring that the actual land on which the event is taking place is the home of a certain Native American tribe or set of tribes. Progressive institutions have also placed these statements on their websites, saying that their organization is housed on…
