I value your thorough and balanced post on the land acknowledgments controversy.
Land acknowledgements can be more than “settler contrition theatre.” To be historically accurate—and for that reason extra useful to students—they ought to report how many occasions the land might have been taken or retaken by migrating tribes over millennia. Columbia College historian Jacques Barzun offered a relevant historical summary in his e-book From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present (2001):
“The Caribs whom Columbus first encountered had fought and displaced the Anawaks who occupied the islands. The Aztecs whom Cortez conquered had at first descended from the north and destroyed the earlier civilization. To the north and east many of the tribes lived in perpetual warfare, the powerful exploiting the weak, and several—notably the Iroquois—had slaves. In brief, what took place on the newfound hemisphere in early fashionable times continued the follow of the aged: in ancient Greece alien tribes marching in from the north similarly in the generating of the Roman Empire, in the peopling of the British Isles by Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Normans in France, Italy, and Spain by Franks, Normans, Lombards, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and later by Arabs. Everywhere you go the tale is one particular of invasion, killing, rape, and plunder and profession of the land that belonged to the vanquished. Right now, this fusion or dispersion of peoples and cultures by signifies of dying and destruction is abhorred in basic principle but flourishing in reality. Africa, the Middle and Far East, and South Central Europe are however theaters of conquest and massacre.”
French author and thinker Pascal Bruckner explained modern-day Europeans as “[b]rooding about its past crimes … constantly prepared to feel pity for the world’s sorrows and to choose responsibility for them.” In a context exactly where substantially of the rest of humanity refuses to engage in comparable self-flagellation (Russia, for example, is hectic rehabilitating Stalin), single-minded European and American contrition could start to look suspiciously like a new variety of congratulatory exceptionalism.
–Gary Pavela
University of Maryland (Honors School college and Director of Pupil Conduct, retired)