Land Acknowledgements Quotes

“It Was Never Stolen Land. It Was Bought and Paid For. Now the Indians Are Trying to Renege.” By James Fulford, December 4, 2020, VDARE

[Fulford is quoting Felix S. Cohen:]

Fortunately for the security of American real estate titles, the business of securing cessions of Indian titles has been, on the whole, conscientiously pursued by the Federal Government, as long as there has been a Federal Government. The notion that America was stolen from the Indians is one of the myths by which we Americans are prone to hide our real virtues and make our idealism look as hard-boiled as possible. We are probably the one great nation in the world that has consistently sought to deal with an aboriginal population on fair and equitable terms. We have not always succeeded in this effort but our deviations have not been typical.

It is, in fact, difficult to understand the decisions on Indian title or to appreciate their scope and their limitations if one views the history of American land settlement as a history of wholesale robbery."

The quotation is from The Legal Conscience: Selected Papers Of Felix S Cohen,1960.”
― Felix S. Cohen, The Legal Conscience: Selected Papers of Felix S. Cohen

“A land acknowledgement or territorial acknowledgement is a formal statement, often spoken at the beginning of a public event, that it is taking place on land originally inhabited by or belonging to indigenous people.

In Canada, land acknowledgements became popular after the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission report (which argued that the country's Indian residential school system had amounted to cultural genocide) and the election of liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau that same year.[2] By 2019, they were a regular practice at events including National Hockey League games, ballet performances and parliament meetings. Critics of land acknowledgements have described them as excesses of political correctness or expressed concerns that they amount to empty gestures that avoid actually addressing the issues of indigenous communities. Ensuring the factual accuracy of acknowledgments can be difficult due to problems like conflicting land claims or unrecorded land exchanges between indigenous groups.

In the United States, the practice of land acknowledgements has been described as "catching on" as of 2020.”
― Wikipedia: Land Acknowlegement

“These are the ancestral lands of. . . .' The phrase carries both truth and trauma that can slip past uneducated ears. Indigenous homelands on the Coastal Plain are places of deep connection and remembrance, but they are also places where horrific colonial experiences befell our ancestors. The trauma of those experiences still flows through our communities today. The pain of racial oppression and cultural loss combines with the radical transformation of our homelands, and it haunts us from generation to generation.”
― Ryan Emanuel, On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice