Land Acknowledgments

[Anon1787]

In the original case, the professor was not forced to include the acknowledgment. But he was prohibited from including a dissent from the acknowledgment in his syllabus.

I'm required to include various statements in syllabi not only about the course description and learning outcomes, but also at one place about the university mission. If the "land acknowledgment" statement says "The university holds that the land it is situated on was stolen from native peoples and the university advocates for the return of the land to those native peoples", how different is that requiring professors to include the university mission on a syllabus?

I'm also still unclear if universities do hold this position, then what is the hold up on returning the land? Don't universities own the land they are on? Why not just get their lawyers to sign over the deeds?

I would argue that the difference is that this isn't just compelled speech (which government may require in certain circumstances) but compelled political speech, which is forbidden by the 1A.

In Wooley v. Maynard, SCOTUS ruled: "The State may not constitutionally require an individual to participate in the dissemination of an ideological message by displaying it on his private property in a manner and for the express purpose that it be observed and read by the public." Remember that the course syllabus is the intellectual property of the instructor, not the university.

In Pacific Gas & Electric Co. v. Public Utilities Commission of California, SCOTUS ruled that forcing an entity to carry a political message that it may or may not agree with creates an unconstitutional pressure to respond on the part of the entity being forced to carry the political message: "Should TURN choose, for example, to urge appellant's customers to vote for a particular slate of legislative candidates, or to argue in favor of legislation that could seriously affect the utility business, appellant may be forced either to appear to agree with TURN's views or to respond. This pressure to respond 'is particularly apparent when the owner has taken a position opposed to the view being expressed on his property.'" In this case, an instructor like the UW professor would feel compelled to respond if he were forced to include a land acknowledgement in his syllabus.

I'm guessing that this is why UW as a public university bound by the 1A only "recommends" that the land acknowledgement be included in the syllabus. Whether that recommendation combined with a ban on alternative views that UW deems to be "offensive" satisfies the 1A is not obvious to me.

[downer]

The university mission I need to include in my syllabus refers to some entity they call "God." Obviously, it is a private institution. Public universities cannot require religious speech. But my main point is that the requirement is that "The university believes X", not that "I believe X." It's also not "X is the case." So it more like reporting than religious speech. Seems like the land acknowledgments are more like reporting what the university believes than having to take a position on the issue.

[Anon1787]

The university mission I need to include in my syllabus refers to some entity they call "God." Obviously, it is a private institution. Public universities cannot require religious speech. But my main point is that the requirement is that "The university believes X", not that "I believe X." It's also not "X is the case." So it more like reporting than religious speech. Seems like the land acknowledgments are more like reporting what the university believes than having to take a position on the issue.

If the university is taking a position on who rightfully owned the land (which is itself a controversial political stance) and advocates for the return of the land or fair compensation, then it's engaging in political speech. Because students might reasonably interpret the instructor as endorsing the university's belief due to the university using the instructor's personal intellectual property (syllabus) to convey the university's belief, then any instructor who disagrees will feel pressure to respond in order to make it crystal clear to students that the university's belief is not the instructor's belief. That's compelled political speech.

[marshwiggle]

The university mission I need to include in my syllabus refers to some entity they call "God." Obviously, it is a private institution. Public universities cannot require religious speech. But my main point is that the requirement is that "The university believes X", not that "I believe X." It's also not "X is the case." So it more like reporting than religious speech. Seems like the land acknowledgments are more like reporting what the university believes than having to take a position on the issue.

So because the land acknowledgement is kind of vague, embodying no specific commitment to anything it's OK that they require it? That's a ringing endorsement, if I ever heard one.

[downer]

Nothing I said implied the acknowledgment has to be vague. It could be a notice: "The university beileves the morally right action is to hand back stolen land to native peoples on Jan 1, 2025."

[marshwiggle]

Nothing I said implied the acknowledgment has to be vague. It could be a notice: "The university beileves the morally right action is to hand back stolen land to native peoples on Jan 1, 2025."

Presumably including the land on which the university sits? Stakeholders including faculty, students, etc. might want a bit of clarity on what that means. For instance, if the institution may effectively disappear in 3 years many potential students would probably pass on applying. Similarly, many potential faculty and staff might forgo applying for any advertised positions.

[Parasaurolophus]

It does not follow that mocking a symbolic practice necessarily means that the substantive issue to which it refers is entirely without merit

Of course not. But the way in which one mocks something communicates one's beliefs about the underlying value of the issue. I think the act of mockery here was pretty clear, and his added remarks confirm that.

UW is a public institution and thus subject to the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, which, unlike free speech hellscapes like Canada, does not allow government to punish disrespectful or hate speech. The course syllabus is a curious hybrid. According to National Council for Teacher Quality v. Curators of the University of Missouri (2014), the syllabus is the intellectual property of the instructor. Therefore it does not seem obvious that a university may willy nilly decide what sort of political speech may and may not be included in a syllabus since it is necessarily associated with the instructor.

It's hardly willy-nilly. And you'll recall that SCOTUS has upheld regulations of personal conduct which nevertheless impose burdens upon free speech, provided those burdens aren't too onerous (Casey is probably the most famous case of this). In this case, since nobody is even required to include any statement, let alone a single one, exercising minimal oversight to ensure that deranged faculty don't publish offensive material seems entirely compatible with those rulings.

What are the things that non-Indigenous people today are doing and have done that have caused harm, and how does that harm compare to governments ignoring treaties in the past, residential schools, etc.?

In this country, they include cultural genocide (remember, the last residential school closed in 1997), forced displacement, kidnapped children, medical experimentation, failure to investigate murders, the police practice of dropping Indigenous people off a hundred kilometres away without a coat in the winter (I confess I thought this was only a thing in the prairies in the '60s and '70s, but there have been recent incidents further east), failing to obtain consent or to consult about land use, etc.

How do they compare? Well, they're on the same continuum, especially since many of them are essentially the same harm (viz., ignoring treaties and violating duties to consult and obtain consent).

Because the economic collapse of the region would be so good for indigenous communities?

It was a joke. But if we want to take it seriously, then I strongly doubt increased taxation would lead to the region's economic collapse. It's already broken by housing prices. The average family income is something like 60k, but houses cost millions, apartments are thousands a month, and food is waaaaay more expensive than elsewhere in the country (outside of the far north). If anything is holding back economic development in the region, it's unaffordability.

Yeah, what are we hearing from the communities that would be affected?
Most of the energy, argumentation around these social justice issues is typically coming from liberal whites, as with racial things that the USA is bickering over.

Here, they got together and officially recommended the use of land acknowledgements as an easy first step. Nobody thinks they're sufficient or the end of the story.

This is the point; those issues are hard to fix (and will take ongoing effort, with slow progress, in perpetuity.) Crying, apologizing, and putting "land acknowledgments" on every piece of paper and webpage are, by comparison, easy-peasy, and get immediate ego-gratification rewards.

Kicking and screaming and doing everything in your power to prevent even the smallest symbolic change from occurring doesn't exactly do much for the prospects of the necessary significant changes, though, does it?

Faculty in my department say they're broadly sympathetic to the idea of including Indigenous content in their courses, but because there's virtually no such content in the discipline, it can't be done. When I have given specific examples of high-quality content that does exist and which tackles issues relevant to several of our courses, the response by individual instructors has been that that's great, but they've achieved a perfect balance in their courses and they don't want to start including new readings, since that would require a slight change in the topics they survey.

While that's entirely their prerogative, it suggests to me that their hand-wringing is disingenuous, at best. Incidentally, I have one colleague who was designing a new course who publicly proclaimed that he had looked hard but couldn't find any female authors on a topic (his PhD topic, I might add), but that if we could suggest any for his syllabus that'd be great. Off the top of my head I presented him with over thirty (I teach the subject, but it's nowhere near my PhD specialization). Not a single one made it onto the syllabus, though.

It seems to me that there's a performative kind of contrarianness and obstacle-gathering at work in many such discussions. One might even call it... vice-signalling.

So because the land acknowledgement is kind of vague, embodying no specific commitment to anything it's OK that they require it? That's a ringing endorsement, if I ever heard one.

But it wasn't required. You can't just make up facts to fit your feelings.

[marshwiggle]

What are the things that non-Indigenous people today are doing and have done that have caused harm, and how does that harm compare to governments ignoring treaties in the past, residential schools, etc.?

In this country, they include cultural genocide (remember, the last residential school closed in 1997), forced displacement, kidnapped children, medical experimentation, failure to investigate murders, the police practice of dropping Indigenous people off a hundred kilometres away without a coat in the winter (I confess I thought this was only a thing in the prairies in the '60s and '70s, but there have been recent incidents further east), failing to obtain consent or to consult about land use, etc.

How do they compare? Well, they're on the same continuum, especially since many of them are essentially the same harm (viz., ignoring treaties and violating duties to consult and obtain consent).

Most people today are not kidnapping children, doing medical experimentation, etc.

Again, trying to get everyone to claim guilt has no relationship whatsoever to their own actions. Nearly everyone who hears about the things you have mentioned is disturbed by them and wants things to improve in the future. That doesn't require implying they are somehow personally responsible for any of those just by being non-indigenous.

Anyone who has come from a strict religious background can probably attest to the frequency of the use of guilt as a motivator. However, most charities and other organizations have been much more successful by showing people how their contributions can make things better.  Guilt makes people want to appear to comply to avoid the stigma, but often results in all kinds of secret hypocrisy.

[Parasaurolophus]

How do they compare? Well, they're on the same continuum, especially since many of them are essentially the same harm (viz., ignoring treaties and violating duties to consult and obtain consent).

Most people today are not kidnapping children, doing medical experimentation, etc.

Correct. But most people alive today were alive when it did happen. The Sixties Scoop, for example, started in the 1950s and continued into the 1980s. Forced sterilization of Indigenous women continued well into the 1970s, and there are documented cases from the 2000s and 2010s, too (IIRC the most recent allegation is from 2018 or 2019).Where even a basic thing like Indigenous 'status' is concerned, women weren't fully able to 'pass' it on until 2019.

I have a friend who's in the absurd situation of having been counted as white until a few years ago, when he became (incorrectly!) counted as Métis. That's because each of his grandfathers had to renounce his Indigenous status to volunteer for WWII. Then when they returned to their reserve and had children there, those children were counted as white because they had one non-status (male) parent.

Again, trying to get everyone to claim guilt has no relationship whatsoever to their own actions. Nearly everyone who hears about the things you have mentioned is disturbed by them and wants things to improve in the future. That doesn't require implying they are somehow personally responsible for any of those just by being non-indigenous.

I don't think anyone is trying to get everyone to claim personal guilt. But fixing things is surely our collective responsibility. And we certainly can't fix things by covering them up, as the so-called 'critical race theory' bans in the US are trying to do to Black history. And we absolutely were covering things up until very recently. Our own educations can attest to that fact.

[artalot]

Also, most of these statements say nothing about giving the land back. They simply acknowledge that the institution sits on what once was (or in my case, still is) indigenous land. This is just a fact, the same as saying that the Britons inhabited England before the Roman invasion or that VCU Doha is located on land belonging to the country of Qatar.

I actually haven't seen any universities that advocate returning their land - where would they go? The most daring I have seen are statements that support indigenous sovereignty in territories and reservations already occupied by native peoples. Not sure what's so radical about saying that you support upholding the law. Some acknowledge that land removal was part of a larger colonial policy of genocide and/or assimilation, but, again, that's an historical fact. I don't see how requiring people to include facts about the university's history and mission violates anyone's free speech. Are we going to start rioting because we must include academic dishonesty policies, required readings, or learning objectives? 

[Anon1787]

Nothing I said implied the acknowledgment has to be vague. It could be a notice: "The university beileves the morally right action is to hand back stolen land to native peoples on Jan 1, 2025."

Even mere required statements of fact (reporting what X believes) can be considered compelled speech depending on circumstance. But it is difficult to avoid viewing a statement like that in the context of a syllabus as anything other than political or ideological.

It's hardly willy-nilly. And you'll recall that SCOTUS has upheld regulations of personal conduct which nevertheless impose burdens upon free speech, provided those burdens aren't too onerous (Casey is probably the most famous case of this). In this case, since nobody is even required to include any statement, let alone a single one, exercising minimal oversight to ensure that deranged faculty don't publish offensive material seems entirely compatible with those rulings.

Casey is not relevant since that case involved a requirement to state facts deemed to be "integral to conduct" or immediately relevant to an act (medical procedure) about to be performed (on the patient). There is no equivalent conduct involved in including a land acknowledgment in syllabus. It's an interesting constitutional question as to why a professor may mock a political position in a class discussion but not in a syllabus.

The more fundamental question is why subjecting students attending a public university to a one-sided statement in a syllabus to promote a pet political cause is good practice even if it manages to avoid the problem of compelled political speech.

[downer]

Also, most of these statements say nothing about giving the land back. They simply acknowledge that the institution sits on what once was (or in my case, still is) indigenous land. This is just a fact, the same as saying that the Britons inhabited England before the Roman invasion or that VCU Doha is located on land belonging to the country of Qatar.

I actually haven't seen any universities that advocate returning their land - where would they go? The most daring I have seen are statements that support indigenous sovereignty in territories and reservations already occupied by native peoples. Not sure what's so radical about saying that you support upholding the law. Some acknowledge that land removal was part of a larger colonial policy of genocide and/or assimilation, but, again, that's an historical fact. I don't see how requiring people to include facts about the university's history and mission violates anyone's free speech. Are we going to start rioting because we must include academic dishonesty policies, required readings, or learning objectives?

Yes, that's true of the statements I have heard read out. Indeed, it has felt like some kind of religious or spiritual model for the moment. People have been invited to reflect on the facts. I've found those moments puzzling. What am I personally meant to feel? Of course, participating in a benefit received on the basis of using stolen land makes us all accomplices and bad people. We should all move off the land. I do wonder what other moral or spiritual insights people are looking for. We think about it for 90 seconds and then move on. It feels more confessional than political. If the aims are political, then they should be transparently political, and demands should be voiced.

[Anon1787]

Also, most of these statements say nothing about giving the land back. They simply acknowledge that the institution sits on what once was (or in my case, still is) indigenous land. This is just a fact, the same as saying that the Britons inhabited England before the Roman invasion or that VCU Doha is located on land belonging to the country of Qatar.

I actually haven't seen any universities that advocate returning their land - where would they go? The most daring I have seen are statements that support indigenous sovereignty in territories and reservations already occupied by native peoples. Not sure what's so radical about saying that you support upholding the law. Some acknowledge that land removal was part of a larger colonial policy of genocide and/or assimilation, but, again, that's an historical fact. I don't see how requiring people to include facts about the university's history and mission violates anyone's free speech. Are we going to start rioting because we must include academic dishonesty policies, required readings, or learning objectives?

As if academy dishonest policies or learning objectives are comparable. Of all the possible historical "facts" that could be included in a statement in a course syllabus, you expect us to believe that this is the one that they just happen to choose with no ideological or political motive.

Yes, that's true of the statements I have heard read out. Indeed, it has felt like some kind of religious or spiritual model for the moment. People have been invited to reflect on the facts. I've found those moments puzzling. What am I personally meant to feel? Of course, participating in a benefit received on the basis of using stolen land makes us all accomplices and bad people.

That is the intent and it's ideological to suggest that you are an accomplice and therefore a bad person.

[downer]

The issue of a university requiring or encouraging land acknowledgments on syllabi is a solid one of academic freedom, to be sure. It has its own interest, though it is also pretty tiresome.

But that's a very rare case. How many universities have any requirement? None as far as I know. UW has a recommendation. What is far more common in my experience is that some faculty or administrators will start off a meeting with a land acknowledgment. It is ritualistic. Why single out that issue to start the meeting with? Aren't there plenty of morally weighty issues that people could start out meetings reflecting on?

Presumably the purpose of the acknowledgments is also to start conversations such as the one we are having. And to get people to look up information. I was just reading about Land-Grab Universities.
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/land-grab-universities
That ends with this statement:

"The first step is understanding and acknowledging your history, and then the second step is committing yourself to the principles on which the land-grant system was founded," said Dunn, president of SDSU. "And if you do those things, then the answers emerge."

It's an optimistic view about answers emerging. I'm not sure that's evidence-based.

[artalot]

Most unis have a whole page dedicated to their founding, another to their mission, more than one to their sports accomplishments, and a paragraph dedicated to a land acknowledgement. I'm not sure why it's beyond the pale to create a land acknowledgment and ask faculty to link to it or include it on their syllabi. Truth, I am much more upset about my uni's made up learning objectives and the way they affect my teaching than I am about a land acknowledgment that has no bearing on what I say in the classroom.

As for what you're supposed to meditate upon, I'm not sure you are. You seem to think these things are about making white people feel guilty. They're not about white people. They're about Indigenous people.
I agree that it would be nice if the statements would commit to educating Indigenous peoples, or maintaining a faculty position or available courses in Indigenous histories and would report on how well the uni is meeting that goal. I hope we will get there someday. But we get there by making a start, as Parasaurolophus has been saying. This is a beginning of a process, not the end.