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Holding My Tongue
Last Friday, I attended a high school musical starring my younger daughter. Though she’s only in 8th grade, she really stole the show. She played the female lead in a Cinderella-type story, the virtuous peasant girl who marries the Prince. Proud papa barely begins to describe how I felt.
It’s also a special venue for me, where my older daughter performed a couple of years ago in her first semi-professional role. It’s at the old YWCA in Tucson, where I spent a great deal of time during the Reagan years. It was the home pool of my high school swimming team. The pool is now a parking lot, though part of the deck is still there. So I got to recall my sports glory days, such as they were, remembering how in my senior year, we handed our arch-rival Amphi High team their only dual-meet loss. They did beat us at the city championships, but only because of the diving.
These were the happy parts of Friday night, which overwhelmingly outweighed the annoyance that leads to the title of this post. Me holding my tongue. Yes, folks, it’s possible, though rare.
In the lobby of the theater was one of those “land acknowledgment” statements, something about how the theater “acknowledges” that it sits upon the “unceded” blah-blah-blah — you get the sense that they mean “stolen” — ancestral land of the loopi-loohi people or something. (I think that it was actually the Tohono O’Odham, a local tribe.)
There was a small fee to see the show. I thought about asking for my money back.
I wanted to ask if the theater, which apparently believes that it was stolen from the injuns, plans to give the land back to the tribe. I wanted to ask how they had the nerve to collect a ticket fee to allow access to a venue that doesn’t belong to them.
I did hold my tongue.
I have to admit that I hate the hypocritical Woke ideology. I try not to hate the Wokeists themselves. The latter is difficult sometimes.
As a Christian believer, should I hate? I think that I should. I listened to a great sermon by Voddie Baucham over the weekend, titled Do Not Love The World. This is from 1 John 2:15. I think that I’m supposed to hate Satan, and hate sin, and hate the evil systems and ideologies that rule this world.
James Lileks’ post about Mt. Rushmore, noting at the end the Target-backed crusade to give the site back to the indians, led me to recall my brief annoyance on Friday.
Published in General
The correct terminology is “conquered”.
Virtue signaling without having to pay a price. Imagine if someone said, “Hey, I feel really bad about stealing your car. I like the ride, so I am going to keep it but please know I do feel bad for your loss”?
I saved that to listen to later. Baucham is a powerful preacher and probably the only person I ever heard of named Voddie (is that short for something?).
I think that Voddie is his legal name. As I recall, he’s Voddie Jr., though his mother and father were not married. He has an amazing life story, being raised in the hood by a teenage Buddhist mother, and somehow coming to faith in Christ by college. He was a college football player at Rice.
I agree that that is the correct terminology, and that it’s good for people to know about it. I do a lot myself to make such things known. But I don’t like these public ritualistic recitations. I find them to be somewhat of a mockery of the history and the people involved.
Living in Texas the last five years, these “land acknowledgements” have been theoretical and at a distance for me. Land in Texas has changed hands so often it would be impossible to figure out a “legitimate” claimant.
So last week when I was in Seattle and encountered a “land acknowledgement” by the Museum of Flight (albeit only on its website, not anywhere that I could see in the building) was the first time patronizing a function that apparently thinks it is illegitimately occupying the space it uses.
So, why haven’t they handed everything back to the group they think it was stolen from? Perhaps the museum rationalizes that the museum is a noble purpose that is superior to whatever use the original “native” tribe would have for the land?
I understand that cost-free virtue signaling is the likeliest answer, but I’d like to hear some of the proponents of these “land acknowledgements” to explain why, if the “land acknowledgement” is true, they continue to occupy the space and don’t hand it back to the people cited in the “land acknowledgement.”
“I acknowledge that this land was made by G-d for human beings to cultivate and enjoy, and is now claimed by the big government in Austin who thinks citizens only have the right to lease it through property taxes.”
(I’m not sure I even agree with that view on property taxes. But . . . it’s a theory I’m willing to consider.)
The “land acknowledgements” that I’ve heard don’t say anything about land that was “stolen” or who the “legitimate” owners are (to mention a term I’ve seen elsewhere). If they did, that would be going a huge step beyond anything I remember hearing.
But acknowledging who “owned” this land previously is good. It would also be good for big, centralized corporations to acknowledge that the land they now occupy was once enjoyed by small-scale farmers, small businesses, and homeowners who have been supplanted by all the big, government-aligned ones, etc., etc.
Which brings up a point I made in #2 that should be clarified. The whole process by which European-Americans took over from the indigenous people who they supplanted can rightly be summarized as a “conquest.” But that term can also be misleading, in that it doesn’t inform as to what a conquest actually consists of. A lot of it is the same process by which the left is now conquering America. But it’s really important to understand the detailed events by which a more organized culture can sometimes take over from a less-organized one that values community, family, and individualism more. Calling it a conquest and leaving it at that also will omit a lot of understanding.
As I see it, the problem with “land acknowledgements” is that it could give rise to legal claims for properties to be returned to the “legitimate” former owners if the current owners “confess” they “stole” the lands. Since just about every acre in the US is claimed to be sacred Indian land, so we might as well pack our bags and move to Mars . . .
Yeah, I don’t get it.
I watch a lot of hockey (NHL), and these land acknowledgements are mainly a thing in Western Canada (go figure). The Canucks, Oilers, and Flames all do them. Can’t recall if Winnipeg does them, only because I’m watching a game in the ET zone and never catch the start. Not so much in Eastern Canada. I think the Seattle Kraken do them as well. My reaction is generally “Well, you all (First Nations, etc.) should have won.”
Sad to see they’re happening in more places in the States. As others note, what’s the point?
The point is to undermine the legitimacy of our nations, and to denigrate and demoralize white people. Obviously, right?
I think so.
The dean opened my daughter-in-law’s grad school graduation by sadly acknowledging all the tribes who are the rightful owners of the very ground beneath our illegitimate feet. One of the perplexing thing about this was that there were a large number of immigrant students graduating at the same time—Sudanese, Somali, Congolese, assorted others. Were they, too, supposed to feel guilty about studying accounting and ESL on land that used to belong to a bunch of people called the Passamaquoddy?
Yes, yes they are.
@Grannydude , do you have the text of that acknowledgement? None of the land acknowledgements I’ve found on the web so far do anything of the sort. I’m n0t saying it can’t happen, but most of the people pushing for these acknowledgements don’t recommend them saying anything of the sort. In the meantime, I’m suspicious that some listeners are reading something into the land acknowledgments that isn’t there.
Remember how the news media kept providing paraphrases from Donald Trump, claiming that he said things that he didn’t actually say? This may be another case like that.
I found the online land acknowledgment of the theater referenced in the OP, the Scoundrel & Scamp. It says:
This seems likely false, too, as I don’t see how the Hohokam, Tohono O’Odham and Pascua Yaqui could all have been the sovereigns over the tiny territory in question, probably less than 5,000 square feet in an old YWCA building. If they were, then it must have been the result of successive conquest or abandonment.
As far as I know, the Hohokam don’t exist, and hadn’t existed for centuries before the first Europeans arrived in what is now Arizona. How their land can be “unceded” escapes me, as there was no tribe in existence that could have ceded such land.
The Hohokam are best known for their irrigation system in the Phoenix metro area, which was in ruins when American farmers arrived. Apparently, some of the modern canals were built over the prior Hohokam system.
I like that one even less than some of the others I’ve seen.
Why are you bringing the word “sovereigns” into it? What does that have to do with anything? I don’t know if I have any objections, but I wish you would explain.
One place to start studying which cessions that U.S. government thinks it obtained is here: https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwss-ilc.html
Of course, there have been many legal battles since those data were compiled, of which those documents are only part of the evidence. Tuscon is on the line between two different Royce areas (designations that are often used in the legal contents) and I didn’t bother to look up which side of that line your theater is on.
In Indiana, a state in which I know a little more about the history of cessions, most of the land was ceded to the U.S. by various treaties. But there is at least one case where a Potawatomi leader refused to sign away the land that was reserved for him from an earlier cession, but the Indiana authorities took the land anyway, luring him and his people into a church for religious services, where they had him trapped. They then deported his group at gunpoint to a destination across the Mississippi, I disremember just where at the moment. So I suppose his descendants could refer to that reservation as unceded land. Maybe they do, but if so I haven’t heard about it.
That was an exceptional case. Usually some kind of cession was obtained. The means used to obtain those cessions often involved bribery or other dirty tricks, though some of the methods were less savory than others. But usually some sort of formal cession was obtained.
A lot of the methods have parallels in the way Democrats deal with Republicans.
🤮🤮🤮
Yeah, it’s one of the smarmier ones I’ve seen.
BTW, we should save these so we can demand that Democrats use them as patterns in their acknowledgements of their colonialist takeover of the American people.