“Land Acknowledgments” Ring False As Universities Arrest People Supporting Palestinians’ Right to Live
Cross-posted from Medium
Post on X by Dr. William D. Lopez, PhD, MPH, University of Michigan School of Public Health
I first learned about land acknowledgments at an event hosted by the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy. They seemed a step forward in learning and speaking the truth about our nation’s founding. Growing up in a small town in Ohio in the 1980s, we weren’t taught our nation’s real history. In our textbooks, John Smith and Pocahontas’ “relationship” was a love story (no one told us she was ten when they met). Slavery was a bad chapter of our collective story, but President Abraham Lincoln had ended it. White people were saviors and creators, not gaslighters and destroyers.
But the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution contains an exception to the ban on involuntary servitude — “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” — and laws were enacted to put Black people behind bars, creating the culture of police violence and systemic racism that is killing Black people today. And “Pocahontas” (real name Amonute, or Matoaka) was not a pro-colonial Native who loved John Smith, as legend and Disney would have it. She was a teenager who became “one of the first real-life Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women,” writes Meera Baswan of the Indigenous Foundation, after being kidnapped, raped, and taken to live far from her family. Her baby was left in the care of her community and her indigenous husband was murdered by the colonists.
These truths were missing from our history books. So when universities began prefacing public events with land acknowledgments, it seemed a muted but positive nod toward learning from mistakes of the past.
“Emory University acknowledges the Muscogee (Creek) people who lived, worked, produced knowledge on, and nurtured the land where Emory’s Oxford and Atlanta campuses are now located. In 1821, fifteen years before Emory’s founding, the Muscogee were forced to relinquish this land. We recognize the sustained oppression, land dispossession, and involuntary removals of the Muscogee and Cherokee peoples from Georgia and the Southeast. Emory seeks to honor the Muscogee Nation and other Indigenous caretakers of this land by humbly seeking knowledge of their histories and committing to respectful stewardship of the land,” reads that institution’s Land Acknowledgement.
The Auraria Higher Education Center (AHEC) in Denver is a convergence point for three institutions—Community College of Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and University of Colorado Denver—which are all designated Hispanic Serving Institutions as well. The Auraria Campus Land Acknowledgement reads, “Auraria Higher Education Center is on the traditional territories and ancestral homelands of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe Nations. This area was also the site of trade, hunting, gathering, and healing for many other Native Nations: The Lakota, Ute, Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Shoshone, and others… Let us also acknowledge the painful history of genocide and forced removal. We respect the many diverse Indigenous peoples still connected to this land on which we gather. We pay our respect to them and give thanks to all Tribal Nations and the ancestors of this place.”
Yet today, the actions of Emory University, the Auraria Higher Education Center, and so many other institutions of higher learning in the United States look a lot more like the colonizers than the “land acknowledgers” they perform at being.
On the Emory campus, students asked Professor Clifton Crais to ensure University President Gregory Fenves didn’t contact Atlanta police on a peaceful encampment of students and community members. They were protesting the university’s support for Israel and its assault on Palestinians’ right to exist. But, reports The Guardian, “It was too late.”
“Within minutes, dozens of Atlanta police officers and Georgia state troopers had arrested 28 people – 20 of whom were ‘Emory community members,’ according to a statement from the school, including three faculty members and an unclear number of students from Emory and other Atlanta schools. The university’s response was likely the quickest show of police force in response to a divestment protest among the dozens nationwide that have occurred in recent weeks. It was also probably the only one where pepper balls, stun guns and rubber bullets were used against students, faculty and community members – at one of the few student protests in the south to date.”
Protestors at the Auraria Campus in Denver were also met with police in riot gear, responding to their “aggressive” act of setting up tents. Tents! Protestors chanted, “I don’t see a riot here, why are you in riot gear?” Several dozen were arrested.
Post on X by Kim Tran, PhD
Meanwhile, Israel continues to carry out the very acts of genocide and forced displacement that university land acknowledgements are meant to confront, as a step to ensuring they are never repeated. Reports Al Jazeera, “At least 32,490 Palestinians have been killed since Israel launched its assault on October 7 in the wake of a surprise attack by Hamas, in which more than 1,000 people were killed and dozens taken captive.” Even U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III admits that 80% of the people killed by Israel have been women and children. Yet the United States government—our tax dollars—continues to fund Israel’s murder campaign.
And people exercising their right to free speech and assembly on college campuses are being attacked by the police.
In my grade school textbooks, the displacement and genocide of Native people; violent possession of land that belongs to the earth, not humans; kidnapping of people from Africa to use their bodies while denying their humanity; and creating toxic institutions to preserve social inequities were recast into a story where white people were “heroes” and racism was a product of a bygone era.
But we have far more accurate information in our hands these days, and there’s absolutely no excuse for ignorance. Watch this ABC 7 (Los Angeles) interview with a father who is protecting his daughter’s right to protest against the genocide in Palestine.
This is how we should be.
Post on X by Fiza Pirani, journalist and truth-teller, reposting an interview on ABC 7, shared by PALESTINE ONLINE, in which the father of a USC student explains why he joined his daughter in protesting the genocide