Earlier this week, King Charles opened the Canadian Parliament with the traditional speech from the throne — the first time the monarch has done so since Queen Elizabeth II in 1977. While this was destined to be a somewhat eccentric affair, I was surprised by just how daft it turned out to be.
“I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people”, muttered the King from his throne, to dutiful nods from his parliament and acclaim from the press for his “thought-provoking” speech. I must admit that the speech has provoked thoughts, but these are more along the lines of “what on Earth was he thinking?” rather than challenging my preexisting notions of the legacy of colonialism.
Land acknowledgements of this kind have become commonplace in western countries where the brain-rot has most evidently taken root, like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They are supposed to offer respect to so-called indigenous peoples, and recognise that many of our modern cities and political institutions exist atop land once held by others.
Of course they do. All land was once held by somebody else. History has not been a polite pass-the-parcel style game featuring “pleases” and “thank-yous”; it has been settlement, conquest, war, treaties, empires, invasions, empires rising and falling, and an awful lot of bloodshed. History is very messy. To acknowledge only one moment in the various chains of settlement across the world and ignore the entire human history of conquest and displacement is insincere, condensing, and self-congratulatory.
What makes the King’s speech even more risible than others who give land acknowledgements is the bizarre logic that it forces us to accept to make it make sense. This is the sovereign, the literal embodiment of the crown, God’s representative on Earth, and the head of the state most directly implicated in Canada’s colonial origins, acknowledging that he is speaking on his own territory which is unceded and belongs to someone else, yet will not do anything about it. It seems more like the sort of apology one would mutter after mistakenly wandering onto someone else’s allotment.
What exactly is anyone supposed to do with the information that the King believes that Ottawa is someone else’s territory? Are we to advocate for him to hand the keys to the city over to the Algonquins? Relocate parliament to international waters? Lobby for Somerset Council to have a permanent seat for the closest living relative of Cheddar Man?
Land acknowledgements do not acknowledge anything close to the truth of history
It is precisely this lack of coherence about the actual point that renders the entire concept of land acknowledgements absolute nonsense. Of course, he almost certainly didn’t write this section of the speech himself — but that is no excuse.
Land acknowledgements do not acknowledge anything close to the truth of history; they presuppose that before Europeans arrived, these places existed as a kind of perpetual Eden, undisturbed by war or displacement, and that those who lived there were as innocent as the day they were born (unless you ask Saint Augustine, who argues that newborns are sinners, too). As Jonathan Miller points out, land acknowledgements “are rote recitations that signal moral superiority as a substitute for tangible action. The statement is a feel-good ritual, not a commitment to change.”
There is also rarely any consistency when it comes to who is considered indigenous enough to warrant a land acknowledgement. In New Zealand, politicians often offer acknowledgements to the Maori people, who are viewed as indigenous in law despite only arriving on the islands around 800 years ago and who themselves committed genocide against other local populations. In Australia, where the Aboriginal people have been resident for a much longer 40,000-50,000 years, land acknowledgements are offered even as Aborigines bury the fossilised remains of earlier humans in unmarked locations, with the explicit consent of the Australian state. Who are we to let the truth get in the way of a good story?
And what about those colonisers who are not white westerners? The Khoisan people were the oldest known inhabitants of southern Africa, and were heavily displaced by Bantu expansionism as recently as 1,500 years ago. Can we expect apologies and the redistribution of land from them? How about the Jōmon people, who were the earliest inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago and were not East Asian in the sense we view them today, becoming isolated from other mainland Asian groups around 25,000 years ago. They were displaced and amalgamated by later settlements, yet the modern Japanese do not offer any land acknowledgements to them.
Nor should we expect them to. It would be ridiculous to suggest that these people should be bending over backwards to offer reparations or apologies by other names for events which transpired long ago and were almost universal in the historical human experience. Indigenous people did not live in their own perfect, peaceful Arcadia. Many had complex political structures, territorial disputes, and war.
Europeans did not pave paradise and put up a political system; they encountered other societies, often violently, and through that contact emerged the world we now live in, just as it has happened by other groups across the world, before and since. Acknowledging that the history of humanity is the history of conflict does not deny the suffering of older settlers, but rather places it in proportion. It is time that this nonsense is put to bed, and that humanity continues as it has done for all its previous years of existence.
