Compelled Speech and Land Acknowledgements
So much for the University as a place of free thought and inquiry
As I have written before, land acknowledgments are at best pointless virtue signaling. At worst, they are people who are other than Native American1 forgiving themselves for using land that colonial powers stole from Native Americans. Regardless, your typical land acknowlegement is a statement by an institution or person that the land they currently own was owned by Native Americans before it was stolen at gunpoint by some colonial power or other.
Land acknowledgments cheese me off. Seriously, if your reallly concerned that the land was stolen, then you need to give it back. No excuses. If your land is in New York, my law office will even transfer the land back to its rightful owners without charge (the state will still charge you filing fees and taxes on the transfer).
Also as I have written previously, universities tend to love land acknowledgements. In fact, many Universities are now encouraging faculty to add a land acknowledgment to their syllabi. This brings us to the case of Professor Stuart Reges of the University of Washington. The Univeristy in question promulgated a best practices document that included a land acknowledgement for inclusion in syllabi.2
Common Sense reports that Professor Reges opted to include the recommended land acknwoldgement, and then added a disclaimer of his own:
So last school year, instead of reprinting the university-approved language—“The University of Washington acknowledges the Coast Salish peoples of this land, the land which touches the shared waters of all tribes and bands within the Suqaumish, Tulalip and Muckleshoot nations”—Reges constructed his own disclaimer. He wrote: “I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.”3
Common Sense goes on to report that the University retaliated against Professor Reges in a number of ways. The one I will deal with here is that the University, without the permission of Professor Reges, edited his syllabus to keep the land acknowledgement but take out his disclaimer. The university then uploaded the censored syllabus and locked the professor out of the ability to edit it.
That is compelled speech. The Professor is suing the University and I hope he wins.
The professor’s disclaimer was obnoxious, at least to my mind. The labor theory of ownership, however John Locke originally intended it, became a ideological justification for colonial powers to dispossess indigenous peoples from their land. Moreover, even if one accepts the validity of the labor theory, the fact is the Coast Salish people did mix their labor with the land and the sea, the results just did not look like the vast plowed fields the Europeans created. That is, the Coast Salish people had a way of working the land that was in line with their own needs and their own knowldge of their environment. David Graeber does an excellent job of discussing this in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity that he co-wrote with David Wengrow.
The solution, however, is to debate Professor Reges, or perhaps even to mock and ridicule his stated position. The solution is to use the tools of logic and rhetoric to build up your position and convince the public that your view is better. You can also use the tools of logic, rhetoric, and critique to take down the Professor’s position, as well as humor to deflate the smallness of it. Doesn’t that sound like what a university is supposed to encourage? Don’t you want a university to be a place dedicated to free exchange of ideas accompanied by boisterous debate?
Instead, the University of Washington decided to enforce orthodoxy and shut down free thought. We don’t need a university to do that because we already have a place that serves this purpose. It’s called church.
Perhaps we should call them “people of colonization?”
As a former instructor at a prestigous university, I can say that land acknowldgements have jack and shit with the subject matter of a syllabus, which is to outline the content and expectations of the course.
I’ll note here that, even if one wants to grant the legitimacy of Locke’s labor theory of ownership (I do not), the Professor is incorrect on this point. David Graeber makes the case in his book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.