“An Iowa legislative subcommittee has tabled a bill that would prohibit land acknowledgments at the state’s public colleges and universities, even as Iowa’s largest public institutions continue to display such statements on their websites,” reports Campus Reform:
Land acknowledgments are formal institutional statements regarding Native American tribes that formerly inhabited the land…
The bill “requires the state board of regents to direct each regents institution to adopt a policy prohibiting land acknowledgments by the institution or any department or other unit of the institution.”
Lawmakers argued at the meeting that Iowa Code Chapter 261J on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” already addresses the issue.
“We do feel like both in code and in policy, this issue is taken care of,” Jillian Carlson, state relations officer for the board of regents, said.
Even after the subcommittee tabled the bill, citing concerns that existing law already covers the issue, several Iowa colleges still provide land acknowledgments on their websites.
University of Iowa units with land acknowledgments posted online include the College of Nursing, the Law, Health Policy, & Disability Center, the Department of Biology, and Dance Marathon….
Iowa State University’s Center for Agricultural and Rural Development also posts a land acknowledgment, as does the University of Northern Iowa’s Outdoor Recreation program.
Land acknowledgments can leave the misleading impression that virtually all land in America was stolen from the Native Americans.
Much of the land transferred by Native Americans to whites in the United States was sold by Native Americans, not taken by force, although some officials view that fact as offensive. The Native American population was so depleted by disease in the 17th Century that Native American tribes could afford to sell some of their land to whites, because they weren’t using most of it. Selling land they didn’t need made sense — they could use the money they got for the land to buy firearms or metal-tipped arrows to defend themselves against hostile tribes, and to buy other useful things, like pots and pans, cotton and wool cloth, and metal tools needed to improve their agricultural output.
Thousands of square miles of land were voluntarily sold to settlers by Native Americans. Legal historian Stuart Banner’s book “How the Indians Lost Their Land” explains this. Some land changed hands through “consensual transactions,” and other land through “violent conquest.” People can also learn about this subject by watching the educational video, “Are We Living on Stolen Land?”
Land acknowledgments will recite that a college is on the land of this or that Native American people, often claiming that a tribe lived on that land “since time immemorial.”
In reality, the Indian tribe they describe as having lived on that land may only have lived on that land for a century or two before whites arrived, and may have killed off the Indian tribe that previously occupied that land, or driven the original inhabitants away. Native Americans came to North America at different times, and routinely displaced or exterminated other tribes in the process.
Rather than suggesting that a college is on stolen land (when a college has no intention of “returning” that land to the tribe), colleges should focus on helping tribes by expanding their ability to use their own lands. Many federal regulations make Native Americans poorer and stifle economic development on Indian reservations, as The Atlantic pointed out, and as tribal appeals court judge Adam Crepelle explained in a recent book.
