Land acknowledgement
Based on Wikipedia: Land acknowledgement
Here's a paradox worth sitting with: Imagine a thief steals your laptop. He refuses to give it back. But then he attaches a small brass plaque to it that reads, "This laptop was originally the property of [your name]." Now every time he uses it in public, everyone can see the plaque. Is that justice? Is it even respect?
This is the analogy Cutcha Risling Baldy uses to describe land acknowledgements—those formal statements you've probably heard at the beginning of university lectures, theater performances, hockey games, or corporate meetings. "We acknowledge that this event takes place on the traditional territory of the [Indigenous nation] people." The audience nods solemnly. Then everyone moves on.
What Exactly Is a Land Acknowledgement?
At its simplest, a land acknowledgement is a formal statement recognizing the Indigenous peoples who originally inhabited and often still maintain cultural connections to a particular piece of land. These statements can be written—appearing in email signatures, on websites, or in program notes—or spoken aloud at the start of public gatherings.
The practice has become widespread in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and has been gaining momentum in the United States since around 2019. But its origins trace back to Australia in the late 1970s, where it emerged alongside Indigenous political movements and arts communities as the "Welcome to Country" ceremony.
Understanding what a land acknowledgement is requires understanding what it is not. It is not a legal transfer of ownership. It is not reparations. It is not a treaty. It is, at its core, a verbal or written recognition of historical fact—that the land now occupied by non-Indigenous institutions and people was once, and in many Indigenous worldviews still is, the territory of specific Indigenous nations.
The Australian Origins
Australia provides the clearest window into how these practices developed and differentiated over time. Two distinct but related customs emerged: the Welcome to Country and the Acknowledgement of Country.
The distinction matters. A Welcome to Country can only be performed by a traditional owner or custodian of that specific land—someone whose ancestors have cultural and spiritual connections to that place stretching back generations. It's a ritual that highlights the cultural significance of the area to a particular Aboriginal Australian or Torres Strait Islander clan or language group. Think of it like being welcomed into someone's home by the homeowner themselves.
An Acknowledgement of Country, by contrast, can be delivered by anyone. It's more like a guest at a party mentioning that this is so-and-so's house. Still meaningful, but fundamentally different in character.
Both customs represented a direct rejection of terra nullius—the colonial legal doctrine that declared Australia to be "nobody's land" when Europeans arrived, as if the continent had been sitting empty for millennia waiting to be claimed. This legal fiction was used to justify colonization without treaties, negotiations, or compensation to the people who had lived there for at least 65,000 years.
In 1992, the Australian High Court's Mabo decision finally overturned terra nullius, recognizing Aboriginal title for the first time in Australian law. Land acknowledgements had already been gaining traction through the 1990s, promoted by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, but the Mabo decision gave them new weight. By the early 2000s, they had become commonplace across Australian public life.
Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Moment
Canada's embrace of land acknowledgements came later, tied to a specific historical reckoning. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its final report on the Indian residential school system—a network of government-sponsored religious schools that operated from the 1880s until 1996. These institutions forcibly separated Indigenous children from their families, forbade them from speaking their languages or practicing their cultures, and subjected many to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
The Commission concluded that the residential school system constituted cultural genocide.
That same year, Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party won a majority government, and the new administration made reconciliation with Indigenous peoples a stated priority. Land acknowledgements became part of the cultural response. By 2019, they had become routine at events ranging from National Hockey League games to ballet performances to sessions of Parliament itself.
In May 2025, this practice reached what might be its highest-profile moment: King Charles III opened the Parliament of Canada with a land acknowledgement in his Speech from the Throne, formally recognizing that the proceedings were taking place on the unceded territory of the Algonquin and Anishinaabeg peoples.
The word "unceded" carries particular weight in Canadian contexts. Unlike in the United States, where treaties—however broken or coerced—were signed with many Indigenous nations, large portions of Canada were never formally surrendered by their Indigenous inhabitants. The land was simply taken. "Unceded" is a legal term acknowledging that no treaty exists, that the original title was never formally transferred.
New Zealand's Linguistic Approach
New Zealand, or Aotearoa as many now call it using the Māori name, has taken a somewhat different path. Here, land acknowledgements often manifest through language itself. Māori words are commonly incorporated into greetings by public speakers. Publications include acknowledgements using Māori terminology. Legislation increasingly recognizes Māori presence through linguistic inclusion.
Perhaps most notably, there's been a movement to prioritize Māori place names over their English colonial equivalents. In 2022, Te Pāti Māori (the Māori Party) delivered a petition with 70,000 signatures to Parliament calling for the country's official name to be changed to Aotearoa entirely.
This approach reflects New Zealand's particular history. Unlike Australia, New Zealand has the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 between the British Crown and Māori chiefs. While the treaty's interpretation remains contested—the English and Māori versions say substantially different things—it provides a formal legal basis for Māori rights that Australia's Indigenous peoples lacked until the Mabo decision.
New Zealand's acknowledgement practices also extend to the Moriori, the Indigenous people of the Chatham Islands, whose history was long overshadowed and whose near-destruction in the 19th century was sometimes misleadingly used by colonial apologists to minimize Māori grievances.
The American Context
The United States came later to land acknowledgement practices, with adoption accelerating around 2019. Early adopters included arts institutions, museums, universities, nonprofit organizations, local governments, and churches—the kinds of institutions most attuned to progressive cultural shifts.
The 2020 Academy Awards provided a significant visibility boost when filmmaker Taika Waititi, himself of Māori descent, included a land acknowledgement in his Oscar acceptance speech. The practice suddenly had mainstream attention, along with both enthusiastic support and vocal criticism.
The American context has also produced a notable variation: the "land and labor acknowledgement." This expanded formulation recognizes not only Indigenous dispossession but also the history of enslaved African labor. Given that American wealth was built on both stolen land and stolen labor, advocates argue that acknowledging only one without the other tells an incomplete story. Such acknowledgements might recognize both the Indigenous nation whose territory an institution occupies and the enslaved people whose forced labor built the buildings or worked the fields on that land.
But America has also produced perhaps the starkest legal challenge to the practice. In 2025, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the University of Washington had violated a professor's First Amendment rights by subjecting him to a prolonged investigation and formal reprimand for including a parody land acknowledgement on his course syllabus. The case highlighted the tension between institutional expectations and individual speech rights, and raised questions about whether land acknowledgements had become a kind of compelled speech in some academic settings.
The Critique: Empty Gestures or First Steps?
Not everyone is impressed by land acknowledgements. The criticism comes from multiple directions, including from Indigenous voices themselves.
The most fundamental critique is that acknowledgements are empty gestures—what writer Graeme Wood has called "moral exhibitionism." You're essentially announcing your awareness of historical injustice while continuing to benefit from that injustice. It costs nothing. It changes nothing. It may actually function as a release valve, allowing participants to feel they've done something meaningful when they haven't.
Wood goes further, arguing that a land acknowledgement delivered in any context besides the actual return of land amounts to a "highwayman's receipt"—the robber politely documenting his crime. He suggests these statements should be limited to occasions "that preserve their dignity and power," rather than becoming rote recitations that drain them of meaning.
Kevin Gover, a former director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and a citizen of the Pawnee Nation, has raised a different concern: that land acknowledgements can be inadvertently disempowering. By publicly highlighting the involuntary absence of Indigenous peoples from their traditional lands, these statements may serve more to emphasize dispossession than to honor continuing Indigenous presence and sovereignty.
Then there's the laptop analogy from Cutcha Risling Baldy, which opened this essay. If the acknowledgement doesn't lead to the return of land—or at minimum to specific, concrete actions benefiting Indigenous peoples—what exactly is it for? Who does it serve?
Practical problems also arise. Ensuring factual accuracy can be surprisingly difficult. Indigenous nations had complex, shifting relationships with territories. Lands were traded, conquered, shared, or contested among different Indigenous groups long before European arrival. Colonial records are often incomplete or biased. How do you acknowledge land when multiple nations have legitimate claims? When those nations disagree about boundaries? When oral histories conflict with written records?
The Case for Starting Somewhere
Defenders of land acknowledgements don't necessarily dispute these criticisms. Many would agree that an acknowledgement alone changes nothing. But they argue that acknowledgements can serve as a first step—an entry point for people who know nothing about whose land they're standing on.
Consider what a land acknowledgement does at minimum: it introduces a proper noun. Most non-Indigenous Americans, Canadians, or Australians couldn't name a single Indigenous nation whose territory they live on. An acknowledgement provides that information. It makes the abstract concrete. It might prompt a curious listener to look up who the Algonquin are, or what happened to the Tongva, or where the Wurundjeri people are today.
For institutions, acknowledgements can also create a form of accountability, however weak. Once you've publicly stated that you occupy Indigenous land, it becomes harder to ignore Indigenous concerns entirely. The acknowledgement creates an opening for deeper engagement—if the institution chooses to walk through it.
Some organizations have begun treating acknowledgements as exactly that: an opening rather than a conclusion. They follow the acknowledgement with information about what concrete actions they're taking, what Indigenous voices they're amplifying, what resources they're directing toward Indigenous communities. The acknowledgement becomes a preface to a larger story rather than the whole story itself.
The Deeper Questions
Behind the debates about land acknowledgements lie much larger questions. What does it mean to reckon with historical injustice? What obligations do present generations have for wrongs committed by previous ones? How do societies that were built on dispossession come to terms with that foundation without destroying themselves in the process?
These are not questions unique to settler colonial societies like the United States, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Every nation has historical injustices in its past. But settler colonialism presents them in particularly stark form because the foundational act—taking the land—remains visible in every map, every property deed, every government building.
Land acknowledgements attempt to address this by incorporating recognition of that foundational act into public rituals. Whether this recognition is meaningful or merely performative depends largely on what accompanies it. An acknowledgement followed by land return, policy change, or material redistribution means something different than an acknowledgement followed by nothing at all.
Perhaps the most honest position is to recognize land acknowledgements for what they are: a social practice still in formation, with uncertain outcomes and contested meanings. They emerged from Indigenous political movements seeking recognition and have been adopted, adapted, and sometimes co-opted by non-Indigenous institutions. Their ultimate significance will depend not on the words themselves but on whether those words lead anywhere.
That laptop plaque is still attached. The question is whether it stays forever as the only response to the theft, or whether it becomes the first line of a longer conversation about what justice might actually look like.