WHEN I was young and more predisposed to perceive history as a Manichean struggle between light and dark, I read a book called Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. I was travelling on a Greyhound bus from Minnesota across the plains, mountains and deserts of the glorious American West to California during the summer of 1976, the year in which the United States celebrated its 200th birthday. The majestic landscapes I witnessed, redolent of the existential struggles between settlers and natives that took place there during the 19th century, complemented the book.
Brown’s magisterial account of the devastating impact America’s westward expansion had on the Native Americans who stood in the way during the 19th century seemed to fit the mood of the times. He wrote it in 1970 when the war in Vietnam was far from over, at a time when student protests were at their most violent, and the rights of what are now called ‘underrepresented groups’, including Native Americans, were gaining increased attention from the American mainstream. Two years before, in 1968, the radical American Indian Movement (AIM) had been founded, some of whose members were occupying the former federal prison on Alcatraz Island when Brown took pen to paper.
To the young man that I was at the time, it all seemed terribly exciting. And then I grew up; but for a brief moment, I had succumbed to the romanticised and inaccurate history of what the eminent ethnohistorian James Clifford, an expert on the Native American tribes of America, describes as the ‘Invented Indian’, living at peace with his environment and neighbours in an Edenic paradise, which Clifford dismisses as a ‘wholly imagined representation of the past . . . distorted by fanciful imagery, selective reporting [and] hyperbole’.
Minnesota, where I live, features prominently in Brown’s book, being the site of the bloody Dakota War in 1862 which set indigenous people against settlers and the US army and led to the largest mass execution in American history when 38 Dakota men were hanged in Mankato, south of Minneapolis.
Fast forward to Minnesota in 2025. In the past few years it has been virtually impossible to interact with a cultural, political or educational institution in this state without being subjected to what is called a ‘land acknowledgement’. Attend a play at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis or an opera at the Ordway Center in Saint Paul or a ballet at the University of Minnesota’s Northrop Auditorium and you will be told to feel guilty because you are sitting on ‘stolen land’ that belongs rightfully to Dakota Indians.
It is not just cultural institutions where one is subjected to these meaningless acts of moral exhibitionism. They are rife in education at all levels, from the lowest grades to graduate schools. When kids in elementary schools are studying American geography and learning the names of state capitals, for instance, they are required to acknowledge the Indigenous land these cities were built on. At the other end of the educational scale, first-year students at the University of Minnesota Medical School’s ‘white coat’ ceremony in 2022 were instructed to recite a land acknowledgment, utter a ritual confession of guilt, and then ‘pledge to honor all Indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by Western medicine’. Watching the footage of medical students reciting this oath is one of the most troubling things I’ve witnessed in a long time.
Sometimes attempts to patronise America’s indigenous inhabitants have hilarious consequences, at least from my perverse perspective. For example, changing the name of Minneapolis’s iconic Lake Calhoun and surrounding neighborhood to the unpronounceable ‘Bde Maka Ska’ (a name undocumented in the historical record). This beautiful lake is surrounded by some of the most expensive homes in Minneapolis, occupied by some of the wokest white people on the planet, the sort who hang ‘All Are Welcome Here’ and ‘Happy Ramadan’ on their front doors but would never dream of wishing someone ‘Merry Christmas!’ They’re all for Native Americans but such people are also concerned about property values, and their neighbourhood’s alarmingly dramatic renaming is not good for the brand. It would be like changing the names of Belgravia or Mayfair to some unpronounceable Anglo-Saxon or Celtic name. I’m ashamed to admit that the displeasure of those well-nourished residents of the posh Lake Calhoun district of Minneapolis, worried about the selling prices of their expensive homes, has given me hours of delicious pleasure.
While from one perspective, land acknowledgments can be seen as just another example of middle-class virtue-signaling, those who have authored them see it differently. In 2020, Larissa FastHorse of the nonprofit Indigenous Direction, which helped author the Guthrie Theater’s land acknowledgments, spoke very candidly about the agenda behind these statements, likening them to a ‘gateway drug’, telling the Minneapolis Star Tribune that ‘once you have to constantly acknowledge eight shows a week that this land is someone else’s land, it starts opening your brain up to more comprehensive changes’.
No matter that many of these claims about occupied land are historically undocumented and often based on unreliable oral histories. Before the Dakota settled in the area that is now Minneapolis around 1700, having been driven there by their bitter rivals, the Ojibwe, there were other tribes living here, whom the Dakota drove away with great violence.
A few well-heeled activists and DEI hires excepted, the biggest victims of these attempts to sanitise American Indian history are Native Americans themselves, subjected to the condescension and infantilisation of rich liberals, which harms them beyond measure.
A few years ago on a school trip to Washington DC, I had dinner with a woman who taught on a Cree reservation in Montana. A member of the Cree Nation herself, she described the appalling squalor and moral poverty her students endured, many of whom, she claimed, had to be paid to stay in school. She described the drug addiction and alcoholism, the domestic abuse, the teen suicides, the out-of-wedlock births and broken families, the many premature deaths, the murders and disappearances of young women. As I listened, tears filled my eyes. I turned my head away from my interlocutor, fearing she would notice my distress.
November is Native American Heritage Month here in the US and the moral exhibitionists are out there in force. They are the sort of people who are angered by the mascots of sports teams such as the ‘Redskins’ or ‘Fighting Sioux’, celebrated the removal of the logo known as the ‘Land O Lakes Squaw’ or ‘Butter Maiden’ from packages of butter, and were complicit, along with the Walz administration, in the destruction of the statue of Christopher Columbus in front of the Minnesota State Capitol in Saint Paul.
My advice to those who claim to care about the plight of America’s indigenous peoples is to curb your moral preening and cease with your meaningless land acknowledgments and to pay more attention to real issues affecting their Native brothers and sisters.
