Land Acknowledgements, in the US and in Israel

by Walter E. Block

What, pray tell, is a Land Acknowledgement? It is a public statement made by woke land owners. In such a declaration they in effect maintain that they do not really own the territory to which they have legal title. In effect, they opine that while, indeed, they hold rights to their properties, these are not really justified. Instead, in justice, in their opinion, their legally held terrain properly belongs to the descendants of those who occupied the land in question thousands, maybe tens of thousands of years ago.

Who issues such announcements? So called progressives (they are really regressives, in that they want to drag us backwards), wokists, socialists, DEIists, and others of that ilk. Typically, such statements are bruited about by university administrators, since most institutions of higher learning have long ago been taken over by radical leftists.

In turn, who in their view are singled out as the proper owners of these facilities? That would be native peoples, aboriginals, Indian tribe members, who occupied North American lands long before the arrival of Europeans.

At first glance this initiative sounds eminently reasonable. After all, according to philosopher John Locke, land properly belongs to the peoples who “mixed their labor” with it, that is, homesteaded it. Nevertheless, when we probe a bit deeper, we can see overwhelming difficulty with these Land Acknowledgements.

First of all the issuers of these documents are precisely the folks who typically oppose private property rights. Their mentor in this regard is Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who famously, rather infamously, maintained that “property is theft.” He did not aver that white, or black or Indian property is theft. Rather, he opined that all property is theft. If so, why are these folk defending the property rights of native persons? A little bit of hypocrisy has already crept into these documents.

Second, yet more hypocrisy, from a different source. If the descendants of the “first peoples” really, in justice, own these lands, since they were there first and presumably homesteaded them, why on earth do they just not sign over their land titles to them? Why content themselves with these feel-good statements? The universities and other such organizations should forthwith turn over their properties, lock, stock and barrel, to the aboriginals. But that is the last thing these charlatans want or expect. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They utter a statement that does not cost them a single dime.

Then there is the matter of justice, real justice. According to the socialists, the native Americans are the rightful owners of the entire country since they were here first. But this shout out to John Locke, the Godfather of property titles resting with the first homesteaders, will not suffice. In order to see this, consider the following.

At present, there are some 360 million residents of the USA. And the country, for all intents and purposes, is almost totally empty! If you don’t believe me, take an evening flight from Boston to LA and look out the window. Yes, east of the Mississippi, you’ll see a few lights scattered here and there at 30,000 feet. West of this river, apart from Denver and Los Vegas, you will see nothing whatsoever. The population per square mile is so small no lights emanating from their homes and places of work can be seen. For all intents and purposes, there is just about no one there!

How many native persons were there when the Europeans first arrived on our shores? Estimates are all over the lot, but what I get from these various statistical studies is something like 3 million.

Well, if 360 million leave the country for all intents and purposes empty, what can we say about some 1% of that total? Almost as scarce as hen’s teeth would be the answer. So much for the claim that these peoples are the rightful owners of the entire country.

Back to these Land Acknowledgements. These virtue signalers should not be so fast to give away the store to the natives. Based upon homesteading theory they own very little. Yes, they did indeed engage, sporadically, in agriculture, but they were for a great part nomadic, far from the best way to homestead.

It cannot be denied that several treaties with them were abrogated, and they were the victims of sharp (e.g. fraudulent) practice in numerous ways. But to think they properly own the entire country is highly problematic.

What are the implications of all this for Israel? The fact that it is a Jewish state is justified by the fact that the Hebrews where there, homesteading merrily away, for some 3500 years. The Arabs arrived far later, a mere few centuries ago. The Al Aqsa Mosque lies above the Second Temple, which is perched above the First Temple. When archeologists dig into contested land, in the first few feet they do find remnants of Palestinians: coins, cloth, other such possessions. But when they go a few feet below that, it is all Jewish, all the way down . Thus the Lockean philosophy, on the basis of which these leftist opponents of Israel foist their Acknowledgements upon us, actually support the Jewish State.