I'm tired of land acknowledgments before conferences and workshops. I have a colleague in the Levant who wrote an amazing rant about them, but if he ever put it in the public view, he'd be at risk of cancellation from various groups (all sides of the Hamas-IDF-Hezbollah conflict). What point is there to stating you are holding an academic event on "stolen land" and then proceeding as normal? It's not like you are deciding to hold the event elsewhere because of this acknowledgment. Furthermore, please, what land hasn't changed hands over the past millennia?
I agree that colonialism was horrific and continues to be
problematic as a lens through which modern society is viewed. I'm not a BIPOC so I try to listen & learn & support BIPOC in my field, especially other women, and this is so fucking easy because the few in my inner circle are hands-down the most talented women I know.
But I find these statements about land ownership apologies empty time-wasters. If you're not going to give the land back, why talk about who lived there before the French (Canadians) set up shop? Just leave it and donate a portion of registration fees to an indigenous charity. But these weird solemn apologies aren't limited to Canadian conferences, they are popping up everywhere. Maybe there's a point if the conference has something to do with colonialism, but that wasn't the case. It's also funny when it happens on Zoom. Are we going to go around the Zoomroom and confess our guilt for being wherever we are? Listen, if I just packed up and returned to some random country my ancestors came from, that country has changed hands hundreds of times throughout history, too. well whatever.
Canada is, however, the worst offender for this virtue-signaling BS, which is ironic considering how indigenous people continue to struggle with institutions & police there. No offense to Canada but I feel like they are really desperate to whitewash their land grabs purely to "distinguish" themselves from the US. The press has only in the past years been covering more of the historic abuses and current discrimination/apathy toward First Peoples. So they are desperate to bury it or apologize it all away. Just my take though.
Since I ranted about Canada, I also want to say that their allegedly open attitude toward immigrants does not apply to established scholars. I chuckle at every pronouncement about Canad
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