“The On Being Project is located on Dakota Land”

I wrote about this topic a while back, but it came to my mind again today. I shop after 7 a.m. on Sundays as the store opens at 6 and they have time to replenish. Krista Tippett's NPR show, "On Being", was formerly called "On Faith".

My drive back and forth to the store takes about 15 minutes, so I'm not very tortured. I heard the last words of Tippett on his broadcast.

There is a whole page on Tippett's land acknowledgment on the internet.

Both Dakota and Lakota are included in the Dakota people, who were called the Sioux people. Remember, these were Native Americans.

Most of the acknowledgment is here.

About 12 miles away from The On Being Project’s central office, the Minnesota River joins the Mississippi River at a place called Bdote.

In Dakota, one translation of “bdote” is “where two waters come together,” and the bdote where the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers concur is an especially sacred site — the center of the world to the Dakota.

Bdote is a place that carries a complicated and layered history, in the thousands of years the Dakota people have been in relationship and kinship with the land here, and in the several hundred years since European settlers colonized the land that the state of Minnesota now occupies. The United States’ land seizures were a project of spiritual destruction that denied the Dakota free and unhindered access to the land that fundamentally shapes their identity and spirituality.

Today, 11 reservations are located within the state of Minnesota: four Dakota communities in the southern portion of the state and seven Ojibwe communities in the north. The On Being Project pays tribute to the Dakota and Ojibwe.

We invite you to consider the land on which you live and the confluence of legacies that bring you to stand where you are — particularly through critical reflection and conversation with your own community. We encourage you to use the resources below to assist in your exploration.

Honor Native Land: A Guide is a step-by-step guide for writing a land acknowledgment.

There are some issues with land acknowledgments, for example, some lands were not always considered the same as they are today. Native Americans were often the victims of settler displacement and got a raw deal.

I hear this when I hear a land acknowledgment.

“Our people stole land from the Dakota, and that’s where our business is located. But aren’t I a good person for saying it?”

I think that the Dakota would prefer to get their land back, or at least some compensation. Do you think that they care if the upper-class listens to Tippett? They want to be paid money.

Land acknowledgments are the height of wokeness to me. They are not addressed to Native Americans, but to well-fed academics, and they don't offer any compensation for the theft. I couldn't find anything in the page about giving the Dakota some compensation.

Land acknowledgments are its apogee, if wokeness is equivalent to making useless performative gestures that show what a good person you are. They are performances for other people who were involved in the theft.

Either put up or shut up. If you think you are responsible for stealing land, give it back or pay for it.