Land Acknowledgement Ho!

There was an Indian head … drawn by an unknown artist in 1939, broadcast until the late 1970s to American TVs everywhere after all the shows ran out. It’s called the Indian Head test pattern. If you left the TV on … you’d see that Indian, surrounded by circles that looked like sights through riflescopes. … The Indian’s head was just above the bull’s-eye, like all you’d need to do was nod up in agreement to set the sights on the target. This was just a test.

— Tommy Orange, There There

Earl Fowler

Like all North Americans of a certain age I remember staring at that test pattern, which the CBC also deployed in the early years of television. Way more intently, in fact, than I ever paid attention to The Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 23 when they were de rigueur features of school assemblies in the 1950s and ’60s.

Never quite understood why, if the Lord was my shepherd, I wouldn’t want Him. But then, why would I want a shepherd in the first place?

When I was a little older, the penny dropped on why some of the bigger boys always snickered at the “thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me” part. Rod was of course a slang word for penis. (In Grade 9, I met a boy named Rod Friesen. His nickname was Dick Popsicle.)

Inevitably, the eyes of teachers and students alike — even those of Mr. Kindrachuk, a cheerful, Ned Flanders sort of principal — glazed over during the droning of O Canada at the beginning of our assemblies and the butchering of God Save the Queen at the end. Miss Clarke, who cried when the big boys got rowdy, was our piano accompanist.

Mr. Kindrachuk’s son Orest, four years older than I, would go on to win a couple of Stanley Cups with the Philadelphia Flyers in the mid-Seventies while centring Dave (The Hammer) Schultz and Don (Big Bird) Saleski on the team’s intimidating third line.

The Montreal Canadiens rescued the NHL from turning into the UFC in 1976 by beating the Broad Street Bullies in the Cup final. Much as I deplore hockey fights, I have to admit that one of my all-time favourite sports memories is of the time Larry (an even bigger Big Bird) Robinson nailed The Hammer into the ice.

Five minutes for looking so good.

But I digress. The first point of this little diatribe — we’ll get back to the tribal part — is that familiarity breeds … well, not contempt so much as boredom and indifference.

National anthems at sports events obviously serve the interests of television networks, which wrap copious commercials on either side of them. But except for particularly egregious performances by terrible or intoxicated singers, they’re really just a couple of minutes we’ll never get back. At best, an anthem gives you a chance to stand and stretch your back a bit if you’re actually at the game.

Those of us watching on TV see thee rise, but without glowing hearts. And if the game is gallantly streaming from an American rink or stadium, we certainly won’t be watching o’er ramparts for a glimpse of Old Glory.

Just kick the ball or drop the frigging puck. The bombs bursting in air give proof through the night of nothing more than the persistence of xenophobic tribalism.

Which brings us to the second point, the one I actually wanted to get to before all these damn asides, digressions and the usual persiflage. And it is simply to observe that the settler society in North America has had, to say the least, a difficult time coming to terms with Indigenous rights since Columbus first made landfall one October on an island in what is now the Bahamas.

Not sure we’re getting any better with 532 years of practice, notwithstanding the fact that the Cleveland Indians were shamed into becoming the Guardians, the Washington Redskins the Commanders and the Edmonton Eskimos the Elks. (The racist tomahawk-chop traditions of fans of the Atlanta Braves, Kansas City Chiefs and Florida State Seminoles remain idiotic abominations. But I’m secretly — and inconsistently — hopeful that the Chicago Blackhawks, who sport the most stylish jerseys in all of professional sports, can keep their shirts on and fend off pressure to ditch their logo.)

The land acknowledgements of recent years that have replaced prayer and the national anthem at the beginning of virtually all meetings and press conferences involving politicians, education and health sector officials, and even financiers and resource industry executives are an improvement on brazenly appropriating First Nation, Inuit and Métis culture for sports jerseys and tourist attractions, I suppose.

Saskatoon, for example, held a cringeworthy summer Louis Riel Day celebration in the 1970s and ’80s that featured canoe paddling and horseback riding and entertainment for the whole family. The fact that Riel had been found guilty of high treason and hanged in Regina in 1885, to wide approbation throughout Protestant Canada and yowls of outrage in mostly Catholic Quebec, didn’t feature much in the thinking of local television and service club promoters.

So we’ve moved on from that. The city is one of several in Western Canada that now play host to more respectful gatherings in honour of Riel and Métis veterans every Nov. 16, the anniversary of his execution.

But back to land acknowledgements.

As intoned by one dignitary or another, the well-intentioned but formulaic phrase where I live in Victoria, B.C., goes like this:

We acknowledge with respect the beautiful and traditional territories of the Lekwungen People, who are now known as the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations. By making our home and sharing stories on lək̓ʷəŋən Territory, we take on a role that comes with responsibilities to the land and its stewards.

It’s never quite specified, of course, just what that role might be. I’ve sat through enough meetings, clumsy syntax and wastefully approximate locutions, even on Zoom, where brains went numb and eyes deadened during what quickly devolved into a pro forma, mincing but mainly meaningless exercise.

Our voices rang with that Aryan twang.

“In my part of upstate New York,” novelist Francine Prose noted in a recent piece in The New York Review of Books, “ we honor the Lenape (Algonquians also known as the Delaware Nation) without saying what’s become of them, which seems to me like thanking the owners of a house we’ve robbed even though we have absolutely no intention of returning the loot.”

Such statements come with the territory, as they say. Now let’s let bygones be bygones and leave the dirty business of revanchism to Putin.

Land acknowledgements are a form of virtue signalling — some might even call them “woke,” though that term has been so degraded that it now seems to signify any kind of societal progress since the adoption of the Magna Carta.

Still, we’re getting to the point where, if for no other reason than their ubiquity, the sombre bows to conditions that prevailed before we Europeans horned in are about as fatuous and immaterial as singing about Charles III being happy and glorious.

Prose cites an episode I’d seen on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) of “Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi’s brilliant TV series Reservation Dogs, the first (U.S.) show created entirely by Native writers and directors and played by an almost completely Native cast.”

In the instalment in question, rez teens have been promised gift cards for attending a “Native American Reclamation and Decolonization Symposium” offered by a Miss M8tri@rch and an Augusto Firekeeper, a couple of Indigenous social media influencers (that is to say, hucksters) who stage New Age “tribal” gatherings throughout the United States:

Miss M8tri@rch (“I am a PhD student at Dartmouth”) loses her audience almost instantly when she extends the now familiar land acknowledgement — the expression of appreciation for Native people, the former caretakers of the land on which the event is occurring — and goes on to thank their predecessors, “our Neanderthal relatives, so acknowledge them, and before that, even, the Dinosaur Nation. … Before that, the Star People. Also, our reptilian relatives, above and below the earth.”

Mic drop.

If savvy First Nations youth are finding land acknowledgements ridiculous and hollow, you have to wonder about their value.

Heaping Pelion upon Ossa, Oka upon Wounded Knee, our now-standard opening ceremonies for countless events — including the odd hockey game —  have metamorphosed from patriotic to patronizing. Dollars to Timbits there’s a focus group that can prove this is all nothing but cold calculation.

When it comes to truth and reconciliation, nice-nelly land appreciation statements deliver a smattering of the former and a sham feint toward the latter.

White man speaketh with better breath but maintaineth forked tongue.

A candid acknowledgement would state simply: We settlers in the Americas know perfectly well that we’re living on stolen continents, but please do not adjust the Indian Head test pattern that once ruled the idiot box through the wee hours. The trouble with this picture is not temporary. We’re keeping the loot. This is not a test.

Just drop the frigging puck.

And go, Hawks, go!