Give the Land Up — Or Shut Up

As the semester draws to a close, the familiar Commencement traditions loom large in my mind. There is the tolling of the Memorial Church Bell marking the beginning of the ceremony, the procession into Tercentenary Theater, the Sheriff of Middlesex County adorned in a festive top hat and tails calling the meeting to order. And, of course, there is a newer addition: the obligatory land acknowledgement.

Given Harvard’s reputation for being traditional — the University President still sits in a ceremonial chair that dates back to the eighteenth century, for example — this shift might seem surprising. But when the progressive winds of change blow, Harvard is eager to fall in line.

Recently, it has become fashionable for left-wing institutions to publicly acknowledge that the land they occupy used to belong to a specific Native tribe. However, these gestures are not genuine acts of reconciliation — they’re simply a shallow form of performative activism.

Harvard, never to be outdone when it comes to keeping up with the latest trends in progressive orthodoxy, now features land acknowledgments on a range of institutional, departmental, and program-specific websites — from the Harvard Art Museums, to the Graduate School of Design, to the Theater, Dance, and Media concentration.

Yet, I fail to see any tangible value from these acknowledgments. Simply recognizing the tribe doesn’t undo the dispossession that took place. In isolation, this is nothing more than performance.

Yes, Harvard has not existed since the dawn of time. A group lived here before the land was colonized nearly four hundred years ago — that much should be obvious to anyone who has a middle school history education.

So what difference does it make to essentially say, “yeah, we recognize that we took this land from you, sorry about that” and then do nothing about it? Indeed, land acknowledgements may sound more like a perverted reassertion of domination, merely reminding Native people that they lack the power to reclaim land they once occupied.

It seems that the only beneficiaries of land acknowledgments are the institutions themselves. They get to pat themselves on the back, tell themselves that they are doing their part to right a historical wrong, and gain newfound (and undeserved) political currency. Most importantly, they can flex their superiority over close-minded peers that prefer not to hollowly virtue signal.

Sure, some might argue that land acknowledgements, though symbolic, serve an educational purpose by raising awareness. But if that were the case, it would seem that every single group on Earth would be forced to constantly prostrate themselves at the feet of those who occupied the land before them. After all, has any group occupied any one territory since time immemorial?

The practice of conquering land, displacing its inhabitants, and settling new territories is as old as mankind. Should the native Massachusett tribe not, therefore, acknowledge that they too are conquerors of ill-gotten lands? Or are we to assume that they are the only group to have ever lived in parts of Massachusetts since the dawn of time?

Territorial expansion beyond a group’s “original” borders is not a strictly Western phenomenon either. The Mongols famously conquered lands well beyond their native central Asian steppe. Or consider the Aztecs, who did not spontaneously come into existence on terra nullius, but are, in fact, notorious for their brutal expansionism and cruel rule over other peoples.

Who, then, should the current residents of formerly Aztec land pay homage to in their acknowledgements? Surely not to a group who conquered that land from others? How far back does one need to go before they are satisfied that they have found the “true” people to whom the land belongs?

Perhaps it is time to recognize the futility of trying to answer questions like these and acknowledge the inherent hypocrisy and pointlessness of land acknowledgements altogether. After all, performative activism is just that: performative, not meaningful.

Any institution indulging in this nonsense should put its money where its mouth is: Either return the land that it occupies to whichever Native American tribe that it stole it from, or spare us the hollow, meaningless acknowledgements.

Henry P. Moss IV ’26, an Associate Editorial Editor, is a History concentrator in Eliot House.