How useful is a land acknowledgement?

There's am anecdote in the paper about Indigenous playright Cliff Cardinal being asked to do a land acknowledgement before the performance of one of his plays, to which he responded,"I hate land acknowledgements - I find them so goddamn patronizing. I'm afraid that people of money and privilege hear a land acknowledgement, nod solemnly in approval, and then wait patiently for their show to begin." 

He apparently then waffled on for 90 more minutes about the emptiness of land acknowledgements, and people never did get to see the play. Maybe some patrons found this fascinating, but I for one would have been well and truly pissed off, and probably asked for my money back.

Anyway, the point is: Indigenous land acknowledgements are contentious, not least among Indigenous people. 

If you've been to any kind of event any time in the last 10 or 15 years, you will almost certainly have sat through one. But these days you also get them on websites, as part of email signatures, before business meetings and council sessions, in movie theatres, law courts, before sports events, and in many other places.

They have been used among Indigenous nations since time immemorial, but they started becoming common in settler society in about 2010, at least among the more politically correct organizations. They went mainstream in 2015, after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report and calls to action, and particularly after the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls of 2016-9.

And they do serve a purpose, as this article, among many others, argues. They are an act of reconciliation and decolonization, at least to some degree, and they can make people think about their relationship with First Nations, the Métis and the Inuit while doing everyday things, at least to some degree.

But, because they are so ubiquitous, and because we are all so used to them - remember the FIRST time you heard one? - they lack the impact they once had, and have become somewhat performative, tokenized and ritualized, an empty exercise in checkmark-ticking and brownie point-scoring. I have experienced some quite imaginative versions of late, as organizations desperately try to keep them interesting and engaging (although often this just makes them long).

Increasingly, Indigenous commentators are questioning their value, Mr. Cardinal being just one, perhaps extreme, case in point (or maybe his was just an extreme example of an attempt to make them interesting and engaging). 

Some see them as a bare minimum but insufficient on their own. Some get annoyed if pronunciations are botched, or complain that some acknowledgements mention the name of the same nation multiple times under different names. Some see it as a performative sop, and a claim to be doing something without having to do something. Some say that if a person has to read it, they are not thinking it or feeling it. Some say that the very use of the phrase "I acknowledge" is all wrong in the first place. Some say that to give an acknowldgement in the past tense is just another tool of continued colonialism. Some say that there is no point is acknowledging anything if there is no intention of giving the land back.

Certainly, you can't please all the people all the time. But are land acknowledgements pleasing ANY people? I think so, but any pleasing is borderline, and maybe it is just a matter of time until land acknowledgememts are all but useless. What will we do then?