This Land Is Not My Land
Mark Jarzombek and Vikramaditya Prakash
September 2023
The state of land acknowledgment in the United States today is in a crisis. Though many large institutions now readily have such acknowledgments—a step in the right direction—they do not get to the heart of the matter and typically lack meaningful calls for action. Land acknowledgments do nothing to address private property—despite the fact that American colonialism is closely rooted in it—and do almost nothing to educate the public about local Native American claims, politics, and culture. The Office of (Un)Certainty Research (OUR), a design research practice established by the authors, proposes a way to address this dilemma and implicate colonial property ownership through physical intervention.
There can be no disputing the basic fact: all land in the Americas is defined by the break brought on by the era of colonial settlement that, once integrated into the policies of the nation-state, moved across the landscape at different speeds and with various energies and acts of violence. In Massachusetts, for example, the Enfranchisement Act of 1869 granted full citizenship rights to Indigenous peoples. But there was a downside to this act; it eliminated the collective land holdings of tribal communities. Before then, local Native American communities—despite a series of armed conflicts dating back to King Philip's War (1675-1676), despite instances of enslavement and deportation to the Bahamas, and despite widespread forced religious conversions, often accompanied by significant territorial restrictions—still retained thousands of acres guaranteed by treaty. Under the new act, tribal lands held collectively were divided and sold. This was only one of several mechanisms, some “legal” and some not, by which land in Massachusetts disappropriated Native American communities from ancestral land. The residue of these actions remain in our educational system. In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, nowhere along a public student’s educational trajectory is there a single lesson that points to the history of the Massachusetts people—even though a Massachusetts sachem (chief) appears on the state flag—nor to the fact that there are still Native American communities in the state.
The story of land in Massachusetts—including the story of silencing—is, of course, part of a sprawling history of the property-ification that rarely rises to the surface of national consciousness. The Museum at Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis states on its website that it traces “the story of the Native Americans, explorers, pioneers, and rebels who made America possible.”¹ The enduring myth of individual achievement being what “made America possible” neatly sidesteps the less-comfortable, but just as fundamental, role played by the ideology of private land ownership. If we think of an ideology as a collection of overarching ideas that are assumed to be quasi-natural by a particular group, then private property certainly functions as a comprehensive ideology. Despite the complicated history of property rights in Europe (going back as it does to the Romans), the basic, modern equation between land ownership and the right to be political took shape in England in the 16th and 17th centuries on the very eve of the colonization of the Americas. After the formation of the United States, without royal property to worry about (much less lingering feudal rights), transforming land into property had a clarity in relationship to nation-building that had not previously existed anywhere in the world. Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln all worked as surveyors early in their careers. And property was of course, essential to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.
If transforming land into property opened up social and economic opportunities for the newcomers, it was designed to put Indigenous populations into weakened positions. And this remains systemic to our contemporary situation. Kyle Whyte, an environmental justice scholar at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, reminds us that “colonialism and land dispossession are present factors that increase vulnerability and create economic challenges for tribes.”²
The critical issue, however, is that Native land—then and now—was and is of a different cultural order than land as understood by arriving settlers. This was not unknown to government officials. For example, in 1889 a Congressional study of the Native American land purchases in Oklahoma noted that the Cherokees, who during the 1830s and 1840s were forcibly moved from areas in the Carolinas and Georgia to what is now Oklahoma, objected to the sale of the land on which they had been settled. One officer noted that “[w]hen it comes to the Indian[,] putting a price on his land he is at a loss, for he has never considered it a matter of speculation. The idea of ‘Mother Earth’ to him (Indian) is almost a literal expression.”³
Today, in some corners of the U.S., Native communities have started to buy back pieces of land, in some instances receiving land as a gift or by repatriation from the government.⁴ But as important as these efforts are, they do not address the basic problem that all land is marked by the historic rupture precipitated by the nation-state. Which begs the question: When did land shift from being part of Mother Earth to become “property”? The answer might lie in some archive or with a map, but it might also lie somewhere in the root systems of the plants and trees that were chopped down to make way for crops, roads, and buildings. This basic truth applies to every piece of “property” in the Americas, to one’s neighbor’s as well as one’s own.
In the last few years, large institutions have begun to do their part in this conversation by making “acknowledgments.” In places like Australia and New Zealand, oral land acknowledgments at the beginning of public events are now a long-standing tradition. On the West Coast of the United States, they are increasingly commonplace. On the East Coast they are more recent. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for instance, an acknowledgment that its land was unceded territory was drafted in 2020—the belatedness of this acknowledgment a reflection of MIT’s long-term, scandalous indifference. A working group of students, staff, and faculty at MIT suggested, however, that the acknowledgment not be made official until more serious work has been done to “encourage an active, rather than a passive, commitment to Indigenous people, communities, and Nations.”⁵ The reason for their action is obvious. A recent headline in The Atlantic said it well: “‘Land Acknowledgments’ Are Just Moral Exhibitionism.” They relieve the speaker and the audience of the responsibility to think about Indigenous peoples, at least until the next public event. The author of the article, Graeme Wood, adds that “[i]t is like a receipt provided by a highway robber, noting all the jewels and gold coins he has stolen.”⁶
Indeed, land acknowledgments do not address the need for cultural repair. They also do not address the equally pressing question about the reality of land.⁷ And they completely sidestep the question: Can we—individually—do something? After all, there are currently over 80 million landowners, individuals and land-owning corporations in the United States.⁸
The 1 BY 1 Design Project
O(U)R proposes the 1BY1: Land Acknowledgement Design Challenge. The concept is that beyond a verbal or written acknowledgment, every property owner is invited to physically acknowledge that the land they call property is disappropriated. (The predecessorial historicity of property is not something that can be denied.)
One-foot Square Mirror, Mark Jarzombek, Submission for 1BY1 Design Challenge. Courtesy of O(U)R.
Property owners design and produce a 1 meter by 1 meter physical “acknowledgment” on their property, open and visible to the public. As homeowners research the history of their property, they become micro-historians increasingly knowledgeable about local history. The project envisions a world where, as the challenge takes root across a community, people will walk around the neighborhood and talk to each other about the various contributions, mapping out a community spirit that accepts and respects the presence of the land’s deep history. (The name of the challenge, 1BY1, references not just the scale of the intervention—one meter by one meter, one arm’s length by one arm’s length, etc.—but also the additive nature of the enterprise: one property after another.)
Coast Salish Retable, Jennifer Danison, Submission for 1BY1 Design Challenge. Courtesy of O(U)R.
The challenge aims to make evident that the settler colonial structure of property does not obliterate the layer of Mother Earth. It is stamped onto it. But how should one express the fact that land has two histories, one suppressed under the other?
The project is certainly utopian. But sometimes, it only takes a few seeds to start a movement. Indeed, the challenge has now been picked up by several participants who have come from various walks of life. One person picked a place where soil brought by dinner guests can be deposited. Over time, the mound will grow into something much larger. Another designed a type of altar. Jennifer Danison, an artist, made a structure from organic material found on a beach; Robert Cowherd, an architect in Cambridge, worked with his community to not only propose an installation but to even suggest a change in Cambridge’s legal system:
WHEREAS Indigenous land rights pre-date subsequent claims; now therefore be it
ORDERED That every parcel registered in the City of Cambridge shall erect a ground marker acknowledging Indigenous land rights and the conditions by which subsequent rights and governance provisions shall comply.
An excellent idea.
Coast Salish Retable, Jennifer Danison, Submission for 1BY1 Design Challenge. Courtesy of O(U)R.
Seven Sacred Directions Indigenous Land Maker, Robert Cowherd, Submission for 1BY1 Design Challenge. Courtesy of O(U)R.
O(U)R has run workshops with the North American Indian Center of Boston as well as in local schools. Participants are generally willing to create a physical marker for the land they reside on, a first step toward accepting the basic fact that the land they live on was, and still is, Native land.
One of the many lessons we learned is that it is harder than one thinks to convince people to engage in this challenge. It is easier to read out an acknowledgment than to do something in public on one’s own property. What will the neighbors be saying? Most propertied Americans hardly think of the land their house was built on except when it comes time to mow the lawn or rake the leaves. This blind spot in our collective consciousness is itself a construct of our naturalized, settler-colonial mentality.
“Homepage,” The Gateway Arch, accessed June, 2023, https://www.gatewayarch.com.
Lizzie Wade, “Native tribes have lost 99% of their land in the United States,” Science.org (Oct. 28, 2021): https://www.science.org.
“Chief Mayes to U.S. Commission, December 28, 1889,” Correspondence of 1898 between the United States Commission and Cherokee National Authorities (Washington D.C. 1890), 126.
The U.S. holds approximately 56 million acres of land in trust for various Native American tribes and individuals, according to the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management.
“Report of the Indigenous Working Group.” (December 2022):
https://reif.mit.edu/sites/default/files/Indigenous_Working_Group_Report.pdf
Graeme Wood, “‘Land Acknowledgments’ Are Just Moral Exhibitionism,” The Atlantic, November 28, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com.
For a full discussion of how the history of the local Native American community is misrepresented in the cultural landscape, see: Mark Jarzombek, “The ‘Indianized’ Landscape of Massachusetts,” Places (February 2021): https://placesjournal.org.
In 1978 there were 60-77 million landowners (individuals and corporations.) I am extrapolating but I am assuming there are well over 80 million. Gene Wunderlich, Facts about US Landownership (U.S. Department of Agriculture Economics, Statistics, and Cooperatives Service Agriculture Information Bulletin No. 422), v. The homeownership rate in the United States is about 65. https://www.statista.com/statistics/184902/homeownership-rate-in-the-us-since-2003.
