LETTER: Do land acknowledgments do any harm?
When Europeans settled in the American heartland, it necessarily resulted the dislocation of the Native Americans. The Native Americans needed huge amounts of land for their way of life. The settlers, by contrast, wanted to ranch and farm on much smaller tracts of land that they could protect.
So ultimately the settling of our country was a clash between incompatible civilizations.
Did the earliest “native” Americans “own” the land? Did the settlers “steal” the land? Who’s to say? Does remembering the earliest American civilizations do any harm? Should the current occupiers acknowledge the previous occupiers? Should we pause once in a while and perhaps show some gratitude toward our predecessors? Why not?
