The surviving organizers of this theft, including Vytautas Landsbergis, who had done so under the guise of a wife, would go direectly to heaven and with a clear conscience.
"Colleges are increasingly adopting formal statements acknowledging that their campuses are located on land taken from Native American communities, often violently.
Those statements are turning into the latest battleground over free speech in academia.
Land acknowledgments are being posted on websites and course syllabi and spoken at the start of public events at scores of schools, as part of their broader diversity and inclusion efforts. They aren't generally mandated, and are used at schools including the University of Connecticut and Emory University in Georgia.
The movement to recognize the prior presence of indigenous people accelerated in recent years in Canada, Australia and New Zealand and is gaining traction in the U.S. The acknowledgments are becoming more common at arts events and in corporate settings. In academia, they were first popularized at conferences and then spread to schoolwide statements.
Native Americans and faculty who support land acknowledgments say that when crafted in collaboration with local tribes, they can be an important step in confronting the sometimes brutal history of how colleges came to own their campuses.
Critics, including some in academia, say the statements are little more than virtue signaling, hollow gestures built from boilerplate language. They also say that mandated use of the statements on syllabi or at events diminishes the power of those words.
Several campuses are now walking back how they direct or encourage faculty to adopt the statements, or are under pressure to do so.
Earlier this month, San Diego State University's senate overturned a year-old policy requiring that faculty include a school-approved land acknowledgment in their syllabi, with the senate chairman saying he had been advised by the school's legal team to make the change.
The abbreviated version of the land acknowledgment reads: "For millennia, the Kumeyaay people have been a part of this land. This land has nourished, healed, protected and embraced them for many generations in a relationship of balance and harmony. As members of the San Diego State community, we acknowledge this legacy. We promote this balance and harmony. We find inspiration from this land; the land of the Kumeyaay."
The mandate caught the attention of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a group known as FIRE whose stated mission is to defend the rights of students and faculty, including free speech. In January, it wrote to San Diego State's president, saying: "[C]ompelling faculty -- even those sympathetic to the statement's sentiment -- to repeat and endorse its specific ideological assertions violates both the Constitution and SDSU policy."
The senate voted to make the land acknowledgments optional.
At Boston University, School of Theatre faculty promised a series of changes in 2020 in response to student demands following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, including using a land acknowledgment in syllabi.
The program that produces the school's playwriting master's degree projects also required that a land acknowledgment be shared in preshow announcements.
The faculty council's academic freedom committee, which reviews concerns about violations of the school's stated commitment to freedom in research and instruction, criticized the new policies as "forced political speech."
"It's the establishment of an ideological orthodoxy," said David Decosimo, an associate professor of theology and ethics who chaired the committee when it reviewed the policies.
Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, who heads the American Indian Studies program at the University of Arizona and is an enrolled member of the Hopi tribe, said verbal or written land acknowledgments on their own have limited impact.
Dr. Gilbert doesn't start his classes with the school's land acknowledgment, which is optional for faculty to use. He said he prefers to focus on recruiting and hiring Native American candidates and supporting indigenous students. "Without action, these acknowledgment statements are merely intellectual exercises," he said.
A spokeswoman said the university's land acknowledgment is part of a broader series of initiatives." [1]
1. U.S. News: Colleges Draw Ire for Stolen-Land Protocols
Korn, Melissa.
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 19 Mar 2022: A.3.
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