Commentary: Allegiance to guilt: Land acknowledgments are based in woke ideology—not truth.

(American Experiment) — If you’ve attended a cultural event or government meeting in the Twin Cities in the last few years, you’ve likely experienced a “land acknowledgment” — a public confession of guilt for living on “stolen land” that rightfully belongs to the Dakota Indians. I’ve done so twice recently: at a ballet at the University of Minnesota’s Northrop Auditorium and an opera at St. Paul’s Ordway Center for the Performing Arts.

Land acknowledgments in this state proclaim that ordinary Minnesotans are here illegally. They feature an abject apology and a pledge for repentance and reparations, frequently framed in quasi-religious language.

In 2023, the Star Tribune reported that Native nonprofits have been flooded with requests from “major corporations to grade-school teachers” for guidance on how to write these statements.

Land acknowledgements are not so much about righting wrongs as provoking and capitalizing on ordinary citizens’ guilt to gain power, money, and cultural clout. They are just the sort of “woke” initiative we expect to see discredited, now that Donald Trump is in the White House.

But Minnesota presents a special challenge. Here, well-organized and financed Native American activists have used land acknowledgments as the “tip of the spear” to lay the groundwork for a far more ambitious power grab. Today, that agenda — under cover of a flawed, misleading narrative — is proceeding largely unopposed and out of the public eye.

In 2020, Larissa FastHorse of the nonprofit Indigenous Direction, which worked with the Guthrie Theater to craft its land acknowledgment, spoke straightforwardly about these statements’ strategic purpose.

Land acknowledgments are like a “gateway drug,” she told the Star Tribune. “Once you have to constantly acknowledge eight shows a week that this land is someone else’s land, it starts opening your brain up” to more comprehensive changes.

Native nonprofits and community organizers began flexing their muscles out of the gate to engrave Native Americans’ entitled, victim status on the public mind.

Early on, some moves were symbolic — for example, changing the name of Minneapolis’s iconic Lake Calhoun to the unpronounceable “Bde Maka Ska” (undocumented in the historical record).

Other initiatives have focused on appropriating targeted public land and co-opting historical sites that the Dakota associate with past humiliations, such as Fort Ridgely (site of the final Dakota assault in the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862) and Fort Snelling, which activists claimed was “sacred” to the Dakota — again, without historical documentation.

In April 2025, Dakota activists won a particularly noteworthy victory. The City of Minneapolis ceded prime real estate — the five-acre lock and dam area near St. Anthony Falls — to a Dakota non-profit to convert to an Indigenous-inspired “community gathering place.” (The U.S. government had paid twice for the land there, first in 1805 and then in 1837.)

Once again, activists designated the site as a Dakota “sacred place.” In Dakota culture, explained Shelley Buck, the nonprofit’s president, everything has a “life force.” “People look at things like the water as a resource when they should be looking at her as a relative and taking care of her,” she declared.

Native activists exponentially expanded their influence in January 2025, when the Metropolitan Council — the metro area’s powerful, unelected regional government — voted to create an American Indian Advisory Council, composed of “indigenous culture carriers and systems changers.”

Initially, the Council convened the group to write a land acknowledgment, but “the work quickly evolved” into advising the Met Council on its new 30-year comprehensive plan, “Imagine 2050,” according to a Council statement. This massive document will “guide” future metro-area growth and development in land use, transportation, water resource management, and parks.

“We are very weary of land acknowledgments,” proclaimed Kate Beane, an advisory group member and a longtime Dakota activist. Her group wants “actions,” she said.

The American Indian Advisory Council’s numerous, self-serving demands will carry a high price tag. They include hiring many new American Indian staff members and creating a “reparative action fund” and a “new political imagination” of water policy that integrates “a framework based on water as a relative.”

Indoctrination of schoolchildren

But Native activists’ most consequential success to date is their capture of our state’s public education system as a vehicle to indoctrinate Minnesota students in their radical cultural and political agenda.

In 2023, the state legislature passed the “Indigenous Education for All Act,” which gives tribal leaders veto power over the content of all K-12 public school instruction that touches on American Indian-related topics — including U.S. history, environmental issues, and current events.

The law equates “accuracy” in instructional content with tribal endorsement. This virtually ensures that Minnesota students will never be exposed to facts that challenge the false claims on which activists’ ideologically driven “decolonization” agenda is based.

What is this false narrative?

First, land acknowledgments promote a simplistic, revisionist tale that portrays the Dakota as innocent victims — peaceful, egalitarian, and deeply connected to the land — and Minnesota settlers as greedy and ruthless “colonizers” — agents of oppression and despoilers of nature.

In fact, the Dakota were a warrior society and frequently clashed violently with the Ojibwe, their traditional bitter enemies. Between 1820 and 1831, U.S. officials sponsored at least 200 peace councils between the feuding Dakota and Ojibwe in an effort to curb the unrelenting bloodshed.

Second, the narrative charges the U.S. government with a shameful, ongoing theft of land.

In fact, the Dakota arrived in the Twin Cities area around 1700, fleeing the Ojibwe. They did not negotiate with the tribes who were hunting here at that time, but killed or expelled them. In contrast, the U.S. government negotiated and paid for the land in question.

In doing so, Americans broke the age-old pattern of near-constant warfare, enslavement, and extermination that had dominated North America, and much of the world, for ages.

Here in Minnesota, that process wasn’t always fairly conducted. But land acknowledgments scandalously omit a vital fact. In 1946, the U.S. Congress established a national Indian Claims Commission that meticulously addressed land-related and other grievances, including unjust treaties.

Through a decades-long process, the federal government paid tribal members millions of dollars in a process of rectification that has extended into the 21st century.

The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE)’s new K-12 Social Studies standards, adopted in January 2024, reinforce every element of activists’ misleading ideological narrative.

The new standards are awash in “decolonization” buzzwords like “settler colonialism” and appear designed to convince students that the state they live in rightfully belongs to Indigenous people.

For example, when elementary schoolchildren study American states and capitals, they will be required to recognize the “Indigenous land these places were built on.” Students will have to learn the locations of Minnesota’s 11 tribal nations, but not the names or locations of neighboring countries, oceans, or continents.

Perhaps most far-reaching, MDE’s new Social Studies standards require public schools to weave so-called “Indigenous ways of knowing” throughout classroom instruction going forward. This way of understanding the world negates the very idea of objective truth and legitimizes Native activists’ agenda.

The claim is that each racial and ethnic group has its own subjective reality — its own “way of knowing” — to which the “dominant” culture must pay deference. Thus, it is wrong to expect Indigenous people to conform to Eurocentric linear, evidence-based reasoning. Their “traditional knowledge” is conceived as an older, spiritually generated wisdom that springs from a primal connection to nature and the land.

MDE and the activists who helped write the Social Studies standards want Minnesota students to draw at least two lessons from this.

First, the Native “decolonization” agenda — with its claims to “land back” and sacred status — is valid and unimpeachable. It is irrelevant that these claims are frequently based on undocumented “oral history,” elders’ “traditional wisdom,” and reputed “spiritual” insights into the natural world. They must not be questioned by Euro-Americans, even when they conflict with science or the historical record.

Second, the “traditional knowledge” of shamanistic Native “culture carriers” and “information keepers” is just as valuable as the expertise of technically trained historians and scientists — and just as worthy of big-dollar government and corporate consulting contracts.

The ideological revolution underway in Minnesota classrooms is already far advanced in Canada. There, the government and large corporations that deal with natural resources routinely pay Native elders large sums to share their environmental “wisdom.”

This practice is now gaining a foothold in our nation’s institutions.

In 2021, for example, a spokesman for the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul told Minnesota Native News that the institution wants to go beyond land acknowledgments and “subvert the idea that science and scientists are like these white folks in lab coats doing their experiments in some ivory tower.”

Indigenous people, he declared, shouldn’t have to “fit themselves into that box” and are “continuing to do very important science throughout history,” in fields such as “environmentalism and food sovereignty and astronomy.”

In 2022, first-year students at the University of Minnesota Medical School’s “white coat” ceremony were instructed to recite a land acknowledgment, utter a ritual confession of guilt, and then “pledge to honor all Indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by Western medicine.”

At the federal level, in 2022, the Biden administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy and Council on Environmental Quality issued agency-wide guidance on “recognizing and including Indigenous Knowledge in Federal research, policy and decision making.” Such knowledge, it was claimed, is important for purposes from environmental rulemaking to co-management of lands and waters.

The guidance defined Indigenous traditional knowledge as “observations” and “beliefs” rooted in Native people’s “familial intimacy with nature,” and described these as “critical” for “scientific” advancement.

The administration appeared to credit people of Indigenous heritage — “as the original stewards of the natural environment” — with quasi-magical powers that equip them with “expertise critical to finding solutions to the climate crisis and protecting our nation’s ecosystems,” as one official put it.

Biden officials betrayed no concern that Indigenous knowledge lacks all the elements that undergird modern science: theories, experimental methods, predictive value, measurement tools, and any way to resolve contradictions.

Presumably, this Biden-era initiative will get the Trump administration’s attention.

The “Invented Indian” narrative

In Minnesota, Native activists’ radical agenda has generally met with little opposition. Why are we so vulnerable to it?

The answer is, first, our empathy with Native Americans — many of whom have endured real suffering — and our desire to be “fair.”

Second, there’s our ignorance of the history of settlement. That includes the complex story of the European-American encounter with the New World, which brought 5,000 years of technological advances from which Indigenous people here had been cut off.

This process involved not only hardship but also benefits for Native Americans. At the time of settlement, for example, the Dakota were subsistence hunter-gatherers and often faced famine in harsh Minnesota winters.

Indian agents at Fort Snelling regularly supplied the Dakota with goods that helped them survive such as traps, axes, and knives, and missionaries created a written language for them.

In recent times, the Dakota — most of whom now share European heritage through intermarriage — have profited greatly from the contemporary advantages we all take for granted. These range from electricity and indoor plumbing to higher education and modern medicine. Activists’ one-dimensional victimization narrative raises serious obstacles to a balanced consideration of these complex costs and benefits.

But there’s another important reason we acquiesce so readily to the allure of what’s been called the myth of the “Invented Indian.”

Most Americans have encountered this myth in books, TV shows, and movies: “Dances with Wolves,” “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” and Carlos Castaneda’s “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge.”

All of these paint a simplistic, romanticized image of Indians as peaceful, spiritual “ecological stewards” in harmony with nature — just as land acknowledgments do.

James Clifton, an eminent ethnohistorian who studied and worked with Native American tribes for decades, describes this “Invented Indian” as a “cultural fiction” — a “wholly imagined representation of the past…distorted by fanciful imagery, selective reporting [and] hyperbole.”

He observes, however, that this idealized picture of Native Americans as peace-loving environmentalists without greed or guile has deep roots in European literature and philosophy, which over the years have tended to view civilization as an alienating, corrupting influence and the past as a time of simpler, happier and more natural existence.

In America, James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Last of the Mohicans” (1826) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855) portrayed Indians as exemplary — more noble and pure than flawed Europeans. In Germany, more than a thousand titles of idealized fiction concerning Native Americans were published in the last quarter of the 19th century alone.

Over the years, the Indian-as-moral-exemplar has proved highly malleable, taking on new forms in response to cultural shifts. As one commentator has pointed out, the strong, noble, stoic chief of James Fenimore Cooper has evolved into Disney’s ecological feminist Pocahontas and her beneficent, maternal “Grandmother Willow.”

Today, we see Minnesota policymakers’ embrace of the “Invented Indian” narrative in the transfer of “sacred” St. Anthony-area land to a Dakota entity, and the Met Council’s willingness to “imagine” a water policy that integrates “a framework based on water as a relative.” Hennepin County’s pantheistic land acknowledgment is another case in point:

“As part of our commitment to address the unresolved legacy” of “settler colonialism” it runs, Hennepin County praises the Dakota’s “embrace” of “our circular world as Unci Maka or Grandmother Earth,” who is the “role model” to “all her grandchildren — the two-legged, the four-legged,” as well as the “Dakota people’s…daily prayers to the totality of life” and “reverent acknowledgment of creation, meaning All My Relatives (emphasis in original).”

And though public-school sponsorship of a Christian service would be met with outrage, in 2023, the Minnesota Legislature opened the way for our state’s schools to sponsor a Native American ritual called “smudging.”

Smudging is a “spiritual practice… which involves the burning of one or more sacred medicines, such as sage,” according to Minnpost. One proponent described it as a “way for us to deal with negative energy, anxiety, to clear the air… before we start school, before we start prayers.” In Shakopee, school authorities have become the first to build a “smudging space” — a wooden teepee dedicated to the practice of this shamanistic ritual.

Unlike many other now discredited Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, the land acknowledgment agenda — with its confessions, oaths, and pledges to repent and amend our ways — uniquely purports to fill the hole created by our secular age’s lingering yearning for the sacred.

This article was originally published by American Experiment.

The post Commentary: Allegiance to guilt: Land acknowledgments are based in woke ideology—not truth. appeared first on Alpha News MN.