Whose land is it anyway?

The trouble with land acknowledgements

In 1278 King Edward I, determined to learn which subjects had usurped royal privileges, demanded of each man proof of how he came by his property, using a royal writ called quo warranto (‘by what right’).

Not everyone reacted to this in the manner hoped for. When approached by the king’s men John de Warenne, 6th Earl of Surrey, drew his rusty sword and declared that this was his warrant, for ‘my ancestors came with William the Bastard, and conquered their lands with the sword, and I will defend them with the sword against anyone wishing to seize them.’ The authorities, at least according to this colourful tale told by Walter of Guisborough, accepted his legal argument.

The Norman warlords who conquered England indeed took their land at the point of the sword, but then so had their Anglo-Saxon victims centuries earlier when they overran the Romano-Britons. These Brythonic speakers had in turn largely displaced the island’s previous inhabitants, the ‘Beaker People’, in the first millennium BC. And as for the poor Beaker People - they had almost wiped out Britain’s Neolithic farmers around two millennia before Christ, according to genetic evidence. And you’ll never guess how Britain’s indigenous hunter-gatherer population fared when the Neolithic farmers arrived around 4000 BC - DNA studies suggest they left ‘little genetic legacy’ in the subsequent population, pointing to a less than peaceful demographic transition.

That process of conquest and replacement was common in the Europe of Conan the Barbarian, and indeed around the world, an inevitable tragedy when larger agriculture-based societies hungrily look at land thinly inhabited by hunter-gatherers. It is only in the New World territories conquered by Europeans in recent centuries that this story has been humanised and lamented; unlike with the last Neolithic Britons bravely fighting the more numerous Beaker People, we have names and faces in print, camera and film. It is hard to listen to the story of the Lakota and not feel great sadness about their fate - and many Americans at the time did.

The remnants of the conquered, although shattered by the loss of their land and the difficulties of adapting to modern life, still live as reproof of the white man’s crimes and tug at his guilt. Indeed, that sense of guilt is what makes modern European settler nations exceptional among the world’s cultures, a guilt that verges on masochism.

Last week King Charles III of England, heir and direct descendant of Edward I and William the Bastard, opened the Parliament of Canada, another of his realms, where he declared:

‘I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people. This land acknowledgement is a recognition of shared history as a nation. It is my great hope that in each of your communities and collectively as a country a path is found toward truth and reconciliation in both word and deed.’

The Anishinaabeg and the British certainly have a shared history. They fought side-by-side against the Americans in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, and after US independence many fled from the new republic for British North America. But that’s not what Edward’s successor is celebrating, of course, and it is not the purpose of such land acknowledgements, with their pointed use of the word ‘unceded’.