A scalp dance

At the beginning of many events it’s now fashionable to begin with an indigenous land acknowledgment, usually something along these lines:

The ostensible goal of these acknowledgments is to promote a “greater public consciousness of Native sovereignty and cultural rights.” ¹

But strangely, these acknowledgments seem always a bit myopic. If we’re going to acknowledge ancestral and unceded territory of modern-day North America, how far back do we look? To the Clovis People?

Clovis refers to the earliest ² known prehistoric Native American culture. One theory is that the Clovis people crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia and moved south through an ice-free corridor into the central U.S., approximately 12,800 years ago. (See also Peopling of the Americas.)

Clovis culture pre-dates our modern-day concept of land ownership, so Clovis land could never have been legally ceded or given freely.

Today, the 574 federally recognized ³ tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Sioux, Comanche, Chnook, Inuit, etc.) occupy land that was once the home of the Clovis people. This land, in turn, was subsequently appropriated by Spanish explorers, English settlers, and other European colonists.

Given what we know of human nature in general, and Native American populations in particular, it seems safe to assume that land appropriation throughout history (from the Clovis culture thousands of years ago to modern tribes today – even prior to European colonization, circa 1492), was likely violent and unforgiving.

• Violence between Native American tribes took many forms. ⁴

• War captives were executed in ritual ways, sometimes involving torture, as a form of spiritual justice or communal healing. ⁵

• Indigenous slavery existed in some regions even before European contact. ⁶

• Scalping occurred both before and after European contact, though colonial powers (like the British and French) later encouraged it with bounties.^{7 8 9 10 11}

• Raiding was sometimes a way of life, targeting rival tribes or agricultural villages. ¹²

Not all was violence, of course. Many tribes maintained long-standing peace with neighbors and used diplomacy, intermarriage, and trade to manage relations. ¹³

Virtue signaling

Most of the time “indigenous” means first, but it can also refer to people, plants, or animals that originate from, or have a long-standing connection to, a specific place. Other terms used include “Native” and “First Nations.”

So maybe acknowledging Clovis is going back too far.

And yet the question remains: How far back do we go when acknowledging “public consciousness of Native sovereignty and cultural rights”?

Native American nations today are “indigenous” to North America as First Nations. Undoubtedly some of these First Nations displaced other Indigenous nations, even before European colonization. ^{14 15}

So mostly it seems, we’re virtue signaling. Our culture is better.

Our culture is better because we’re willing to shame ourselves by drawing attention to our occupation of unceded land that was unceremoniously appropriated from an indigenous tribe that managed to occupy unceded land from a prior indigenous tribe, who managed to occupy ancestral and unceded territory from a prior prior tribe or nation; and so on and so forth, all the way back to the Clovis people, who’s distant ancestors ultimately came from Africa. ^{16 17}