.png)
.png)
Faces Behind the Names: Millikin Land Acknowledgements
- Jack Hughes
- Oct 6
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 8
If you have attended a major ceremony at Millikin, seen a SOTAD performance, or explored Millikin’s website, chances are that you have seen or heard a brief statement which mentions several Indigenous peoples and their relationship to the land which the university stands upon. Millikin maintains a land acknowledgment in the history section of the university’s website, which includes a pronunciation guide for the names of the peoples it mentions. However, beyond just hearing the land acknowledgment when it is given, it is important that we, as students and members of Millikin’s community, seek to understand more completely the history and intended effect of such statements, as well as their place in academia more broadly so that we can engage with Millikin’s allyship from an informed position.
Land acknowledgments have become much more widespread in the U.S. over the past several decades, particularly among academic institutions such as universities and museums, as a way of acknowledging the original inhabitants of the lands where these declarations are made and the colonial foundations of these institutions. These statements often come in the form of short written or verbal statements which acknowledge the specific groups of people who have inhabited the place since time immemorial. As scholars Brendan K. Tao, Mostafa Bondok, and Edsel B. Ing note in their article “The Case for Land Acknowledgments in Academic Publising,” land acknowledgments reflect customs in numerous indigenous cultures which date back centuries. However, the adoption of such statements by institutions of higher education was largely popularized in the Australian arts community in the 1970’s and spread to the U.S. in the early 20th century, as Tracey Delasco describes here. The use of land acknowledgments by academic institutions represents a notable shift towards allyship with indigenous peoples, a willingness to engage with the uncomfortable aspects of American history, and a desire to push back against ongoing processes of colonization upon which they were founded and have continued to benefit from.
However, land acknowledgments are subject to a variety of criticism. The most notable of which are on the basis of their actual impact, Lumbee environmental scientist and scholar Ryan E. Emmanual states in his recent book On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice:
Too often, however, land acknowledgments are throwaway statements.They are fill-in-the-blank exercises that amount to nothing more than looking up the name of a specific group and announcing that these people were the original inhabitants of the land where an office, lecture hall, or conference center is located today.
Essentially, in order for land acknowledgments to be more than empty statements they need to be accompanied by further anti-colonial and anti-racist practices from the institution. A single answer for what these actions should look like does not exist, except in that they should be formed in explicit collaboration with the peoples whom the land acknowledgment recognizes. While in the case of Millikin, it is the responsibility of the university itself and those seated in positions of power. However, advocating for the institution to engage in such actions and holding it responsible if and when fall short is the domain of everyone involved in the community which makes up the institution, from alumni to students and faculty.
For those interested in this conversation and the history of the land Millikin now resides upon, below are linked the web pages of the modern day Tribal Nations of the peoples which Millikin’s published land acknowledgment names, some of which have merged over the last several hundred years:
Meskwaki:
Comments