The first time I encountered the term “land acknowledgment” in Taiwan was in May 2023, during the height of a series of discriminatory incidents at National Taiwan University.¹  Indigenous students from various departments, backed by supportive Han Taiwanese peers, condemned the widespread, deep-rooted hostility they face both on campus and beyond.²  Their demands included the creation of a just academic environment and the introduction of mandatory education focused on decolonization. Among these demands was the call for a land acknowledgment.³  One might ask, particularly if they are a non-Indigenous student at NTU: why do Indigenous students see land acknowledgment as a solution? Why is recognizing the land and its original inhabitants crucial in addressing discrimination and hostility? The most straightforward response is to acknowledge the land is to acknowledge the history and reality of dispossession.

 

In 2022, an Indigenous high school student died by suicide after being bullied, prompting Indigenous singer Panai Kusui wrote the song “You Said You Didn’t Push Him” to memorialize the tragedy and raise awareness about the widespread hostility towards Indigenous students on campuses across Taiwan.

 

In academic contexts in Turtle Island (North America), Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia, the concept of land acknowledgment is more familiar, often delivered as a formal statement at the beginning of organized events. Affirming the enduring relationship between Indigenous Peoples and the land, these statements serve two major tasks: denouncing the settler colonial narratives that frame colonization as an obsolete historical event, relegating Indigenous struggles to the past; and further confronting this willful colonial amnesia by demanding an extensive reckoning with ongoing colonization.

 

For Indigenous Taiwanese, this dispossession has spanned generations, justified by narratives of modernization and capitalism in which their struggles have been dismissed and reframed as racialized backwardness, incompetence, or even laziness. In the context of NTU, Indigenous students are often stigmatized as either fortunate beneficiaries riding on the legacy of their mistreated ancestors, or as opportunists exploiting affirmative action, despite some being more resource-rich than their non-Indigenous counterparts who face poverty and educational disadvantages. In this elite university, intergenerational Indigenous dispossession is rendered invisible, forcing Indigenous students to bear the burden of unspeakable suffering. Privilege and suffering are not born but produced. NTU, like many other institutions and infrastructures in this nation, is not built on a no-man’s land, and people’s unawareness is at the cost of other people’s—Indigenous People’s—silenced trauma.⁴

 

What can or cannot land acknowledgment offer in addressing dispossession and reckoning with difficult histories? In the US, land acknowledgment gained momentum following the Standing Rock Protests of 2016 and 2017, where they functioned as a political intervention in the land-back movement. Such socio-political significance continued to grow, and by 2021, land acknowledgments had gained nationwide acceptance in universities, museums, and government agencies to open official ceremonies.⁵  However, in May 2021, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) issued an official statement to “pause” the practice of land acknowledgment and conference blessing ceremonies. The Association of Indigenous Anthropologists (AIA), a section of the AAA, advocated for this pause, surprising many fellow anthropologists who viewed land acknowledgment as a public good. The central critique of land acknowledgment lies in its frequent reduction to a performative gesture that signals ideological alignment with decolonial or anti-colonial agendas without enacting substantive change. As Indigenous scholars have noted, many land acknowledgments fall short of their intended purposes, serving as symbolic acts that assuage settler guilt rather than catalyze fundamental shifts in power dynamics or material conditions. For Jenny L. Davis, a Chickasaw scholar and professor of anthropology, this is precisely what has been happening in feel-good academia. In her poem titled “Administrator’s Prayer Before Reading a Land Acknowledgement Statement,⁶  Davis exposes the inner monologue of a reluctant narrator:

 

Dear Officially Nondenominational Deity:

Please let me say these names right, or at least pretty close.

Why are there so many syllables?

And so many tribes?

Why couldn’t they just pick one and go with it?

Are there any Indians in the room?

I hope not. They’ll know if I said the names wrong.

Isn’t there an abbreviated version somewhere? I have a lot

to get through and last time I forgot to thank

the provost and she didn’t talk to me for a month. So please

don’t let me forget again—I’d never hear the end of it.

Where was I, oh right, the land acknowledgement statement.

Amen.

 

Jenny L. Davis, Trickster Academy (University of Arizona Press, 2022)

 

By illustrating how land acknowledgment are often approached with reluctance, superficial engagement, and an avoidance of accountability, Davis calls attention to the problematic nature that land acknowledgment serves as a form of ethical branding. This practice further exemplifies a broader failure to translate tokenistic recognition into tangible transformations in policy, governance, or reparative practices. As a result, the structural conditions that perpetuate Indigenous dispossession remain intact, while land acknowledgment is co-opted as a form of institutional self-legitimization. Moreover, Davis’ whimsical portrayal of the speaker restraining themselves from explicitly complaining is exceptionally powerful, as it unveils the unsettling nature of “political correctness.” The inner monologue exists because people recognize that certain thoughts are not meant to be said out loud—they are not politically correct. The danger in conflating decolonization with political correctness is that it entitles the speaker to maintain the status quo and polarize the will of change into a killjoy. In this scenario, the oppressor becomes an oppressor by divorcing themselves from the accountability of colonial reality as simply a sympathetic observer attending a moral exhibition. As a result, labeling actions as “politically correct” frequently serves to uphold the very settler colonial normativity it seeks to challenge.

 

For those Indigenous anthropologists calling for a suspension of institutionalized land acknowledgment, the concept is fraught with challenges because these acknowledgments often prioritize avoiding offense over engaging meaningfully with the realities of Indigenous dispossession. The poem poignantly illustrates a self-complacent protective mechanism in service of the non-Indigenous, uninformed audience, laying the emotional and ethical burden onto Indigenous People who advocate for changes and justice, as they are told, “we must not hurt non-Indigenous People’s feelings.” A boilerplate of land acknowledgment serves this purpose by showcasing precisely what one should say to be respectful enough, relieving both the speaker and the audience of the responsibility to think about Indigenous Peoples––at least until the next land acknowledgment. The unsettling juxtaposition of ingrained indifference and performative respect nullifies the radicalness of land acknowledgment, reducing it into a symbolic register or, even worse, ideological propaganda.

 

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Currently, land acknowledgments in Taiwan often stem from international collaborations with nations where this practice is customary. This screenshot is from the Bleed Biennial 2022.

 

Nevertheless, we are still here to ask, albeit bearing so many doubts and critiques about land acknowledgment: what are the possible and meaningful ways to reframe our understanding and further intervene in our practices of land acknowledgment? What makes the genuine allyship nearly impossible, or what risks turning the land acknowledgment into a mere performance of reluctant solidarity? How can we rebuild the human-to-human and human-to-land relationship that have been lost amidst the ostentatious performativity of land acknowledgment as a symbolic gesture? More importantly, how do we envision and even materialize the practice of land acknowledgment in Taiwan without replicating the problems present in the North American context? Specifically in Taiwan’s scenario, where the discussion of land acknowledgment is gaining traction yet remains unheard of to many, what kinds of reflections should we engage in to better prepare for its implementation?

 

In fact, land acknowledgment is not an isolated, invented concept; its fundamental format and emotional grammar resonate with, if not rooted in, the Indigenous cosmology of human-non-human relations, as well as multi-species kinship and relational genealogy. For Indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith, land acknowledgment reifies the relationship between humans and the land, positioning the land as an active witness to historical events and ongoing dispossession.⁷  Through this act of recognition, we not only engage in reciprocal relationships but also attend to layered traumas and ruptured connections that have shaped our past and present. Land acknowledgment facilitates the re-encounter of Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors to reckon with their relational accountability. This notion of relational accountability is familiar to Indigenous Peoples in Taiwan, particularly the Atayal, for instance, whose oral tradition lmuhuw serves as a mnemonic device and acoustic narrative to impart genealogical and territorial knowledge. Lmuhuw, through its ritualized chanting, preserves the Atayal people’s social regulations, migration histories, ecological knowledge, and kinship ties, reinforcing their connection to the land across generations.⁸  Similar to land acknowledgment, lmuhuw functions as a practice of historical reckoning, situating individuals within a broader relational context that spans both time and space by articulating the continuity of Atayal’s divergence and convergence that have shaped their cross-region relationships. Through the repetitive invocation of lmuhuw, the Atayal people reaffirm their ancestral connections to the land and the river system they have historically inhabited. In this sense, the practice embodies a form of Indigenous historical consciousness that parallels the objectives of land acknowledgment: the recovery of silenced histories and the reestablishment of relational accountability. By drawing on Indigenous traditions like lmuhuw as an example, land acknowledgment in Taiwan can be imagined in a localized, culturally intimate format, further building on the specificity of each Indigenous nation’s unique cosmologies and social understandings.

 

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Landing page of the Center for International Indigenous Affairs, Dong Hwa University.

 

“What if we considered our relationality to the vast expanse of history and geographies that are surely connected?⁹  Tonawanda Seneca scholar Mishuana Goeman reminds us that the gravity of land acknowledgment lies in recognizing that, while the loss of land can disrupt connections, the utterance of land acknowledgment can––and should––hold people accountable, weaving them back together again. “Rather than return to erasure and disavowal,” she continues, “we must return to the ongoing process of dispossession, a dispossession not merely of property but of life itself. This is not merely a temporal return but a return that demands we encounter, engage, and assess the foundations of settler nation-states, empire-building, and the ethos of violence and disposability.”

 

Goeman makes her point. However, the entanglement of settler nation-states and empire-building in Taiwan, shaped by complex histories of migration and multiple waves of colonization, complicates the accountability and sometimes renders it ambivalent. Colonization and settler colonization, though used interchangeably in this essay and elsewhere, are in fact productively different, with the latter focusing on the tactics settlers employ to assert their innocence and claim nativeness to the dispossessed land.¹⁰  In this context, colonial settlers insidiously “decolonize” themselves, as the colonial past is distorted and settlers are seen as becoming native.

 

This is particularly true in Taiwan, where the country prides itself on being a postcolonial, post-authoritarian democracy in the face of the looming threat of Chinese invasion. The deeper Taiwanese society invests in this postcolonial narrative, the less it acknowledges the ongoing processes of settler colonization and dispossession. Ironically, this postcolonial narrative in Taiwan further buttressed the settler colonial amnesia, where the past colonial situation is easily separated from our present. One prominent example is the widely discussed idea of “authoritarian legacy,” while Indigenous dispossession is left outside that framework, effectively perpetuating the endurance and reproduction of colonial inequities. In this scenario, it is challenging for non-Indigenous Taiwanese to reckon with their dual position––victims of Japanese imperialism and KMT authoritarian atrocities, yet also inheritors of an enduring settler colonial structure and Han supremacy.

 

Patrick Wolfe, the founding scholar of settler colonial studies, once shared in an interview¹¹  that he deemed himself as a “reluctant settler” who has not “voluntarily dispossessed anybody … stolen anybody’s child … participated in any massacre.” By refusing these premises, Wolfe pointed out that being a settler “is not about my individual consciousness and free will; I’m a reluctant settler.” Wolfe emphasizes that no one wants to exist on someone else’s stolen land. Still, as a university-based scholar, Wolfe admits that “I wouldn’t have a university job if Indigenous People hadn’t had their land stolen from them in Australia.” In Wolfe’s view, being a reluctant settler means he is involuntarily positioned by the history of where he is. Despite his personal opposition to this historical injustice, he remains a beneficiary and legatee of the dispossession of Indigenous People. Having been called Gubbab (settler) in Indigenous language, Wolfe adds that he is “happy to accept that terminology.”

 

Wolfe’s acceptance of the “reluctant settler” offers a compelling move for critically engaging with the complexities of settler colonial complicity by underscoring: settler colonialism operates as a structural condition implicating individuals regardless of their personal volition. Participation in settler colonialism is not necessarily contingent upon active violence; rather, it is embedded in the everyday functioning of infrastructure that derive their legitimacy and resources from Indigenous dispossession. Wolfe’s confession is productive and valuable for us to come to grips with the settler colonial condition in Taiwan, recognizing this shared, though asymmetrical, history, and eventually holding ourselves equally accountable to the present we all live in together. For this purpose, land acknowledgment and its mission of reckoning with histories hold the radical potential of envisioning and materializing accountability. It embodies dynamic relationships between Indigenous past, present, and future while also delineating possible pathways for non-Indigenous persons to be involved.

 

To conclude this piece of thoughts, I argue that the radicality of land acknowledgment––its resistance to settler colonial normativity––should always be central to the practice, where the unsettling truths it surfaces, along with productive discomfort, will no longer be tamed. The true solidarity is possible, as Atayal scholar Daya Dakasi envisions, in our collective endeavors of reciprocity and coevalness: “The actions of Indigenous peoples—whether in articulating, performing, or translating—have never been solitary dances or self-contained dialogues, nor do they spiral solely within their spheres. Instead, through these articulations, performances, and translations, they are summoning the descendants of colonizers to join in envisioning a way of life where Indigenous Peoples do not need to be erased, and the descendants of colonizers can also reciprocally belong to this land. If we said that the political significance of indigeneity was created because of colonization and the emergence of modern nation-states; then the nativeness of colonizer descendants—their relationship with this land—can also be defined through coevalness and mutual flourishing with Indigenous Peoples.”¹²