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Halfway through an academic discussion back in 2020, Paige Cognetti offered up a candid observation about US history.
Cognetti — the mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania — recalled university professor Adam Pratt’s opening statement for the “Humanities in Action” panel that honored “the traditional caretakers of this land,” naming Native American tribes from the region. She mused about the “fear of the other” that’s deeply rooted for some Americans.
“It’s always been there,” Cognetti added. “Prof. Pratt began with, you know, speaking about the land that is stolen that we’re sitting on.”
Only a few dozen people have replayed the segment on YouTube since then. But now that Cognetti is battling Rep. Rob Bresnahan, R-Pa., in a critical swing-seat House race, Republicans have found it. They’re asking whether the mayor stands by the view that her district is “stolen.”
“People in the 8th District don’t need liberal elitists like her telling them to be ashamed of their country,” said Bresnahan campaign spokeswoman Samantha Bullock.
Cognetti’s campaign spokeswoman chalked up the attack to “desperate DC consultants” who are trying “to caricature Paige with half-baked out-of-context videos.” While it may not upend her race, it’s a sign that Democrats’ decision to formalize land acknowledgments in their party meetings could haunt their candidates more than they realize.
For some Democrats, the party’s six-year-old habit of acknowledging Native Americans’ role in the founding of the US is a welcome display of its commitment to diversity. Other Democrats, particularly critics of the party’s leftward shift under President Donald Trump, see apologetic language as an unhelpful legacy of the racial justice protests of 2020.
The basic facts of the Democratic policy aren’t in dispute, though: A tradition of naming historic Native tribes during regional events that started in Australia before spreading to Canada, arriving in the US via art exhibitions, is now part of every major party event.
Democrats’ land acknowledgment habit hasn’t drawn the same intraparty scrutiny as other academic language that’s crept into their lexicon, like “Latinx” or “birthing people.” But it’s emblematic of a broader trend toward lofty parlance that draws mockery from the GOP and occasionally raises questions from Democrats who want to keep it simple.
“What we did to Native Americans is really well-documented, and it is a sad part of our nation’s history,” Democratic strategist James Carville said last year, after copious Fox News coverage of a land acknowledgement at a DNC meeting in Minneapolis. “Why are you bringing this up in an election?”
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The official beginning of the DNC highlighting what American colonists took from Native Americans came six summers ago, in front of a few dozen people watching the party’s platform drafting group.
New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland, the first Native American woman to represent her state in Congress — and soon to be Joe Biden’s Secretary of the Interior — choked back tears as she started the tradition.
“I thank all the ancestors for allowing me a voice in this space today as I share the Democratic National Convention land acknowledgment, Haaland said
“What a great way to start us off, congresswoman,” said Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, then the chair of the platform drafting team (now the party’s gubernatorial nominee in Georgia).
Halaand’s language made little news at the time, with Indian Country Today the only outlet to cover it. That may explain why few Democrats are aware of the idea’s origin: It bubbled up in the party’s 2016 platform meetings after Cornel West, named to the platform committee by Bernie Sanders, asked if the party could do more to honor Native Americans.
“Oftentimes, we hear in platforms and speeches that slavery was our original sin. That’s just not true,” West said at the time. “The question becomes: How do we ensure that it’s dispossession of land, of precious indigenous peoples?”
The 2016 Democratic convention did not contain a land acknowledgment. But the practice of beginning events with a nod to slaughtered tribes and “stolen” land spread during President Barack Obama’s second term and Trump’s first term, along with other progressive ideas about race and history.
Iowa Democrats, for example, peeled the names of Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson off of their annual party dinner in 2015, citing their slave ownership and leadership during times of government seizure of Native American land.
By the time Haaland proposed a DNC land acknowledgment in 2020, it sounded to Democrats like an idea whose time had come. Platform drafting committee members who were part of the meeting told Semafor that they did not remember a debate over including it.
“You remember that?” said Rep. Analilia Mejia, a Sanders-backed member of the committee who now represents New Jersey in Congress, when asked about the land acknowledgment. “Oh, lord.”
David’s view
Admittedly, land acknowledgments don’t rank that high on Democrats’ list of problems.
Other center-left parties in English-speaking democracies — Australian Labor, Canada’s Liberals — manage to win elections while making some public apologies to the people their ancestors colonized. The defining anti-woke ads of 2024 were about taxpayer funding for gender surgery, not listing the tribes of Milwaukee.
But the subtle endurance of land acknowledgments makes them especially interesting to me. Democrats did not have campus conferences where they agreed to embrace language that conservatives see as anti-American.
They just adopted the terminology when activists told them it was a good idea.
It raises the question of whether the acknowledgments will go the way of some other language that Republicans dismissed as “woke,” like the term Latinx.
Texas Rep. Greg Casar, the leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, often recounts a story of a Kamala Harris canvass where he couldn’t convince a swing voter that Democrats were focused on affordability, because the voter had heard them talking about gender and race instead.
Room for Disagreement
Casar’s conclusion from his Harris canvass was that Republicans’ message machine was skilled at making swing voters more aware of culture-war issues than Democratic policies.
That tactic isn’t likely to work this November, though. Winsome Earle-Sears tried it last year in Virginia and fell short. Voters are nervous about the economy and rebelling against Trump’s Iran war; ultimately, races like Cognetti vs. Bresnahan will be fought on that turf.
Notable
- In Politico, Emilio Perez Ibarguen looked at the ways that progressive Democrats were explaining away left-leaning statements they made during 2020.