What I wrote in response to “Against Land Acknowledgement” written by a self proclaimed ‘Georgist’.
I also consider myself to be a ‘georgist’ and if by that you mean having the economic view that all living humans share equally in the planetary resources, then there are a number of issues pertaining to colonised indigenous lands, like my own Australia.
1. There was no treaty made or properly observed with the original inhabitants of the land. if you see a legal loophole then shame on you. The land is stolen and never ceded. To imagine otherwise is to say that I can come onto your property and just camp there, erect a building, force you out, and there would be no legal support you could turn to. Although this does happen in the west bank of Israel, it is anathema to most most civilised people;
2 The evaluation of land to be shared can only come about with full agreement of all parties from the get go. When one party has been force to concede, then no georgian equation can be made except on the restoration of a fully agreement of all interested parties, and that would mean dealing with restoration claims. To take that off the table is only to enact domination over part of the community, rather than any sense of equity.
3. How do we truly evaluate the resource that has been conquered, stolen centuries ago? Think of the value that has been derived from the resource of the Australian or North American continent, for that, in Georgian terms, is the full evaluation of the commons. Our failure to evaluate the commons has lead to the modern tragedy of the commons called climate change, but also the poorer developmental situation of all colonialised indigenous peoples. Why, because the failure of appropriate taxes on the value of the use of resources has lead to essential overuse, ecological systems destruction, climate change and an enormous mountain to climb in relation to social and economic equity. How do we know that? Because by definition, when resources are borrowed from the commons by a company, individual or even government as a whole, the taxable level for the use of that resource is set at a rate that allows the commons to conserve and even improve the resource. The appropriate tax does slow down the rate of development to a degree that allows conservation while placing a greater contribution from product to the community at large, thereby paying for equity in public accessible advancements – ‘highways and Byways’ like transport, energy, education, communication, knowledge growth etc.
All that being said, what has it to do with acknowledgments of country? Firstly, and as we include in many of our acknowledgments in Australia, the land was never ceded. It is a reminder across boardrooms, universities, government departments, and the self-centred, that we haven’t paid the rent. We are, like parasites, living off other people’s lost lives, and we are living off the rewards of theft, piracy, conquest.
Yet there is a deeper proposition also at stake. The proposition that, entangled with our conquering, we have overlooked important cultural resources. That too is part of the commons. And a Georgian would wonder, why are we not utilising that resource at all? Why is that human resource left to sit segregated, stagnating. My own view is that it is left to stagnate for the same reasons that up until recent decades, there was a single world view about productive agriculture and, regardless of the damage it has caused to our food quality, soils, and conservation of production for future generations, an ecological view of agriculture was laughed out of town.
But now the chickens are coming home to roost. The piper needs paying all the same, for as you imply, it is the land, the ecosystem, that requires the appropriate equities to be followed, and failing that, the ecosystem will languish, become unbalanced and ultimately become dangerous to the human being. And part of restoring those equities is fully acknowledging what we had been denying, who we are as a complete community, a commonwealth of diverse peoples, which diversity is a large part of the value of the commons.
If it feels humbling to acknowledge what you are complicit against others, then rather than give into your cognitive dissonance around it, trying cleverly to avoid what it is, you would best sit with your dissonance. Perhaps there is indeed a fully human answer that will come to you.