Land Acknowledgements In California Schools: ‘All Of California Is Indian Land’

In recent years, California’s K-12 schools, colleges, and universities have increasingly begun classroom sessions and meetings with land acknowledgements. 

For those unfamiliar, the California Community Colleges (CCC) website explains that a land acknowledgement is “a formal statement that recognizes and respects the Indigenous peoples as traditional stewards of this land, the enduring relationship that exists between Indigenous peoples and their traditional lands.” The CCC further argues that “all of California is Indian land” and that these acknowledgements are a recognition of “the original people who have been living and working on the land from time immemorial.”

Reading this language for the first time can be jarring for the uninitiated. It’s one thing to acknowledge and show respect to indigenous tribes of the past, it’s another to require school children and administrators to publicly recite these statements.

It is true, much of North America was inhabited by a wide variety of Indian tribes. The westward push of European settlers brought an inevitable clash of civilizations with Indigenous peoples. Some encounters led to trade and cooperation, while others descended into violence. Many tribes were nomadic and waged war against rival tribes and settlers alike. But as American settler populations grew, treaties were broken, land was seized, and tribes were forcibly moved.

Given this history, it is fair to ask what ultimate purpose land acknowledgements serve today. While they are said to honor Indigenous history and affirm their continued presence, it remains questionable what actual, positive impact these statements have. They do not appear to improve living conditions or economic outcomes for Native Americans — nor do they provide concrete restitution or reform. Instead, they often operate as a type of forced ritual that foments resentment toward America and Americans of European descent.

Take, for example, a land acknowledgement currently used in a Southern California school district:

I want to recognize that our District and school campuses are located in the Village of Pasbenga. I want to acknowledge that this land we refer to as Orange County, is the unceded and traditional lands of the Gabrielino Tongva Nation, and the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians Acjachemen Nation. These lands were taken through a process of colonization, physical, and cultural genocide. I want to pay my respect to elders, both past and present, as well as the Tongva and Acjachemen Youth who have attended and are currently attending our schools in the neighboring districts.

I find this not only unhelpful but grossly inappropriate — particularly for pre-kindergarten or elementary-aged children, who are subject to various versions of these acknowledgements through ethnic studies programs like the California Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. Children in public schools are exposed to highly politicized narratives about guilt, victimization, and responsibility — long before they are able to grapple with such complex or contentious historical realities.

One of the central flaws of land acknowledgements is that those who promote them rarely pair acknowledgment of past wrongs with any tangible action to remedy them. It reveals an institutional comfort with empty, performative statements: moralizing language that resonates in assemblies and boardrooms but does not foster improvements for Native communities. If academic institutions truly believed their own rhetoric, the only meaningful next step would be the return of their own land — or substantial, material investment. Yet there are no examples of these institutions actually returning any land.

For educators and administrators, the ritual of land acknowledgement belies a more insidious lesson for students: that words without action are sufficient, that virtue is to be signaled but need not be practiced. Children are perceptive. They know, or eventually learn, when adults say one thing but do another. In the long run, this undermines trust and models a kind of hypocrisy — a failure to follow words with real change.

There is another critical aspect frequently overlooked: land acknowledgements fundamentally bypass the authority of parents to determine how values are taught to their own children. In California’s educational system, land acknowledgements are often treated as mandatory and thus serve as vehicles for moral instruction. They transmit a particular worldview about history and justice which may conflict with what some parents believe and wish to impart themselves. The primary function of public education is not to instill contested moral values, but rather to equip students with knowledge and analytical tools. Land acknowledgements risk inverting that focus, making politics rather than learning the centerpiece of the classroom experience.

Finally, the most serious issue may be that land acknowledgements overlook or even erase the substantive progress that has been made to address historical wrongs. Over recent decades, the U.S. government has implemented extensive settlement and reparation processes in recognition of the suffering endured by Native Americans. The Cobell settlement in 2009, for example, allocated $3.4 billion in compensation for government mismanagement of tribal funds and resources. There have also been concrete land returns, such as the restoration of Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo, acreage to the Havasupai, and tribal land initiatives in California involving over 38,000 acres transferred back for stewardship and management.

Neither California nor the federal government can ever fully undo the harms of the past. Rather than engage in hollow, performative gestures, educational leaders should actively support positive, meaningful efforts like investing in Native communities, supporting language and culture, and teaching students the full truth of history along with contemporary progress.

We must move beyond symbolic language and show California’s students and families, by example, what real partnership, restitution, and responsibility look like.

* * *

Walter Myers III is a Southern California-based Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.