Adam Carolla kicked off his speech at the GOP mid-term convention on Wednesday with a not-so-subtle jab at “land acknowledgments” by declaring this country “the greatest land in the history of mankind.”
“All right. I would like to start tonight with a land acknowledgment,” Carolla said, prompting laughter from the audience.
“This is the greatest land in the history of mankind,” he continued. “And if that bothers you, you, your communist and hippy buddies should get the hell off it!”
The crowd applauded.
Land acknowledgements have accelerated in popularity in recent years among left-leaning celebrities and broadcasters, but they have received mixed reviews from actual Native Americans, who view them as an empty virtue signal with little substance.
Writing in the New York Times, Reid Walker, a citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, called them “infuriating.”
“Indigenous relationships to land were not about possession or title. They were about reciprocity, care, responsibility. Wendy Red Star, an Apsáalooke artist, put it this way: ‘The concept of territory is a completely Western idea. When we make land acknowledgments, we’re putting a Western, colonial concept on the relationship between the Native people who were stewards of the land. It’s not ownership,’” he wrote.
“I’m not ready to throw the practice of land acknowledgments out. The form is too small for what it carries; there’s no way to spell out four centuries of dispossession in two sentences,” he added.
“An acknowledgment that opens a conversation, that involves the tribe, that leads somewhere, is different. But the test isn’t in the words. It’s in what action comes after the words have been spoken.”