In David Mamets film State and Main, a Hollywood big shot tries to shortchange a set hand by offering him an associate producer credit on a movie. A screenwriter overhears the exchange and asks, Whats an associate producer credit? The big shot answers: Its what you give your secretary instead of a raise.

The practice of land acknowledgmentpreceding a fancy event by naming the Indigenous groups whose slaughter and dispossession cleared the land on which the audiences canaps are about to be servedis one of the greatest associate-producer credits of all time. A land acknowledgment is what you give when you have no intention of giving land. It is like a receipt provided by a highway robber, noting all the jewels and gold coins he has stolen. Maybe it will be useful for an insurance claim? Anyway, you are not getting your jewels back, but now you have documentation.

Long common in Canada and Australia, land acknowledgment is catching on in the United States and already de rigueur in certain circles. If you have seen enough of theseI have now watched dozens, sometimes more than one at the same eventyou learn to spot them before the speaker even begins acknowledging. In many cases the tone turns solemn and moralizing, and the speakers posture stiff, as if preparing to read a confession at gunpoint. One might declare before, say, a corporate sales retreat: We would like to respectfully acknowledge that the land on which we gather to discuss the new line of sprinkler systems is in Mikmaki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mikmaq. The acknowledgment is almost always a prepared statement, read verbatim, because like all spells it must be spoken precisely for its magic to work. The magic in this case is self-absolution: The acknowledgment relieves the speaker and the audience of the responsibility to think about Indigenous peoples, at least until the next public event.

From the May 2021 issue: Return the national parks to the tribes

Thanksgiving relies on a cartoon version of the settlement of the Americas, focusing on a moment of concord between victim and gnocidaire. Land acknowledgments are similarly confected to stroke the sentiments of mostly non-Indigenous audiencesthis time by enabling their preening self-criticism.

Earlier this month, Microsofts annual Ignite conference began with a land acknowledgment so bewildering to viewers that it went briefly viral. But it was not abnormal among statements of this sort. The emcee acknowledged that the companys headquarters, one square mile of land outside Seattle, was occupied by the Sammamish, Duwamish, Snoqualmie, Suquamish, Muckleshoot, Snohomish, Tulalip, and other coast Salish people... since time immemorial. She noted that the tribes are still there but offered no connection between the past and today. Few if any of the baffled viewers would deny the historic presence of these peoples amid the sacred groves that later produced PowerPoint and Clippy, the Microsoft Word mascot. But in the absence of context, the effect of this parade of names was to suggest that for thousands of years the Indigenous peoples were crammed onto the Microsoft campus uncomfortably like canned salmon, doing who knows what, until Bill Gates arrived in the late 20th century to turn them into programmers.

Maybe it is a victory for Indigeneity to have the name Muckleshoot even mentioned at a Microsoft conference. By far the most common defense of land acknowledgments is that they harm no one, and they educate Americans about a hidden history that took place literally where they stand. Do they not at least do that?

No, not even a little. It is difficult to exaggerate the superficiality of these statements. What do members of the acknowledged group hold sacred? What makes them unique and identifies them to one another? Who are they, where did they come from, and where are they going? The evasion of these fundamental questions is typical. The speaker demonstrates no knowledge of the people whose names he reads carefully off the sheet of paper. Nor does he make any but the most general connection between the event and those people, other than an ancient one, not too different from the speakers relationship with the local geology or flora.

At ceremonies and events in my home city of New Haven, Connecticut, I have heard acknowledgment that we are on Quinnipiac land. This statement is never accompanied by mention of the basic fact that the Quinnipiac all but ceased to exist as a people more than 150 years ago, and there is no currently recognized Quinnipiac tribe. I suspect that few in the audience know this, and that few of the speakers do. (There is an Algonquian Confederacy of the Quinnipiac Tribal Council. Its leader, Iron Thunderhorse, is currently in prison in Texas for rape, and projected to be released in 2051, at the age of 107. He is half-Italian, was born William Coppola, and according to a legal filing by the Texas prison authority, was not listed as Native American on at least one of his purported birth certificates.)

Some people argue that land acknowledgments are gestures of respect. Im not sure one can show respect while also being indifferent to a peoples existence. The statements are a counterfeit version of respect. Teen Vogue put it well, if unintentionally: Land acknowledgment is an easy way to show honor and respect to the indigenous people. A great deal of nonsense about identity politics could be avoided by studying this line, and realizing that respect shown the easy way is just as cheap as it sounds. Real respect occurs only when accompanied by time, work, or something else of value. Learning basic facts about a particular tribe might be a start.

Most of these acknowledgments are considered (by the speakers, anyway) moral acts, because they bear witness to crimes perpetrated against Native peoples and call, usually implicitly, for redress. If you enjoy moral exhibitionism, to say nothing of moral onanism, land acknowledgments in their current form will leave you pleasured for years to come. (Cartoon history serves this purpose well; reality, less so. Do you acknowledge the Quinnipiac, or the tribes they at times allied with the English to fight? Or both?) The acknowledgments never include any actual material redressreturn of land, meaningful corrections of wrongs against Indigenous communitiesor sophisticated moral reckoning. Nor is there an easy way to reckon with this past. In the early 1600s, as many as 90 percent of the Quinnipiac were wiped out, along with other coastal Native Americans, by chicken pox and other diseases imported by Europeans. How does one assign blame for the spread of disease, hundreds of years before anyone knew diseases were something other than the wrath of God? (Does China owe Europe reparations for the Black Death, which came, like COVID-19, from Hubei? Or should China take two Opium Wars and call it even?)

Without time, work, or actual redress, the land acknowledgment that implies a moral debt amounts to the highwaymans receipt. To acknowledge Indigenous homelands and to return those lands are related, but the former alone allows for rhetoric without further action, Dustin Tahmahkera, a professor of Native American cultural studies at the University of Oklahoma, told me. If Microsoft truly felt bad about the location of its offices, it could move its operations to soil less blood-soaked. (There arent many such places, alas.) Not every Microsoft conference needs to be an announcement of a real-estate deal. But if Microsoft is going to acknowledge a debt, it should also pay it.

Read: How to acknowledge a shameful past

If the practice of land acknowledgment persists, it should do so in a version less embarrassing to all involved. I would propose restricting such acknowledgments to forms and occasions that preserve their dignity and power.

Follow these rules, and object to any land acknowledgments that violate them:

These reforms in land acknowledgment would leave plenty of cynicism to go aroundnearly all warranted, I think. Land acknowledgments are a classic culture-war issue, Nick Estes, an American-studies professor at the University of New Mexico, told me via email. They can be a pantomime of caring or outrage mostly by professional class elites and educational institutions. Meanwhile, he asked, what of the real issues facing Indigenous peopleshousing, employment, child removal, generational poverty, lack of adequate healthcare, police violence, racism, and erasure; in other words, real colonialism?

Land acknowledgments are just words, and words can distract from real issues, in particular the ultimate one, which is Native American tribal sovereignty. But some words are honest, even loving, and others are hollow and nauseating. As an American, and as a once and future member of an audience at ceremonies and events, I would be thankful for more of the former and fewer of the latter.

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Land Acknowledgments Are Just Moral Exhibitionism