You just can’t escape it. At hockey games, city council meetings, school assemblies, and town hall meetings. You see it at the bottom of email signatures, and it’s even done at the beginning of monthly meetings of the rock and lapidary club I belong to (I stopped going to those meetings because of it). The prayer begins, and we are expected to bow our heads in observance and shame. Someone must recite that we are gathered on the traditional, ancestral, and frequently unceded territory of whichever nations the script committee selected this year. Then everyone nods, the real business begins, and nothing of consequence changes.I refuse. I have had it. I couldn’t care less who may or may not have walked on the land I own, whether it was 80 years ago or a thousand years ago, and I owe them nothing. I feel no guilt or shame for this, and I am sick and tired of woke institutions insisting I display remorse and contrition. It’s indoctrination, and it’s not harmless.The ritual is increasingly compulsory. Parents and school council members who politely object have been investigated, suspended, or treated as if they committed a hate crime by declining to read a political statement. Compelled speech is not reconciliation. It is a small, daily lesson that certain ideas may not be questioned in public institutions. Children absorb that lesson first, and this is where the most danger lies. They learn that Canada’s legitimacy is provisional, that their presence requires a disclaimer, and that moral seriousness consists of saying the right paragraph in a woke liturgy.The acknowledgements help set the stage for increasingly aggressive and effective claims on what had been thought to be private land. How long did people think they could call themselves settlers, colonists, interlopers, or even uninvited guests in public prayers before the alleged victims of these historical crimes demanded compensation?.When claimants go before judges raised on land acknowledgements and make the case that the entire society agrees in regular public rituals that the land was stolen, how do you think the judge will rule? Land acknowledgements aren’t an apology for the actions of prior generations. They are a contemporary admission of guilt.Activists, legislators, and teachers may be too obtuse to understand where these acknowledgements are leading, but investors aren’t. Resource projects already face years of consultation, overlapping claims, litigation risk, and benefit agreement negotiations. That process can be legitimate. What is not legitimate is layering a daily public confession on top of it that treats title as forever unsettled. Uncertainty has a price. Pipelines, mines, housing, and transmission lines aren’t getting built. They get built when the rules are knowable. How can we set lasting rules when we constantly claim we stole the land we are standing upon?No nation’s history is spotless. Canada’s record includes broken promises, residential schools, and dispossession. Those facts belong in history class, books, and museums. They do not require a prayer before every junior hockey faceoff. Reciting a claim does not return land. It does not build a water plant. It does not make a teenager on a reserve more likely to finish school. It does make a roomful of people feel they have discharged a duty in a collective act of virtue signalling. It solves no real problems and increases a sense of victimhood among a large segment of the population, though.There are two terrible things that can be instilled in impressionable children as they grow into this world. A sense of guilt and a sense of entitlement. Non-indigenous children are being immersed in lessons through acknowledgements that they are responsible for the sins of the father. Indigenous children are being taught they were robbed and the world owes them a debt. Children indoctrinated by these lessons are certain to become dysfunctional in a society already ripping itself apart in the pursuit of some kind of intergenerational reconciliation, which will never come. It must stop..We must start speaking up against these damaging, public displays. Turn your back when the chant begins. Cause distractions. Make it clear you will not be one of the woke lemmings marching lockstep off a cliff of woke public apologies. Get involved with school boards, committees, and local sports teams. Speak out openly in favour of ending these rituals. The public is exhausted with demands for the assumption of collective guilt.If a person gets on your case over your refusal to participate, just tell them this: “You weren’t born in a tipi, and I never stole an inch of land.”Then get on with real issues of today.
