Stuff You Should Know - What are land acknowledgments?

Episode Date: May 10, 2022

Land acknowledgements are all the rage in some parts of the world. But they also open a can of worms if not done properly. Learn all about this increasingly common practice today. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right. This is about land acknowledgements and

Livia, one of our awesome writers helped us put this together and I was just noticing the other day when we're thinking about topics and who should tackle them. It feels like everyone has, I mean everyone can do everything, but like some feel like this should be so and so because it just feels like a fit. And a new Livia, this would be a great fit for her and she did a killer job. Because this is a tough one. Land acknowledgements is a controversial thing mainly because of the clunkiness in which it's carried out in most cases. Oh boy. You just said a mouthful friend. Yeah, so land acknowledgements, if you don't know what we're talking about, if you've possibly ever been to a Montreal Canadiens game. Give us a bad example like in character. I show up at a

concert at a large venue in Canada. I'm going to see the reunion of Poison and everybody, Cece Deville. And I met the Enormo Dome and someone that looks like you walks out with a microphone before the show and go. Okay. We acknowledge that this poison show is about to take place on First Nations land who are excellent stewards of this land and on with the show. Perfect bad example. Yes, that was supposed to be bad. That wasn't just me. Yeah. And that's the last time we're going to laugh in this episode. Disagree. We always say that and then there's something funny that comes up. But it's a serious topic because it's something that hasn't been figured out. It's still very contemporary. It's still very raw. It rouses a lot of emotions.

It's one of those points of the spear of the culture wars in America and from what I gather Canada as well. In Australia, New Zealand. Probably, yeah. But the whole point of the land acknowledgement is to basically say like, hey, this land was probably stolen. It was probably taken from a broken treaty. The people who originally lived here were probably forced off the land. They're still in terrible shape in a lot of ways today compared to their white or black or Latinx or Asian counterparts in this country. And we should probably do something about that. At the very least, we should acknowledge it and like keep them from getting erased from history. And it's in its ideal form. That's what a land acknowledgement is. But the problem is, there's

a lot of people out there, especially who are probably right of center who don't want to hear that kind of stuff. They don't like that. It's snowflake stuff. There are people left of center who are like, that is the most vapid thing I've ever heard. It makes no difference whatsoever. And the fact that you're even saying it makes things worse than if you didn't say anything at all, like go back and just go away. And there's the people who are actually doing these land acknowledgements who very frequently are like corporate HR reps who are doing it to whitewash their company's activities elsewhere. It's just a mixed bag, but yet the reason why it's important is because there's some kernel there that is important, that makes sense, that makes it worthwhile

and worth exploring and not just tearing down, not just going ahead and doing, you know, rote, but actually like using it as a jumping off point for like, you know, kind of re-exploring and revisiting history and then hopefully creating redress to that history. Yeah, boy, well said. It was off the cuff. Oh, you mean you wrote it down in your cuff? Yeah. And read it? Yes. And I'm wearing my very nice little Orphananie cuff links today, too. So she was staring back at me admiringly the whole time. All right, so we should dive into a little bit of the history

here because if you go to Australia, you know, thousands of years ago, you would find something called a welcome to country ceremony from Indigenous people, which was sort of a protocol, a diplomatic protocol, where a nation or a tribe would visit another person's land and they would, the people that hosted them would have a welcome to country ceremony. It might have been a poem or a song. There might have been a smoking ceremony, you know what I'm saying. And in the mid 1970s, white Australians started getting into this idea and this practice. And it was that year in 1976, there was a group of Maori and Cook Islander dancers who were coming, they were invited to come to a performance, a multicultural dance performance

in Perth at the International Arts Festival there. And they said, you know what? We're not going to come unless we are welcomed by the traditional owners of this land. In 1976, they said this. And it was a performer named Richard Wally and a member of, and boy, I think I'm going to do my best with these pronunciations. I really, really tried this time and looked everything up because part of the problem with a bad land acknowledgement is some dumb white person mispronouncing the name of a tribe or Indigenous person. Like this. Do you want to give a go on this one? This is your section. All right. And the troublesome part about the internet is you can find different pronunciations. But what I landed on was in Western Australia,

these were the Jungar people. Very nice, Chuck. Spelled in Y-O-O-N-G-A-R. So they all agreed that this should happen. They got permission from the elders and he welcomed the visitors. And this was Richard Wally in that language and sang a song from their people. Yeah. And Richard Wally was a member of those people. So there was a legitimacy to him performing this welcome to country ceremony, welcoming these dancers who very rightfully and very traditionally said, we can't really step foot in Perth unless we're welcomed. Like that's just custom. Yeah. And so it's very interesting to me that you can trace this phenomenon back to one arts festival in Perth in 1976. And this one incident, this one happening, and it's just kind of spread from there.

It didn't spread like wildfire or anything like that. It was pretty sedate. It was wrapped up in like midnight oil stuff throughout the 80s, that kind of radical politics, I guess you could say, to where probably people on the furthest left were the ones who were carrying out welcome to country ceremonies or having those performed at their events. And then in the 90s, Australia really started to kind of like self reflect that it's history of its treatment of Aboriginal Australians. And one of the things that kind of came out of that, that self reflection, was this idea that welcome to country ceremonies were like a really great way of honoring this heritage and kind of bringing Aboriginal culture back into Australian society where it had been so

zealously pushed out for so long. Yeah. And this sort of morphed over, I guess, between the 70s and the 90s in Australia to where the welcome to country was in some cases replaced by a land acknowledgement or an acknowledgement of country, which would, and this was in the beginning days, would be a short speech. Like we said, it would recognize the traditional land owners that were local. And in the 80s and 90s, it was sometimes an Indigenous person doing this, sometimes a non-Indigenous person doing this. And eventually the National Indigenous Australians Agency came up with basically some guidelines, right? Yeah, they basically said like that whole welcome to country thing, like do not do that unless you're an Indigenous person. And if you're an Indigenous

person, you should only be doing it if it's, you know, your people's land that this event is being held on. If you're non-Indigenous or you're Indigenous, but not a member of the land, what you'd be doing is an acknowledgement of country, which is just basically like what you would call a land acknowledgement today, where you don't have to be Indigenous. You're just basically acknowledging that the land, you know, was originally owned, inhabited, trod upon, used, cared for by an Indigenous group. Or if you want to really just kind of, you know, myth the whole thing, just say Indigenous people in general. Right. And Canada is where it took off in North America first. And this is not that long ago. This was about what, seven years ago in 2015,

Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission released a big report that year, basically addressing the residential schools and the removal. And we should do an episode about this for sure. The removal of Indigenous children from their families and basically said this was a cultural genocide. And this is when Justin Trudeau was coming into office. And he was really big on, you know, during the campaign for sure, on reconciliation with Indigenous people as a big part of his platform and something he wanted to get accomplished in office. Yeah. And so, like, just like in Australia, the idea of land acknowledgments seemed to be a really good low-hanging fruit as far as kind of reintroducing the presence of Indigenous First

Nation people into Canadian society and, you know, not ignoring them, not erasing them from history, actually, you know, acknowledging them in the past that this, that took place here or there in Canada. But the thing is, is it also kind of like underscores just how easy it is, which can be problematic, as we'll see too. Yeah, for sure. You know, it spread from Canada to the US. It trickled down south in the late 2000s. Is that how you would say that? Sure. Like 2017, 2018. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, which sounds like a government agency, but it's not. It's an independent group. They published a guide to land acknowledgments for the United States. The group's founder, Adam Horowitz, came out and said that it was

downloaded more than 7,000 times. And he said one lonely beast IIB all by myself. I got nobody. Very nice. And very bad dad joke. I thought it was a great joke. I didn't even think it was dad. I don't think you can make a dad joke about the beastie boys unless it's how beastly they are. Written on your cuff. What was it? Can you say your version? The King Ed Rock, that is my name, and I know the fly spot where they got the champagne. I taught my daughter a line that was not something that a kid should say when she was like four and Emily was so mad at me. She was so afraid she was going to say it in kindergarten. And I think she's forgotten it by now. I'll tell you off the air. Okay. Sorry, everybody for that tease. But now in the United

States, you will find cities like Denver, Phoenix and Portland that have adopted these guidelines. The National Park Service has, NASA has. You might have heard it at the Academy Awards or the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade or the Democratic National Convention, not the Republican National Convention. No. And so this is a thing that is kind of brand new if you look at a timeline over the past three or four years that America is treading into very gingerly. Gingerly awkwardly keeps running into the door frame, all sorts of different stuff. And I think before we kind of go back into why you would even do this and how you would do it, I feel like we should take a commercial break. Let's do it. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart

at the end of the road. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy would give you? Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boybander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to subscribe to my channel. Listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird. Fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So there are a number of reasons to use the land acknowledgement. And again, this is usually what opens your meeting, your conference.

Like you could see it if you're in a beautiful conference hall in the woods in a kind of a beautiful remote area. I can totally see that. But I've also heard of these things being used on conference calls and just at regular meetings in the city. So it can get kind of weird. But the overall point of it is that if you're not an indigenous person and you're reading a land acknowledgement, supposedly you're thanking the people who used to live there in pre-colonial days for being stewards of the land. You probably also are in some way, shape, or form, whether subtly or overtly, also acknowledging that violence is why they don't live there anymore and violence by the white colonists and or the federal government. And then also, if you really want to make your land acknowledgement pop, you can say, and this is how we can build connections to these people who have been harmed and are still harmed. And it can get even more nuanced and deeper than that. Yeah. And, you know, it's a mouthful to get up before your work conference and talk about people being raped and murdered and displaced and treaties broken and the fact that the oppression of indigenous Americans is ongoing. And the problem is far from solved.

Like, that's going to put a damper on whatever awesome energy you're trying to start with. If it's a sales conference or something. Yeah. So it's, people are trying to figure out the best way to do that. And sometimes, as we'll learn, it is a shorter acknowledgement where they will then point people to, hey, our company has this website or a page on our site. Just scan this QR code. Probably so, where you can really dive in and learn about what we can do. And this is what our own company is doing, including hiring programs or training programs with the people who once lived here. That is the ideal is that it's a, you know, there there's actually something being done and it's not just words being spoken.

So, you know, they're still trying to figure this out. Who knows where it will end up, but it's been a little clumsy so far, like you said, pumping into doorways. And there are also other like, other reasons why people do land acknowledgments rather than just kind of like make their company look, you know, with it or sympathetic or empathetic even. I was not going to, but yes, you could use that word. One of them is to just show solidarity and support for the idea of truth and reconciliation. To just say like, oh, you wanted to pump all the biffs and muffies up to go sell a bunch of mufflers. Well, T.S., because I'm going to suck the air out of this room with this clunky land acknowledgement. And it's going to make them think a lot more than this, you know, little page that you guys have on your website that five people are going to visit in the history of the Internet.

So, I think there are some people who say like, yeah, that's exactly what it's supposed to do is to kind of suck people into it. Also, another big thing is to kind of begin to repair relationships between American society and the indigenous cultures that have kind of been pushed out of American society and continue to be kept there. Acknowledgement of the fact that like the American government did a lot of really terrible stuff to indigenous people. In addition to enslaved people in the past and that just by talking about it in random weird places makes people think about it. It keeps it from being erased. It actually does the opposite of keeping it from being erased. It kind of scribbles it almost like graffiti into everyday life of people. A good land acknowledgement could do that.

So, there's a lot of different reasons to do it beyond what I think most people who are opposed to land acknowledgements accuse people doing that of which is morally performing. It's more like exhibitionism is what a lot of people challenge it with and it's not supposed to be at least. That's right. So, I guess we could talk a little bit about how you go about doing this to begin with. The first thing, there's something called the Native Governance Center which is a non-profit, a native-led non-profit that has resources for native nations. It's a good place to start because they will say, hey, if you go to do this, the first thing you should do is take a good hard look in the mirror as a company. Why are you doing this to begin with? And if your reason is just to rattle off something so you appear to be forward thinking and acknowledging something in a sort of a blithe way, then that's not a good reason to do it.

After that, after you have made that right within yourself as a company and you want to press forward, then you have to do some research because you can't just open Wikipedia and say, oh, the Apple headquarters is built on the land of these people because it says so right here in the sentence. So, let me just type up a quick little thing and we're done. It is very, it can be very challenging to find who the indigenous peoples of a land are because they moved around a lot and because they were forcibly removed a lot. They sometimes traveled with the waters and the riverways and it's not as easy as you might think. So, you have to really put in the work to really find this out. And as we'll see, one of the controversies is putting that on us on the indigenous peoples and saying, hey, let's just go find some of them and let them do this research for us. And we're not going to pay them or anything like that, but we want to get it right and they want to get it right, right? So, let's do it for us, right?

Yeah, I saw that compared to so like a land acknowledgement is basically like a receipt that a thief gives you after stealing your stuff. But then having an indigenous group actually create the land acknowledgement for you is having somebody that you've just stolen from write the receipt to themselves on your behalf. That's pretty good. Yeah. So, there are actually like websites, there's apps that have been set up to help make land acknowledgement research a little easier. I found one, you can text your zip code to 907-312-5085. That is not a rickroll or spam, I tried it myself. And it texts you back a name of like the group that you are that lived in your area. That seems like the Simpsons, doesn't it? Kind of a little bit, but if you just, like you said, you just take that copy and paste it into your land acknowledgement, that's that.

Then you've just done something that's worse than not doing a land acknowledgement at all, which is an incompetent, inept, thoughtless land acknowledgement. That's literally worse than not doing a land acknowledgement. Yeah. So, after you've done your research and you have really found out the true origins of the people of that space that you're in, you should reach out to them. And like I said, not just dash off your own few lines on your computer, but actually get in touch with them and say, hey, I don't want you to do the work for me, but can we work together on this? And how would you like this to go down? How much detail would you like? And it can be as if, and you know, maybe follow their lead for a change and see what they want. And they said that that's a really good second step. Yeah. And you also, you might not be able to fit as much detail as you want to, or certainly everything you turn up in your research, if you do decent research.

Because again, land acknowledgments and following kind of that tradition of welcome to country ceremonies, they go at the beginning of an event. And because these are such random events from a corporate retreat to a Canadian's hockey game, like it's bolted on to the front. There's no easy way to put it in there except to just do it. And so, to take up a lot of space at the beginning of a Canadian's game or a corporate retreat or whatever, explaining like the detailed history and like intertribal relations between, you know, the people who lived on this land before. And then they're, they're dealings with the United States government and like their removal and what are they doing today? What can we do to help them? Like, that's, that's not what land acknowledgments are meant to be. But ultimately for a satisfying, like decent, good land acknowledgement, you have to figure out how to distill that down into just a few sentences.

It's almost like writing poetry, you know? Dude, retirement job for us. I guess we should start up the land acknowledgers.com. And at the beginning of every single thing, Josh and Chuck show up and do a short stuff. Right. Just say, give us 15 minutes. Yeah. And we will speak of all the atrocities and bring this room down to its lowest point.

And then say, thanks everybody. And Microsoft will say, write us a big fat check. That's right. We'll say short stuff out. Short stuff is out. And so are we. Man, that could be a pretty good gig for us. Yeah.

I think you're right, Chuck. We actually, I was wondering what we were going to do in retirement, but now I know. Let's just do that. I have a real sense of security now. Thank you. Sure. So one of the things you're probably going to run into though too, Chuck, is you were saying like it's, it's not as straightforward as, oh, this is the people who used to live here.

I'm just going to copy and paste. You have to do some research. And when you're doing research, you're going to find out that there might be like more than more than one group that claims land to this. So that kind of opens up a whole kettle of worms too while you're making this, because the whole point of this is to acknowledge the people who, whose land this was. And if you suddenly have two groups who are saying, this is my land, no, this is my land. You're about, you're a non-indigenous person about to step in to kick your event off right,

to step into hundreds of years old hornet's nest. You know, you really have to be careful if you're going to do this right. You need to understand a lot more than what it takes to just write a few sentences. Again, I just really wanted to hit that point. Yeah. And you know, it can go beyond just land acknowledgement. There's also something called land and labor acknowledgement where if you do your research, you might find, all right, there were the indigenous peoples that lived here.

But then this very town, this very city was sort of built on the backs of enslaved Africans. And that's the only reason why this place is a place now. So let's include that. The University of Chicago's land and labor acknowledgement mentions the four native nations that were forcibly removed in what is Chicago, what is now Chicago, and that the university was built on land donated by a man named Stephen A. Douglas, whose fortune was the product of enslaved Africans. So, you know, once you open this can of worms, it's pretty clear that there is a lot of acknowledgement to go around.

Yeah. And usually it's institutional. I mean, like you could trace the history of any plot of land, find all sorts of horrific things that individuals have done to other individuals. But it's usually, ultimately you're tracing like institutional violence against groups is the point of land acknowledgement or labor acknowledgement. Right. What's sad is if you start scratching beneath the surface of the history of any city, Chuck,

you find that virtually none of them were built on rock and roll. It was way darker than that in every case. I don't know what Jefferson Starship was talking about. They were just lying. Yeah, flat out lying. Makes me really sick to guess the whole white rabbit thing too. Although that was Jefferson airplane. But you know what I mean?

I know what you mean. Sure. I know what you mean. I'm hip. I'm fly. It's made of, we built the city on rock and roll reference. That's right. The worst song in the history of music.

Oh, I don't know about that. Oh, come on. You don't like that song. Oh, sure I do. I'm not like- Guilty pleasure. It's not like my favorite song. I don't have it on my phone or anything.

But if it's on, I will, there's a 70% chance I won't turn it. You know what? Guilty pleasure song I've been rocking this week. What? Which is a great song. I shouldn't even call it a guilty pleasure. But the sign by Ace of Bass. Oh, yeah.

All of their work was really good. It's such a great song. And my daughter loves it now. And when you have a kid who loves something, they're like, I want to listen to it four times on the way to school. So I've been singing the sign for two weeks straight. That's great. In my head.

It's pretty great. That is good. Are you wearing like a little black ribbon choker now? No, but I'm unashamed about my love of Ace of Bass. Those are some good tunes. Sure. Guilty Schmilty, you know, I'll tell you something as far as guilty pleasures go that I'm pretty happy with.

I watched the Betty Broderick story starring Meredith Baxter Bernie from like 1992. Who's Betty? Do you remember that? She was a woman who was divorced by her husband and did not take that very well and kind of went off the rails, culminating in her going and sneaking into her ex-husband and his new wife's bedroom at night and murdering them both with a gun.

Yeah. And Meredith Baxter Bernie, the mom from Family Ties is the one who plays Betty Broderick and she does it so well. Yeah. And it's like a two part, three hour made for TV movie. It's on Amazon Prime if you have that. And every minute of it is just wonderful and great to watch. Yeah.

I love some of this stuff. Like let's reject prestige TV that's going on now and let's just go back to those days. I say we just include all the good stuff. Also, one more thing while we're not talking about anything about lane acknowledgments for a minute. Have you seen Promising Young Woman? Oh yeah, sure.

That was a really good movie. It was great. I had no idea, but I would highly recommend that as well. Yeah. It was awesome. So before we talk about criticisms, which we'll get to last, we should talk a little bit about the ideal, which is that it doesn't just stop there on stage with an acknowledgement

before you kick off the muffler sales conference. There are ways that you can actually take action to make things better for Indigenous people because they're still suffering today in a lot of cases. It might be political causes that are championed by Native Americans. It might be universities offering free tuition for Indigenous, I was about to say kids, but people of all ages, I guess, I mentioned hiring programs by those very

corporations that now sit on that land. Those are all some great things that companies can do to take action. Yeah. And you as a person, as an individual, if there's things that you want to do, you can show up to Native American rallies just to show support. You can, there's a movement in Seattle called Real Rent

Duwamish, which says, hey, if you live in the Seattle area, you should pay rent to the Duwamish tribe because this is originally their land. And the reason why there's so much to do is because Native Americans in the United States have lived in this limbo world, just again, just kept out of American society for so long. And unlike Canada, unlike Australia, the United States has not engaged in anything even approaching a truth and

reconciliation or any kind of deep reflection about the history and the historical treatment of Native Americans in America. And so this still continues. And so like Native American is likelier to live in poverty more than any other group in America. There's a huge problem of the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, which is such a problem.

It has its own acronym, MMIWG. And that, of course, deserves its own episode too. We've gotten requests for that before. Yeah, for sure. Apparently, there's also an issue, Olivia writes that Native American kids are frequently taken away from their families and put with white foster families even when there's no evidence of abuse in the house.

So, I mean, there's still, there's so much stuff we could be doing for Native American people in the United States that it completely undermines in a lot of ways the very presence of land acknowledgments because people say, like, there's so much to do. That has nothing to do with it. Like actually go do the actual stuff. And I saw this article by a guy named Graham Wood.

It was in the Atlantic, it's called Land Acknowledgements or Just Moral Exhibitionism. He was the one who basically said that, you know, getting a Native American or an Indigenous person to write your land acknowledgement was like getting them to write the receipt for the land you stole from them. He said, I'm going to quote, some people argue that land acknowledgements are gestures of respect.

I'm not sure one can show respect while also being indifferent to a people's existence. The statements are counterfeit versions of respect. Teen Vogue put it well, if unintentionally, quote, land acknowledgement is an easy way to show honor and respect to the Indigenous people. And he goes on and then he says, 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. Yeah. And I think that's the whole idea is that this is a starting point and the bare minimum for what should be a series of steps, especially if you're a corporation. Yes, now that's a huge thing. Like, you know, it's one thing if you're a person and you're having like a poetry slam and you do this.

It's cool. You're probably more likely to actually be doing something of action to help Indigenous and Native American people than the corporation is. Yeah. Who's having land acknowledgements researched and written and performed at their retreats and their conferences and stuff like that.

And so it's really well within fair game to call corporate America out about using land acknowledgements because they're doing virtually nothing in the real world to help Indigenous and Native American groups. Yeah. And in fact, in a lot of ways, they're actually oppressing them further and continuing their oppression and keeping them in a cycle of poverty.

You got big cuffs today, my friend. Little orphan Annie is crying chrome-plated tears right now. All right. Let's take our last break and when we come back, we'll talk about some of the criticisms and sort of poke around a little bit at the land back movement as well. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because

I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously. I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the

universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop.

But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. The situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too.

Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. If we're going to talk criticisms of land acknowledgments, we already talked about a lot about the criticisms of how they're done poorly for people that support them. But there are people that don't support doing

that at all. The United Conservative Party of Canada, when they took control in Alberta, stopped land acknowledgments period. And right-wing Canadian politicians have called it just political correctness. I'm sure here in America the word woke and wokeism has been used to refer to stuff

like this. But there's also criticisms that history isn't even being portrayed accurately to begin with. Yeah. So, you know, there was a huge kind of, I guess a political fight in Montreal when the Canadians started doing land acknowledgments for their games.

They were thanking the Ganyingeha tribe, or the Mohawk nation is how most of us know of them. And then it came up after they started doing these and people were like, I don't think this was actually their land. Yeah, they lived here, but I don't think it was their land. So the Canadians had to revise it a little bit. And they still included the Ganyingeha reference.

But they also observed or acknowledged other tribes too. But then a lot of people were like, see, can't even get it right historically. Why is anybody doing this at all? And other people are like, look, yes, we got it slightly wrong historically, but that's certainly no reason to throw this out entirely. And the point is to actually acknowledge these people

and that their land was stolen, even if you don't get it exactly right. And that's a big debate too. Yeah, and just the way that you talk about this land can be a little problematic to begin with because it's not appropriate to say that they owned this land because the idea of ownership to indigenous people of land wasn't even a thing.

I guess a lot of times I think they're called for being stewards of the land. That's, I guess, an acceptable workaround in a lot of cases. But I know that it's all just sort of a lightning rod for criticism. Yeah, the idea that they're stewards of the land, I mean, there's some Native American culture saw that themselves as that,

but others are like, no, we belong to the land. So this doesn't make any sense at all. And then what's more, we really care more about these bodies of water than we do the land. Are you guys mentioning that kind of thing? Yeah. So yeah, there's almost all criticisms

come back to a land acknowledgement doing it wrong. And then if somebody's really hopping on a very small thing, they probably don't like the idea of land acknowledgments in the first place or acknowledging the plight of indigenous peoples in their country. But ultimately, if you do agree with it and you have a problem with it,

it's that it's being done wrong is usually what your problem is. Yeah. And again, if you were to reach out to these people to begin with, you have a way better chance of getting it right, I think. Right. The other thing is that if you're not actually saying,

if you're just saying, we acknowledge that this land used to be inhabited and cared for by indigenous peoples who lived here. And that's it. There's almost like a unspoken like, and thanks to them for that. Right. You're keeping the existence of how that land changed hands

from those people to your conference center and all the history in between. And all you're doing is perpetuating, keeping the history of indigenous people out of society, outside in a mythic past. Yeah. And it can be easily romanticized, too, because Native American tribes did a lot of unsavory stuff

or that we would today find unsavory. And a mythic past, too, that puts you at risk of turning the Native American people into the noble savage, which is a huge issue in and of itself, too. But again, it comes back to just doing it right, doing your research, doing it right, and then fitting it into a comprehensive

but concise land acknowledgement. Yeah, for sure. And all of this, you know, I mentioned the land back movement. This is a different topic, but I think we can sort of cover the broad strokes here at the end. The idea of giving land back to these people, it sounds crazy, like how would we even do that? But it has happened a little bit here and there,

which may surprise some of you. The land back movement in the Black Hills, which here in the United States, where the Mount Rushmore Monument is located, was a sacred Lakota site. And in 1980, the Supreme Court of the United States said, you know what, this land was stolen and it violated the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.

So why don't we settle this with money and offer some financial compensation as a settlement? And the Lakota tribe said, no, we don't want that. And they are still to this day pushing for the return of the Black Hills land There's an Ojibwe writer named David Truer that said, you know, how about we take the 85 million acres of national park land and we all own it with a big federally organized and recognized group of tribes that are still around.

Give that back to us and you can still come here, but we can hunt on it and we can farm on it. And a little bit of that is happening. Some parts of the national park or national forest, they have allowed some hunting for indigenous peoples and some farming, which is going on. But he's like, why don't you just give it all to us? And you can still come visit, but that would be a nice start.

You can still come visit for sure. They've also found that it's a really good way of preserving forests as well. Like we kind of talked about it in the National Parks episode where the National Forest Service is like, oh, we don't have any idea what we're doing wrong here. Maybe we should ask the Native American tribes who used to live here who manage this land to kind of give us some pointers. They found that that land back actually helps like restore forests

and ecosystems that are proving to be problematic because we don't really quite know how to make them work correctly or allow them to work correctly. Yeah, they did it in Minnesota just a couple of years ago in 2020. They transferred almost 12,000 acres of forest service land to a federal trust for the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. So it's happened here and there. Libby also points out that it's happened with individuals.

There are a few cases of just landowners in the United States that said, here, you know, have this two or three acres. I mean, it hasn't been like thousands of acres yet at this point. The fact that individual citizens of the United States are giving land back to indigenous peoples is, I think it's pretty cool. It's a good start. Agreed. That's certainly putting your money where your mouth is

and not just reading a land acknowledgement, you know? Yeah, or like you said, paying actual rent, that's putting your money where your mouth is. You got anything else about land acknowledgments? I got nothing else. I hope we did a good job. You know, we mentioned doing this one and we got a bunch of emails from people that said really helpful emails that said, hey,

just wait into this carefully. I think they thought, and they don't know us. Of course we're going to do a good job, but they thought that we might just be like, hey, reading a thing is great and that kind of solves all the problems. Yeah. Not true. And we would dust our hands off as we walked away from the mics.

No, not at all. If you want to know more about land acknowledgments, go to a Montreal Canadians game, a Microsoft retreat, or just go onto the internet and start doing some research yourself. It's pretty interesting stuff, and it's like Chuck said, a good place to start. And since I said a good place to start, that means it's time for Listener Mail.

That's right. And before I read Listener Mail and we were recommending TV shows and movies, since this is appropriate, I got to recommend the great TV show from last year, Reservation Dogs. I think I mentioned it once on the show, but it is fantastic and it explores the lives of these teenagers in rural Oklahoma, indigenous teenagers, and it is, I think, Taika Watiti is the executive producer,

but the show is written and directed and crewed up mainly by indigenous peoples, and it is a great show. It is very funny, very moving, very heartwarming. I love it. I love it. Can't wait for season two. Very nice. All right, Listener Mail, what should I do here?

How about the Slopey Pub? Okay. And what we have here is a Listener that very much accurately named the Slopey Pub that I went to in Manchester, and while I'm doing that, I believe someone found the one in Ireland for you, correct? Yeah, the Brazen Head, down by the Guinness Factory. It's amazing.

That's right, and do you know who sent that to you? Can you find that while I read this? Yes. All right, so I'm going to read this. Hey guys, just finished listening to the episode on pubs. It was great. I think you mentioned the Sloping Pub on a previous episode, and being from Manchester,

I immediately knew what you were referring to. I think the pub in question is the Marble Arch, which is just on the outskirts of the city center. It's a great place that's run by a small brewery, and wow, is that floor confusing if you've had a few. Keep up the great work. I've been listening for five years. Can't get enough,

especially with subjects like these that have local relevance. And I looked it up. He sent a couple of pictures. It was for sure the Marble Arch, and it is not in the city center where all the other kind of hangout pubs and bars are. I was on a walk and I stumbled upon it, and if you're ever in Manchester, go check it out because it's great.

And that is from Hugh. Nice. And also we want to say thank you very much to Susie from Dublin, who at the very least used to work in Dublin, who correctly named the brazen head for me. So thanks Susie and Hugh. Awesome. I knew they would come through.

Yeah, we'll come through. Thanks to Susie and Hugh. If you want to be like Susie and or Hugh, you can get in touch with us via email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen,

so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.