I remember the first time I heard a statement at a public event along the lines of, “This building is located on traditional unceded Aboriginal land.” It was in Australia, and it struck me as disingenuous, simplistic and patronizing. If the people making this statement really felt that badly about the land they (and possibly their forebearers) lived and worked on for generations and ostensibly stole, then they would reasonably choose to give the land back along with all they had built upon it.
However, the people who utter such statements implicitly recognize that the country they inhabit and the land they live and work on is only distantly connected to the land occupied, or colonized earlier by groups we now label as Indigenous. Moreover, the land acknowledgments also skip over the reality that in some nations, treaties cover part or all of the territory — Canada and New Zealand, as examples.
In giving primacy to the more activist Indigenous groups, institutions and governments around the world readily express their willingness to not only change history, but also to ignore scientific evidence as well.
I live in Prince Edward Island and regularly attend musical and theatre events here. Every show begins with someone coming out to recite their Indigenous mea culpa. But the last time I heard the phrase, it was slightly different, and it jarred me. I heard that the Mi’kmaq, the Indigenous tribe with deep roots in the province, had been here “since time immemorial.” Since that event, I have begun to hear more extreme versions of this prescribed mantra, with “time immemorial” replaced by “the beginning of time.” While “time immemorial” can legally refer to any time before 1189, the claim that Indigenous people have been on the land since the beginning of time is historical and scientific nonsense.
While some archaeologists date the earliest migration of hominids into North America via the Bering Strait as far back as 12,000 to 15,000 years ago, the figure is still uncertain. Archeological evidence in Nova Scotia, meanwhile, places the earliest human activity in the Maritimes at around 10,000 years ago (however, between then and 5,000 years ago, there was no evidence for human presence at all). Research from 1871 suggested that Mi’kmaq believed they had emigrated from the west, and that they warred with people already on the Island; recorded tribal traditions pointed to another group called the Kwēdĕchk as the original inhabitants.
Oral histories are notoriously unreliable, but it is telling that in traditions recorded 150 years ago, when the need to connect inhabitation of the land to time immemorial was less pressing, the Mi’kmaq themselves recognized what archeology now tells us to be true. Namely, that North American inhabitants emigrated from the west, and moreover, that Mi’kmaq territory was established with a less-than-peaceful takeover. Now, however, arts organizations that claim to represent the Mi’kmaq, like Indigenous PEI, ignore historical records and claim the Mi’kmaq have been in PEI for over 10,000 years, far longer than the archaeological record supports: the oldest human bone found on the Island is only 5,000 years old.
This is not to cast any aspersions on the Mi’kmaq in particular. Their history is not different from the many other human groups that colonized parts of the world and in the process, often decimated the land, if not other hominid inhabitants. Human habitation in North America correlates with the decrease and extinction of numerous species of animals, just as in New Zealand and Australia. Hominids have, as far as we can tell, often not lived in harmony with the land. The claim that Indigenous tribes were not themselves the successors to earlier groups who had emigrated from elsewhere does a disservice to these groups, and to history. Ultimately, all human groups in what is now North America, even the first groups that occupied various locations here were colonizers from what is now Asia.
One such disservice involves the sensitive issue of the repatriation of ancient bones. Some Indigenous groups claim ownership of ancient skeletons, which they view as sacred.
Perhaps the most famous case in this regard was the well-publicized discovery in 1996 of “Kennewick Man,” found eroding in a Washington state riverbed. Dated at least 9,000 years old, the Pacific Northwest’s Umatilla tribe claimed it as their own; one of the group’s leaders stated, “We didn’t come across no land bridge. We have always been here.” After years of legal battles, scientists were eventually able to study the bones and determine he was indeed most closely related to modern North Americans; they could not link him to any one tribe, though several seemed to be descendants of his people. Even so, over several thousand years, the genetic relationship is too distant to warrant property rights.
President Barack Obama in 2016 signed a bill to turn over the remains to the Umatilla for burial.
Similar claims were made by the Navajo Nation in Arizona, who took to the courts to repatriate 303 human remains and objects that had been found on their land and are currently housed in a government archaeological centre. This, even though historical and archeological evidence showed the Navajo did not live in the valley at the time the bones were deposited, and that early inhabitants were more likely to be closer relations of the modern Hopi or Zuni tribes, according to anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss. But even if the Hopi or Zuni were the ones claiming ownership of the artifacts instead, their genetic link to the people who created them doesn’t imply immediate kinship or warrant property rights. In the same vein, the fact that I am most closely related in the distant past to Eastern Europeans doesn’t give me or them rights over each other’s property.
When the digital catalogue of artifacts retrieved from a 12,000-year-old ravine near Charlie Lake in northeastern British Columbia was repatriated back to the local Dene people in 2024, an elder of the group celebrated by stating, “We can tell a narrative that is truly Indigenous.” There is no guarantee that this narrative will be based in science, however, as the only data one might use to tell the actual story of these ancient peoples is no longer accessible, even in digital form, to scientists. Whatever story that emerges from it need not pass the test of scientific scrutiny.
There is no doubt that Indigenous groups have an interest in learning about ancient peoples who lived in the areas they currently inhabit, even if those ancestors may be separated in time by hundreds of generations. But so does society in general; any knowledge that results from unearthing ancient human remains and artifacts is a gift for all of humanity. Denying that gift because a group with a marginally larger genetic connection to ancient artifacts, which are likely to be also genetically connected at some level to a far larger part of the human population, is inappropriate.
None of this is to suggest that we should ignore past mistreatment of Indigenous groups. The Mi’kmaq culture began to be supplanted on Prince Edward Island beginning around the 1700s; we can and should bemoan the fact that they were not treated better.
But that does not justify creating a mythology and special recognition that may have no basis in fact. We need to respect history, even as we work to provide equal opportunities for everyone in this country, within a realistic 21st-century context.
We all share this land, its laws and resources, whether our ancestors moved here decades, centuries or even millennia in the past. These ancestors were, at various times in history among the colonizers or the colonized. Let’s celebrate the diverse cultural mix that makes up present-day Canada, along the fact that if we go back far enough, we are all related, instead of creating myths to appease any modern guilt about the past.
National Post
Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist, is a senior fellow of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, President of the Origins Project Foundation, and Chair of the Board of the Free Speech Union of Canada. His most recent book is The Edge of Knowledge, and his new book, due out in July, is The War on Science.