The Savage Philosophy of Endless Acknowledgment

"Efforts to 'decolonize' institutions are embodied in ritual acts of acknowledging Indigenous presence and claims to territory.  Within what is currently called the United States, these acknowledgements are increasingly—if only recently—understood as prerequisite for demonstrating engagement with Indigenous communities. However, without continuous commitment to serve as accomplices to Indigenous people, institutional gestures of acknowledgement risk reconciling 'settler guilt and complicity' and rescuing 'settler futurity.'" ('Decolonization is not a metaphor,' E Tuck, KW Yang, Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society, 2012.)

How can we escape this entrapment and allow acknowledgement to retain its potential to unsettle? What must we do to begin to undertake a process of endless acknowledgement?

In our current period of existential and environmental catastrophe, desires for Indigenous epistemologies increase and enterprising settlers labor to extract this understanding as if it were a natural resource. The New Red Order—emerging out of contradistinction from the Improved Order of Red Men, a secret society that 'plays Indian'—calls attraction toward indigeneity into question, yet promotes this desire, and enjoins potential non-Indigenous accomplices to participate in the co-examination and expansion of Indigenous agency."

– New Red Order