“Before we begin the concert, we acknowledge with gratitude that we gather and make music today on the ancestral homelands of the Pocumtuck people. We honor the Indigenous peoples who have cared for these lands and waters across generations, and the Native communities whose connections to this place continue today.”
I feel uncomfortable every time I hear acknowledgments like this. There’s a part of me that hears, “Thanks for the land that we stole from you. We’re looking forward to the concert.”
Yet we live with our history, whether we think about it or not. Much of American life has been shaped by injustices that reach back to the country’s beginnings. It can be difficult to connect our lives today with events that happened generations ago, but their consequences remain with us.
Our history includes a repeated pattern of people not receiving a fair share of what their labor and land produced; enslaved African Americans generated wealth they could not own. Native Americans lost land that became a foundation of wealth for others. Women have provided the unpaid labor, often unseen, of childcare, care for the elderly, ill, and disabled, and housework. Immigrants have toiled in dangerous, oppressive environments for next to nothing. And many more. All of which is essential for sustaining an economy.
All these different people have very different histories. But they share a common thread: the wealth created by many has been funneled to the few. That pattern points to a deeper contradiction at the heart of the American experience: the gap between our ideals of equality and the reality of who has benefited from the nation’s wealth.
One of the enduring contradictions of American history is that our nation proclaimed itself to be founded on an extraordinary ideal of human equality while tolerating slavery, dispossession of land, and profound economic and political inequality.
Over time, we have expanded the circle of people protected by those ideals. We abolished slavery, prohibited discrimination, expanded the vote, and declared equal protection under the law. However, changing the law does not necessarily dismantle the underlying exploitation. Those practices may still be embedded in their ordinary workings, allowing past inequalities to persist even as the law promises equality. And when those inequalities persist over time, so do their economic consequences of passing greater wealth to fewer over the generations.
We can’t change the inequities and injustices of the past. Knowing our history, though, can open our eyes to the economic and social landscape we inhabit today. My hope is that, using that knowledge, we can rebuild a social structure that creates opportunities rather than takes them away, a society where the wealth we create is shared, a society where social and economic interactions are based on cooperation rather than exploitation.
We can’t escape our history. The question is what history we choose to create next.
Christopher “Kiffer” Sikes is a 40-year resident of Franklin County and founder of Common Capital, a nonprofit that finances small businesses and community projects in western Massachusetts. Any comments are appreciated and can be sent to kiffersikes@gmail.com.