Whither land acknowledgments?
The final jots of November
I make the case for (the existence of) Canadian TV in my latest The Hub book column for which I read Jennifer VanderBurgh’s What Television Remembers (McGill-Queens UP, 2023). This is not a brilliantly written book but all the same it is a valuable source of references and points to where we should be looking when looking at the history of Canadian TV. An appealing general readership book on the history of Canadian TV has yet to be written.
This piece was also a way of defending the CBC of yore and its place in the creation of some of the most important and watched Canadian TV shows. It didn’t have to go this way. But the situation is code red critical now.
Land acknowledgments gradually, quietly being retired?
There was a time in Toronto when you couldn’t start any gathering of two or more people without somebody chanting a land acknowledgment. And they were/are being taken dead seriously; when I called them nonsense in the Canada Day 2023 episode of the TVO’s The Agenda I had a massive social media pile-on on hand (notification settings are a very useful thing, btw). It stormed for a few days and it moved on.
The 2023 was still of the LA era. The first time I publicly called them nonsense (in more polite terms) was on my opera blog in 2018. It was still the pre-widespread-cancellations time and while I received the expected comments (“educate yourself… talk to an indigenous organization to learn what you should think about these things and then think that”) I actually had a young (ethnic minority, if that matters) staffer of an art song organization approach me at an event to say that he shared my qualms. But soon enough that became an inexpressible opinion.
Now I’m noticing more and more organizations not bothering with this once-most sacred duty. I remember the COC in one of its last Neef years opening a season announcement with an elder who did some sort of a smudging-like ritual which involved the General Manager contributing to the ceremony. The COC now plays a recorded LA, I believe, or projects one on the surtitles? Someone will correct me. They remain faithful to it, however.
Not the TSO, though. It was in 2018 that I noticed the TSO asking prominent figures to open concerts with a LA, after I had to listen to a classical music bigwig trying to pronounce “Haudenosaunee” while reading from a piece of paper. No LAs before the TSO concerts today. They are gone.
It was circa 2019 when some of the Toronto Summer Music Festival performers - this was at Walter Hall, and these were young but rising musicians that I don’t need to name - asked the assembled audience to chant the elaborate LA in unison, the words of which they projected onto the surtitles screen. And the audience, shockingly, obeyed. I was so stunned, I wrote the publicist about it and said I couldn’t review the concert because I left in a daze soon after. This anecdote made it into my 2022 book (I am possibly over-fussed about it? It looked shocking to me).
No LAs anymore at the TSMF on any main stages today. While I don’t go to Walter Hall concerts (not a fan of that space) and the Macmillan Theatre is closed, the Sarah Connolly concert at Walter Hall, while having quite a bit of on-stage talk by Canadian Art Song Project’s Steven Philcox, did not offer any LAs, so I’ll take this as a sign that they have been abandoned at U of T venues too.
Crow’s Theatre used to have LAs before the shows, then after the shows, when the performer would say, roughly, “please stay a minute longer, let me tell you how you can donate money to this indigenous organization, and how you could help the reconciliation effort”. Now the endnote LA is being dropped too; The Bidding War, the last thing I saw there, had nothing. (Oh by the way: The Bidding War was terrible.)
Coal Mine doesn’t bother. (Did they ever bother? I can’t remember.)
Tarragon still has a front of house staffer come out and speak the sacred words to the audience. (Passe Muraille? Factory? Are they still in operation? If anyone has any info, please write in.)
Soulpepper had absolutely nothing, nada, zilch, when I went to see The Master Plan a couple of days ago. (Oh yes, Reader: a friend’s plus-one cancelled so I went with her to the opening night. While better written than much of what we can see in the Toronto theatre world, Michael Healey’s The Master Plan veers between a theatre play and a PowerPoint presentation, from drama to didacticism back to drama back to educational graphics, and has, I was surprised to learn, a few moments of tedium too. But it is better written and more interesting than much on offer, and it is very of this terroir and terroir is catnip for me these days.)
I should note that all (most of?) these theatres put a LA in the printed program, but no one reads that. They’re becoming like the standard pseudo-legalese text you see some people still sending with their emails “if you received this email by mistake and it’s not meant for you, destroy it” etc.
West End Micro Music Festival had someone read the LAs a couple of years ago, but they are gone one. The concerts simply start. (What a concept.)
So I’m keeping score and I’ll probably stop noticing the lack of LAs when the lack of LAs becomes the norm. (It’s still not.)
Did we all see this stat, by the way, from the US election?
Native American vote in the last presidential election? Originally, thanks to some NBC exit poll or other, the Native vote was reported at 64 percent for Trump, but has since been corrected down to 51. To tweak-quote that post that went viral on Twitter, land acknowledgments should from now on recognize that more than half of Native Americans voted against the people who perform land acknowledgements.
What of the we-repent statements that so many art orgs felt called to put out in 2020-21, the diversity reports they commissioned? Many have been shuffled off to hard-to-find sections of websites, but many still remain easily findable, not as a relic of a time, but as a sign that the dial has barely moved and that the woke era is nowhere near self-correction in Canada. Stratford Festival still says that it “upheld white supremacy in the past”, thus tarring its own artistic and executive directors and theatre artists of “the past”.
The woke has not peaked, no. Especially in Canada, where it’s structurally embedded in organizations and the judicial system. It’s heartening though to see some bits chipping away. Let’s keep going.
One more thing on the Gillers
The good people of Bonjour Chai, a culture podcast of the Canadian Jewish News, invited me over to chat about my recent Giller post and how and why the arts in North American became so politicized so fast. We can now talk of sector-wide shifts and we’ll be seeing more of these bird-eye pieces about entire artistic disciplines, like this Dean Kissick’s longread in Harper’s about the visual/media arts including international biennials and fairs becoming identiterian and oppression-obsessed (forgive the very exploitative lede; the poor woman does not reappear in the article and is there only to provide the initial gore) or Kat Rosenfield’s piece on the earnest, programmatic turn in American pop culture.
I'm just back from a road trip in the US, where every second radio ad ends with a long legal disclaimer read at chipmunk speed. An idea for future LAs, perhaps?