The Unsung Virtues of the Statute of Limitations
Land Acknowledgements
The folding chairs in the Marriott conference room were the color of dried yogurt, which Elena thought was appropriate for a Democratic strategy summit. Someone had set the thermostat to morgue. She pulled her cardigan tighter and watched her breath almost, but not quite, fog in front of her.
At the podium, Marcus Chen adjusted the microphone, producing a squeal of feedback that made the woman beside Elena wince and cover her ears. He wore three buttons on his lapel, layered like medals: “Land Back,” “Abolish Billionaires,” and a third, smaller one that Elena squinted to read. “Ask Me About Mutual Aid.”
Nobody ever asked.
“Before we begin,” Marcus said, “I’d like to offer a land acknowledgement.”
Elena uncapped her pen, clicked it twice, recapped it. She’d sat through dozens of these. They washed over you like hold music.
“We gather today on the ancestral lands of the Piscataway and Pamunkey peoples.” Marcus’s voice had the cadence of a flight attendant explaining emergency exits: memorized, polished smooth by repetition. “We recognize that this land was stolen through centuries of genocide, forced removal, and broken treaties. We commit ourselves to the ongoing work of justice and reconciliation.”
He paused. Elena shifted her weight, preparing to reach for the agenda in her bag.
“However.” The word hung in the refrigerated air. “I believe we must go further.”
At the front table, the presiding officer looked up from her tablet. Diane something. Diane Kowalski, maybe. She had the face of a woman who had moderated too many panels and remembered every single one.
“The Piscataway and Pamunkey peoples themselves displaced earlier inhabitants,” Marcus said. “Archaeological evidence suggests continuous human habitation in this region for eleven thousand years, at minimum. To acknowledge only the most recent indigenous nations is to participate in erasure.”
“Marcus.” Diane’s voice landed flat as a cancelled check. “We have a full agenda.”
“This is the agenda.” He gripped the podium’s edges. “How can we discuss voter outreach when we haven’t reckoned with the foundational violence of property itself?”
Elena’s hand went up before she could stop it. She felt the familiar sensation of watching herself make a mistake from a slight distance, like a driver seeing the deer too late.
“Are you suggesting,” she said, devilishly, “that the indigenous peoples we just acknowledged were colonizers?”
Marcus pivoted toward her. His eyes had the particular brightness of someone who had been waiting for exactly this question. “I’m suggesting that land ownership is inherently colonial. Every owner displaced a previous owner. If we’re going to acknowledge that history, we should acknowledge the whole thing. All of it.”
“That seems like it might take a while.”
“Justice,” Marcus said, “takes as long as it takes.”
A man in the second row stood up so quickly his chair scraped against the floor, a sound like a small animal dying. He was wearing a “Bernie 2028” shirt, even though Bernie Sanders was eighty-six years old and had publicly stated he would not run again. “I support this. We should trace the full lineage of displacement.”
“How far back,” Diane said, each word a separate sentence, “would you like to go.”
Marcus produced a folded paper from his jacket pocket. It unfolded, and unfolded again, and kept unfolding, accordion-style, until it nearly touched the floor. “I’ve prepared some notes.”
The next forty minutes dissolved the normal architecture of time. Elena watched the clock’s minute hand crawl like something injured. Marcus traced human habitation through the region in waves, each group washing over the previous like tides erasing footprints. He acknowledged the Clovis people, their distinctive spear points scattered across the continent. He acknowledged the pre-Clovis peoples, those controversial ghosts whose tools kept turning up in the wrong geological strata.
Somewhere around the land bridge migrants, Elena noticed that the man beside her had fallen asleep. His head drooped forward, jerked up, drooped again, a metronome of surrender.
“But we cannot stop with humans,” Marcus said. His voice had begun to fray at the edges, threads pulling loose from the weave. He accepted a water bottle from someone in the front row without breaking his rhythm, drank without appearing to swallow. “Homo sapiens displaced Neanderthals. Before that, earlier hominids displaced still earlier hominids. The chain of violence extends backward into deep time.”
“How deep?” Elena asked. She had stopped clicking her pen. She had stopped thinking about the agenda, the afternoon breakout sessions, the hotel restaurant where she’d planned to eat a $24 salad alone. She was caught now, pinned to her seat by horrified fascination, a lepidopterist’s specimen still twitching.
“To the beginning,” Marcus said. “To the first land-dwellers.”
Diane had put her head in her hands approximately twelve minutes ago. She had not moved since. She might have been praying or sleeping or calculating the number of days until her retirement. The posture offered no clues.
“We acknowledge,” Marcus continued, and his voice climbed toward something that was either transcendence or heat stroke, “the first tetrapods. The pioneers who dragged themselves from ancient seas onto shores that had never known the weight of a footstep.” He was sweating now, his forehead glossy under the fluorescent lights. “We acknowledge that they displaced no one. There was no one to displace. They were the original inhabitants. Everything since, every creature that has walked or crawled or slithered across this earth, every human hand that has signed a deed or drawn a border, represents an unbroken chain of displacement stretching back to that first emergence.”
A woman three rows ahead had begun filming on her phone. Her hand trembled slightly, whether from suppressed laughter or the cold, Elena couldn’t tell.
Marcus drew a breath that seemed to come from somewhere below his diaphragm, from some deep reserve he had been saving. “We acknowledge Tiktaalik. We acknowledge the lobe-finned fishes whose bones would become our bones, whose fins would become our hands.” He raised his own hands, turned them over, studied them as if seeing them for the first time. “We acknowledge the courage, the audacity, the world-splitting arrogance of leaving the water. Every one of us in this room is a colonizer of the land. We have been colonizers for three hundred and seventy-five million years.”
Silence. The air conditioning hummed its idiot hymn. Somewhere in the hallway, a housekeeping cart rattled past.
“Is the acknowledgement complete?” Diane asked, her words muffled by her palms.
“The acknowledgement is complete.”
She lifted her head. Her eyes were the color of old ice, of something that had been frozen so long it had forgotten any other state. She looked at the clock, which read 10:47 AM, and then at the room full of Democrats who had not yet discussed a single item on the agenda.
“Wonderful,” she said. “Let’s begin our first panel.” She glanced at her tablet, and something moved across her face, quick as a fish in dark water. “’How to Appeal to Swing Voters in the 2028 Election.’”