I dont think that acknowledging traditional owners, which is the current convention in Australia, is the same as admitting that the land was stolen.
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Ah, I somehow missed that the point of contention was acknowledging traditional owners vs admitting that the land was stolen. Regardless, thereâs no custom of doing either in the States.
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I think âstolenâ is used for the sake of accuracy. Itâs probably most generally accurate in the United States, but as stated, this kind of acknowledgement of history is rare at public events in the US.
But I donât think I have heard âstolenâ so often any way. âUncededâ is much more common. Sometimes they make mention of the (always broken) treaty that the land has been shared under.
I can only speak for what I know about Canada (which is still limited knowledge), but those descendants of the 3000+ year inhabitants of the land have no intention to send others âback to where they came from.â Itâs not appropriate to impose the views of ethno nationalists on people who are only looking for reconciliation and undoing the wrongs that were done. Many First Nations people consider the land to be the home of anyone who was born on it. But they also consider that agreements that were made nation to nation need to be upheld.
And that story is just an absolute fraction of the horrors done by the settlers to the aboriginal people in Canada.
Not sure how to tie all this in to EBT exactly. When I led retreat days in Winnipeg I would start with a guided gratitude âmeditationâ that started with gratitude to the people who had lived on the land long ago (mentioning the names of the peoples) and who had made it possible for any of us to be where we were that day. Because especially in Winnipeg, the settlers who came certianly would not have survived without the help of those people. -40c is a serious thing. 
From what I know, people are encouraged to adapt the acknowledgements to the situation so they donât just become a standard statement that is read out and forgotten.
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I think part of the awkwardness is that our modern political structure divides ownership into private and public. The act of stealing within this framework is better designated to private property. As private properties are protected under the same political structure, other terms are used to describe disputes over public land between tribes/people/groups such as occupation. These differences in designations are relevant to how intentionality is defined where the act of occupying a land is meaningfully different from stealing someoneâs private property. The dispute and grievances over public land (occupation) often takes the form of referring to political entities (institutions) that existed at the time of the dispute/conflict. Did the aborigines in AUS, NZ, US, CAD, PAL âŚetc establish a political entity akin to modern countries to designate the act of occupying them as immoral or illegal?
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Namo Buddhaya
The only world that I dream of is one without kingdoms, nations and ethnic names. A world for humanity based on kindness, sharing and understanding. As an anthropologist, I know that till we deal with history, we will never have that. We should learn from the mistakes and the suffering, but the remaining stack in history causes only further conflicts and a cycle of anger.
As in Palestine and Israel, peace will never be reached until history does become just the past from which to learn instead of the past from which to claim.
Nationalism and identity, territory, borders based on group ideology, although very much mammalian in nature and based on evolution, will never bring peace and unity but greed, violence, delusion and anger. It is only if we start to stop ourselves from seeing ourselves as part of territorial, geo-linguistic-ethnic entity and identity that we will be able to be humans among humans. 
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The concept of a territorially-enclosed âstateâ or âcountryâ is a fairly recent invention in human history. If you take the long historical view, there are very few areas of land that werenât âstolenâ by one group of people from another at some point. If you look at the maps of Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania, and South America, where state borders are drawn on a map does not necessarily correspond to where people have historically either lived or migrated in those areas. Who âownsâ any politically-defined territory is a very complicated matter.
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I agree no one stole anything particularly in buddhist nothing is yours so no one can stole whatâs not yours in the first place
We are all immigrants too in the sense that all human ancestors migrated from Africa 1,8 millions years ago so no one is native or immigrant atleast outside of Africa
Are you saying that Buddhism has no concept of stealing? I remember the precepts mentioning something about that!
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In New Zealand the governance was by tribal groups. Representatives from those groups signed the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, which allowed for purchase of land. Subsequently there were various violations, including invasions of various areas by the British Army, and various arguments about interpretation. The settlements that began being negotiated in the 1980s resulted in the tribes organising corporate entities that manage land and businesses. MÄori became an official language in 1987. It had been suppressed in the 20th C, and its revival was important to preservation of MÄori culture. NZ English now contains many MÄori loan words.
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Where i live, Jordan was mainly inhabited by bedouin/nomadic tribes who co-existed but fought each other under the ottoman administration. When the British replaced the Turks, they brought an outsider " a Hashemite" who would rule the land and be acceptable amongst the tribes due to his noble linage. Having this outsider as an intermediary between the tribes still forms the basis of the social contract where i live. The tribes still expect special treatment even when they became a minority after waves of Palestinian refugees. Cronyism, nepotism and corruption are major problems under the current governance structure. Keeping the Jordanians from Palestinian ancestors as second hand citizens maintains the existing checks and balances. It also gives a regional role to the country in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict by having an interest in keeping it under control without completely solving it.
Talking about awkwardness ⌠our tribes have their sense of entitlement intact. No apologies are needed.
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Thank you all for not bypassing the cold, hard reality of the situation - Indigenous people in Australia are still dying 10 years younger, getting locked up in obscene numbers & dying in police custody, many more Aboriginal children are still being taken from their homes & put into foster care. The situation is painful and comes out of a widespread ignorance of the history of frontier massacres which were never recorded. As a Buddhist group the least we can do is acknowledge the truth of the situation and try to say it how it is. Thanks to our beloved Bhantes for responding at the Monks in Cyberspace meeting last night.
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For those not familiar with Australian history, there was no comparable treaty here, which would have loaned at least some legitimacy to events. In Australia, the invading English forces declared that the land was ownerless (Terra nullius), a legal fiction that was not overturned until the 1992 (!) Mabo case.
At the time of the English invasion, there were perhaps a million aborigines in Australia, all organized into perhaps 400 distinct ânationsâ (the term currently preferred by aborigines to describe their own cultural organization). Each nation had a defined territory, and there were well-established procedures for trade and travel between nations. These are still sometimes observed today. For example, when we held a retreat at an aboriginal community in Central Australia, the community there welcomed us to their land by ushering us through a âsmokingâ ceremony.
One underappreciated aspect of aboriginality in Australia is that Australia is essentially a developed nation wrapped around an underdeveloped nation. And the people of that underdeveloped nation, especially the aborigines of Central and Northern Australia, have a similar demographic pattern to other underdeveloped peoples; that is, they have lots of children and a rapid population growth. By 2030 itâs estimated that the aboriginal population will be over 1,000,000, and in the Northern Territory they will make up the majority of the population.
Thanks for raising the issue, and we will be more clear about mentioning this in future.
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Of course one of the tragic effects of colonisation is the current acceptance of concepts such as ânationsâ as well âmobsâ. Concepts that were never part of their heritage and to be honest labels that it would be better to see disappearing everywhere in the world because where there is ânationsâ there are conflicts, greediness, suffering. Copying the twenty century western rhetoric can only bring further issues and misrepresentationâŚ
That was a reason for which when I was teaching I worked with a group of aboriginal students to create a project of decolonisation of Aboriginal language in the effort to go back to the more holistic, universalistic original terminology they have in their own languages and myth. Of course as you can imagine the idea was rather controversial but surprisingly more among the older generations