Blood, Soil and Land Acknowledgements

By Daniel Greenfield |  October 25, 2024

The 2024 Democratic National Convention opened with the claim that “our country was built on Indigenous homelands” from tribes that had been there “since time immemorial.” The American Lung Association’s DEI office tells members to begin by stating that “the land on which we stand” used to belong to Indian tribes who are now suffering from the “on-going violence and repression” of “tobacco-related health, indoor and outdoor air inequities.”

“The ACLU of Northern California exists on the occupied territory of over 100 tribes,” the Communist founded activist group thundered. New York declares that “the land politically designated as New York City to be the homeland of the Lenape who were violently displaced as a result of European settler colonialism” also known as the United States of America.

Yale University’s land acknowledgement concludes with, “we honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land.”

Land acknowledgements, which began as a Marxist movement in Australia, have spread to America and become universally accepted by woke institutions, especially universities, as part of the larger conception of America, Australia and Canada as illegitimate “settler states” which displaced the “indigenous population” and require a program of leftist “decolonization”.

Behind the radical politics is ‘Blut und Boden’: an idea that came from an entirely different branch of the international socialist movement. The Nazi ideology of ‘Blood and Soil’ or  ‘Blut und Boden’ posited that the German people had an innate racial link to the land. That’s the same nationalistic romantic idea behind land acknowledgements.

The magical “enduring relationship” that the Nazis believed existed between the ‘Aryan race’ and German land (along with the land they intended to seize from the Poles and other ‘slavs’) has been transplanted to America, Australia and Canada under the guise of social justice.

Land acknowledgements frequently gush over the “soil” and “blood” in ways that closely resemble Nazi ‘blood and soil’ doctrine.

“When we talk about land, land is part of who we are. It’s a mixture of our blood, our past, our current, and our future,” the Native Governance Center claims in a line widely incorporated into land acknowledgements. The National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center muses on “blood and land memory.” Behind the poetry is ‘Blut und Boden’ or the idea that some people belong on land because they are connected with it and others are foreign invaders who do not belong.

The Nazis followed through on the logic of “Blood and Soil” by expelling and killing millions of people with plans to exterminate millions more including ‘slavic’ peoples. Decolonization follows a similar formula justifying the dispossession of millions of peoples as “European settlers”. And while land acknowledgements may seem like silly performative wokeness, those who promote them have justified the brutal massacres of the European population in Africa and elsewhere.

Both ‘Blood and Soil’ and land acknowledgements ultimately find their way back to the utopian communes created by European radicals in America. In my book, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left, I described the rise of these ‘Communists’ who sought to abolish private property and marriage. The Nazi obsession with utopian peasantry emerged from a ‘communist’ commune based on the work of Robert Owen, the Father of British Socialism, and Charles Fourier, the French socialist who coined the term “feminism”.

The serial failures of these communes across over 150 years led leftists to build a mythology in which only the American Indian tribes could have lived in a perfect state with nature because of some magical link with the land. They never considered the possibility that ideological agriculture has always failed, whether it was the Soviet collective farms or the Nazi racialized farms, and that farming requires hard work not a great deal of theorizing about human society.

“Blood and Soil” farming failed miserably leading the Nazis to accelerate their plans for the conquest of Eastern Europe in search of slave labor and fresh land. Soviet agriculture led to famines, the embrace of eccentric theories, desperate attempts under Khrushchev to copy American agriculture and the USSR finally going deep into debt to buy American wheat.

Land acknowledgements are conveniently detached from real performance. Like the DNC’s 2024 land acknowledgement, they often get the tribes and their locations wrong. Their claim that the Indians had a mystic link with the land and were its ‘stewards’ is more empty romanticism. Like 19th century Europeans believing that the Arab and his horse had a special connection, land acknowledgements are the kind of ‘orientalism’ that woke academics decry elsewhere.

Nomadic tribesmen who move about have far less connection to the land than farmers and homeowners. They are also far less likely to romanticize the land and its flora and fauna than university professors who collect turquoise earrings and dubious stories of family Cherokee ancestry. The land to nomads is a utilitarian resource to be exploited, not stewarded, and there is always more land on the horizon, more fish, more passenger pigeons, and more buffalo.

Land acknowledgements, like the rest of blood and soil ideology, have nothing to do with reality. But there’s no more interest in exploring the actual history of American Indian tribes than Nazi theoreticians wanted to discuss the actual history of German peasantry. The purpose of ideology is to seize power and impose social change with a false paradigm.

Land does not belong to races, but to those cultures that build civilizations atop it. Land does not make people, people make land. They cultivate it, develop it and make it accessible. A century or two goes by and some other people drive them out and do the same thing. Or not. A great civilization or culture becomes forever associated with the land, not because of ‘blood and soil’ nonsense, but because its culture reached beyond the land to change the world.

The ancient Egyptians may be long vanished, but we associate the land with them, not with the current Arab invaders and occupiers. So too Rome, Athens and Jerusalem. The power of these names does not lie in the blood or the soil, but in the mind and heart. The vast frontiers of the West were romanticized, not by the Indians, but by the cowboys, farmers, and poets. The culture of the West was distilled by dime novels and nickelodeons into the cowboy mythos.

Land acknowledgements revive ‘Blood and Soil’ ideology to uproot the United States. Like ‘Blut und Boden’, decolonization represents a genocidal worldview that is doomed to fail.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.