You just can't please the jackpine savages.
“We work so hard to get our name out there so people understand our treaties and our territory and then all of a sudden, on one of Canada’s biggest stages, we’re ignored and that stings a little,” Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation Gimaa (Chief) R. Stacey Laforme said in an interview.Haudenosaunee Confederacy Chiefs Council secretary Leroy Hill delivered a land acknowledgement when the Grey Cup arrived in Hamilton’s Bayfront Park on the Tuesday before the game and addressed the sold out Tim Hortons Field crowd prior to kickoff alongside young Indigenous football players.
For those keeping track, the Gimmie-Credit Indians and the Had-No-Saucy-Sneeze Confederacy are two different groups. So when Leroy Hill stood and claimed that the Grey Cup was being played on his tribe's "sacred territory" yadda yadda yadda, was he outright lying? Did he falsely claim that his tribe owned the land? Was the vaunted oral history in error? After all, when the British wisely took over this empty continent they unwisely paid lip service to who the Red Indians claimed were the proper "owners" (whatever that means in their backwards tribal thinking) of the land in question: these treaties which pretended a couple wandering tribes were equivalent to Russia or Switzerland still had to pick a "current owner". So is this the Had-No-Saucy-Sneeze Indians cleverly retroactively seizing the land from around Hamilton?
As Martok noted, however, this is a common issue: when they do the insultingly stupid land acknowledgements before Oilers games they mention about 4 or 5 different tribes. Again, they can't all be the people who Britain bestowed the awesome and ideally pointless title of "previous owners of the land".
Of course, the issue is that of course more than one group could have been in the same general vicinity of Edmonton or Hamilton over the 18,000 years of human migration through the region. That is, in fact, the key problem with these land acknowledgements: we're rewarding the most recent thieves of the land to use their own failed logic against them. Since all Red Indians came from Mongolia over the Bering Strait land bridge (and hilariously we let them pretend their demonstrably false creation myth is a real thing), the "first" occupants of north-central Alberta were then forced farther south by the invaders from Alaska who "stole" their land (after fleeing Alaska from the land-thieves coming after them). There's no reason to presume that the migration patterns within North America differed from any other prehistoric (or early historic!) human migration pattern: it's easier to just flee south to empty lands rather than waste energy defending yourself against the people nipping at your heels from the north, and if there are people to your north fleeing invaders from farther north it's easier to invade the decadent folks to the south instead. So therefore every Oilers land acknowledgement should acknowledge that the Yahgan People were the proper owners of the land and the evil Cree and Blackfoot should feel ashamed that they were ever hanging around the neighbourhood.
Which brings us around to the obvious, of course: if the Cree simply were the secondmost recent occupiers of this land, why not include the most recent occupiers: to wit, the British? Almost as if, and stop me if you've heard this before, we shouldn't give two shits who else land "belonged" to other than the current owner: in this case Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II and all her rightful non-Charlie heirs.
