Imagine the following: Four car thieves are driving along in a freshly stolen Hyundai Elantra, when the driver pulls over to the side of the road. He says to his friends, “let’s take a moment to acknowledge this car’s former owner, who no longer has a car.”

I know, it sounds pretty ridiculous. But that is largely how the University of Michigan and other left-of-center institutions choose to address the issue of Native American displacement from the land we live and work on. They issue relatively pointless land acknowledgements that only serve to make people in charge of these institutions feel better about themselves. Students deserve better, and administrators should scrap these acknowledgements.

Opinions on land acknowledgements are likely formed through an ideologicalheuristic. The Democratic administrators governing these institutions largely consider them appropriate, developing their views through the framework of helping a disadvantaged minority and reminding people of America’s indigenous history. Alternatively,conservative tocenter-left pundits find them performative and irrelevant, while many rank and file Republicans probably think, “woke bad” and leave it at that. But there’s room for nuance here, as well as a solution that informs students withoutvirtue signaling.

Since before I arrived on campus my freshman year, the University has exposed me to a series of land acknowledgements intended to teach students about Ann Arbor’sindigenous history. I heard one on my first campus tour, as well as before each University ceremony I have attended since enrolling. The University’s Inclusive History Project documents the University’s use of land acknowledgements on itswebsite, and the Office of Student Conflict Resolution displays one on its webpage.

But these land acknowledgements — especially in their verbal form — are purely performative. They don’t teach students anything, save that Native Americans of the Anishinaabe and Wyandot peoples once occupied the land on which the University’s three campuses were first established, and that European settlers displaced them through coercive treaties.

That statement is accurate, but that doesn’t make it valuable for students or indigenous people. In fact, I would imagine that most U-M students already know that the European settlement of America involved the mass displacement and killing of Native peoples. What they may not know is the more detailed history of Native American nations and their dispossession. It is that history the University should commit itself to telling.

The University and other institutions’ current land acknowledgements are often performative efforts at self-gratification, but that doesn’t make learning about pre-colonial history an unworthy cause. We teach children about the religious persecution that motivated the first pilgrims to travel to the New World. We teach them about the first colonies, Manifest Destiny and the Age of Jackson. If college students are unaware of what happened to Native Americans at those critical junctures, that represents, at best, a failure of education and, at worst, a deliberate omission in an attempt to alter the historical record.

This knowledge is important for its own sake, but awareness of the raw deal Native Americans received can also help to dispel the worst aspects of American nationalism.

Today, much of the United States seems wrapped up in the notion that this land somehow belongs to any one ethnic group. The American right is activelyremoving Native American names from public lands and places — in part because those names contribute to the understanding that America was once occupied by non-white people. But land acknowledgements and their proponents only *reinforce *this kind of ethnonationalism by arguing that the continental United States is theproperty of the dispossessed natives. The phrase “you’re on (insert tribe name) land” captures this sentiment well.

Both of these conclusions are largely rejected by the historical record. The United States, like most nations, was formed in the crucible of territorial conquest. European settlers crossed the Atlantic and forciblydisplaced the natives living in the New World.

And despite the clean, organized narratives land acknowledgements seek to offer, land transfer through territorial violence was common in the United States before and during the first European settlements. There are numerousexamples of tribes ceding territory in response to raids from neighbors, and nations like the Pequotabsorbed several tribes as tributaries. With firearms supplied by the Dutch and English, the Iroquois people staged a series ofconflicts against Algonquin-speaking tribes in the 17th and 18th centuries, which ultimately led to the massive displacement of eastern tribes and a substantial reshaping of the country’s tribal geography.

The point of all this is that assigning individual areas of land to individual Native groups is often more complex than meets the eye, a factrecognized by many Indigenous scholars. Land that acknowledgements attribute to a specific tribe often changed hands multiple times before ultimately ending in settler hands. If the present-day U.S. was returned to the ethnic groups that occupied it immediately before the colonists arrived, that would not be a restoration of aboriginal ownership — merely a handoff to the most recent occupant. When land acknowledgements attribute ownership to a single group, they miss a complex history of Native groups that most students likely never learn.

And that complex history should be learned, if for no other reason than to inform present-day Americans that the nuanced matter of land ownership isn’t as absolute as they might think.

But land acknowledgements don’t succeed in that goal. The information offered is limited, and largely conforms to what students already know. When universities should be presenting a nuanced narrative about this land’s history and peoples, students are instead exposed to a boilerplate determination that their school sits on stolen land. Most listeners have probably adapted to tune them out, rendering any positive benefit moot.

Students deserve a better system, especially when the resources to learn more are so accessible. The University’s Museum of Art, for instance, offers anexhibit on the Native groups that lived in the Ann Arbor area, which provides much more information than land acknowledgements can. The exhibit engages in much of the ethnonationalist jargon proffered by many land acknowledgements — using phrases like “you’re on Anishanabee land” — but the University should nonetheless make efforts to direct students toward it.

The University could also augment its course selection with classes on Native groups who lived in Michigan. Course offerings about such groups arelimited — even within the Native American studies department — and a permanent class could provide valuable information while satisfying LSA’s Race and Ethnicity requirement.

These efforts should be paired with outreach to Native American communities, forming partnerships that emphasize and augment the tribal businesses and Native students that drive the University and regional economies. The University’s Inclusive History Project makes one such effort with its Native American Student Stories initiative, but more should be done.

The displacement of Native Americans from the Ann Arbor area and the broader United States is an issue of serious historical concern, but the University and its peers haven’t treated it as such. Awareness and understanding of Native history is important for its own sake, and can also help to remedy the senseless aspects of nationalism. A genuine outreach program can also benefit the Native groups that were disadvantaged in the first place. With so much to gain, we deserve more than virtue signaling.

Lucas Feller is an Opinion Columnist who writes about politics, economics and campus culture, sometimes all at once. His column, “Contrarian’s Corner,” runs biweekly on Thursdays. He can be reached at lucasfel@umich.edu.