There is something obviously insane about Parasite, a Korean film about the violence of wealth inequality, winning the top honor at an event that sends its honored guests home with $225,000 gift bags. (Highlights included $20,000 of “facial rejuvenation treatments” and a 24-carat-gold-plated vape.) But that level of dissonance is kind of Hollywood’s thing.

You could see the same conflict at play when Māori director and writer Taika Waititi collected the hardware for best adapted screenplay for Jojo Rabbit. “I dedicate this to all the Indigenous kids in the world who want to do art and dance and write stories,” he said in his speech, sending up a beacon for Indigenous artists in the lily-white space of the Academy. “We are the original storytellers, and we can make it here, as well.” While presenting later in the evening, Waititi also offered a land acknowledgment, letting the audience know that they were “gathered on the ancestral lands of the Tongva, Tataviam, and the Chumash. We acknowledge them as the first people of this land on which our motion picture community lives and works.”

In less than 20 seconds, standing before an industry that considers Native people so narrowly, Waititi forced a moment of recognition: that Hollywood is literally built on stolen land and broken treaties. Acknowledging the acknowledgment for Slate on Sunday night, Dan Kois wrote that “it’s meaningful to address colonialism so overtly in an institutional context, and to have Waititi on the televisions of millions of people around the world saying those words will hopefully resonate for a long time.”

This is true, but the next question becomes: How do you make the land acknowledgment meaningful in this context? A first step that comes with a second step from the non-Indigenous audience about actually respecting sovereignty and marshaling resources in service of it. Because without that, land acknowledgments like Waititi’s, necessary as they are, do what Hollywood has made millions from: They situate us in the past, out of sight and out of mind, save for when a show of good faith is needed.

While they are now routine in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, land acknowledgments are a more recent phenomenon for mainstream American institutions. They are especially common now in artistic performance spaces, like theaters, art galleries, and film festivals. Sundance, for instance, opened each film showing last month with a land acknowledgment—for the first time in the festival’s history.

