Every morning, at the start of the school day in Toronto, my children hear the following inelegant little paragraph read aloud, just before the singing of “O Canada”:

I would like to acknowledge that this school is situated upon traditional territories. The territories include the Wendat, Anishinabek Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nations, and the Métis Nation. The treaty that was signed for this particular parcel of land is collectively referred to as the Toronto Purchase and applies to lands east of Brown’s Line to Woodbine Avenue and north towards Newmarket. I also recognize the enduring presence of Aboriginal peoples on this land.

I hear the same little speech, or a version of it, at gala events—literary prizes, political fund-raisers, that sort of thing—when whichever government representative happens to be there reads some kind of acknowledgment before his or her introductory remarks. But you know a phenomenon has really arrived in Canada when it involves hockey. Both the Winnipeg Jets and the Edmonton Oilers began acknowledging traditional lands in their announcements before all home games last season. Acknowledgment is beginning to emerge as a kind of accidental pledge of allegiance for Canada—a statement made before any undertaking with a national purpose.

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada released its final report, with ninety-four calls to action, and Justin Trudeau was elected to great gusts of hope that we might finally confront the horror of our history. In the time since, the process of reconciliation between Canada and its First Nations has stalled, repeating the cycles of overpromising and underdelivering that have marred their relationship from the beginning. The much-vaunted commitment to “Nation to Nation” negotiation has been summarily abandoned. The National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls—another Trudeau election promise—has been plagued by resignations, inertia, and accusations of general ineffectiveness. Nonetheless, the acknowledgment is spreading. No level of government has mandated the practice; it is spreading of its own accord.

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There is no single acknowledgment. There are many acknowledgments, depending on where you are in the country. If my kids’ school happened to be east of Woodbine Avenue in Toronto, for instance, they would hear a slightly different acknowledgment, recognizing the Mississaugas of Scugog, Hiawatha, and Alderville First Nation. The acknowledgment forces individuals and institutions to ask a basic, nightmarish question: Whose land are we on?

Sometimes it’s relatively easy to figure out an answer. When Canada acquired Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory, in 1870, the government negotiated a series of numbered treaties covering the territories stretching from northern Ontario to the Rocky Mountains. So, if you’re a professor giving a talk in Sudbury, Ontario, say, you can go to the government Web site and look up that Sudbury was part of the Robinson Huron Treaty, and then figure out from there whom to acknowledge. A simpler method is to go to the Web site of a local university in whichever town you happened to be in. In Sudbury, Laurentian’s acknowledgment reads, “We would like to begin by acknowledging that we are in Robinson Huron Treaty territory and the land on which we gather is the traditional territory of the Atikameksheng Anishnaabeg.” Not that complicated.

In other places, particularly in the bigger cities, the acknowledgment can become exponentially more difficult. The British Crown acquired Toronto, or, rather, the 250,880 acres that include present-day Toronto, from the Mississaugas, in 1787, for two thousand gun flints, two dozen brass kettles, ten dozen mirrors, two dozen laced hats, a bale of flannel, and ninety-six gallons of rum. The British government officially purchased the land for an additional ten shillings, in 1805. But even before the Toronto Purchase, as it was called, the land was a contested site between indigenous peoples. That history is also reflected in the question of who should be named in the acknowledgment. “For the sake of current land claims and also for the sake of basic respect, you have to name them, and you have to be correct about it,” Jesse Thistle, a historian at York University in Toronto, says. “Haudenosaunee people, some of them, don’t want to recognize that the Anishnabe took control and were here historically. Some Anishnabe people will not recognize that the Haudenosaunee people were here. And both those people sometimes want to erase the Wendat.” Historical truth is always subject to the structures of power. Always. The erasure of the Wendat “is, in a way, a kind of indigenous way of doing what the British were doing, in terms of writing other people out of the narrative,” Thistle says.

But writing marginalized peoples into the narrative is not always the correct instinct, either. Thistle, who is himself Métis-Cree, believes that the Métis should not be included in the list of traditional land acknowledgments in Toronto; he has brought his concerns to the authorities at the Toronto District School Board as well. There were Métis in Toronto—they constituted a “historical presence”—but it was not a homeland, and to claim otherwise, for Thistle, “disempowers the Haudenosaunee or the Anishnabe, who do have a rightful claim.”

Even the phrasing of the “acknowledgment of traditional lands” raises immense difficulties of basic meaning. What does “traditional” mean in this case? Does it simply mean “not legal”? Does it mean “sort of but not really”? Whose tradition are we referring to? There are six hundred and eighteen First Nations recognized by the government of Canada. They speak more than sixty different languages, and practice different religions. “Traditional land” is, in many cases, a colonial concept. The English traded for land, but to many First Nations the waterways were what mattered. “There are some scholars who say that the traditional homeland of the Métis was the travelling they did,” Thistle says, “so that totally goes against our modern conception of a rooted, bounded territory that comes out of nation-state-building.” The political consequences of a differing lens are unimaginably vast. There has never been a purchase of the Great Lakes, just parcels of land beside them. “Are all those waterways suddenly 1491?” Thistle asks.

If Toronto’s acknowledgment captures the complexity of history, Ottawa’s reveals its underlying brutality. “We would like to begin by acknowledging that the land on which we gather is the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin nation,” it reads. The country’s capital is built on land settled without any negotiation or treaty or compensation, not even ten shillings and some frilly hats. The country’s capital is on straight-up filched land.