A British Columbia Supreme Court decision made last August in the case of Cowichan Tribes vs. Canada upheld the Nation’s title claims to about 800 acres in Richmond, B.C.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press

I love a good land acknowledgement.

Many will disagree with me. They’d argue that land acknowledgements are just empty, mispronounced words that don’t mean a thing. But I think when a non-Indigenous person starts a public meeting reminding everyone about the land they are standing on, it means something.

Every time someone does it, I believe they learn. This might be the only time they have to consider speaking an Indigenous language, to toss the unknown words around on their tongue, to think about the living, breathing land beneath their feet and what it has given them.

What they’re not meant to do is terrify people, or make Canadians think the Indians are coming, riding fast over the hills to take your houses away.

Court ruling on Indigenous claim creates uncertainty around land ownership

But this fear-mongering forms the start of the Canadian-American thinker David Frum’s recent essay in The Atlantic, “Good Intentions, Gone Bad: How Canada’s ‘reconciliation’ with its Indigenous peoples went wrong.” Mr. Frum begins by warning that land acknowledgements are “rote confessions of historical guilt” that are being reinterpreted by Canadian courts as “legally enforceable........

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