Pop star Taylor Swift opened the latest leg of her “Eras Tour” in Toronto, Canada, Thursday with a “land acknowledgment” notice flashed across the giant stage screen, alerting fans that the concert was being held on supposedly stolen territory.
“We acknowledge that we are performing today at Rogers Centre, located on Treaty 13 lands,” the notice on the screen read. “We acknowledge the First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples whose original and treaty territories we stand upon.”
The Canadian treaty mentioned in the notice was part of the Toronto Purchase of 1805, which facilitated the British government’s purchase of the land from the Native Mississauga tribe where Toronto and the city’s Rogers Center now sits.
The treaty and land purchase also encompassed the homes of other tribes including the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Chippewa, and Wendat peoples.
This is not the first time that Swift has opened a concert tour by informing fans that they were standing on “stolen” lands.
According to Billboard, Swift also opened some of her concerts in Melbourne, Australia, informing fans that they were on lands once occupied by the country’s Aboriginal peoples.
Many native activists, though, feel these notices are meaningless and actually contribute to less awareness, not more.
“If it becomes routine, or worse yet, is strictly performative, then it has no meaning at all,” Kevin Gover, a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma and undersecretary for museums and culture at the Smithsonian Institution, told NPR last year. “It goes in one ear and out the other.”
Gover added that the notices also can make some Native peoples feel despondent.
“If I hear a land acknowledgment, part of what I’m hearing is, ‘There used to be Indians here. But now they’re gone. Isn’t that a shame?’ And I don’t wish to be made to feel that way,” he said.
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