I see these acknowledgments as compelled speech. That is a fundamentally abhorrent thing to do. The forced utterance of statements that the speaker or writer may strongly disagree with is totally unacceptable in any free society. It is much the same as forced medication, or forced labor. These are things that are done by authoritarian despots, of which there seem to be a proliferation currently. On the particular topic of acknowledgments of whatever natives happened to live in an area before some form of civilization turned up is highly flawed. The noble savage fallacy runs amok here, where any primitive people are deemed to somehow have been ideal stewards of whatever land they happened to wander around on. Regardless of whether they did anything, let along anything good (where the definition of good is highly subjecting also). If you want to acknowledge people, then why can't we acknowledge MY ancestors, who through blood, sweat, tears and sheer determination transformed an arid and undeveloped country into a functioning technological marvel where human lives are were more free and prosperous as any time in history, where ordinary people live lives that mere centuries ago could not have been imagined even by kings or emperors. Give thanks the brilliant minds that invented the technology that most take for granted, and the hard working people who built and maintained it. The native people of most previously uncivilized areas had little to nothing to do with any of this, many of them were very primitive and in their culture practiced beliefs and customs that are abhorrent to civilized peoples. ------ Fuck Dan Andrews!