After naming whose land we stand on: awareness, curiosity, and accountability in land acknowledgements
Original Chinese title: 說完「我們站在誰的土地上」，然後呢？土地承認聲明為何可能提高認知、卻降低好奇
Randomized experiments with 1,724 Australians and 1,773 Americans found that land acknowledgements can increase awareness of local Indigenous groups while reducing cultural and historical interest. This feature examines Australian authority distinctions, institutional accountability, and locally determined relationships in Taiwan.
Sulangal
Sulangal is a member of the Puyuma people and a veteran cultural and visual-media worker.
After the name is spoken
An opening statement identifying the Indigenous communities connected with a place can bring overlooked history into public space. After listeners learn a name, will they continue learning? After an institution reads a statement, will its budgets, partnerships, and decision-making change? The meaning of land acknowledgement cannot be judged only by the completeness of a script. It also depends on the relationships it invites and whether living communities can influence institutional action.
A 2026 Nature Human Behaviour study used randomized experiments with non-Indigenous audiences in Australia and the United States. Exposure to land acknowledgements increased awareness of local Indigenous groups but could reduce interest in learning about culture and heritage. Knowing more and wanting to explore are different outcomes. The finding does not establish that acknowledgements inevitably cause harm or remove responsibilities to communities. It asks institutions to examine what they hope to achieve.
What the experiments establish
The original research abstract indexed in PubMed reports 1,724 participants in Australia and 1,773 in the United States, all non-Indigenous. Randomized experiments examined responses following exposure, including awareness of local groups, interest in culture and heritage, and political attitudes. No significant effects were found for a range of political attitudes, including collective guilt and support for reparations. Lack of a significant difference does not mean that influence is forever impossible. Improved awareness cannot be relabeled as realized land rights.
The sample sizes do not turn the study into a global conclusion. The countries have distinct colonial histories, institutions, practices, and public debates. Materials, measurement timing, and questions constrain what the study can answer. The abstract supports the main findings described here but cannot alone resolve long-term behavior, community experiences, or differences between every type of acknowledgement. For Taiwan, the study offers questions to investigate, not a ready-made forecast or authority to determine local practices.
Awareness, curiosity, and power differ
Awareness might mean recognizing a local Indigenous group's name. Curiosity might mean willingness to read, listen, or undertake further learning. Power involves decisions about exhibitions, research methods, resources, and what knowledge can be shared. These dimensions are related but not interchangeable. An activity could increase recognition while leaving listeners feeling they have completed their responsibility and need ask nothing further. That is a possible explanation to test, not a psychological mechanism established by this article.
Institutions should therefore avoid treating opening applause or an event photograph as evidence of better community relationships. Nor should they turn culture into attention-grabbing content to increase clicks. Questions about who defines learning goals, corrects errors, refuses unsuitable uses, and receives resources after a partnership connect symbolic expression to institutional responsibility. They also prevent the feelings of non-Indigenous listeners from becoming the only measure of success.
Welcome to Country cannot simply be performed by anyone
Official guidance from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, AIATSIS, distinguishes Welcome to Country from Acknowledgement of Country. Indigenous and non-Indigenous people can offer the latter as respect. The former involves Traditional Owners speaking for Country to welcome visitors, or giving others authority to do so. Changing a presenter while retaining the same script does not make the practices equivalent. Country includes complex relationships with place, custom, language, and identity, rather than merely an area on an administrative map.
The distinction helps prevent cultural authority from being mistaken for performance credentials. Even well-intentioned institutions need appropriate local contacts to confirm form, names, and scope. This discussion introduces the Australian distinction to explain authority and relationships. It does not propose renaming every local welcome, ceremony, or greeting in Taiwan with a foreign term. Different communities have different governance arrangements. Institutions should begin with actual local relationships rather than a script that looks solemn.
Relationships come before polished wording
AIATSIS's engagement guide addresses non-Indigenous policy workers with limited experience and emphasizes meaningful engagement through community-led collaboration. It can inform institutional thinking, but it is not a form that makes everything acceptable once signed. Drawing on that starting point, this article proposes clarifying how relevant communities determine representation and review procedures before preparing a statement or activity, then deciding together what work is worthwhile and what should remain private.
Sometimes the responsible result is narrowing a statement, recognizing differing understandings, or delaying use of a story. Participation should begin before a completed text needs endorsement. The easiest person to contact should not automatically represent all generations, families, or communities. Travel, language, time, and care responsibilities affect participation. Insisting exclusively on an institution's schedule shifts costs onto partners. Improving those conditions helps make relationships sustainable.
Institutions can disclose their commitments
After a statement, an institution might offer trackable actions: jointly designed teaching, suitable payment for knowledge work, corrected exhibit descriptions, or continuing discussion channels. Each needs responsibility, timing, and reviewable results. Their form should be decided by partners rather than imposed as a universal standard by this article. Accountability allows commitments to be examined and corrected instead of supplying another publicity scorecard.
Budgets and decision-making must be examined separately. An institution might pay for a lecture while retaining exclusive editing power, or invite a representative into a meeting without providing information, time, or influence. Beyond spending, ask where decisions occur, when community views enter, and how disagreements are handled. This is the article's governance analysis, not policy effects measured by the randomized experiments. It does not claim that any particular Taiwanese institution has already made these commitments.
Educators can connect acknowledgement with further questions
After a short statement, educators can offer suitable learning routes: community-approved public reading, collection descriptions, language resources, or activities. Questions might address place names, overlooked histories, and present institutional relationships. This avoids compressing complex histories into names and dates or presenting Indigenous peoples only in the past. Learning requires time, context, and an ability to return to evidence; an opening statement cannot replace a course.
A learning invitation is not unlimited permission to acquire cultural knowledge. Public material can be read, but restricted knowledge should not be filled in through persistent questions, recording, or artificial intelligence speculation. Educators who do not know an answer can define the question and seek appropriate authorization rather than improvise on a community's behalf. Recording, circulation, editing, and possible withdrawal need prior discussion. Audience curiosity does not oblige communities to satisfy every request.
Participants can begin with a responsible action
After listening, a participant's first step need not be an immediate declaration of position. They can identify which place, public resource, and contemporary relationship the statement addresses. They can read material communities choose to share, support community-led learning, or ask an institution what follows its words. Such actions do not guarantee political changes or confer authority to represent others. They extend listening into continued understanding.
Avoiding a sense of completion need not become endless self-blame. Instead of declaring sufficient respect, listeners can retain questions, accept corrections, and respect another person's decision not to answer. They can examine whether they encounter culture only at festivals, focus only on costumes and imagery, or merge distinct Indigenous experiences. Learning should pursue a more accurate understanding of people, places, and institutions rather than a larger collection of cultural material.
Taiwan needs locally defined questions
Schools, museums, businesses, and public institutions in Taiwan considering this research should discuss the actual problem with relevant communities. It might involve inaccurate naming, incomplete collection descriptions, or exclusion from decisions. Different problems need different approaches. An overseas experimental script cannot serve as a universal intervention. Evaluation should extend beyond non-Indigenous recognition of names to community judgments about partnership value, opportunities to correct content, and verifiable changes in resources and authority.
Research and local experience can question each other. Behavioral findings encourage institutions to distinguish awareness from interest; communities can identify overlooked power, history, and restricted knowledge. Joint design does not require sharing all knowledge or assuming every member agrees. Appropriate space for disagreement, clarity about authorization, and acknowledgment of partnership limits help avoid reducing participation to a one-time endorsement or rejection.
Keep respect present after the event
Land acknowledgements can make local Indigenous groups more visible, a concrete but limited result. The experiments also remind us that awareness does not automatically generate further interest or institutional power. Institutions can place their statements within longer relationships of responsibility: learning, resources, review, and community influence over what should continue and what needs correction.
The question of what follows does not demand a longer script at every event. It asks who can still raise questions and affect outcomes after the event ends. Taiwan can begin with specific local partnerships without expecting every community to adopt the same form. Where names, knowledge, and rights receive appropriate respect, acknowledgement may become the beginning of a relationship rather than a declaration an institution considers finished once spoken.
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