This is an excerpt from Chris Hedges’ interview with Omar El-Akkad, the author of the newly released One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This (2025).

A long time ago I was at a literary festival up in Canada and literary festivals in Canada started with land acknowledgements well before US festivals started doing the same. And we were sitting there, we were about to start our event and one of the organizers gets up and says, just before we begin, you know, I just want to take this time to acknowledge the really important acknowledgement that we are on unceded indigenous territory and to also thank the hedge fund that is sponsoring this event. And I was like, this is the most honest land acknowledgement I’ve ever heard.

I think of it, particularly this idea of after the fact acknowledgement as, and maybe this is particularly cynical of me, but I think of it as a continuation of theft. You steal land, you steal lives, and what’s left to steal at the end but a narrative? The narrative that absolves all that came before. You know, when I wrote the title of this book when I was first thinking about it, I wasn’t thinking in terms of weeks or even years. I was thinking if I’m fortunate enough to live the average lifespan in this part of the world, maybe by the end of my life, I’ll be watching a poetry reading in Tel Aviv that begins with a land acknowledgement. I think it’s a fundamental part of any system of endless taking, which, you know, colonialism and whatever stage of capitalism we’re in are fundamentally part of. There are very few systems as well-versed in after-the-fact shame and after-the-fact guilt as the ones that are predicated on endless taking.

And you see it all over the place. I mean, there’s an incredible poetry collection by a Layli Long Soldier called “Whereas,” which is all about sort of repurposing and undermining a U.S. government declaration that basically said, sorry about all that genocide, indigenous people, sorry about the theft. And it was passed in the most sort of bland manner hundreds of years after the fact. And that is such an important part of the entire project. We can all be sorry afterwards. The taking happens now and the apology comes later. It’s a hallmark of every colonial society.

The thing that makes it so dangerous to acknowledge right now is that we’re not after the fact. We’re in the middle of the fact. And so the people who disagree with the content of this book or with the assertion of that title are going to disagree vehemently until one day they don’t have to. And then they’re going to acknowledge it and there will be no repercussions and we can sit around and listen to a very flowery land acknowledgement when it’s too late to do anything about it.