Sue Lani Madsen: Migration, displacement are constants in our history

Land acknowledgments recited at public meetings are reminiscent of a perfunctory mea culpa at the start of a Catholic mass. Unless you’re planning to give it back, it would be better to just keep the apology for “stolen land” to yourself. Displacement has been a constant across all continents since time immemorial, and we’re not any different.

Whether you count your point of origin as a fossilized 3- or 4-million-year-old skeleton in Ethiopia or start from the oral tradition of Adam and Eve’s eviction from the Garden of Eden, people have dispersed, displacing others who either assimilated or moved on. The Americas were the last frontier. When their ancient ancestors left the settled Old World behind to cross the land bridge from Asia, those we now call Native Americans became the pioneers of human sprawl into virgin landscapes. They displaced 78 species of megafauna in North America by driving them to extinction, according to the Wildlife Society. Maybe that requires a mea culpa, too.

Land acknowledgments aren’t going to catch on in the Old World no matter how progressive European culture becomes. Tribe-on-tribe land displacement is the root of centuries of war on the continent. On a recent European vacation on the Danube River, I imagined writing a land acknowledgment for Budapest, Hungary:

“This land was the traditional homeland of Germanic tribes and possibly also the Celts, until the Magyars from the Ural Mountains moved into the Carpathian plains, overwhelming and absorbing the Indigenous peoples. They were in turn ruled by the Romans, but regained their sovereignty, building the culture now known as Hungarian. Having faced absorption, displacement and attempted erasure at various times by Mongols, Turks, Austrians, Germans and Russians, Hungary now seeks to nurture its relationships with its neighbors through the European Union and NATO.”

Despite its long history, Budapest doesn’t have any old buildings by European standards because, as our city guide noted, the Hungarians have a 600-year history of losing wars and revolutions. They’re still rebuilding parts of the city destroyed during the 50-day siege of Budapest in 1945. Hungary is proud of its 1956 uprising against Russian domination even though it lost that revolution, too, in a shorter siege of the city. It is now ranked as one of the unhappiest countries in Europe with one of the most beautiful capital cities.

The people of Vienna would debate the beauty claim and proudly boast of the city’s victory almost five centuries ago turning back a Turkish invasion. Hungarians still remember their defeat by the Turks in 1541 and absorption into the Ottoman Empire, a period that ended after another siege of the city. Ancient history from a U.S. perspective is still relevant in modern times. A Hungarian described one of the common bits of graffiti under Soviet Russian domination: “The Turks ruled us for 150 years, but we didn’t become Turkish.”

When the Austrians and Hungarians were battling on the frontiers of Europe, the New World was only beginning to be drawn into the global network of trade that had dominated the Old World for millennia. North Americans in general have a poor grasp of world history, like teenagers who think the world started the day they were born. There was a lot going on, whether you start the clock at 1776, 1619, 1565 or 1492.

A building only has to make it to 50 years old in the U.S. to be eligible for our register of historic places. It’s a little different in Europe.

As our vacationing group waited last week for the start of a city walking tour in Regensburg, Germany, one of the guests asked about a crenelated tower next to us. “Oh, that’s not very old, only about 500 years. I will show you old buildings later,” the guide said dismissively.

Regensburg is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We walked the path of the invaders who absorbed the land south of the Danube into the Roman Empire and built the earliest city walls, using the river as the border with “barbaric” tribes to the north. When the Indigenous tribes replaced the retreating Romans around 500 A.D., they turned to trading and either incorporated the old walls into new buildings or used them as a quarry.

Regensburg’s golden age lasted for centuries. The only stone bridge across the Danube for many miles was built in the 12th century, the town hall in the 13th century. Tolls on the bridge and its key location on the trading routes to Asia made Regensburg into a cosmopolitan city-state for a thousand years, until new empires arose in the East and trade routes shifted. Even after its economic importance faded, it remained the seat of the deliberative council of the Holy Roman Empire until 1806.

Meanwhile, back in the Americas, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had just made it back to St. Louis to report on the Indigenous peoples they’d bumped into while exploring the continent. No apology necessary.

Contact Sue Lani Madsen at rulingpen@gmail.com.