A highly civilized country seems to have found its own answer.

Food for thought:

[...] a volunteer welcomed the soggy audience of more than 200 people and mentioned that the land was originally part of an indigenous nation. This, an outright mention of a displaced population, connecting the space to a time before colonialism, was something I’d never experienced before. In Australia, it’s called an “acknowledgment of country.”

In just a few weeks, I heard these remarks in places as modest as a classroom and as grand as the Sydney Opera House.

When my mother and I returned home in the fall, we discovered a United States newly interested in the way we begin our own public events, incited by the football player Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem in protest of police brutality toward African-Americans.

Why, I thought, bother with any of it? Why can’t we just get started with a speech or a football game without playing an anthem? The aftermath of the presidential election has changed my thinking. Since the election, white supremacists and perpetuators of hate speech appear to be emboldened. In this political climate, the words we use and the traditions we champion matter more than ever.

I was still struck by what the Australians did: begin symphonies and lectures and talks among writers with a succinct acknowledgment that their country had a complicated past. What would it be like to consider something like that here? [USA]

[...] One thing context can highlight is the basic fact of a group’s humanity.