The most off-putting thing about the NFL asking two teams to fly 16 hours to the other side of the world and play a key division rivalry game in Australia the first week of the season was the league agreeing to give the performative antics of some lady named Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin a stage during its pregame ceremony.
Aunty Joy, as she is affectionately called by her followers, which include people in the Australian government, is an Indigenous Australian and Senior Wurundjeri elder of the Kulin Alliance, Victoria.
And what that title means is that she is often tasked with giving the traditional Welcome to Country greeting at many Melbourne, Australia events.
Except a welcome to country greeting from Aunty Joy isn’t actually a welcome. It’s a stolen land acknowledgement lecture during which she makes it clear that the land the visitors are on doesn’t belong to White Australians.
It belongs to whatever Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander that first inhabited the land thousands of years ago. It was 60,000 years ago, if you believe Aunty Joy’s speech at the Melbourne Cricket Ground before Thursday’s game.
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And the obvious question one might ask is why the NFL would accept this narrative being part of what was otherwise a solemn and respectful 9/11 pregame memorial featuring both Americans and Australians?
Why make the Netflix audience at home, not to mention the teams standing on the sidelines waiting for kickoff, listen to this stolen land gibberish?
And, let there be no doubt, it was gibberish meant to finger-wag and lecture Whitey.
During her history lesson disguised as a welcome, Aunty Joy thanked the NFL and both participating teams. She thanked the San Francisco 49ers and the Los Angeles Chargers, um, Rams.
That’s right, the stolen land acknowledgement lady initially thanked the wrong Los Angeles team that wasn’t present and has actually moved in to the Rams’ home market after departing San Diego.
“Kulin Nation and neighboring islands … We pay our respects to your culture and heritage and those watching at home,” Wandin said. “And we also thank the National Football League for bringing the San Francisco 49ers and the Los Angeles Char-Rams to ‘Naarm to celebrate their first-ever flag session for this season.”
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Naarm, by the way, is the Indigenous name for Melbourne. Except Aunty Joy doesn’t use that name – kind of like the Soviets didn’t use St. Petersburg so they called it Leningrad.
“We hope that everyone enjoys themselves,” she continued. “We also hope that you have enjoyed our celebration of honoring 60,000 years of our culture, and we thank all of our community who have been involved.
“We are known as the Manangan people, and I’ll take this leaf on behalf of our community, the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung, and our neighboring islands.”
That’s when Aunty Joy plucked a leaf from a dying plant she was holding and symbolically offered it up like some pagan ritual.
“Accepting this gift means that you are welcome to everything from the tops of the trees to the roots of the earth,” she said. “Wominjeka, Wurundjeri Baluk, and on my father’s land, we sincerely hope you have a wonderful time here at the MCG. Wominjeka. Welcome.”
Stolen land acknowledgements are apparently a thing in Australia because the people who own the land now apparently feel guilty that the people who owned it thousands of years ago no longer do.
Well, they don’t feel that guilty because nobody is offering to give their land back. But they want you to feel guilty, anyway. So, yes, all performative.
What makes this strange is the NFL’s collaboration. Look, it’s one thing to visit historical locales and participate in cultural events in the weeks or days leading up to an international game.
But once the gameday lights go hot, nobody tunes in to hear white people get portrayed as usurpers.
And if the NFL wants to hear that, perhaps it should hold such presentations at its league office in Manhattan. You know, the New York borough settlers purchased from natives and nobody is giving back.
