I don’t know how to respond to this. It pisses me off that this (white, cis, straight, upper middle-class American) man thinks of it as an “interesting logic problem,” but I just don’t know what to say. I’m just putting this out here with a bunch of tags in the hope that someone will see it … someone who is more qualified to comment. Please help!
This isn’t a ‘logic problem’
this is some smug white boy trying to wrap his head around an issue he doesn’t understand, according to what he thinks he knows about Native people.
It is, in fact, incredibly overwhelmingly difficult to read, because it’s so fucking basic. This is usually par for the course whenever some ignorant tool armed with the erroneous idea that all opinions are held equal, blather on about something they know nothing about. Particularly white boys discussing the variegated “indian problem.”
Like I get visibly uncomfortable. Embarrassed even, because they’re so off the mark. Like listening to someone butcher your favourite song at karaoke, only worse because they’re calling your land rights struggle “an interesting logic problem”
See, what we have here is essentially this:
“Indians have no conception of private property, so all of this territory, by default, reverts to our laws based on terra nullius and res nullius and all that totally valid Christian Discovery stuff.”
Which is to say the exact same thing as Ayn Rand did, during that West Point address lamenting the sorry savages who had no conception of property and, in any case, weren’t using it anyway. This is a convenient lie imperialists have long used to justify the settlement.
Territory was demarcated. Possessions were treasured. Hunting grounds, agricultural zones and trading routes were all defended and policed. If you were Cree and travelling into Blackfoot territory in numbers, someone would be along shortly.
I’m not going to bother laying the different conceptions of property held by differing Native cultures, but I will leave you a quote:
The only difference between your land systems and ours is that the unoccupied surface of the earth is not a chattel to be sold and speculated in by men who do not use it.
-D.W. Bushyhead, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, 1881
That simple distinction is what people like Sean {redacted} can’t wrap their basic moniyaw brains around. Nor can they conceive of a living people and culture who adapt to circumstances and can very easily say “we need to own that land, according to the imposed laws of this country, if that’s what it takes to keep these ignorant settlers off of it.”
I mean, pretty simple right? Apparently this is not the case for people like Sean.
As for the apocrypha about elders holding a Nation in thrall with their refusal to accept a settlement for land that was never for sale, you can probably ignore it. In my experiences with white boys talking about this specific issue, they love to refer to this unclaimed cash as the magic bullet for the Oceti Sakowin’s problems.
What they haven’t considered is that if you steal a TV from someone’s house, but you leave 20 bucks on the counter, the TV is still stolen.
and that maybe unfettered access to a People’s most holy of places means more than a temporary injection of cash? Hard for a white boy to come to grips with that, I guess.
(boom)
native-american-language-signs:
Lakota sign. Not really a sign, sign. But hey, we needed some Lakota on this blog.
Whoo! Lakȟótiyapi kiŋ! :)
