The Indian tribesman’s claim to his ancient stomping grounds can’t be reduced to a title search at the deeds office. That’s the stuff of the positive law. And this was the point I took away from a conversation, circa 2000, with Mr. Property Rights himself, Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
Dr. Hoppe argued unassailably—does he argue any other way?—that if Amerindians had repeatedly traversed, for their livelihood, the same hunting, fishing and foraging grounds, they would have, in effect, homesteaded these, making them their own. Another apodictic profundity deduced from that conversation: The strict Lockean stipulation, whereby to make property one’s own, one must transform it to Western standards, is not convincing.
In an article marking Columbus Day—the day Conservatism Inc. beats up on what remains of America’s First People—Ryan McMaken debunked Ayn Rand’s specious claim that aboriginal Americans “did not have the concept of property or property rights.” This was Rand’s ruse for justifying Europeans’ disregard for the homesteading rights of the First Nations. “[T]he Indian tribes had no right to the land they lived on because” they were primitive and nomadic.
Hoppean Homesteading
Cultural supremacy is no argument for the dispossession of a Lesser Other. To libertarians, Lockean—or, rather Hoppean—homesteading is sacrosanct. He who believes he has a right to another man’s property ought to produce proof that he is its rightful owner. “As the old legal adage goes, ‘Possession is nine-tenths of the law,’ as it is the best evidence of legitimate title. The burden of proof rests squarely with the person attempting to relieve another of present property titles.” (Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, p. 276.)
However, even if we allow that “the tribes and individual Indians had no concept of property,” which McMaken nicely refutes—it doesn’t follow that dispossessing them of their land would have been justified. From the fact that a man or a community of men lacks the intellectual wherewithal or cultural and philosophical framework to conceive of these rights—it doesn’t follow that he has no such rights, or that he has forfeited them. Not if one adheres to the ancient doctrine of natural rights. If American Indians had no attachment to the land, they would not have died defending their territories.
Neither does the fact the First Nations formed communal living arrangements invalidate land ownership claims, as McMaken elucidates. Think of the Kibbutz. Kibbutzim in Israel instantiate the principles of voluntary socialism. As such, they are perfectly fine living arrangements, where leadership is empowered as custodian of the resource and from which members can freely secede. You can’t rob the commune of its assets just because members elect to live communally.
Conservatism’s Perennial Piñata
Columbus Day has become an occasion for neoconservatives, conservatives and their followers to vent their spleen against American Indians. And woe betide the deviationist who pens anything remotely fair or sympathetic about, say the genocide of the Indians, the trail of tears, or the relegation of Indians to reservations. Berated he will be for daring to lament the wrongs visited on the original inhabitants of this continent on the grounds, mostly, that they were savages.
Come Columbus Day, the same hackneyed observations are disgorged. You’d think conservatives were cutting through the Left’s rhetoric of moral superiority to challenge a cultural script that upholds the myth of the purity of primitive life, juxtaposed to the savagery of Western Culture. But they’re not.
I mean, who doesn’t know that natives were hardly nature’s custodians? This fallacy was popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s panegyric on the Noble Savage. Pre-Columbian America was no pristine natural kingdom. Native tribes likely engaged in bi-annual forest burning to flush out the species the Indians most wanted to hunt. There was the stampeding, during a hunt, of herds of animals over a cliff. Used repeatedly, some buffalo jumps hold the remains of hundreds of thousands of animals, with patterns of local extinction being well-documented. Where agriculture was practiced in the central and southern parts of America, evidence from sediment points to soil erosion, which was, too, likely ongoing before the arrival of Europeans.
It’s old hat that the Americas are scattered with archaeological evidence of routine massacres, cannibalism, dismemberment, slavery, abuse of women and human sacrifice among native tribes. In no way can these facts mitigate or excuse the cruel treatment natives have endured. For is such exculpation not the crux of the American exceptionalism creed, peddled by neoconservatives? “The world is up to no good. As a superior ‘nation,’ let American power remake it in its image.” By hook or by crook, if necessary.
Neoconservative deity Dinesh D’Souza likes to claim Native-Americans were decimated not by genocide or ethnocide, “but by diseases brought from Europe by the white man.” Not quite. In his magisterial History of the American People, historian Paul Johnson, a leading protagonist for America, details the rather energetic “destruction of the Indians” by Andrew Jackson.
Particularly poignant are Red Eagle’s words to Jackson, on April 14, 1814, after the president-to-be had rampaged through villages, burning them and destroying crops in a ruthless campaign against the Indians east of the Mississippi: “I am in your power. My people are gone. I can do no more but weep over the misfortunes of my nation.” Jackson had just “imposed a Carthaginian peace on 35 frightened Indian chiefs,” forcing them to part with the lion’s share of their ancestral lands.
Equally moving is the account of another philoamerican, philosopher and historian Alexis de Tocqueville. The Frenchman describes a crowd of displaced Choctaw warriors—having been subjected to ethnic cleansing (in today’s parlance):
There was an air of ruin and destruction, something which gave the impression of a final farewell, with no going back; one couldn’t witness it without a heavy heart. … it is an odd coincidence that we should have arrived in Memphis to witness the expulsion, or perhaps the dissolution, of one of the last vestiges of one of the oldest American nations.
North America, less what is now Mexico and the Caribbean, was an empty continent in 1491, except for a small scattering of tribes along the coast and rivers. Probably 500,000 people, a million at most. In many places, cooperation and co-living was successful…before trouble erupted from both sides.
The idea that this small population had natural rights to the entire continent is void.
You only have the rights you are willing and able to defend. You can make a case that the Native Americans were treated unjustly, but they were outside of the enforced law, and they failed to resist the terrible injustice.
Now we have 3rd world aliens and refugees coming in and altering the law. Fining people who won’t bake cakes for gay weddings. Insisting non-citizens have rights. At some point we will have to act to stop it, and the earlier we do so the less chance of violence.
Europe is in worse shape. The Muslim young (fighting age) men are already demanding the Europeans leave or convert. Rape is becoming more common, and there are no-go zones.
We will end up like the Native Americans or worse if we fail to defend our rights. Starting with the 2nd amendment – Jackson would not have been able to remove the Indians if they were properly armed.
The error here is the dissing of Ayn Rand that set you up for John Donohue to vaporize your article with a one-line sentence. You obviously made a most common fatal assumption, i.e that statements Rand made that seem outrageous to you could not possibly be anchored in the facts of reality.
Consequently, you did not bother to investigate what she meant by “the concept of property.” Had you, you would have discovered that possession of land is not the same thing as ownership. One can only own values that are the product of one’s own mind and physical actions—that which one creates.
No one can own land, because no one created it. One can only own the values added to a piece of land that are embodied in it. Justifiable possession of a piece of land therefore, must be earned by embodying added value to it or exchanging other values for the values others have embodied into it.
This is the principle underlying homesteading, and once it was codified as property rights, Amerindians would have had to lay claims to ownership accordingly. Prior to that, it is conceivable that some of them would have had moral claims in accordance with that principle even if they did not fully grasp the concept, but as John correctly noted, not enough to be relevant to Rand’s statements.
The right to pay property taxes anyway.
There’s nothing more ridiculous than listening to certified anti communist libertarians (the latter movement having been lifelong enemies of Israel) use the near-dead kibbutz movement to justify supporting idiot leftists who are working to undermine support for the European and Judeo-Christian Capitalist underpinnings of America.
Oh and this from the people whose patron saint Rothbard denied the Holocaust.
Screw you and the Indians whose land you live on.
As we Jews say, call us when you sign the deed on YOUR property back to the Indians.
What a bunch of bull crap. Throughout the millennia one group has made war on another and taken lands they wanted. According to this idiot, humanity’s march across this planet and societal advancement is void. He should take it back to only a few humans be allowed to survive in trees on the edge of the South Africa wilderness because all other lands were controlled by something before that.
The real proof of idiocy is to take the supposition to the extreme and its easy to see just how ridiculous it is. What I have to wonder is how any one ever hired this idiot unless its NWO trying to convince people that only they have a right to decide on who lives where and and has access to what resources.
Even that Amerindian would have to PROVE that they did not take that land from a prior inhabitant and current knowledge is limited about who lived where for a few hundred years. Yet we know that North America has been populated for at least 10,000 years.
Asz kickers have always ruled the land.