October 12, 2017
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Columbus, American Indians, and Whose Land
is it?
Friends,
Happy
Columbus Day! And, yes, I recognize to express this greeting is to get oneself
labeled, by today’s progressivist and culturally Marxist standards, both
politically-incorrect and incorrigibly “racist.” Too bad, I shall continue to
say it, every October 12—that is, until the PC crowd, if they gain complete
control of the American judiciary and enact even more extreme “hate speech”
legislation, decide to put me behind bars!
But
celebrating this special day (the post office and certain government offices
now celebrate a day next to the nearest weekend for “convenience”), once
thought a normal part of observing and honoring the history of America, is now
considered by cultural Marxists in academia, in the media, and amongst an
increasingly growing number of politicians as just one more example of what’s
wrong with America, or, more particularly, the country’s long history of
bigotry, hatred, racism, and “white oppression.”
As
the day approached this year, several excellent and distinguished
writer-friends of mine have engaged in a friendly and scholarly conversation
not so much about the historical figure and legacy of Columbus, but more so
about the accumulated mythology which undergirds some of the present-day
attacks on that intrepid explorer and on the genocide he supposedly unleashed (at
the hands of future European colonists) on American Indians, in both the
southern and northern hemispheres. Both authors understand that the cultural
Marxist Left has created a target variously termed “historic white European
supremacy,” “the history of white racism,” or “European colonialism,” which
becomes central to its greater attack on Western and Christian civilization and
traditions. Both reject that Marxist narrative.
Yet,
their focus points differ. And in examining those points the most fascinating
discussion comes in their examination of property rights, and in particular,
the idea that American Indians had prior (natural) rights to the property that
makes up the present American nation before the coming of the Europeans. Just
what were those rights, how were they understood, and what did they entail?
Were they anything like the concept of settled territorial property rights
accepted generally by Europeans with their significant legacy of “property rights
theory” inherited from the Romans—Roman law—and codified by such Christian authorities
as St. Thomas Aquinas [e.g., in Summa
Theologica, II-II, Q. lxvi] and by the medieval 12th-13th
century Bologna Legal School, and the revaluation of Aristotle [e.g., his Politics, I. 2, c. 5]?
These
questions go far beyond the scope of this introductory commentary.
I
will make just a couple of more or less technical points before offering
articles by my friends. I am not a follower of John Locke, whose philosophical
approach I reject. Locke has much to say about property and property rights, and
in particular the oft-quoted aphorism of an individual’s “right to the fruits
of one’s labor.” But, essentially, he was wrong.
Locke believed
the foundation of private property to be in
the right which every man has to the products of his labor. This
“labor theory” was strongly endorsed by 19th century liberal, free
market political economists, especially by Adam Smith, Ricardo, and
others. But it is untenable. No doubt labor is a powerful factor in the
acquisition of property, but the right to the products of one’s labor is not
the ultimate source and basis for the right of property. The worker can call the
product of his work his own only when the material on which he works is truly his property,
but then the question arises how he came to be the owner of the
material. Suppose, for example, that a number of workers have been engaged
by a car maker to build cars. After the
work is done, they may claim their wages, but the products of their labor, those shiny new Ford F-150s, do not belong
to them, but to the Ford Motor Company. Then the further question may be asked:
How did Henry Ford, the original owner of the company, acquire his property? It was through Henry Ford’s own investment,
his capital, in short, his use of his property,
that Ford Motors came into existence.
The
most primitive means of acquiring property is through simple physical
occupation, and, as the old legal saying goes, “possession is nine tenths of
the law.” But in pre-colonized America did American Indians actually possess or
own the land? True, as largely
hunter-gatherers they possessed a certain, but very limited, residual proprietary
title to the lands on which they roamed. Especially the Plains tribes would
roam for hundreds of miles in search of buffalo, oftentimes into “hunting
grounds” where other tribes also roamed. But does traveling over a large
breadth of land, searching for food and staples, without permanent settlement
entitle the traveler to actual property rights over those lands? No, not really.
Certainly those tribes that were settled
on distinct and specific lands and engaged in agriculture on those plots had
better founded claims.
With
the coming of Europeans and the growth of what became the United States, and as
the whole country was thus turned into measurable property under established
law, physical occupation, alone, lost its significance as conferring a title to
real estate. Other titles of acquisition, which are subordinate or derived
titles, became the norm: for instance, accession, fructification,
conveyance by various kinds of contracts, prescription, and
especially the right of inheritance. Still, property via occupation
for movable goods remained important. Only recall fishing
and hunting on quickly disappearing unclaimed lands, searching and
digging for gold or diamonds in regions—as in portions of Alaska around 1900—which
had not yet passed over into private ownership.
My
point here is to illustrate that the arrival of Europeans on these shores was
not, at least from the point of view of natural law or property rights,
necessarily a bad thing, not necessarily against the laws of morality that the
Europeans themselves professed, or, for that matter, not against the common
usages and accepted customs of the inhabitants they found here, who had engaged
for centuries in the customary and armed incursion into the claimed “hunting
grounds” of neighboring tribes: that practice was normal, as were regular conflicts
and wars which could and did decimate those native populations.
Of
course, the European explorers and colonizers were not without violations of
those same standards and laws of morality that they held themselves to. And in
that regard, we can always cite the horrid Sand Creek Massacre (Chivington),
the “Trail of Tears,” and other instances when traditional standards—Christian
standards—of conduct and morality were conveniently forgotten and violated by
the newer settlers and their armed contingents.
Yet,
to paint the European advance into the New World, whether in the Spanish and
Portuguese areas of the Southern Hemisphere or in those areas settled by
Britain and France in the north, as examples of genocide and mass murder is
simply untrue, a useful trope and accusation employed by purveyors of cultural
Marxism in their withering attack on Western Christian civilization and
culture.
The
fact is that when those Europeans came to these shores they found primitive
peoples practicing animist/pagan religious cults. Especially in Latin American
the apostolic calling was to Christianize and humanize native peoples, to halt
human sacrifice and extreme cruelty, not to exterminate those peoples; and in
this, Hispanic missionaries were largely successful. Yet, still, in much of
Anglophone thinking, Spain receives a bad press and enjoys a poor reputation
for its colonial policies. But, just as the superb historian Dario Fernandez
Morera has demonstrated in his study, The
Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, about Spain’s treatment of the Moors,
Spain’s record in Latin America is far better than some Marxist historians
would have us believe. Equally, Dr. William S. Maltby, in his important volume,
The Black Legend in England,
convincingly describes how the “legend” of Spanish mistreatment of South
American Indians became an ideological cudgel, based not on fact, but on
anti-Spanish English prejudice.
In
North America, it was the existence of millions of vacant acres of land that
attracted colonists. The dearth of native populations in those largely
unoccupied areas provided both the incentive and the opportunity to settle and
move beyond simple physical occupation of land. And with European settlement also
came the implementation of those rules and standards of traditional European
law, of registries of deeds, of legal sales by law, of regulated inheritance,
of renting and contracts, and much more. In a sense, it was the triumph of a
more developed and profound system which overwhelmed the previous, more
primitive system and also replaced it.
The
cultural Marxist narrative, under examination, does not hold.
Today,
then, I pass on three essays: two by Dr. Jack Kerwick on Columbus and the idea
of the “Noble Savage,” and by Ilana Mercer on the property rights of American
Indians. I hope you find the conversation interesting.
Dr. Boyd D. Cathey
Columbus, the West, and the Myth of the Noble Savage
https://townhall.com/columnists/jackkerwick/2017/10/09/columbus-the-west-and-the-myth-of-the-noble-savage-n2392389
Jack
Kerwick Posted: Oct 09, 2017 12:01
AM
Well, it’s Christopher
Columbus Day again.
And this, of course, means
that it is but another occasion for leftists everywhere to repudiate their own
civilization.
For a few decades now, the
15th century European
explorer’s face has been held up as that of Western civilization, i.e. the face
of all that is evil in the world. Columbus is the proverbial poster child for the
White, Christian, Heterosexual Male, i.e. the contemporary left’s version of
Public Enemy Number One.
Columbus Day assumes a new
significance this year, however, for monuments to Columbus are no longer alone
in being targeted for destruction by leftist agitators. They are now in
the company of monuments to Robert E. Lee, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson,
Abraham Lincoln, and, yes, even legendary Philadelphia mayor and Police
Commissioner, Frank Rizzo.
It is now clear that the
campaign against monuments to Columbus has always has been and remains a
campaign designed to subvert the Western world’s historic identity as a
predominantly European (white) and Christian civilization.
The leftist historian Eric
Foner recently remarked that there is a conflict over monuments because the
latter signify “power.” There is some truth in this—but only some truth. If the
monuments signify power, this is only because there is power, self-empowerment,
in knowing oneself: Essentially, monuments are expressions of identity.
In attacking monuments to
historically famous white men, the vandals strike blows against, not this or
that aspect of the Western world, and certainly not this or that person.
They attack, and mean to attack, the very being of the West.
The enemies of Columbus
convict the West with having introduced violence to the New World, a “Native
American” idyll in which indigenous peoples lived in total harmony with one
another and nature. This, though, is a
Big Lie. For starters, those who were long recognized as American Indians
constituted anything but a monolith but, rather, many tribes or nations. Secondly,
American Indians comprised numerous tribes or nations that were continuously at
war with one another. Thirdly,
these wars were distinctively bloody and savage.
The Myth of the Noble Savage,
a uniquely European fiction that Columbus himself initially endorsed, has long
exposed as just that by anthropological and archaeological research.
Consider the Yellowknives,
a tribe that once inhabited Canada. It has no present descendants, and for a
very good reason: The Dogrib Indians launched a series of massacres against its
members, effectively purging them from the planet.
There’s also evidence of
plenty of intra-tribal warfare. Between the borderlands of what is now Brazil
and Venezuela, the various Yanomami tribes would continually slaughter each
other for purposes of status or in order to abduct female members. When
Yanomami warred with others, like the Macu, they would enslave the latter’s
members. Studies have found that over a third of Yanomami males died
from warfare.
In his War Before Civilization: The Myth
of the Peaceful Savage, the
professor of archaeology Laurence H. Keeley determines that only about 13% or so of the indigenous population(s)
of the New World did not partake of warfare annually.
Some Indian groups
observed the practice of collecting human scalps as trophies. The Iroquois
would slowly torture to death their victims—men,
women, and teenage boys—over a period of many days. Torture was a ritual.
It was also a communal event, a public spectacle, in which everyone, including
the children, participated. If the prisoner of war was a “warrior,” he
was expected to remain stoic during his tribulations and even sing “death
songs.”
Captives were burned, not
over a pyre, but by way of hot coals that were applied individually to exposed
body parts over an extended tract of time. Additionally, the tortured
were stabbed with knives and beaten with sticks and switches. Their fingernails
were ripped out and their fingers broken. Children would then yank and
twist the broken fingers. Captives were made to consume pieces of their
own flesh. To insure that the ritual lasted for as long as possible,
those who lost consciousness while being brutalized were revived with food and
water so that their torture could resume. Eventually, they were scalped…alive.
Those tribes that
inhabited the American Northwest would enslave war captives to such an extent
that an enduring slave class formed. Slaves were regularly traded and given as
gifts.
In South Dakota, over 100
years before Columbus was born, about 60% of the members of a tribe at Crow
Creek were murdered. Archaeologists found a mass grave containing the remains
of over 500 men, women, and children who had not just been killed, but
dismembered and scalped. About 800 dwellings were destroyed, burned to
the ground. Those who survived appear to have been young women who, it is
believed, were taken as captives.
Not only is it a great lie
that the West introduced violence to a world that had never known it. It
is a lie as well that the West made a relatively violent world of indigenous
peoples more violent. The European technology
characteristic of modern warfare accounts for why far fewer people died in war
throughout the 20th century
than died in “pre-historic” tribal wars. About 60% of combatants in the close-quarter
conflicts of non-Western, premodern tribal peoples were killed. In
glaring contrast, about 1% of combatants involved in the wars of
the 20th century lost
their lives. Whether considered in terms of a percentage of total deaths due to
war or in terms of average deaths per year from war as a percentage of the
overall population, tribal warfare is about 20 times deadlier than the wars of
the 20th century.
To put this in perspective, Nicholas Wade, science writer for the New York Times and author of Before the Dawn wrote: “Had
the same casualty rate [as tribal peoples in warfare] been suffered by the
population of the twentieth century, its war deaths would have totaled two
billion people” (emphasis added).
None of these facts are
intended to deny, much less justify, those injustices that some American
Indians undoubtedly suffered at the hands of some European explorers. They
are, though, meant to undermine guilt-inducing lies regarding Columbus, yes,
but, ultimately, Western or European civilization.
Happy
Columbus Day!
https://mises.org/blog/everyone-has-property-rights-whether-they-know-it-or-not
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.
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.
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
archeological 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 philo-american,
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.”
======================================================================================
A Response to ‘Columbus, the West, and the Myth of the Noble Savage'
https://townhall.com/columnists/jackkerwick/2017/10/11/a-response-to-columbus-the-west-and-the-myth-of-the-noble-savage-n2393376
Jack
Kerwick Posted: Oct 11, 2017 12:01
AM
My most recent article, “Columbus, the West, and the Myth of the Noble Savage,”
elicited a quite surprising response from a friend that took me off guard.
Although no one with whom I shared this article raised a single
syllable’s worth of an objection to any of the facts that I stated, she
proceeded to note that, though my thesis is true, it didn’t justify the virtual
elimination of the “Native American” “as a people” from the Earth. Needless to
say, some counter-replies are desperately needed here.
(1)Logically and substantively, this response to my essay is the ultimate
non sequitur: I never so much as hinted that the perennial warfare in which the
indigenous peoples participated against each other justified any kind of ill
treatment on the part of Europeans, much less the effective “genocide”
mentioned in this criticism. My thesis, which I will not restate
but again, was entirely different in meaning, and there is no logically
defensible way to get from it to the dastardly conclusion that genocide was
morally permissible. In fact, not that I
should have needed to do so, but I explicitly stated that none of the facts to which
I alluded were intended to either deny or justify any of the injustices
suffered by the original inhabitants of what would become the Americas.
(2)Another claim that I made is that those who have long been referred to
as Indians did not see themselves in the monolithic terms that we speak of them
in today. They comprised numerous tribes or “nations,” most of which were
mutually antagonistic. It is indeed telling that some tribes allied with
Europeans in their battles against other tribes.
(3)To speak of the land that we now
call the Americas as having originally belonged to the Indians is to speak
anachronistically: It is to project onto the foreign peoples of yesteryear
quite contemporary, incorrigibly Eurocentric categories that are simply not
applicable. It is to be guilty, in other words, of precisely that which
the Columbus despisers insist is among European civilization’s gravest sins: Imperialism.
The conventional line that we (Europeans) took their (Indians’) land is the product
of the colonizer’s, the imperialist’s brain. This landmass that we call the Americas was sparsely
populated. Indians inhabited relatively little of it. The rest was
wilderness.
And, again, they were no more “a people” than were the English and the
Spaniards a single people. The indigenous saw themselves as peoples,
mostly enemy peoples of one another.
Furthermore, the concept of “a natural right to private property” is a
European specialty. Did the Iroquois think that they were violating the private
property rights of their enemies when they invaded the latter’s camps, abducted
their women, laid waste to their homes, and scalped them alive? I don’t
mean to suggest that there isn’t some right to property rooted in natural law;
rather, my point is that if there is an “inalienable” right to property, the
Indians certainly didn’t give any indication that they were aware of it.
To be clear, a person no more manifests awareness of a right to private
property in defending what he views as his or his tribe’s own than the gazelle
manifests awareness of a right to life by attempting to flee the ravenous lion
seeking to devour it. The insistence that this territory belongs to me and/or mine emphatically does
not translate into everyone has a natural right to property. If indigenous
peoples were conscious of a right to property, then they would have recognized
the wrongness of raiding the goods of others. By the way, isn’t the left
forever assuring us that the idea of property rights is a culturally-specific, namely, a
Eurocentric construct?
(4)Regarding this last point, not all Indians were forcefully moved from
their lands. Some most definitely were. Yet there was much
bartering and trading going on between Europeans and Indians as well.
While there was plenty of tragedy, there is no basis in fact for
regarding the whole European encounter with Indians as one grave injustice,
much less genocide.
(5) The idea that Europeans committed genocide against a whole race of
people, nearly exterminating them from the planet, is as big a fiction as that
of the Noble/Peaceful Savage. In fact, the former depends upon the
latter. To repeat, Indian numbers were kept down not just by way of
warfare with Europeans, but warfare with one another. Also, the bulk of
casualties stemmed from diseases that indigenous peoples contracted from
Europeans.
These points having been made, it is high time to put to rest once and for
all the Big Anachronism at the very heart of the debate over Columbus:
Columbus did not discover America. And he most certainly
didn’t invade America.
There was no America before the Europeans, beginning
with Columbus, began creating it. America was named after another
Italian (European) explorer: Amerigo Vespucci.
If monuments to Christopher Columbus need to be razed and the name of his
holiday changed because of what he (supposedly) represents to the descendants
of indigenous peoples, and if these perpetually aggrieved activists who make
these demands had the courage to follow their logic through, then they would
concede that the name of America itself
needs to be changed because of what it must signify to these same
peoples.
The Columbus despisers would recognize that the label of “Native American”
is even more offensive than that of “Indian,” for it is inescapably
Eurocentric, affirming, paradoxically, the legitimacy of the Europeans’
founding, the rightness of naming the continent(s) after the European Vespucci.
To see the self-defeating moral and historical idiocy here, we need only
consider the following analogy. Imagine if Jews had been the predominant
population of Israel from the Biblical period straight through to, say, World
War II. Now, further imagine that Hitler invaded Israel, renamed it
Hitler Land, and decimated many, but not all, of the indigenous (Jewish)
peoples. While we can imagine this scenario, we cannot imagine that these Jews (or
their descendants) would eventually self-regard as “Native Hitlerians” and
charge Hitler and his Nazis with having invaded…Hitler Land.
Here’s hoping that everyone had a very happy Columbus Day
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