Catching up a bit in the new year Antonia. Your writing is always challenging to my thinking -- thank you. Whenever I read discussion of this sort I always wish for an examination of the craziness of the water rights that go along with land. Even in the United States, a country with a lot of fresh water, it is still scarce. When you wrote of the latest oil boom out west, I believe it will eventually be seen as a tragic and incredibly expensive experiment. Working in a place where water is scarce, it seems an incredible gamble of the greater water table to blast shale, perhaps contaminate and pretend that granting a modest lease to a small patch of land to survey for oil is a good tradeoff. I believe so many of those wells, pressure filled with "proprietary" chemicals will turn out to be a Superfund of sorts that we will all share the cost of. Meanwhile the LLC that grabbed some barrels will be long gone.
Saw a post on Twitter just now about the Nederlander monument in lower Manhattan. Since I can’t post the screenshot here, I’ll put it in our group chat. Another false story of an indigenous leader who agreed to “sell” land.
Jan 7, 2023·edited Jan 7, 2023Liked by Antonia Malchik
Unfortunately, I have mostly failed to keep up with earlier readings due to time management (though I prefer to call it "entropy" which sounds more elegant); hopefully that lack of context isn't too much of a barrier. It's interesting to observe the same limitations and circular logic at play in efforts to acknowledge and rectify past injustices as the mindset which enabled land theft in the first place. Sometimes it's in lame gestures to fix a "mistake" that we see most clearly the mechanisms behind the mistake being "fixed."
But I wonder if in part this isn't just the dogma of private ownership, but our default dependence on fungible goods like money or capital as the generic substitute for literally anything that has real, material, emotional value, or deep history. Even where redress is approached more or less in good faith, this is all our society has to offer as "justice": pieces of paper or abstract quantities of something rather than the actual thing. Of course you need some kind of unit of exchange - money isn't the problem in itself - but the way money stands in retroactively for literally everything seems lazy and all too convenient. Even if it's not feasible to magically reverse the land theft, you would think we could find a closer analogue to the original loss than something that just lets you buy a little more stuff!
As I understand the traditional Native American point of view, it is not so much that they want land "back," per se, but that they want it out of private ownership and returned to the commons.
So good. I used to listen pretty regularly to Estes’ Red Nation podcast. That’s where I first learned about the land back movement. In the scheme of things private land ownership is a relatively recent phenomenon. Yet it seems inviolable. Are there examples of successful unraveling of this tie to capitalism?
As you know, I immerse myself in these questions, though not perhaps to the degree you do. I find myself wondering why our learning curve is so flat (or does it descend?) and realizing that the power of owning things, however illusory, is just about all capitalism leaves people.
Catching up a bit in the new year Antonia. Your writing is always challenging to my thinking -- thank you. Whenever I read discussion of this sort I always wish for an examination of the craziness of the water rights that go along with land. Even in the United States, a country with a lot of fresh water, it is still scarce. When you wrote of the latest oil boom out west, I believe it will eventually be seen as a tragic and incredibly expensive experiment. Working in a place where water is scarce, it seems an incredible gamble of the greater water table to blast shale, perhaps contaminate and pretend that granting a modest lease to a small patch of land to survey for oil is a good tradeoff. I believe so many of those wells, pressure filled with "proprietary" chemicals will turn out to be a Superfund of sorts that we will all share the cost of. Meanwhile the LLC that grabbed some barrels will be long gone.
Saw a post on Twitter just now about the Nederlander monument in lower Manhattan. Since I can’t post the screenshot here, I’ll put it in our group chat. Another false story of an indigenous leader who agreed to “sell” land.
Unfortunately, I have mostly failed to keep up with earlier readings due to time management (though I prefer to call it "entropy" which sounds more elegant); hopefully that lack of context isn't too much of a barrier. It's interesting to observe the same limitations and circular logic at play in efforts to acknowledge and rectify past injustices as the mindset which enabled land theft in the first place. Sometimes it's in lame gestures to fix a "mistake" that we see most clearly the mechanisms behind the mistake being "fixed."
But I wonder if in part this isn't just the dogma of private ownership, but our default dependence on fungible goods like money or capital as the generic substitute for literally anything that has real, material, emotional value, or deep history. Even where redress is approached more or less in good faith, this is all our society has to offer as "justice": pieces of paper or abstract quantities of something rather than the actual thing. Of course you need some kind of unit of exchange - money isn't the problem in itself - but the way money stands in retroactively for literally everything seems lazy and all too convenient. Even if it's not feasible to magically reverse the land theft, you would think we could find a closer analogue to the original loss than something that just lets you buy a little more stuff!
As I understand the traditional Native American point of view, it is not so much that they want land "back," per se, but that they want it out of private ownership and returned to the commons.
Does this sound right?
So good. I used to listen pretty regularly to Estes’ Red Nation podcast. That’s where I first learned about the land back movement. In the scheme of things private land ownership is a relatively recent phenomenon. Yet it seems inviolable. Are there examples of successful unraveling of this tie to capitalism?
You are hard on my book budget!
As you know, I immerse myself in these questions, though not perhaps to the degree you do. I find myself wondering why our learning curve is so flat (or does it descend?) and realizing that the power of owning things, however illusory, is just about all capitalism leaves people.