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.
Oh my goodness, Mark, this is definitely a subject I think a lot about! Sandra Steingraber gave an amazing talk some years ago about the use of freshwater in fracking, and how it fundamentally removes that water from the water cycle for hundreds if not thousands of years. I keep trying to find it online again but it's disappeared. Her books a good job of address it.
Not that that solves the problem. And from where I am, I'm watching Teck Resources in British Columbia foul rivers and lakes far downstream with selenium and other toxins due to mountaintop-removal coal mining. It's estimated that that pollution will last at least 700 years. It's all just such a mess and I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone thinks trading fresh water for any other benefit -- even where it is a benefit to someone -- is a good idea.
My research is that in low regulation western states like Wyoming for example oversight is slight. The last bust cycle of fracking led to the individual LLC's abandoning uncapped wells. Wyoming gets fees n work but then seeks favorable federal treatment when the administration is "right". Ideal for drillers who transfer their costs to all of us
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.
Sorry to jump in here Julie. A bookclub that I participate in is focused on non-fiction history. We read "The Island at the Center of the World" by Russell Shorto. It captured the period of flux when the Dutch arrived and the changes that rapidly happened around the "birth" of NYC. You might find it interesting. The group largely enjoyed it.
Thanks. Will check it out. Recently read a passage in a book set in the 1940s when schoolchildren were taught that Tammany was “befriended” by William Penn. 😱🙄
Thank you! I'd completely forgotten about that statue and don't think I've ever seen it in person, but if I remember it has a role in N.K. Jemisin's science fiction book "The City We Became," and she writes about the lie behind it. Maybe? It's been a couple years since I read that.
oh, thanks for that link. Will definitely check it out. I've been delving into land rights / ownership, mostly in Pennsylvania for the novel I'm working on. I'm also fascinated by the whole land-has-rights movement. Personhood for rivers, etc.
That is a fascinating one. And especially when you consider that corporations are considered persons for legal purposes, why not rivers, mountains, wild rice, etc.?
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!
I don't think "failure" is the word that applies here. This is all for pleasure and education, but it's not like there's a deadline or a test at the end! (I think if I do a Threadable circle again I'll do it on a less weighty topic, like walking or science fiction -- the latter would be a good excuse to read fun stuff!)
And I think you're right that not having the reading context doesn't matter for the point to come through. It is fascinating to me to read some of the court case decisions and to see what knots justices tie themselves into trying to "acknowledge" past wrongs while shrugging shoulders about any real remedy or recourse. Enraging, too.
And I do think you're right about the dependence on fungible goods. "You would think we could find a closer analogue to the original loss than something that just lets you buy a little more stuff!" kind of sums it all up, doesn't it? I think that's where you *have* to end up in a system that rewards capital and encourages commodification. But people still want something more in their lives--our lives--and sense that the fungible goods don't really make up for it. (Which is not, I'm sure I don't need to say, a promotion of NFTs! Abstract commodities of intangible value don't fix the problem.) I'm thinking of something like eminent domain, which is a government power that can be given to, say, a pipeline company (and has been many times). If you've got land or a home you're deeply attached to, no amount of monetary compensation is really going to make up for the layers of loss you'd feel if the company acted on that property right.
Thanks. No, I know - there is no "fail" here - just regret at not having taken better advantage. It's probably easier using Threadable.
I wonder how often these justices were in bad faith or simply covering for their interests, and how often they really believed they were addressing grievances. Institutional/legal support for corruption, greed and politics is one way the system fails people (like the U.S. Supreme Court right now), but institutional/legal support for inadequate solutions and bad decisions even when corruption and political maneuvering is not the main driver seems like yet another kind of systemic failure, where things are just locked in a certain way.
That's why I was thinking about the limitations of awarding money for damages as the go-to response in the legal toolkit. It's clean, it's efficient and measurable, and once it's awarded your duty is done. But as you say, it cannot make up for layers of loss. So we need a more robust conception of *loss* and *responsibility* (not just "damage" and "claims" which implies actuarial quantification and superficial fixes) that fully accounts for these complex emotional layers, and looks forward as much as backward.
I did find this key passage confusing: "Non-Natives believe that somehow Indigenous peoples will do to settlers what they did to them. But the opposite is true. The example of the Black Hills Alliance in the previous chapter demonstrates that when Indigenous and poor settlers organize around treaty rights, they can beat multinational energy corporations and take control of their lives." How does this example show settlers wouldn't need to give up land they stole but rather the opposite? I must be missing something here.
Honestly I'm not sure if it's easier using Threadable. I know how many people are in my circle but I have no visibility into how many people are actively reading any of the material. I suspect less than one would think. People are busy!
I think you're right about judges really believing they're addressing grievances. I think part of it is that people have so frequently not believed that the grievances in front of them are important, or often even real. Even when you think about the U.S. Supreme Court right now, in the most recent case eroding the right to abortion, some of the questioning showed not corruption necessarily, but lack of understanding, and care, about the harms being caused. (I'm thinking of the line that kept insisting that adoption is an option, so why is there a need for another?) It's a perspective that refuses to give other worldviews validity.
This is probably a bigger field than even I can think about right now, but it seems like legal philosophy might have a lot to say on it!
I am looking at Estes's book now: This is from Chapter 5: Red Power. In a passage discussing Madonna Thunder Hawk's work starting in 1973, and including "the Black Hills Alliance, a Native and non-Native alliance formed to halt uranium mining in the Black Hills." Later in the chapter (page 199): "Woman of All Red Nations, an AIM [Amerian Indian Movement] contingent of women leadership, formed the Black Hills Alliance (BHA), a coalition of white ranchers and Native activities to halt uranium and coal mining in the Black Hills. Eleven thousand people from around the world gathered, succeeding in halting mining operations altogether. After the Alliance dissipated, AIM formed a short-lived encampment on the outskirts of Rapid City, named 'Yellow Thunder Camp' (YTC), after Raymond Yellow Thunder. Their goal was to begin to reclaim the Black Hills region under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. . . . The alliance with white working people and farmers--historic enemies of Lakota's--proved vital because it demonstrated that working-class settlers and Natives shared a common struggle against corporate exploitation. Fighting for Native land rights and sovereignty was also necessary to protect the lands upon which both groups depended for their continued existence. If dispossession was the primary mode for exploitation in Rapid City and the Black Hills, then liberation for both Native and settler required upholding, at bare minimum, the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. For a while, white sentiments toward Natives in border towns actually improved."
I'm not sure this passage actually implies what he says it does in the passage you quote. I get what he's saying, that if white settlers understand where dispossession actually comes from, and that they are also subject to it, then they would start defending the original treaties upholding Native land rights. The logic is a bit turned around, but I think what he's getting at is that, by upholding those treaties and those rights, white settlers would find that it would promote protection of everyone's land.
But again, I'm not sure the logic follows. And I think he's right, but it doesn't quite get to people's amorphous fear of loss of ownership -- what they think they would lose if Native rights were upheld. Which to my mind can only be addressed if the emotion behind it is articulated first. What are people afraid of and why?
Wow, thanks for parsing all this material so carefully! I hope it was at least partly out of interest and not just a sense of duty. That interpretation sounds right to me: he seems to be pointing to the potential for coalition building across settler-indigenous lines and breaking down that zero-sum thinking.
But this still feels dissatisfying, which is what I think prompted my confusion. For one thing, the basic conflict is still there between the powerful vs the vulnerable, or those exploiting the land for corporate profit and power vs those living on the land who depend on it for livelihood and stability; getting a handful of poor white settlers on board isn't going to change that dynamic. And then as you point out, it doesn't speak to the more basic fears of losing ownership that make it so hard to move toward a different arrangement. It's one thing if you're talking about voting coalitions in a national election: if you can get working-class whites to join forces with working-class POC you only need to get to 50% to tip the outcome. But I bet you need way more than 51% support to transform land ownership.
This whole endeavor is about my own interests, so it's all very self-serving ;)
I agree with you, it's unsatisfying. This week I'll be posting some more resources on Land Back, and a lot of it seems to bump up against the structures that keep everyone bound within these systems. Given that, it makes sense to start with honoring treaties, but I'm sure plenty of people would say it's not nearly enough (which I'd agree with).
For your larger point, I think this is part of why it's important to me to look back into the history of the European enclosure movements and other privatization, to connect the deeper, longer colonial project to what we face today, and bring that history back to life. To even begin to help settler-colonial beneficiaries understand that they (we; I'm one, too) are not somehow immune from the effects of colonialism and land theft, either.
I don't know that transforming land ownership will ever truly happen, but think you're right that it would need more support than that. I see promising movements in land trusts, for example, which don't overthrow the system but do maybe begin to slowly erode it and shift at least some areas to a more commons-based system of land use and livability.
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.
I am definitely not an expert in this area! My broad understanding -- and this is very rudimentary understanding on my part -- is that it varies according to nation, culture, leadership, history, and so many other other things. There is no one way that it looks. Nor should there be, necessarily. Every nation is, after all, distinct and individual. And some do, from my understanding, want land back. What does that look like? Again, I think it varies. As that conversation becomes more mainstream, I imagine that more specifics will be part of more conversations.
There are a lot of flaws in that -- why should they have to pay for land that was stolen in the first place? and why only "surplus" land? -- but it made me think of the Dawes Act and forced allotments of reservation land. One idea (I haven't read this anywhere, so maybe it's a stupid or crazy one) that the New Zealand case made me think of was, what if a starting place would be that every Native Nation had the first right of refusal to any land that was being sold within reservation boundaries?
This is true, re reflexive generalizations. Rereading this, I am reminded of "The Dawn of Everything" and what a relief it felt to be reading a vast history that repeatedly talked about how many different ways humans have ordered society.
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?
And in Echo-Hawk's "In the Courts of the Conqueror," he talks of a private landowner returning 600 acres to the Pawnee Nation.
Your question runs deeper than that, though, doesn't it? Even with land returned in patches, it's still surrounded by and connected to a capitalist system that puts enormous pressure toward commodification and profit. Along the lines of your own writing, this episode of Frontiers of Commoning about land trusts is also relevant, I think: https://david-bollier.simplecast.com/episodes/konda-mason-on-land-race-money-and-spirit
She talks some about that difficulty, that freedom from capitalism is dependent on having a land base, which is in turn dependent on owning land. It's going to take a long, careful time to unravel.
Yes! That was the episode where the editors and writers of that issue of Briarpatch came on to talk about it. I ordered copies for myself and friends. Good thought - I should go back and reread it. Yes, the piecemeal approach is so . . . . well, piecemeal. I was intrigued by the argument in The Atlantic magazine a while back to return all our national parks to indigenous stewardship / management. Also not a perfect solution, obviously. You probably saw that. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/05/return-the-national-parks-to-the-tribes/618395/
That was a really good piece and such a great, direct way to talk about the issue! So obvious, really. And places like the eastern portion of Glacier National Park (close to where I live) were so recently and egregiously stolen, it's a no-brainer to give it back.
That you for recommending Red Nation! That's one I'll look forward to diving into.
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.
I hear you about that book budget! I wonder how many hours I work just to support the books?
That is a powerful observation I hadn't fully thought through before, that owning things is about all capitalism leaves us. So much truth in that. And so hard to help ourselves relearn that we deserve something more than that -- connection, rest, laughter, community, time to mourn as well as time to celebrate . . .
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.
Oh my goodness, Mark, this is definitely a subject I think a lot about! Sandra Steingraber gave an amazing talk some years ago about the use of freshwater in fracking, and how it fundamentally removes that water from the water cycle for hundreds if not thousands of years. I keep trying to find it online again but it's disappeared. Her books a good job of address it.
Not that that solves the problem. And from where I am, I'm watching Teck Resources in British Columbia foul rivers and lakes far downstream with selenium and other toxins due to mountaintop-removal coal mining. It's estimated that that pollution will last at least 700 years. It's all just such a mess and I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone thinks trading fresh water for any other benefit -- even where it is a benefit to someone -- is a good idea.
My research is that in low regulation western states like Wyoming for example oversight is slight. The last bust cycle of fracking led to the individual LLC's abandoning uncapped wells. Wyoming gets fees n work but then seeks favorable federal treatment when the administration is "right". Ideal for drillers who transfer their costs to all of us
Absolutely.
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.
Sorry to jump in here Julie. A bookclub that I participate in is focused on non-fiction history. We read "The Island at the Center of the World" by Russell Shorto. It captured the period of flux when the Dutch arrived and the changes that rapidly happened around the "birth" of NYC. You might find it interesting. The group largely enjoyed it.
Thanks. Will check it out. Recently read a passage in a book set in the 1940s when schoolchildren were taught that Tammany was “befriended” by William Penn. 😱🙄
No, it’s “Lila,” the third book in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series. Good books, all.
To be clear - I seriously doubt Robinson sees it that way; it’s part of the story’s realism.
I like sci-fi, alternate history genres. Sometimes a great way to frame things. Thank you!
Was it by chance written by H.G. Wells? :)
On second thought here’s a link to the NYC Parks page about it. https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/battery-park/monuments/1092
Thank you! I'd completely forgotten about that statue and don't think I've ever seen it in person, but if I remember it has a role in N.K. Jemisin's science fiction book "The City We Became," and she writes about the lie behind it. Maybe? It's been a couple years since I read that.
So interesting, here's an article about what you're talking about: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-native-new-yorkers-can-never-truly-reclaim-their-homeland-180970472/
"What do we mean by ownership" is such an enormous question and source of so many problems.
oh, thanks for that link. Will definitely check it out. I've been delving into land rights / ownership, mostly in Pennsylvania for the novel I'm working on. I'm also fascinated by the whole land-has-rights movement. Personhood for rivers, etc.
That is a fascinating one. And especially when you consider that corporations are considered persons for legal purposes, why not rivers, mountains, wild rice, etc.?
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!
I don't think "failure" is the word that applies here. This is all for pleasure and education, but it's not like there's a deadline or a test at the end! (I think if I do a Threadable circle again I'll do it on a less weighty topic, like walking or science fiction -- the latter would be a good excuse to read fun stuff!)
And I think you're right that not having the reading context doesn't matter for the point to come through. It is fascinating to me to read some of the court case decisions and to see what knots justices tie themselves into trying to "acknowledge" past wrongs while shrugging shoulders about any real remedy or recourse. Enraging, too.
And I do think you're right about the dependence on fungible goods. "You would think we could find a closer analogue to the original loss than something that just lets you buy a little more stuff!" kind of sums it all up, doesn't it? I think that's where you *have* to end up in a system that rewards capital and encourages commodification. But people still want something more in their lives--our lives--and sense that the fungible goods don't really make up for it. (Which is not, I'm sure I don't need to say, a promotion of NFTs! Abstract commodities of intangible value don't fix the problem.) I'm thinking of something like eminent domain, which is a government power that can be given to, say, a pipeline company (and has been many times). If you've got land or a home you're deeply attached to, no amount of monetary compensation is really going to make up for the layers of loss you'd feel if the company acted on that property right.
Thanks. No, I know - there is no "fail" here - just regret at not having taken better advantage. It's probably easier using Threadable.
I wonder how often these justices were in bad faith or simply covering for their interests, and how often they really believed they were addressing grievances. Institutional/legal support for corruption, greed and politics is one way the system fails people (like the U.S. Supreme Court right now), but institutional/legal support for inadequate solutions and bad decisions even when corruption and political maneuvering is not the main driver seems like yet another kind of systemic failure, where things are just locked in a certain way.
That's why I was thinking about the limitations of awarding money for damages as the go-to response in the legal toolkit. It's clean, it's efficient and measurable, and once it's awarded your duty is done. But as you say, it cannot make up for layers of loss. So we need a more robust conception of *loss* and *responsibility* (not just "damage" and "claims" which implies actuarial quantification and superficial fixes) that fully accounts for these complex emotional layers, and looks forward as much as backward.
I did find this key passage confusing: "Non-Natives believe that somehow Indigenous peoples will do to settlers what they did to them. But the opposite is true. The example of the Black Hills Alliance in the previous chapter demonstrates that when Indigenous and poor settlers organize around treaty rights, they can beat multinational energy corporations and take control of their lives." How does this example show settlers wouldn't need to give up land they stole but rather the opposite? I must be missing something here.
Honestly I'm not sure if it's easier using Threadable. I know how many people are in my circle but I have no visibility into how many people are actively reading any of the material. I suspect less than one would think. People are busy!
I think you're right about judges really believing they're addressing grievances. I think part of it is that people have so frequently not believed that the grievances in front of them are important, or often even real. Even when you think about the U.S. Supreme Court right now, in the most recent case eroding the right to abortion, some of the questioning showed not corruption necessarily, but lack of understanding, and care, about the harms being caused. (I'm thinking of the line that kept insisting that adoption is an option, so why is there a need for another?) It's a perspective that refuses to give other worldviews validity.
This is probably a bigger field than even I can think about right now, but it seems like legal philosophy might have a lot to say on it!
I am looking at Estes's book now: This is from Chapter 5: Red Power. In a passage discussing Madonna Thunder Hawk's work starting in 1973, and including "the Black Hills Alliance, a Native and non-Native alliance formed to halt uranium mining in the Black Hills." Later in the chapter (page 199): "Woman of All Red Nations, an AIM [Amerian Indian Movement] contingent of women leadership, formed the Black Hills Alliance (BHA), a coalition of white ranchers and Native activities to halt uranium and coal mining in the Black Hills. Eleven thousand people from around the world gathered, succeeding in halting mining operations altogether. After the Alliance dissipated, AIM formed a short-lived encampment on the outskirts of Rapid City, named 'Yellow Thunder Camp' (YTC), after Raymond Yellow Thunder. Their goal was to begin to reclaim the Black Hills region under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. . . . The alliance with white working people and farmers--historic enemies of Lakota's--proved vital because it demonstrated that working-class settlers and Natives shared a common struggle against corporate exploitation. Fighting for Native land rights and sovereignty was also necessary to protect the lands upon which both groups depended for their continued existence. If dispossession was the primary mode for exploitation in Rapid City and the Black Hills, then liberation for both Native and settler required upholding, at bare minimum, the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. For a while, white sentiments toward Natives in border towns actually improved."
I'm not sure this passage actually implies what he says it does in the passage you quote. I get what he's saying, that if white settlers understand where dispossession actually comes from, and that they are also subject to it, then they would start defending the original treaties upholding Native land rights. The logic is a bit turned around, but I think what he's getting at is that, by upholding those treaties and those rights, white settlers would find that it would promote protection of everyone's land.
But again, I'm not sure the logic follows. And I think he's right, but it doesn't quite get to people's amorphous fear of loss of ownership -- what they think they would lose if Native rights were upheld. Which to my mind can only be addressed if the emotion behind it is articulated first. What are people afraid of and why?
Wow, thanks for parsing all this material so carefully! I hope it was at least partly out of interest and not just a sense of duty. That interpretation sounds right to me: he seems to be pointing to the potential for coalition building across settler-indigenous lines and breaking down that zero-sum thinking.
But this still feels dissatisfying, which is what I think prompted my confusion. For one thing, the basic conflict is still there between the powerful vs the vulnerable, or those exploiting the land for corporate profit and power vs those living on the land who depend on it for livelihood and stability; getting a handful of poor white settlers on board isn't going to change that dynamic. And then as you point out, it doesn't speak to the more basic fears of losing ownership that make it so hard to move toward a different arrangement. It's one thing if you're talking about voting coalitions in a national election: if you can get working-class whites to join forces with working-class POC you only need to get to 50% to tip the outcome. But I bet you need way more than 51% support to transform land ownership.
This whole endeavor is about my own interests, so it's all very self-serving ;)
I agree with you, it's unsatisfying. This week I'll be posting some more resources on Land Back, and a lot of it seems to bump up against the structures that keep everyone bound within these systems. Given that, it makes sense to start with honoring treaties, but I'm sure plenty of people would say it's not nearly enough (which I'd agree with).
For your larger point, I think this is part of why it's important to me to look back into the history of the European enclosure movements and other privatization, to connect the deeper, longer colonial project to what we face today, and bring that history back to life. To even begin to help settler-colonial beneficiaries understand that they (we; I'm one, too) are not somehow immune from the effects of colonialism and land theft, either.
I don't know that transforming land ownership will ever truly happen, but think you're right that it would need more support than that. I see promising movements in land trusts, for example, which don't overthrow the system but do maybe begin to slowly erode it and shift at least some areas to a more commons-based system of land use and livability.
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?
I am definitely not an expert in this area! My broad understanding -- and this is very rudimentary understanding on my part -- is that it varies according to nation, culture, leadership, history, and so many other other things. There is no one way that it looks. Nor should there be, necessarily. Every nation is, after all, distinct and individual. And some do, from my understanding, want land back. What does that look like? Again, I think it varies. As that conversation becomes more mainstream, I imagine that more specifics will be part of more conversations.
This is an issue of the Canadian magazine Briar Patch devoted to Land Back that has both discussions and some specific instances of reclaiming land: https://briarpatchmagazine.com/issues/view/september-october-2020
In New Zealand, Ngāi Tahu now have legal right of first refuse to purchase surplus Crown land: https://ngaitahuproperty.co.nz/about-us/right-of-first-refusal/
There are a lot of flaws in that -- why should they have to pay for land that was stolen in the first place? and why only "surplus" land? -- but it made me think of the Dawes Act and forced allotments of reservation land. One idea (I haven't read this anywhere, so maybe it's a stupid or crazy one) that the New Zealand case made me think of was, what if a starting place would be that every Native Nation had the first right of refusal to any land that was being sold within reservation boundaries?
This is true, re reflexive generalizations. Rereading this, I am reminded of "The Dawn of Everything" and what a relief it felt to be reading a vast history that repeatedly talked about how many different ways humans have ordered society.
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?
Do you know, I've never listened to that one? I should download some episodes -- there are so many!
That is a good question. There are some stories in this Canadian magazine issue devoted to Land Back: https://briarpatchmagazine.com/issues/view/september-october-2020
And in Echo-Hawk's "In the Courts of the Conqueror," he talks of a private landowner returning 600 acres to the Pawnee Nation.
Your question runs deeper than that, though, doesn't it? Even with land returned in patches, it's still surrounded by and connected to a capitalist system that puts enormous pressure toward commodification and profit. Along the lines of your own writing, this episode of Frontiers of Commoning about land trusts is also relevant, I think: https://david-bollier.simplecast.com/episodes/konda-mason-on-land-race-money-and-spirit
She talks some about that difficulty, that freedom from capitalism is dependent on having a land base, which is in turn dependent on owning land. It's going to take a long, careful time to unravel.
Yes! That was the episode where the editors and writers of that issue of Briarpatch came on to talk about it. I ordered copies for myself and friends. Good thought - I should go back and reread it. Yes, the piecemeal approach is so . . . . well, piecemeal. I was intrigued by the argument in The Atlantic magazine a while back to return all our national parks to indigenous stewardship / management. Also not a perfect solution, obviously. You probably saw that. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/05/return-the-national-parks-to-the-tribes/618395/
That was a really good piece and such a great, direct way to talk about the issue! So obvious, really. And places like the eastern portion of Glacier National Park (close to where I live) were so recently and egregiously stolen, it's a no-brainer to give it back.
That you for recommending Red Nation! That's one I'll look forward to diving into.
That podcast looks amazing! Thanks!
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.
I hear you about that book budget! I wonder how many hours I work just to support the books?
That is a powerful observation I hadn't fully thought through before, that owning things is about all capitalism leaves us. So much truth in that. And so hard to help ourselves relearn that we deserve something more than that -- connection, rest, laughter, community, time to mourn as well as time to celebrate . . .
Jerky is a good analogy. I like chewing on jerky but it's not easy!