gimme everything you own, and then beg to get it back
We've been reading about the various methods by which the United States took land from the native tribes. It's not quite what you'd expect- long before the government came anywhere near putting the tribes on reservations, our nation's greatest minds were working on the assumption that as heirs to the discovering nations that came before them, the United States already had 'absolute title' to all of the land within their borders. They then forced each tribe onto smaller and smaller parcels of land, by treaty and forced treaty, by forced migration, by congressional legislation abrogating treaty. Native people weren't using the land productively, they reasoned, and so they weren't entitled to it. A choice quote in my casebook reads, 'three hundred thousand people have no right to hold a continent and keep at bay a race able to people it and provide the happy homes of civilization.' This isn't the rhetoric of self-evident rights and liberties that we are familiar with; rather, it is the rhetoric of imperialism, of fascism.
Aand Godwin's Law strikes again. I don't know. I'm rambling. The point is, all this makes me unbearably angry. There's this sad irony that in 1491, the inhabitants of the Americas had the incredible good fortune to be living in a vast land with vast resources, vast enough to accommodate them two times over; in 1492, they had the bad fortune to be in that same vast land when others 'discovered' them. Native Americans had, for the most part, no systems of real property ownership (read: real estate) because they didn't need them, because land wasn't at a premium; when the European nations began parceling up the New World, they only acknowledged a basic right of occupancy in the inhabitants because the inhabitants did not have property rights that the European nations recognized.
If I were there, on San Sebastian, when Columbus landed, I would have told them to kill every damn European who set foot on their land, and keep doing it until no more came. Because once those greedy nations got a foothold, it was mere centuries before they'd taken it all.