In a previous blog post I wrote about how the modern social justice ideology engages in heavy-handed historical revisionism when it comes to historic slavery. If you were to believe what the most outlandish claims of social justice warriors are with regards to slavery, in the distant past native non-white civilizations were pretty much a paradise, an Utopia, where native people lived in peace and harmony with nature and each other, and things like slavery were a completely unknown concept. Up until, of course, the evil white people came to conquer, destroy, kill, pillage, rob, steal and, of course, take slaves. If any non-white peoples in the past ever engaged in slavery it was only because they learned the practice from white people (who 100% invented it, and absolutely nobody had come up with the idea before), and even then they engaged in it solely to sell the slaves to white people.
There's a somewhat similar notion of the pre-Columbian native people of North America (ie. the people who were for the longest time called "Indians", because Europeans thought for decades that they had arrived in Asia from the east. Even after centuries of it becoming clear that this was not Asia but an entirely new continent, that name, "Indian", stuck for centuries to come.)
Social justice warriors argue that Europeans conquered and stole the lands of the natives living in America, and thus white people (because of course all white people in the world are to blame, even though it was only a small fraction of them who ever set foot on the new continent) have no right to be there.
(Curiously, oftentimes they use this argument to support unrestricted immigration into the United States. To this day the logic behind this baffles me. Since white people stole the lands of the natives, now everybody should be free to come into these same lands, even though it doesn't belong to them? I don't get it. But I digress.)
There might be some validity to this argument. However, there are many facts that the argument ignores.
For starters, native Americans did not, in fact, inhabit every single square meter of the North American continent. Even within the area that's today the United States there were absolutely vast expanses of uninhabited wilderness, belonging to nobody. There weren't hundreds of millions of natives inhabiting every corner of the continent. Heck, even today, with well over 300 million citizens, there are still vast expanses of uninhabited areas within the country. The number of native Americans living in the continent before Columbus was but a small fraction of that. It's a physical impossibility for them to have somehow claimed, marked or settled but a minuscule fraction of the continent.
Given that there were dozens and dozens of independent pre-Columbian tribes, it thus becomes a completely legit question of who those vast expanses of uninhabited wilderness actually belonged to. Which tribes, exactly, and why? If those tribes never lived even near those areas, and never set foot anywhere near them, why would they somehow own it? And why those tribes and not some others? Why should some tribe have the right to claim ownership of some uninhabited wilderness that they never during their entire history set foot on, not even close? Or does every single square meter of the entire continent, North and South America, belong to every single one of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of tribes and civilizations that lived there? Why? Based on what? Where would this "shared ownership" concept come from? Why would a tribe from southern Chile own land from North-East Canada? Based on what logic?
The other problem is similar to what I described in that other blog post: There's this widespread notion, especially among social justice warriors, that pre-Columbian American Native tribes all lived in peace and harmony, one with nature, with wise elders teaching their young, engaging in beautiful culture, song, music and dance, hunting just for their needs, always living in peace and harmony with everybody.
Of course I'm not saying something like this never, ever happened during the millenia that the continent was inhabited. There probably were periods, probably even quite long periods, during which individual tribes locally lived in peace and harmony like this.
However, the reality is that the different tribes were quite often at war with each other, attacked each other, pillaged each other's villages, and even conquered their lands. The "ownership" of rich hunting grounds often changed tribes, as one tribe would go on war with another and, if they were victorious, would settle in the newly conquered area.
This fact is absolutely nothing controversial. Native American tribes warring with each other is a well known historic fact and there's nothing controversial about it.
However, this too raises many question about ownership. If an area of land changed ownership several times among many tribes, who exactly gets to claim ownership of it today? And based on what? Can we trace with 100% certainty which tribe inhabited that area the first? How do we know that tribe didn't simply conquer that area from another, even older tribe?
The fact is, universally, that the vast, vast majority of land is conquered. There may be a few remote areas that were originally uninhabited and where ancient people merely migrated into, settled, and their extremely distant descendants still live today, but these cases are a rarity. The vast, vast majority of inhabited areas have at one point or another been conquered, in one way or another, from other peoples. Perhaps sometimes via war, perhaps via displacement, perhaps via integration, perhaps even because of natural phenomena killing or forcing the population out, only for the area to be later settled by other peoples from elsewhere.
If the idea with North America is that the land was stolen from their original owners, one could reasonably ask how do we know they actually owned that land in the first place. As mentioned, native Americans did not live everywhere in the continent, and even when they did, sometimes, even oftentimes, they were areas conquered from other tribes. Why do they have more rights to those lands?
Even a "as long as you are a direct descendant of native Americans, you have the right to the land, regardless of which tribe you are a descendant of" stumbles across the ethical problem of, possibly, giving the land to conquerors who stole the land from another tribe. If the idea is that white people stole the land from the natives and thus don't have a right to it, then why should the tribe that stole the land from another tribe have any more right to it? The same logic should follow.
And if the answer is "well, we give the land to the descendants of the tribe that originally owned the land", the question once again raises: How do we know for certain that they were the original owners, and did not just conquer it from another tribe?
We don't.
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