Comment by TychoCelchuuu
14 hours ago
> Most Indians were hunter/gatherers, and suggesting that because someone roves through massive tracts of land is ownership, is beyond weird.
It is not "beyond weird." It is a well-defended position in contemporary political theory and it has had many prominent defenders for hundreds of years. For example, in the 1790s, Immanuel Kant wrote:
It can still be asked whether, when neither nature nor chance but just our own will brings us into the neighborhood of a people that holds out no prospect of a civil union with it, we should not be authorized to found colonies, by force if need be, in order to establish a civil union with them and bring these human beings (savages) into a rightful condition (as with the American Indians, the Hottentots and the inhabitants of New Holland); or (which is not much better), to found colonies by fraudulent purchase of their land, and so become owners of their land, making use of our superiority without regard for their first possession. Should we not be authorized to do this, especially since nature itself (which abhors a vacuum) seems to demand it, and great expanses of land in other parts of the world, which are now splendidly populated, would have otherwise remained uninhabited by civilized people or, indeed, would have to remain forever uninhabited, so that the end of creation would have been frustrated? But it is easy to see through this veil of injustice (Jesuitism), which would sanction any means to good ends. Such a way of acquiring land is therefore to be repudiated.
I see no relevance in your quoted text, with respect to what I said in my post. And the premise I cited is indeed beyond weird.
Note that I said seasonal camping sites make sense. And I said treaties make sense. I simply said 'wandering about' doesn't convey ownership, aka 'possession'. To take such a notion to the extreme, imagine a grouping of 4 who rove all around the entirety of Canada and the US through their lifetime. You could easily do this over 20 to 30 years. Should those 4 be attributed possession? As owners of that entire landmass via treaty, or just prevent any use of that land by anyone else?
Absurd. And it is equally absurd that land used for travel between two campsites, basically as a road, should mysteriously convey ownership/possession too.
For example, typically there were winter and summer camp sites in the US. Yet when not doing so, Natives would often 'rove' from one of the other, think 'migration'. Yet I've seen ridiculous assertions that someone basically using the land as a road between two campsites, to conveys ownership. Sheer nonsense.
Your argument in the post up-thread appears to be that because the Native Americans did not cultivate or make use of the land in any Western sense, they have no claim to ownership. The Kant quote attempts to repudiate this by stating that it makes no difference whether we consider the Native Americans' use of the land to be ineffective: their deprivation of it is still an injustice and, when it comes to injustice, the ends cannot justify the means.
I don't find Kant's position at all convincing, mostly because the two parties' understandings of the concept of "ownership" were not mutually intelligible (possession vs usufruction). However, the quote does have relevance to your post.
The key here is 'use'. Kant, while obviously not some gospel to be held to any form of authority, is making a point about differences in culture and sure, as you said, use. However, my point wasn't disputing usage at all. Living on it. Hunting on it. Working the land.
However no view exists in a vacuum, and I will indelibly view my example of a group of 4 as a valid statement, about the absurdities of 'walked on the land once in my life, to get to my summer/winter home', compared to some claims of a tribe of a few hundred people, somehow owning hundreds of millions of acres of land, just cause they walked on tiny parts of it to get to their seasonal homes.
So no, I don't see the relevance, because I'm not discussing the concepts therein directly.