by Demon of Undoing » Tue Jun 14, 2011 5:35 am
First off , lets avoid lumping all natives in America. A Commanche chief might be able to carry off a bit of the tyrant bit , but that shit would get you attacked on the spot by family and clan among Cherokee. Cherokee were democratic as you'd like , to the point where you just about couldn't be forced to do anything but leave. You might get knifed by somebody for grudges , but that's just doin' business in the South, it's not tyranny.
Second , yes , I do get what Tinker is saying about property rights , and actually feel them on a level that makes me question our understanding of epigenetics and how memories are transferred. At any rate, it has to be understood that thinking in terms of buying and selling land and the idea of property rights requires whole reams of assumptions about reality and our place in it. Simply put , the abstractions that a title deed implies were to natives as a whole not even wrong.
As it was said , how can you sell your mother ? The idea of signing things that were not theirs but a gift to them was just too strange. More accurately , it would be for them like trying to sell the college education your parents paid for. Not leverage it as labor , but actually sell the experience , the diploma , tge wages , the comfortable retirement , all of it They would trade for rights to travel through or hunt in an area. But to actually sell the fucking place ? Are you nuts ? I want a total valuation of all action verbs in the English language. If I don't like the price , I will just kill you and erase your language.
Do you people get why I have so many freaking anger issues yet ? On a level deeper than I can express , just about your whole getup is an absurd and abominable trick. 'S alright. Wasn't your idea , it's fucking you, too.
But before we all break out our copies of "Dances With Wolves" , do understand the assumptions of the native position. There were no property rights , per se. You couldn't just kill someone for being in your lodge , that would be as nonsensical as being killed for wearing purple ( that modern fact would confuse the shit out of them too until the modern tribe structure was explained). However , while there was no law saying this belonged to this guy and that couldn't be walked on , it was only because there really wasn't much of a law, period. More correctly , there was no sense of a rule of law. You couldn't be legally justified for killing a man in your bedroom , but nobody would give a damn if you did it for whatever reason that might be named . Except for kin and clan , there was nobody to create much of a sense of right or wrong.
Similarly , the property beliefs about the land were a byproduct of plenty and a complete lack of any redress of greivance beyond opprobrium. As a result , people killed strangers on their accustomed hunting lands all the time. Again , agreements existed , but the incursion on another tribes hunting stock was a constant source of training for the young warrior and a steady source of lives ended more often by violence than pestilence. The myth that the natives had no diseases that they didnt have a cure for partially comes from the fact that many tribes tried to stay as isolated from strangers as possible. Most were simply killed outright.
By any modern standard , their way was not superior. I'm not entirely convinced modern standards are worth a fuck. All the high mindedness and rational goodness of enlightend blabby blabber blab won't mean shit if it leads to a biodiversity crash unlike anything this side of the Precambrian. I'll be real impressed with the commitment to sanitation when the oceans are a desert and the land looks like a rusted skillet. Maybe most of us are supposed to be dead from axe wounds and toothaches already in order to keep us from breeding out of control. Life isn't necessarily a straight line, striggt lines eventually end and are no more . Indeed the Chinese see evil spirits as preferring straight lines. I prefer hoops.
Happy Tuesday. Now get off my lawn.
Don't know what it is, but I'm agin'it.