MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘American Indians’

Who really owns the United States?

Posted by M. C. on November 28, 2023

Walter Block

There is also more than just a little bit of hypocrisy involved in this left wing land recognition movement. If the native peoples really own it in total, all others should either depart (back to Europe? Back to Africa? Back to Asia?) and/or start paying rent to the rightful owners. Has anything of this sort, on a serious basis, been placed on the table by any of these advocates? If so, not by too many of them;

Who really owns the United States?

Nowadays, it is common, when introducing an event, to say something along the lines of: “We are grateful to the XYZ Indian Tribe for allowing us to hold this gathering on what is really their land.” Universities, bastions of the left, have been particularly intent upon engaging in this practice. For example, Northwestern University offered this “expression of gratitude and appreciation to those whose territory you reside on, and a way of honoring the Indigenous people who have been living and working on the land from time immemorial.” Here is another instance: “Princeton (University) seeks to build relationships with Native American and Indigenous communities and nations through academic pursuits, partnerships, historical recognitions, community service and enrollment efforts.  These communities and nations include the Lenni-Lenape people, who consider the land on which the University stands part of their ancient homeland.”

Do the American Indians really own the entire country based upon homesteading, mixing their labor with the land? Not at all. There are now some 350 million people in the country, and there are still vast areas of it that have never so much as been touched by human feet, let alone homesteaded as farms, factories or residences. Before the white man came to the continent the best estimate is that there were only 2-3 million native persons in existence (the lowest estimate is less than one million; the highest, 18 million). It is difficult to see how they, alone, could have accomplished any such task.

There is a continuum issue heavily involved in homesteading. How intensively must the land be homesteaded, and for how long, before it can be clearly stated that ownership has been attained? Experts aver that it must be more intense, and less acreage attained for any given amount of effort, east of the Mississippi rather than west of it. Why? This is due to the fact that area off the Atlantic is far more fertile, on average, than in most of the west. Thus, a family of four would rationally invest in the homesteading of less acreage in the east than in the west.

Not only is there a continuum in terms of how intensively must be the homesteading, and the duration thereof in order to attain ownership, but, also, the degree of property rights after the fact. Consider many Indian tribes in the Midwest of the United States.

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I Was a Teacher. Here’s How Your KIds Are Indoctrinated by Leftist Ideas. — Rangitikei Environmental Health Watch

Posted by M. C. on August 18, 2020

I was preparing a lesson on Thanksgiving involving Pilgrims and American Indians, with an activity centered on making paper teepees for arts and crafts. Cue the progressive panic.

Other teachers at the school were incensed that a non-Indian was “appropriating” Native American culture for an activity. Of course, these teachers weren’t Indians either, they just wanted to virtue signal.

The whole thing culminated in a hilarious incident where my colleagues tracked down the one teacher on staff who was one-sixty-fourths Native American and asked her if it was cultural appropriation. In her esteemed authority, it most certainly was. The school administrators pulled me aside and promptly nixed the project.

Originally posted on Wake Up To The Truth: Douglas Blair / August 16, 2020 ? The left uses a combination of propaganda and suppression to push kids into the ensnaring grip of socialism and anti-patriotism. (Photo: skynesher/Getty Images) ? Douglas Blair is an administrative assistant at The Heritage Foundation and a graduate of Heritage’s Young…

via I Was a Teacher. Here’s How Your KIds Are Indoctrinated by Leftist Ideas. — Rangitikei Environmental Health Watch

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My Corner by Boyd Cathey BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP and the Future of America

Posted by M. C. on August 28, 2019

http://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/

Friends,

Kamala Harris is very angry with Donald Trump.

With her usual condescension and scorn, she tweeted out on Thursday, August 22, that Donald Trump should go read the 14th Amendment—the implication being that when the president brought up, once again, the possibility that he might issue an Executive Order regulating birthright citizenship, he was woefully misreading the application of that Reconstruction amendment.

Of course, for a supercilious Leftist elitist like Harris, Trump will forever be that ignorant, brash, illiterate, racist New Yorker who is just way out of his league. It doesn’t really make any difference that he graduated with a B.S. in Economics from the prestigious Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. You see, he doesn’t have all the fineries and veneer of the self-proclaimed East Coast-West Coast Brahmin Elites who have controlled this country, its economy, its foreign policy, and its government for more than a century. Despite the fact that he has—in my view—given in far too often to those same Elites, nevertheless, they will only accept 100% obedience and compliance. Upsetting the apple cart, thwarting the advance of globalism in the slightest will get you—the Russia Hoax, the White Nationalist/Racist Hoax, the Gun Control Hoax, endless investigations and multiple mini-impeachment efforts, plus the extreme and active (even violent) hostility of almost all the media, academia, Hollywood, and the political class.

You can’t get off the Deep State reservation, even a hare, and expect any mercy.

So, when once again the president declared that his administration was looking into ending “birthright citizenship” through a presidential Executive Order—something he had suggested back in October of 2018—all hell broke loose, and the officious and ideologically crazed Harris jumped like a famished black snake on a defenseless toad. Once again it was the Trump template of “full blown racism,” “appeals to white supremacy,” “undermining and attacking our democracy,” and, of course, since Trump is an illegitimate president, an interloper—then almost any type of resistance is permissible.

What such an Executive Order would do is clarify the application of the 14th Amendment and, essentially, end birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens who come across the US border and then produce offspring who, then, as if by magic become American citizens.

Recall that the amendment was enacted after the War Between the States to guarantee the rights of citizenship to manumitted slaves and their offspring. And, indeed, there is a serious legal question about whether the amendment itself was ever legally and legitimately ratified. But be that as it may, it has applied ever since 1868.

Here is how Section 1 of the 14th Amendment reads:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Harris and other open border zealots always quote the first section: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States…are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” But the leave out, either by mistake or by direction: “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

It’s a key phrase, critical to understanding what the authors of the amendment intended and what for nearly 100 years was settled law up until the 1960s when leftist lawmakers got into the act simply by de facto practical applications. In other words, between the very clear and forthright intention of its authors that the 14th Amendment only applied to slaves and their offspring born in the United States who are necessarily “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” and the imposed practice we now have which enables a foreign woman to illegally slip across the Rio Grande and have a child who then, by that simple act, becomes a citizen and an “anchor baby,” permitting its illegal relations to all come across—between these two interpretations and applications there is an absolute irreconcilable difference.

The key figures in drafting the amendment at the time were clear: Senator Lyman Trumbull, pivotal in the drafting the 14th Amendment, declared “subject to the jurisdiction” meant subject to “complete” jurisdiction of the United States, and “[n]ot owing allegiance to anybody else.” Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, responsible for the critical language of the jurisdiction clause, stated that it meant “a full and complete jurisdiction,” that is, “the same jurisdiction in extent and quality as applies to every citizen of the United States now.” In other words, a non-citizen simply by giving birth on this side geographically of the Rio Grande does not produce a new citizen of the United States.

Presented with this history, those defending the current practice, including Judge Andrew Napolitano on Fox, appeal, like Harris, to constitutional practice and to the courts.

But, actually, the Supreme Court has spoken on this question, at least indirectly.

In 1884, sixteen years after the 14th Amendment was ratified, John Elk, an American Indian, went to court to argue that he was an American citizen due to his birth in the United States. In Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94, the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment did not grant Indians citizenship. As Ann Coulter cites that decision:

[The] “main object of the opening sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment was to settle the question, upon which there had been a difference of opinion throughout the country and in this court, as to the citizenship of free negroes and to put it beyond doubt that all persons, white or black … should be citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside.”

And she adds: “American Indians were not made citizens until 1924. Lo those 56 years after the ratification of the 14th Amendment, Indians were not American citizens, despite the considered opinion of Judge Napolitano.”

Ending birthright citizenship, based on a false and specious reading of the 14th Amendment, is an idea whose time has come, in fact, is far overdue. At the very least, an Executive Order would force the courts, including the Supreme Court, to take a serious look at the historic abuse of our immigration system and the definition of American citizenship.

Let us hope that this time—nearly a year since he raised it—President Trump will follow through on his consideration: birthright citizenship has been and is an Achilles’ Heel in American immigration policy. Ending it would be a major step in securing our border and preserving the integrity of our culture.

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I believe I passed on to you last year the following legal essay by Professor of Law, John Eastman. It is a succinct but thorough restatement of the points made in my commentary:…

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Nations within a Nation: Real Sovereignty for American Indians | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on July 8, 2019

JD: Do Indigenous people think total sovereignty is too extreme? Is the current situation working, where many reservations are de facto welfare state wards? Is there a better answer to the question of “stolen land” than giving it back? I suspect many tribes would benefit financially and create a better standard of living for tribal members without too much upheaval.

https://mises.org/wire/nations-within-nation-real-sovereignty-american-indians

Pipeline Observer Magazine recently interviewed Jeff Deist on the subject of tribal land and sovereignty in North America. Interview by Clayton Reeder, originally published in May 2019.

Pipeline Observer: The Ludwig von Mises institute in Alabama is the world’s most popular free market think tank, promoting the “Austrian School” of economics.

Writing on the website mises.org, Jeff Deist recently added a novel perspective to the endless debate about fair treatment of Indigenous people in North America.

Deist proposed addressing the “stolen land” issue by abandoning the reservation system and ceding vast tracts of federal land to Indigenous tribes and giving them complete sovereignty. This would create “nations within a nation.” Tribes could keep, use, sell, or develop the land as they wished.

This would mean no state or provincial or federal taxes or regulations. Government agencies would have no jurisdiction there at all. Armies of bureaucrats would no longer administer resource rights and land use. The bands would have full ownership and control within their own territory.

We asked Deist to elaborate on these ideas so that we might consider them in relation to our own country’s divided interests, especially about oil and pipelines.

PO: Ludwig von Mises said democracy means “self-determination, self-government, self-rule.” Do you think Indigenous North Americans have democracy in this sense?

Jeff Deist: Mises elevated self-determination to an ordering principle of liberalism. In other words, without a healthy degree of self-determination, no society can be truly liberal in the right sense of the word. [Indigenous people] in the U.S. and Canada certainly do not enjoy a healthy degree of self-determination, despite all of the political rhetoric. With their relatively small numbers, [Indigenous people] are not a political force either as a voting bloc or lobby, at least at the federal level—so what good is democracy to a tiny minority? Tribal sovereignty—real sovereignty in the Misesean sense, the right to organize politically outside the jurisdiction of any federal, state, or provincial government—should be acknowledged sooner rather than later. Otherwise all the talk about North America as stolen land is empty.

PO: When it comes to Indigenous North Americans, many people understand that there are problems with the status quo. Naturally, conservatives and the left tend to see the issue differently. For example, many conservatives support abolishing the reserve system and having Indigenous people be more like “regular” citizens. The left often sees themselves as the real advocates for Indigenous people, saying they need more fiscal support from the state in order to have more autonomy. Your idea is quite different. Why are your suggestions better?

JD: Should [Indigenous people] trust the governments of Canada and the U.S.? It’s absurd on its face. Tribes should be free to form nations within nations, and those nations can be as connected or disconnected from the rest of North America as those tribes see fit. Certainly, there should be trade, travel, diplomacy, and communication between these tribal nations and the rest of the world, including North America. Certainly, tribal members should have a say in determining the degree of connection and should be granted U.S. and Canadian citizenship to live outside tribal lands as “regular” Americans or Canadians if they choose. And, of course, the tribes themselves should issue passports and control their own borders. It’s bizarre to give so much lip service to tribal history, traditions, and practices while simultaneously pushing either assimilation or dependency….

JD: Do Indigenous people think total sovereignty is too extreme? Is the current situation working, where many reservations are de facto welfare state wards? Is there a better answer to the question of “stolen land” than giving it back? I suspect many tribes would benefit financially and create a better standard of living for tribal members without too much upheaval. Many might wish to remain closely engaged with the U.S. or Canadian government and accept continued regulation and transfer payments (i.e. welfare becomes foreign aid). Others might become radically independent and create true nations within a nation. But either way, if we believe in self-determination—if we really believe in a liberal ordering of society—we should stop trying to “fix” [Indigenous] problems and simply grant tribes sovereignty and land.

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Reparations for Slavery – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on June 26, 2019

I’d like to see lawyers bring class-action suits against public school systems in cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Detroit and Los Angeles for conferring fraudulent high school diplomas.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/06/walter-e-williams/reparations-for-slavery/

By

…Let’s pretend for a moment that the reparations issue makes a modicum of sense. There’s the question of responsibility. More explicitly, should we compensate a black person of today by punishing a white person of today, by taking his money, for what a white person of yesteryear did to a black person of yesteryear? If we believe in individual accountability, we should find that doing so is unjust. In other words, are the tens millions of Europeans, Asian and Latin Americans who immigrated to the U.S. in the late 19th and 20th centuries responsible for slavery, and should they be forced to cough up reparations? What about descendants of Northern whites who fought and died in the name of freeing slaves? Should they pay reparations to black Americans? What about non-slave-owning Southern whites — who were a majority of Southern whites — should their descendants be made to pay reparations?

Reparations advocates make the unchallenged pronouncement that United States became rich on the backs of free black labor. That’s utter nonsense. While some slave owners became rich, slavery doesn’t have a good record of producing wealth. Slavery existed in the southern states and outlawed in most of the northern states. Buying into the reparations argument suggests that the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places where slavery flourished: Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. And the richest states and regions were those where slavery was absent: Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts.

The reparations movement would be an amusing sideshow were it not for its damaging distractions. It grossly misallocates resources that could be better spent elsewhere. According to the state Department of Education, 75% of black California boys cannot meet state reading standards. In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore’s 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state’s mathematics exam. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. The same story of low education outcomes can be told about most cities with large black populations. I’d like to see lawyers bring class-action suits against public school systems in cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Detroit and Los Angeles for conferring fraudulent high school diplomas. Such diplomas attest a 12th-grade level of academic achievement when in fact those youngsters often cannot perform at sixth- or seventh-grade levels…

As of 2014, U.S. taxpayers have spent $22 trillion on Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty (in constant 2012 dollars). Adjusting for inflation, that’s three times more than was spent on all military wars since the American Revolution. If money alone were the answer, the many issues facing a large segment of the black community would have been solved.

There’s another possible reparations issue completely ignored: Blacks as well as whites live on land taken, sometimes brutally, from American Indians. Do blacks and whites owe American Indians anything?

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