Of course before the Europeans came our knowledge of ever shifting tribal boundaries is virtually bupkis. More to the point Indian tribes had no concept of land ownership and the farce of saying that such and such land was owned by a particular tribe is imposing completely alien European concepts upon a long ago state of affairs where they simply didn’t apply. Leftist virtue signaling is always nauseating but the original ownership meme is especially senseless.
Thought For The Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I have a much loved (if misguided) BernieBro cousin, so a mess of Bernie material comes over our Fakebook wall. One thing that sort is pushing is a federal tax on household assets, something that’s expressly unconstitutional and let’s just say…challenging…to administer. Make a Venn diagram. In one cell, you have the people ‘acknowledging’ property rights when there were no land titles. In the other, you have people who want to siphon off what is indisputably the property of others. How much overlap?
If any ownership of land has real documentation, it is the same one which has been fought over for centuries, and that is the Holy Land, documented for many centuries as given to His people by God.
I once owned a piece of heavenly land in upstate NY (Adirondack park) with a deed as thick as a bible. It originally was carved out of the wilderness and given to our revolutionary war soldiers as payment for fighting.
Property rights were at issue in the Kelo court case.
Route 210 Indian Hwy MD being renamed Piscataway Highway for the nearby tribal lands in S Maryland. Not a federally recognized tribe. Wondering about the total cost to replace signage. Same with Jefferson Davis Hwy (VA Rte 1) to Emancipation Hwy.
“ More to the point Indian tribes had no concept of land ownership and the farce of saying that such and such land was owned by a particular tribe is imposing completely alien European concepts upon a long ago state of affairs where they simply didn’t apply. ”
For sure European concepts were alien, but Native tribal land concepts did exist.
We know when the Pilgrims landed the Wampanoag were on the east side of the Narragansett bay, and Narragansett’s the west.
Each separate. Each rivals. The Wampanoag weakened by disease (ironically leaving Plymouth vacant), were eager to form an alliance with the Pilgrims as they feared the tribe across the bay.
And when the Wampanoag started selling their land to the Pilgrims, it was their land to sell.
Indian tribes would occupy land for a time, deplete the fertility of the soil, hunt out the surrounding land and move on. The boundary lines between hostile tribes were extremely indistinct unless there was a river, a bay or some other natural feature. Other than the meso-American empires the Indians had no means of doing even rudimentary surveys of land.
The Wampanoags were a migratory people and each year would move to various sites in southern New England. From their point of view if the idiot Pilgrims wanted to give them valuable items for the right to remain on some of the land they roamed over, so much the better. I repeat that the European concept of land ownership, particularly private land ownership, was entirely foreign to them.
It’s like the difference between rotational grazing and planted fields.
Don’t cry for the Native American. Today, they’re doing it to you.
Since March 2020, US property rights are under more dire threat than the Noble Savages’ had been in the 1800’s. Tragically, 6,000 diners and 8,000 saloons went bankrupt as a result of the loony lockdowns, which BTW did not work.
Since January 2021, they have been taking [inflation is the cruelest atx and it doesn’t require a majority vote on Congress] your money by making food and fuel unaffordable. Can’t afford $5 gas, buy a $70,000 EV.
They broke it. They own it.
Let’s also remember that the “Indians” came over the land bridge and stole the land from the “equal animal species.”
@ Don L.
A dog psychologist would agree 100% with your point. Cheers.🍻
Don, I migrate around my yard all the time. The seat of the Wampanoag was Mount Hope.
You always live in your house Dave no matter what you do in your yard. The Wampanoags migrated each year not because they wanted to but out of economic necessity. In that they were typical of most, not all, tribes of North America prior to the advent of the Europeans. Most tribes tended to have migratory patterns over their territory, the territory often shared, usually unwillingly, with other tribes on the peripheries.
Mount Hope was used by King Philip as his base of operations in the latter part of the Seventeenth Century. I doubt it had all that much significance to the Wampanoags prior to that as they began to be squeezed out by the English settlers.