Who Owns America’s Lands?

By Sidney Secular

February 12, 2024

Before the discoveries of Columbus, America was considered a new and unsettled land. No one, even the Indians themselves considered it their exclusive domain. It was first come, first served, or “finders keepers” as far as who got to utilize or get to claim a particular plot of land. Indeed, the Indians themselves did not believe in the concept of private property in which land could be claimed as belonging to someone in perpetuity and this is revealed by the constant wars that saw different tribes moving into and out of areas when they were stronger than the indigenous people (into) or found themselves weaker than larger, more warlike tribes (out of).

The Indians treated both life and land as being on loan from “The Great Spirit” to be used for the purpose of living. This is why tribal life changed so little over the centuries. Of course, Indian power struggles went on long before and after the advent of the “white man” though they did recognize certain areas as not being within their sway. One large plot of land in what became Pennsylvania was asked by whites of those Indians whom the whites believed “owned” that land, were told that the land did not belong to that tribe but rather to an ancient warlike people who were giants with red hair! To the Indians, even though these rather ferocious folk were no more, they refused to stake any claim to territory! With most land issues involving the Indians, no one had special right to the utilization of a particular territory unless the tribe occupied it for a continuous period of at least one year.

The term “Native American” is recently created leftist lingo to “prove” that the Indians are now first in line to receive GovMint bennies and deference because they were supposedly the first here. No one really knows who was the first anywhere because of humanity’s mostly nomadic ways over a long periods of time. “Hunter gatherers” – as were most humans before the advent of efficient agriculture – had to move according to the disbursement and/or migration of game and the availability of such food as grew naturally such as nuts and berries. It is just coming to light, and still largely unknown, that ancient advanced white civilizations existed in prehistoric periods and early records reveal that these peoples arrived in the Americas about the same time the “Native Americans!” One such group might well have been the giant redhaired folks in Pennsylvania, but whatever the case, this reveals that the “Indians” have no special place as first in line for the dole or undue deference. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter who was first anyway, as that is of no consequence when it comes to today’s realities except as it can be used to repudiate and disfranchise whites!

In a sort of oblique attempt to dislodge and disinherit “Anglo-America” (as American whites are sometimes called) from ownership of the great majority of the land that is called America, we experience leftist jabs and jabber claiming that we illegally or unfairly took over what rightfully belonged to the Indians – which cannot be the case based on the Indians’ own laws (as we have seen), natural concepts of territorial expansion and biological defense as we see in the animal world. In fact, the White World’s concept of real estate and the ability of individuals to own property is a better guarantee of actual ownership to every individual whatever his or her race or background. Using property laws, people can claim and utilize their property without someone taking from them simply because they are more powerful. Of course, even this “constitutional guarantee” is under attack as our present government moves to remove all such “rights” from white and Indian alike.

On the other hand, the Indians believed that might equals right, and that the most powerful of two tribes, peoples, or alliances of peoples had the right to conquer and subdue the weaker sometimes even to the point of extinction. Thus, in colonial and early American days, any objection to white settlement and expansion had more to do with the immediate influence on the particular tribe than any overarching concept of “ownership.” Indeed, the Indians often sought what they believed to be the strongest white group to help them not only against other whites but against their own Indian enemies. A study of the so-called French and Indian war gives a very clear view of the entire white-Indian situation extant on the continent prior to the American revolution. Eventually, the only real objection was that whites broke their treaties with the Indians providing that the latter were entitled to keep certain lands as their own. This was sometimes true but it often, at least in colonial times, involved a change not in the Indian vs. white situation as the white vs. white situation (see the above French and Indian War!). Eventually, however, it was the tremendous increase of immigration from Europe that occurred after the American Revolution that upset the balance between whites and the so-called “native Americans.” Once America as a government and a people had adopted the concept of “Manifest Destiny*,” the fate of the Indian as far as holding any large tracts of land was sealed. (*see below)

In the beginning of white settlement and expansion, the whites largely respected the right of the Indians to occupy and utilize the lands on which they had settled although in truth, only the French of European settlers seemed to be willing to permit the Indian as an inhabitant of the land with an equal right to maintain his place and way of life. The English and the Spanish saw their own way of life as superior to that of any non-European and as a result, frequently became involved in nasty local wars between both groups. But what has been obscured from this debate today is that the lands under discussion constituted only 3% of the overall land mass of the continent, with the remainder open to “first come, first served” settlement with little objection or pushback as initial occupation occurred. Even much of the aforesaid 3% were areas that the Indians temporarily occupied in their mainly nomadic way of life and to which they never laid any permanent claim. They did not understand the need to claim what, to them, had always been and would always be open to their use and passage. When the Indians did “settle” and were not simply nomadic, they also believed that any land not settled for at least a year (12 moons) was free for anyone else to claim in the “might equals right” understanding of the situation.

Most so-called Indian wars were initially precipitated when the Indians attempted to destroy already well anchored or established white communities without warning or justification. This occurred regularly in New England and northern areas so the colonists felt justified in pushing the Indians out of the way as their settlements expanded. In the Virginia colony, which initially encompassed most of the Middle-Atlantic area westward to Kentucky, there was no proclivity to displace the Indians just because it could be done, and the colonists initially took a defensive posture. It was only when the Jamestown colony was attacked nearly right from the start in 1607, and more massively in 1622 and later in 1644, that the whites lost their patience, and started proactively pushing the Indians back in self-defense and self-preservation. These attacks had nearly decimated the newly created white settlements. But we must also remember that whites themselves were largely to blame for Indian attacks in the so-called Ohio Territory west of the Appalachia Mountains when both the French and the British used Indians as allies in their war! And this also resulted in Indian tribes making war on each other depending upon which side a tribe supported but often that support was given based upon those tribes already considered enemies! This was not an Indian vs. white war, but a war with both Indians and whites fighting each other!

The modern libber narrative that the Indians were a peaceful people who only hunted, lived off the land, and made colorful jewelry, clothes and pottery until the whites came along and massacred them is a total fabrication! The white race has both moral and legal rights to the Western Hemisphere (including America) according to international law (genocide prevention), Indian custom, and the law of nature (basic survival, the requirement to obtain adequate living space for survival, and survival of the strongest and/or fittest), or a combination of these laws or factors. Mankind has, from the beginning, waged war for a place to live. The truly amazing thing is that as the population of people rises, there is less and less of such wars as people learn to live in (reasonable) peace and to find better things to do with our time than kill for a plot of land – at least for now. But whites must stop feeling guilty about the expansion of Western civilization, a matter that has made the life of all mankind infinitely better through knowledge and moral decency.

American Progress (1872) by John Gast is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Columbia, a personification of the United States, is shown leading civilization westward with the American settlers. She is shown bringing light from east to west, stringing telegraph wire, holding a book representing learning and knowledge, and highlighting different stages of economic activity and evolving forms of transportation. On the left, Indigenous Americans are displaced from their ancestral homeland.

Manifest destiny was a phrase in the 19th-century United States that represented the belief that American settlers were destined to expand westward across North America, and that this belief was both obvious (“manifest”) and certain (“destiny”). The belief was rooted in American exceptionalism and Romantic nationalism, implying the inevitable spread of the Republican form of governance. It was this “spirit” that grew in the early Republic that led to much of the grief that followed.

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