While the Spanish conquistadores were surprised to see humans sacrificed in droves, they were not shocked to witness slavery, the subjugation of women, or brutal treatment of war captives—these were familiar enough practices from their own culture. Moreover, in conquering the Indians, and establishing alien rule over them, the Spanish were doing to the Indians nothing more than the Indians had done to each other. So from the point of view of the native Indian people, one empire, that of Spain, replaced another, that of the Aztecs. Did life for the native Indian get worse? It’s very hard to say. The ordinary Indian might now have a higher risk of disease, but he certainly had a lower risk of finding himself under the lurid glare of the obsidian knife.
What, then, distinguished the Spanish from the Indians? The Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa offers an arresting answer. The conquistadores who came to the Americas, he concedes, were “semi-literate, implacable and greedy.” They were clearly believers in the conquest ethic—land is yours if you can take it. Yet these semi-literate greedy swordsmen, without knowing it, also brought with them something new to the Americas. They brought with them the ideas of Western civilization, from Athenian rationalism to Judeo-Christian ideas of human brotherhood to more modern conceptions of self-government, human rights, and property rights. Some of these ideas were nascent and newly developing even in the West. Nevertheless, they were there, and without intending to do so, the conquistadores brought them to the Americas.6
To appreciate what Vargas Llosa is saying, consider an astonishing series of events that took place in Spain in the early sixteenth century. At the urging of a group of Spanish clergy, the king of Spain called a halt to Spanish expansion in the Americas, pending the resolution of the question of whether American Indians had souls and could be justly enslaved. This seems odd, and even appalling, to us today, but we should not miss its significance. Historian Lewis Hanke writes that never before or since has a powerful emperor “ordered his conquests to cease until it was decided if they were just.” The king’s actions were in response to petitions by a group of Spanish priests, led by Bartolomé de las Casas. Las Casas defended the Indians in a famous debate held at Valladolid in Spain. On the other side was an Aristotelian scholar, Juan Sepulveda, who relied on Aristotle’s concept of the “natural slave” to argue that Indians were inferior and therefore could be subjugated. Las Casas countered that Indians were human beings with the same dignity and spiritual nature as the Spanish. Today Las Casas is portrayed as a heroic eccentric, but his basic position prevailed at Valladolid. It was endorsed by the pope, who declared in his bull Sublimus Deus, “Indians … are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possessions of their property … nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen it shall be null and of no effect.”7 Papal bulls and even royal edicts were largely ignored thousands of miles away—there were no effective mechanisms of enforcement. The conquest ethic prevailed. Even so, over time the principles of Valladolid and Sublimus Deus provided the moral foundation for the enfranchisement of Indians. Indians could themselves appeal to Western ideas of equality, dignity, and property rights in order to resist subjugation, enforce treaties, and get some of their land back.
It is against this backdrop that we should consider the question of whether the white man stole the Americas from the Indians. Let’s begin by appreciating the ambiguity of the term “theft” in this context. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass in his autobiography tells the story of how as a slave he stole food from his master. Douglass impishly points out that in extracting meat from the tub, he wasn’t really stealing. That’s because as a slave he wasn’t considered a human being; he was considered his master’s property. But the master’s provisions were also the master’s property. So Douglass says that far from stealing from his master he was merely “taking his meat out of one tub and putting it in another.”8 The point of this anecdote is that concepts of “theft” only make sense when there is a built-in infrastructure of ownership, property rights, and morality. “Theft” requires that someone legitimately own something, so that it is possible for someone else to illegitimately take it. If I steal your corn, and it turns out it wasn’t your corn—you stole it from someone else—then I have indeed committed theft, but not against you, only against the person who actually owns the corn.
Theft, with respect to the Indians, is rendered problematic because the Indians themselves had no concept of property rights. The Indians held that no one actually owns land—land is the common property of all. Who then gets to use the land? Naturally it is the one who is occupying it. This picture was further complicated by the fact that there were two types of Indian tribes, the sedentary agricultural tribes and the nomadic hunting tribes. The sedentary tribes cultivated the land and seemingly by occupation they were its rightful owners. The hunting tribes, since they moved around, occupied no particular place. Over time, however, the hunting tribes used their martial skills to defeat and displace the sedentary tribes. They then became the new sedentary tribes, and their claim to the land was also based on occupancy. Of course there were constant clashes among tribes—no one wanted to be ejected from their land. Everyone understood, however, that there was no real basis for complaint since it wasn’t “their” land in the first place. When everyone is a renter, use is solely according to possession. This is the conquest ethic in its purest form.
The white men who settled America didn’t come as foreign invaders; they came as settlers. Unlike the Spanish, who ruled Mexico from afar, the English families who arrived in America left everything behind and staked their lives on the new world. In other words, they came as immigrants. We can say, of course, that immigration doesn’t confer any privileges, and just because you come here to settle doesn’t mean you have a right to the land that is here, but then that logic would also apply to the Indians. Let’s recall that the Indians who were here also once came as immigrants. In the beginning there was no one here, and then the Indians came from Asia or someplace else and themselves “discovered” the new world.
Does this mean that the Indians “owned” America because they got here first? To see this question in its clear light, consider the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Abel was a shepherd while Cain was a farmer. Abel moved around with flocks, while Cain cultivated the earth. Now imagine that each day while Abel tended livestock, Cain built fences and said “This is mine and this also is mine” until Cain has enclosed all the existing land, while Abel continues as a shepherd. Does this mean that the descendants of Cain—owing to their original occupation of the earth—own the whole world? In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau suggested that the first man to build a fence around something and say “this is mine” was the original con artist. Rousseau raises the question of how one can claim to own something in perpetuity simply by occupying and claiming it. To understand the legitimacy of property rights, we have to see the justice in Rousseau’s comment. If ownership of the globe is not first-come, first-served, then how does an individual—or a tribe, or a nation—get to declare that it owns land and that everyone else who tries to occupy or use it is a usurper?
It would be nice to turn to an American Indian source for a doctrine of the origin of property rights, but no such source exists. The white man who displaced the Indians also brought with him that doctrine—not to mention courts of law to enforce it—which ultimately enabled the Indian to challenge the white man’s occupation on the basis of the white man’s own doctrine. What, then, was that doctrine? In the ancient and medieval world, just as in the Americas, there was no clear notion of property rights. People owned property, but the idea that they had a right to it would have been regarded as absurd. The ancient view of property was summed up in Cicero’s analogy: Owning a piece of land or property is like occupying a seat in a public theater. It’s your seat, but only while you are sitting in it. You don’t own it, and even its possession comes with certain duties and obligations. The ancients also assumed that
the amount of land, like the number of seats in a theater, is generally fixed, so it’s not right to take up more space than you need.9
Philosopher John Locke was the first to formulate a coherent doctrine of property ownership. Interestingly he developed that doctrine by considering the contrast between Europe and the new world. Locke observed that an Indian chief, lording it over thousands of his tribe, nevertheless “feeds, lodges and is clad worse than a day laborer in England.” Why is this? Locke reasons that it is not because of land, which the Indians have in abundance, more than they can possibly use. The difference, then, is not in land but in what people do with land. For Locke, the difference comes from human effort. It is human effort that converts unowned and largely useless land into owned and useful property.
Locke began with the simple premise that every person owns himself or herself. Every man has property in his own person which “no Body has any Right to but himself.” Locke adds, “The Labor of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, are likewise properly his.” It follows from this that nobody has a right to own somebody else or to forcibly seize the fruits of another person’s labor. So where do property rights come from? Locke argues that when we “mix” our labor with land, we come to own the land as well. Why? Because land is abundant, and nature by itself is almost worthless. What good—Locke asks—are acorns, leaves, and moss? It is labor that adds value to land. Indeed labor adds virtually all the value that converts nature’s provision into bread, wine, and cloth. Thus, Locke says, we have a right to acquire as much land as we can ourselves cultivate and develop.10
We can see what Locke is getting at by considering the purchase price reputedly paid for the island of Manhattan. Supposedly the Dutch bought Manhattan from a group of Indians for $24—or around $700 in today’s dollars. This was in 1626. Today, it seems like an incredible bargain. But Locke might argue that the Dutch overpaid, because in 1626 there was no Manhattan. There was a piece of land—no better than any other piece of land—and its actual value would depend entirely on what was done with it. There are places in the world today where one can buy a large piece of land for $700. Prices in Manhattan are astronomical only because of everything that has been built there with human ingenuity and foresight over the intervening three and a half centuries. The Indians who sold Manhattan were not robbed. “Manhattan” is the creation of the new people who built it, not the original inhabitants who occupied it.
None of this is to excuse, or justify, the record of cruelty, displacement, and broken treaties involving the Indian. Even though I am an immigrant, and my ancestors were not here at the time, I cannot read about these without shame and distress. Tocqueville felt the same way. As he traveled through America, he saw in the winter of 1831 a band of Choctaw Indians being taken across the Mississippi. “The Indians had their families with them, and they brought in their train the wounded and the sick, with children newly-born and old men at the point of death.” It was a wrenching sight. At the same time, Tocqueville writes, “It is by agricultural labor that man appropriates the soil… . The Indians occupied America without possessing it… . They were there to wait merely until others came.” It was those others, Tocqueville realized, who would conduct the “experiment of the attempt to construct society on a new basis” and build “a great nation yet unborn.”11
In a way, the tragic outcome was predictable. America was settled by successive waves of bold, energetic, entrepreneurial people who were ready to mix their labor with land and build a new kind of civilization. The Indians were here first, but they were only sparsely and sporadically occupying the land. Consequently, many settlers regarded America as largely unoccupied, although the Indians surely disagreed with that perspective. Too bad the two groups could not amicably work out a way to share and benefit from this vast country. They couldn’t, I believe, because both groups continued to espouse at least elements of the conquest ethic. Neither wished to be taken from, but both were willing to take when they had the power and the inclination to do so.
Historically, it was a missed opportunity. When we study the history of white-Indian relations, we see that in the eighteenth century white attitudes toward the Indian were largely sympathetic. Indeed several leading figures of the founding period (Patrick Henry, John Marshall, Thomas Jefferson) proposed intermarriage between whites and Indians as a way to integrate the natives into the American mainstream. “What they thought impossible with respect to blacks,” political scientist Ralph Lerner writes, “was seen as highly desirable with respect to Indians.” Attitudes hardened, however, when the Indians sided with the British during the revolutionary war. During this period, Howard Zinn admits, “almost every important Indian nation fought on the side of the British.”12 After the revolution, naturally, the American leaders treated the tribes as hostile nations—which they were.
Today we think of Indians as tragic figures, woebegone on the reservation. But that’s not how Andrew Jackson—Indian fighter and later president—saw them. Jackson knew the Indians were canny, organized, and strong. In short order they had the same guns and equipment as the white man. The Indians knew the territory, they knew how to fight, and at first they resisted the settlers on even terms. We should not regard the Indians as passive weaklings. Many of them had the spirit of the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, who famously cried, “Let the white race perish… . Back where they came, on a trail of blood, they must be driven! … Burn their dwellings—destroy their stock—slay their wives and children that their very breed may perish. War now! War for ever!”13
This was not mere rhetoric—Indian massacres were a serious threat that settlers had to contend with. Some of this violence was unprovoked. Indians weren’t retaliating for injuries done them; they were engaging in simple banditry and theft. As late as the 1840s, a traveler heading north from Mexico commented on the regularity of Comanche raids over the previous months. “Upward of ten thousand heads of horses and mules have already been carried off, scarcely has a hacienda or rancho on the frontier been unvisited, and everywhere the people have been killed or captured.”14 It was only over time, with the advance of Western technology, that the raiding threat subsided and the military advantage shifted decisively in favor of the settlers.
So the settlers fought the Indians, and made deals with them, and signed treaties with them, and sometimes broke those treaties, and eventually the settlers got the land they wanted. The Indians were forced to retreat and settle for reparations and reservations. For many decades now, the U.S. government has tried to make restitution to Indians for broken promises and repudiated agreements. Unfortunately, the result has been to make large numbers of Indians dependent on the federal government. Many Indians today live on reservations without working, subsisting off the federal dole. I drove across the Pine Ridge reservation with Charmaine White Face. We saw the dilapidated trailers the Indians lived in. In every village, there were stray dogs barking loudly. I saw in the Indians, especially the young men, the same look of hopelessness that I used to see among slum-dwellers in Mumbai. “This is a terrible place to live,” White Face told me. I asked her if she trusted the federal government. She snorted. “Never! Look what they have done to our people. They promise to protect you, and then they destroy you.” I mentioned Obamacare. Her only response was, “Get ready.”
So when Indian leaders like White Face say that their people are being shafted, I know what she means. The Indians have gotten a bad deal. I’m not saying it is a good deal. At the same time, we should be clear about what the alternatives are. It makes no sense to say, “Give us back Manhattan.” We cannot give you back Manhattan because Manhattan was never yours. You sold a piece of land that was virtually worthless and on it others have built a great and glorious city. It is unjust to demand back what was never yours in the first place. Then you say, “Give us back the Black Hills.” You point out that there is uranium and other minerals in those hills, and now that land is worth a fortune. Once again, no Indian tribe knew how to mine uranium and no Indian tribe
knew what to do with uranium if they had it. Other Americans have added value to the Black Hills by figuring out how to tap its resources, and now the Indians want the land back so they can take advantage of what others have figured out how to do. The Indians were cheated when the treaty was broken and they deserve a fair restitution. If the courts simply return the Black Hills, however, they will be giving back far more than was ever taken. The same is true of the rest of America. The land now is not the same as the land then, and demanding a return of land which others have developed and whose value others have increased is not justice; it is stealing.
The best option available to the Indians, it seems, is to assimilate to the new civilization that the Europeans brought to America, and to take advantage of the wealth-creation opportunities that have so enriched the lives of wave upon wave of immigrants. This assimilation option has been available to the native Indians in a way that, for nearly two centuries, it was not available to blacks. Yet this is precisely the option that the native Indians rejected from the outset. Today, many Indians have assimilated, and some tribes have taken advantage of gaming rights and made huge fortunes through operating casinos. Still others live forlorn on the reservation, psychologically removed from the America that is around them. These are people who seem to prefer the joy of victimhood—and the exertions of claiming reparations of one sort or another—to the joy of entrepreneurial striving. They are doing this in the name of their ancestors, who were brave and resourceful people, and yet I sometimes wonder what their brave and resourceful ancestors would think if they could see the current state of the native Americans.
Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her Page 10
