https://hexbear.net/comment/4510892

  • 420blazeit69 [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    10 months ago

    I'm saying many indigenous people did have land ownership as part of their societies, even if the specifics of that concept differed from European ideas about land ownership. The idea that European settlers introduced the idea that one could have property rights in land is ahistorical, egregiously so depending on the indigenous society you're looking at.

    simply arguing for the coherence of a perspective that some aboriginal and Native American nations held

    I agree individual, exclusive ownership of land in the European sense was pretty foreign to plenty of aboriginal Australians and indigenous North Americans, but I think a lot of these societies had ideas of collective land overship (maybe extending only to using the land or taking its fruits) that Europeans could have recognized had they had any incentive to. We know there were conflicts between various indigenous societies, we know the Americas were much more densely populated before the initial wave of European diseases hit (I'd imagine Australia was the same), we know more people means less abundance for all, and we know groups fought over land all over the world, including the Western Hemisphere and East Asia. This all points to ideas about at least collective ownership of property being common, or at least not foreign.

    It also strikes me as suspicious that the idea indigenous people had a "live and let live" approach to land is strongest in the places where the eradication of indigenous people was most thorough (North America, Australia, and Argentina come to mind). We know justifying the theft of indigenous land was a conscious part of colonial projects, and "they didn't really own it, they just lived there for a little" is one attempt at justification.