Philosopher views

UNITED STATES CLAIMS TO NATIVE LANDS ARE SUSPECT

1. EVEN MARSHALL ADMI1TED US CLAIMS TO NATIVE LANDS WERE DUBIOUS

Ward Churchill, professor of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Associate Director of the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, THE STATE OF NATIVE AMERICA, edited by M. Annette mimes, 1992, p142. Such lofty-sounding (and legally correct) rhetoric was, of course, belied by the actualities of US performance. As Chief Justice Marshall pointed out rather early on, almost every white-held land title in the country--New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and parts of the Carolinas--would have been clouded had the standards of international law truly been applied. More, title to the pre-revolutionary acquisitions west of the 1763 demarcation line made by the new North American politico-economic elite would have been negated, along with all the thousands of grants of land in that region bestowed by Congress upon those who had fought against the Crown. Not coincidental to Marshall’s concern in the matter was the fact that he and his father had each received 10,000 acre grants of such land in what is now West Virginia. Obviously, a country that had been founded largely on the basis of a lust to possess native lands was not about to relinquish its pretensions to ownership of them, no matter what the law said. Moreover, the balance of military power between Indians and whites east of the Mississippi River began to change rapidly in favor of the latter during the post-revolutionary period. It was becoming technically possible for the US simply to seize native lands at will.
2. US MANIPULATED COURT CASES TO SUBVERT INTERNATIONAL LAW

Ward Churchill, professor of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Associate Director of the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, THE STATE OF NATIVE AMERICA, edited by M. Annette Jaimes, 1992, p 142. Still, the requirements of international diplomacy dictated that things seem otherwise. Marshall’s singular task, then, was to forge a juridical doctrine that preserved the image of enlightened US furtherance of accepted international legality in its relations with Indians on the one hand, while accommodating patterns of illegally aggressive federal expropriations of Indian land on the other. This he did in opinions rendered in a series of cases, delineated in Table: Key Indian Laws and Cases at the front of this volume, beginning with Fletcher v. Peck (1810) and extending through Johnson v. McIntosh (1822) to Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832). By the end of this sequence of decisions, Marshall had completely inverted international law, custom and convention, finding that the Doctrine of Discovery imparted preeminent title over North America to Europeans--the mantle of which implicitly passed to the US when England quit-claimed its thirteen dissident Atlantic colonies--mainly because Indian-held lands were effectively “vacant” when Europeans found them. The chief justice was forced to coin a whole new politico-legal expression--that of domestic, dependent nations--to encompass the unprecedented status, neither fish nor fowl, he needed native people to occupy.

Ward Churchill, professor of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Associate Director of the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, STRUGGLE FOR THE LAND, 1993, page 7-8.

As “Perversions of Justice” demonstrates, the philosophical/legalistic rationalization of such circumstances is not new. Rather, the present situation is simply the outgrowth of a juridical doctrine which has been evolving in the U.S. since before the very earliest moments of the republic. This ideology of expansionism--popularly known as “Manifest Destiny”--has ongoing direct impacts upon the indigenous peoples of North America. The ideology also supported philosophical developments elsewhere. A salient example is Adolf Hitler’s concept of lebensraumpolitik (“politics of living space”). The ideology stipulated that Germans were innately entitled, by virtue of an imagined racial and cultural superiority, to land belonging to others. This rendered Germany morally free in its own mind to take such lands through the aggressive use of military force.

GENOCIDE OF NATIVE AMERICANS STILL OCCURS TODAY

1. THE MOTIVE FOR GENOCIDE STILL EXISTS TODAY

Ward Churchill, professor of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Associate Director of the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, STRUGGLE FOR THE LAND, 1993, page 7.

The history of 500 years of warfare directed against the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas is gradually coming to light. Even those who acknowledge the genocidal nature of European and Euroamerican policies regarding American Indians, however, tend to see them as the extremes of a different era: the brutality of the Conquistadors or the massacres permeating the saga of the ‘Winning of the West.” The underlying motivation prompting the genocide of Native Americans, the lust for their territories and the resources within them, is typically hidden behind a rhetoric extolling the “settlement” of essentially vacant and “undiscovered” lands. To admit otherwise risks revealing that the past motive for genocide exists as much today, and in some ways more so.

Ward Churchill, professor of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Associate Director of the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, STRUGGLE FOR THE LAND, 1993, page 7.

This volume of the series on Genocide and Resistance illustrates through a sequence of case studies that the destruction of indigenous peoples through the expropriation and/or destruction of their land bases is very much an ongoing phenomenon in both the United States and Canada. The processes are not simply genocidal; they are increasingly ecocidal in their implications.’ Not only the people of the land are being destroyed, but, more and more, the land itself. The nature of native resistance to the continuing onslaught of the invading industrial culture is shaped accordingly. It is a resistance forged in the crucible of a struggle for survival.
3. EVEN AFTER REDUCING NATIVE POPULATION BY 98%, GENOCIDE CONTINUES

Ward Churchill, professor of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Associate Director of the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, INDIANS ARE US?, 1994, page 76-77.

By 1900, the national project of “clearing” Native Americans from their land and replacing them with “superior” Anglo-American settlers was complete. The indigenous population had been reduced by as much as 98 percent. Approximately 97.5% of their original territory had “passed” to the invaders. The survivors were concentrated, out of sight and out of mind of the public, on scattered “reservations,” all of them under self-assigned ‘plenary” (full) power of the federal government. There was, of course, no tribunal comparable to that at Nuremberg passing judgment on those who had created such circumstances in North America. No US official or private citizen was ever imprisoned--never mind hanged--for implementing or propagandizing what had been done. Nor had the process of genocide against Indians been completed. Instead, it merely changed form. Between the 1 880s and the 1980s, more than half of all American Indian children were coercively transferred from their own families, communities and cultures to those of the conquering society. This was done through compulsory attendance at remote boarding schools, often hundreds of miles from their homes. Native children were kept for years and systematically “deculturated”: indoctrinated to think and act in the manner of the Euroamericans rather than as Indians.