DRAFT: It Is Our Business Here in America Not to Repeat Old World Society-of-Domination Mistakes

Musings on Noah Smith's allergic reactions to "land acknowledgements"...

Musings on Noah Smith's allergic reactions to "land acknowledgements"—but below the paywall because it is not yet ready for prime time, & I actually need to do my Day Job now…

San Franciscans, Amerindians, rights of conquest, justice, ethics, & America’s Errand Unto the Wilderness…

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I do not think that living in San Francisco is terribly good for Noah Smith’s mental equilibrium.

He probably needs to live in a place where, instead of being confronted with land acknowledgments, he is confronted with people who eagerly wish to see Netanyahu manage to expel all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza so that Israel can then be destroyed in the Gog-Magog War, the End Times begin, and all uncoverted Jews consigned to the Lake of Fire, which is the Second Death.

Instead, he lives in San Francisco, and is subjected to—Land Acknowledgements:

Noah Smith: No, you are not on indigenous land: ‘Why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough to be the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever? I have never seen a satisfactory answer to these questions. Nor… a satisfactory explanation of why ownership… should… collectively… [be] racial or ethnic groups…. The ethnic groups who now claim pieces of land as their own did not even exist when the first humans discovered or settled that land….

You can assign land ownership this way — it’s called an “ethnostate”…. The downsides of ethnonationalism have been exhaustively laid out in the decades since World War 2…. And yet these days I am subjected to a constant stream of ethnonationalist claims from progressives in the country of my birth… <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/no-you-are-not-on-indigenous-land>

I understand and also feel Noah Smith’s annoyance. When one is looking forward to being entertained or educated, thinking seriously for a moment about colonist-Amerindian interactions is a serious downer, against which one wants to kick. And there are lots of ways to kick against it:

Yes, 99%+ of colonist-Amerindian interactions were friendly win-win exchanges of commodities or of useful information about folkways, resources, and technologies.

Yes, the ten million Amerindian population today is twenty times what it was when the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Rock (and twice what it was back in 1500, before the plagues came boiling up from Mexico and from across the sea).

Yes, seen from today’s perspective, the first-order long-run effect of the Columbian Exchange on the genetic lineages present in 1500 in the territory that is now the United States has been the Columbian Exchange’s bringing to this side of the Atlantic ta dōra tēs Athēnās—the Gifts of Athene. Those Gifts of Athene in the form of humanity’s technologies are what make today’s Amerindians fabulously wealthy relative to their ancestors and predecessors of 1500.

But.

Yes, we know—we are, after all, none of us new-born and bloody from the womb—that humans clump together as communal groups rather than cosmopolitan societies and claim exclusive control over land for the group through on process and one process only. That process is through the horrible and awful human social practice of war. And, yes, we know that a self-identified group’s anger over an unjust war waged against its putative ancestors needs to matched by regret over the unjust wars waged by its putative ancestors if it is to be in any sense a demand for peace and justice, rather than simple anger that the warriors among their putative ancestors were not a lot better at the human social practice of war than they were.

I first ran into these issues in any depth as a teenager, while following the lawsuit Arthur Lazarus and Marvin Sonosky pursued from 1956 until their final victory in 1980. Then by 8-1 the U.S. Supreme Court held that the U.S.’s seizure of the Black Hills was illegal, and awarded the Lakota damages still in escrow that have now compounded to $1.3 billion.

In the footnotes there was a reference to the Cheyenne living in the Black Hills in the early 1700s, the Cheyenne selling horses to the Lakota and teaching them the fundamentals of riding around 1725, and a generation later the Lakota launching a 20-years war that succeeded in driving the Cheyenne out of the Black Hills. I never understood why the Cheyenne did not also have a case for damages, or at least a right to share in the damages awarded to the Lakota. It seemed to me that the case for the Lakota as a group for claiming damages from circumstances in which their military had not been effective enough would have been infinitely stronger were they willing to offer compensation in paying damages for circumstances in which their military had been all too effective. And yet that was not forthcoming.

The Lakota were not very special. Amerindian militaries frequently proved awesomely competent at waging unjust and just wars given their low population base. Other Amerindians begged the King of France for protection against the aggressive Mourning and Beaver Wars waged against them by the Haudenosaunee—Iroquois. The Comancheria was the terror of the Great Plains for a century. Perhaps the Lakota had a small edge: Tasunke Witko and Phizi and those they led taught General Custer and the U.S. 7th Cavalry a harsh lesson at the Little Bighorn River. But the campaigns of the 1785-94 Northwest Indian War bear names like “Harmer’s Defeat” and “St. Clair's Defeat” inflicted on the U.S. Army by those led by Weyapiersenwah and Mihšihkinaahkwa, before Mad Anthony Wayne—Black Snake—led his soldiers to end the war with their 1794 victory in the Battle of Fallen Timbers.

Bravery and forethought and organization and brotherhood are human virtues, even when used for bad ends. And in the bulk of not intra-Ameridian but Amerindian-U.S. Army conflicts, the Amerindians were using these virtues for good—just war—ends. And we should, can, and do honor these virtues. And it is appropriate to mourn that necessity enforced the same end here in the way that it always ends, with the swamping of the foragers and the low-technology slash-and-burn agriculturalists by the higher-density higher-technology agriculturalists, with even the steppe horse-riding populations succumbing to weight of numbers, once gunpowder weapons had neutralized what had before been the superior military technology and craft of the horse-archer.

Yes, there are lots of ways to kick against it, lots of them very valid.

But.

The United States of America is not just another communal group of non-cosmopolitan group of humans bound together for themselves and against others by blood and soil and the memory of past unjust wars waged by our putative ancestors. Or, at least, the United States is not supposed to be that.

The United States of America is an Errand Unto the Wilderness. It is people escaping from an overpopulated (relative to the technologies of the time) Old World of societies of domination into a New World of much greater resources per capita in which we can build a utopian society that, if we do not succeed, at least avoids the mistakes of the Old World. And one of those mistakes is to take glee in the unjust-war conquests of our putative ancestors, or even to shrug them off. When Thoukydides put the words “the strong do what they will, while the weak suffer what they must” into the mouths of his power-made Athenian conquerors of the Island of Melos, he did not intend for hi readers to enthusiastically endorse the sentiment.

Yes, the subtext of a land acknowledgment that does not include “and those here before us have forgotten and erased those who were here before them…” is just weird. It seems to be an attempt to say, with a straight face: our conquest title is valid because our putative ancestor-warriors were better at the human social practice of war than their predecessors, whom they erased and we have forgotten, while your conquest title is invalid.

Yes, there are lots of ways to kick against it, lots of them very valid.

But still.

The natural reaction to that subtext—to think “we are no worse than you, only stronger and more competent” is one of the Big Mistakes of Old World societies of domination that it is our purpose here in America not to repeat. Rather—if we are Americans engaged in our utopian Errand Unto the Wilderness—the appropriate reaction is: you people demanding land acknowledgements from your successors but not offering any to your predecessors may be no better than the standard Old World blood-and-soil anti-cosmopolitan human group; but we are better. For if we Americans are not better than that, what is the point of America? Noah Smith is crystal clear and correct about where the logic of demanding while not offering land acknowledgements would lead anyone with the power to act on that logic:

Noah Smith: No, you are not on indigenous land: ‘The morality of following the principles behind land acknowledgements… [leads to] “decolonization” of the land of the U.S… an act of ethnic cleansing surpassing even the previous conquests… dispossess[ing] 330 million people…. Here was Najma Sharif Alawi’s famous tweet right after the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel: “what did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers”… <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/no-you-are-not-on-indigenous-land>

And there is no time limit here. Najma Sharif Alawi wants the timer on Israeli settlement in the Middle East to finish counting down, while Binyamin Netanyahu wants the timer on the Roman and Arab conquests of the Hasmonean-Herodian kingdom to finish counting down, and since Old World thinking offers no off-ramp here, the odds are good that we will see nuclear explosions in downtown Damascus and Tel Aviv in the next half-century.

No. We Americans need to be better than that. Indeed, in a world of nuclear weapons all people need to be better than that. We Americans, however, have a much better chance than others of doing so.

Moreover.

Consider the Muwekma Ohlone.

Wikipedia reports that in 1928 the Sacramento Indian Agency decided that since it had not yet purchased land according to the terms of a 1906 law to give to the Muwekma Ohlone for their use, it would simply drop them from the list of federally recognized Amerindian tribes and bands—along with 133 other California Amerindian populations. Without any land, the Muwekma Ohlone more or less dissolved as a corporate entity. When they reformed—with 99% of their members having a sufficient paper trail of descent from pre-1928 members—the Bureau of Indian Affairs denied their petition for federal recognition on the grounds that it was “not identified as an Indian entity for a period of almost four decades after 1927”. Congress say the BIA can only recognize tribes that have been “‘substantially continuous'… since 1927.”

It seems to me like any 1500s Tudor Dynasty Chancellor, even Richard Rich, presiding over a Court of Equity would look at this situation and say: Wait a minute—the only reason the Muwekma Ohlone have not been “‘substantially continuous'… since 1927…” is the administrative malfeasance of the United States, and so the United States cannot thus escape from its obligations under the 1908 law.

But I am not surprised that the U.S. BIA and the federal court system does not have the wisdom of any Tudor Dynasty Chancellor,

So what can the Muwekme Ohlone do? They can organize as a 501(c)(3) corporation. Then they can try to get people to pay some attention to them? And isn’t pleading for a land acknowledgement one of the very few things they can do? And so shouldn’t we be charitable?

Isn’t it a little harsh for Noah to, from a land acknowledgment before a dance recital, to tiptoe toward an accusation that the Muwekma Ohlone and their fellows are actually WROSE THAN HILTER!!, genuinely seeking a world in which:

Noah Smith: No, you are not on indigenous land: ‘“Colonizers” could presumably avoid violent death or second-class citizenhood by voluntarily deporting themselves…. [That] leads very quickly to some very dark futures. Assigning each person a homeland based on their ethnic ancestry, and then declaring that that homeland is the only place they or their descendants can ever truly belong, would… be a global nightmare made real… <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/no-you-are-not-on-indigenous-land>

?

Actually, the Muwekma Ohlone could do something better than seek land acknowledgements. And they are doing so (and also doing some worse things, I think). One of them, I think, is <http://makamham.com>—mak-’amham/Café Ohlone, in the garden of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology on Bancroft just west of College in Berkeley. They plan to reopen after the rainy season in the spring of 2025, and are giving a talk at the Glen Park Library in San Francisco at 3 pm. on Saturday, December 14, 2024.

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But I need to close with one more observation on land acknowledgements as a communications strategy: I understand the impulse, but it is not working. Two of my touchstones these days are Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias. And my message for everybody who wants to win a sequence of free-and-fair elections here in America—even in California—is this: if your communications strategy alienates Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith, it ain’t working, and it is leading you down a path that ends with your chances of winning a sequence of free-and-fair elections equal to zero.

I do think this especially applies to you, LatinX people…

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References:

• Hogeland, William. 2017. Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the U.S. Army & the Invasion That Opened the West. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. <https://archive.org/details/autumnofblacksna0000hoge>.

• mak-’amham/Café Ohlone. 2024. “Café Ohlone: A love song to Ohlone culture”. <https://www.makamham.com/cafeohlone>.

• Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. n.d. "Land Acknowledgment." Accessed December 2, 2024. <https://www.muwekma.org/land-acknowledgment.html>.

• Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. n.d. "Muwekma Ohlone Tribal Land Acknowledgment for Cal State East Bay." Accessed December 2, 2024. <https://www.muwekma.org/pdf/Muwekma%20Ohlone%20Tribal%20Land%20Acknowledgment%20for%20Cal%20State%20East%20Bay_Public-2.pdf>.

• Smith, Noah. 2024. “No, you are not on indigenous land”. Noahpinion, December 1. <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/no-you-are-not-on-indigenous-land>.

• Stein, Shira. 2023. "A 'Pretendian' Claim. Territory Disputes. A Bay Area Tribe’s Bid for Federal Recognition Sparks Conflict." San Francisco Chronicle, June 12. <https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/tribe-recognition-bay-area-17843604.php>.

• Thoukydides. 1910 [-400]. The History of the Peloponnesian War. Trans. Richard Crawley. London: J.M. Dent; New York: E.P. Dutton. <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7142>.

• Wikipedia. 2023. "Iroquois." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified November 30, 2023. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois>.

• Wikipedia. 2023. "Black Hills." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified November 25, 2023. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hills>.

• Wikipedia. 2023. "Seizure of the Black Hills." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified June 12, 2023. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seizure_of_the_Black_Hills>.

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