What you have encountered is the John Locke concept of wasteland. Stolen land in the first place under "squatters rights", that were then undocumented and basically unused. Once they did it to your people, they now, like Hitler and the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals etc., have turned on their own and began to devour their own lower class or "other" citizens.
Our people are perfectly literate and have been for generations. We not only write in English but in Cherokee as well. (Even though the Cherokee language and religion was banned when I was in school) Indians have had newspapers for almost two hundred years. They have been periodically banned because being written in Cherokee the dominant culture couldn't read them and figured things were being discussed behind their backs. They were correct. I was amazed when I met illiterate non-Indian Celtic people in Nova Scotia. Why did these Celtic people give up their language for English? Even though Indians had big college degrees beginning in the 1820s and were literate in English before that, we were still declared unfit and needed guardians when we refused to grant mineral rights to oil and mining companies. (We had the Cherokee Phoenix National Cherokee language Newspaper in the 1820s.) In the 1820s gold was discovered on Cherokee land that ended in a death march and as many people's dying as died in the World Trade Center from a much smaller population base, splitting the Cherokee people, it seems, forever. At the turn of the 20th century oil and minerals were "discovered" on Indian land and the dominant society wrote bad contracts (that were then ignored even for the little royalties they gave) and they gave the non-Indian guardians big salaries for the jobs, even land with mineral rights. (I understand these same deals are happening in the oil sands in Canada.) Today the land despoiled has been returned to the original owners to fix. That's us. The capitalist companies have destroyed a whole Appalachian Celtic, in some cases illiterate, society in West Virginia and leveled the Mountains as well. So Locke is turned on his head. Great forest land that was "waste" is now truly "waste" and good for nothing. We call it witchcraft. Only an evil witch would conceive of such a system. The Pueblo MacArthur Genius Grant writer Leslie Marmon Silko has written extensively about the "witchery" involved in this. Surprisingly to the witches, the Quapaw are happy to have their land back. Non-Indians would have sued the government for replacement land but the Quapaw consider the land to be hurt. The earth mother to be damaged and willingly or not themselves to be complicit in the damage. As a result they want to work to heal the land and bring the mother into balance even though it may take hundreds of years. I am proud to have been a part of and helped such a magnificent people with such morals. REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 2010 3:26 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Futurework] Going Viral: FW: [p2p-research] Empoweringthe Empowered or Public Data for Everyone > A few questions... > 1. has the case you point to below been documented anywhere? Not to my knowledge. > 2. did the gentleman in question look for help from any source > (apart from a lawyer)? If so, what happened? He received notice by mail of a claim. He is illiterate. His wife (recently deceased) was minimally literate. They didn't fully understand the purport of the notice but passed it to a slightly more literate relative who was to look into it somehow. The looking into seems never to have happened. As a consequence, the claim was uncontested. When a third party, contracted verbally by my neighbor, began to cut timber on the land, he was accused of theft by the (newly legal) owner. At that point the third party (literate) and the neighbor consulted a lawyer who reported that the claim to title to a portion of my neighbor's land had been uncontested and so was now, under the new GIS legislation, guaranteed by the Crown to the predator claimant. > 3. what kind of help might have been useful for him do you think and > how could that help have been made available in your community or in > a way that he could easily access... Well, in rural Nova Scotia, there are a lot of older people who are functionally or totally illiterate. They (as well as many quite literate older people) tend to depend on extended family networks for support. This tends to be almost orthogonal to the established legal conventions of documentary notification, statutory benchmarks and the like. When I bought a piece of land 35 years ago, the vendor and another, older guy (born about 1900) walked the boundary with me through dense bush, pointing out landmarks. That old Clayton said "This is the boundary that my father and I knew in 1913 when we lived on this land" was my guarantee. Certified by living memory of a relative of the vendor. Ray should recognize this as how things are done. So: lets say that you can't get title to property the ownership of which you're contesting until an advocate has verified by personal, face to face conversation that the affected parties understand what's going on. The claimant has to pay for that but cannot approach or influence the advocate. There is no digital way to do this. In today's world, I'm not sure there is *any* way to do it. Most educated people barely realize that people such as my neighbor exist and have never met one. The predator in this case had spent many hours amassing a collection of documents, essentially the corpus of a detailed title search, from which it was possible to infer that an error had been made (or possibly that a scam had been perpetrated) 90 or 100 years ago such that a parcel woodland acreage had more or less vanished, becoming part of another, or possibly two other, parcels. No question of ownership had arisen since that time. That's vague enough that it could have been contested, even though the "old guys" who could have vouched for it 40 years ago were now dead. But an illiterate guy, however skilled a horseman and woodsman, would need a lot of verbal discussion without big words or legal jargon to get it. He'd want to consult relatives who might know the story gramps told to uncle George that related to the situation. He might have to go out in the woods and look at the lay of the relevant land. The other option, of course, is for 4 young guys to take the predator out behind the barn and beat the shit out of him with pick axe handles. That's not a preferred methodology here in Lunenburg County although if I worked at it and hung around in places that I usually avoid, I think I might find some volunteers. - Mike -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
