Hi, Dan, Well, I wasn't going to get into it, and I know your post is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but when the First Nations arrived here (over the ice bridge of the Bering Strait?), they didn't displace anyone. If anyone was here, they co-existed.
When Europeans came here, they displaced the First Nations. They forced illegal treaties on them, and then broke the treaties. The treaties themselves should be unenforceable, because the parties were talking apples and oranges. The First Nations had no concept of land ownership. They were stewards of the land, sharing it with "nature". What they were "agreeing" to was to allow the Europeans to share the land with them. They didn't agree to "give" or "sell" the land to the newcomers. To give the Europeans the benefit of the doubt, they may have thought they were "buying" or "taking" the land, in terms of ownership. But the parties weren't "ad idem", or of the same mind (to use a legal term - but hey, they're legal documents). They are therefore invalid. These aren't my ideas, but those of several respected legal scholars. Unfortunately, history makes any form of redress very difficult, in terms of giving back land. But, there can and should be some form of monetary compensation, IMHO. ciao, frank Dan Scott wrote: > On Sunday, December 8, 2002, at 10:52 AM, Ken Archer wrote: > > > Do you know what the Indians called North America before the white man > > arrived? > > > > Ours! > > > > But they're immigrants too. Someone or something else will displace us > eventually. Hopefully Pentaxians still. :-) > > Dan Scott -- "The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true." -J. Robert Oppenheimer
