> Date sent: Tue, 10 Feb 1998 15:12:25 EST
> Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: primitive communism
> In a message dated 98-02-09 14:48:09 EST, you write:
>
> << s this really going to happen? I find it nearly impossible to believe that
> a capitalist government would ever sign over significant amounts of land to
> aboriginals, no matter how solid their claim. Am I being too cynical?
>
> Doug
> >>
>
> According to the NYTimes (I think this was last Thursday (2/5/98) or Friday),
> the Canadian courts have ruled that the oral histories of canadian tribes can
> be used as evidence of ownership of the land. If this holds up in higher
> courts -- this could mean different tribes gaining some of the most
> significant winnings of land rights since Columbus landed in the Bahamas.
>
> maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Response:
It is all very dialectical. As the capitalist system and its
defining/core/inner contradictions ripen, the imperatives of
accumulation cause either selective/situational abrogation (and
therefore de-legitimation) of the "sacred" and/or raw naked hypocrisy
and de-legitimized brute power. The "sacred" principles, laws,
rights, privileges, bases of legitimacy, myths, power relations etc
of "private property" indict/condemn the very private property they
protect, and, "private property" (e.g. the porn shop next to the
grade school) in turn indicts/condemns the sacred principles etc.
If oral histories are declared illegitimate, how much of non-Indian
property becomes de-legitimized?; how much of non-Indian history
becomes de-legitimized?; how many place-names of non-Indian
territories become suspect?
Suppose one finds his/her neighbors being slaughtered all around him
or her and those doing the slaughter announce that person is next.
Suppose that person flees and his/her house is occupied and all
papers or oral/written records of original occupancy are destroyed,
suppose the occupier decides to sell the house, even under the most
sacred of bourgeois principles and laws, if the true history of
occupancy can be discovered and proved, the new owner of the house
has no more claim than the owner who stole the house in order to sell
it; it must revert back to the first owner who can show acquisition
through legal means--that is bourgeois law.
So how to get around the contradiction? Then we have the myths and
revisions of history as one kind of attempt to re-write the history
of acquisition in order to ratify the "givens" of neoclassical theory
and the established order--"given" distributions of property
ownership/control, wealth and incomes, information and access to
information, laws and access to legal assistance etc: 1) Indians may
have had an idea of territory in a broad sense but did not
"continuously occupy" particular turf; 2) Indians did not really
"improve" and land they occupied; 3) Indians were primitive
communalists who had no concept of "private property" and "therefore"
no "private property" was looted from them; 4) If "private property"
was indeed looted, reparations have been paid/are being paid in
accordance with the demands of the "legitimate representatives" of
the Nations and Tribes and therefore the books are clean; 5) etc.
Jim Craven
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