American Indian Lands Were Stolen--From Other Indians

If you go to "Native Land Digital," you will see a map of North America showing the lands claimed by indigenous peoples.  If you live in North America, you can locate your street address and identify the native American tribe that claims the land on which you reside.  If this makes you feel guilty, because you live on land that was stolen from indigenous people by European settler colonists, you might be receptive to the argument of postcolonial theorists who say that justice requires returning all of this land to its original indigenous owners.

But notice what is implicitly assumed in this map of "native land."  It is assumed that when the first European settlers arrived in the New World after Columbus's first contact in 1492, the boundaries for these native land claims had already been drawn up by the American Indians, and then the European settlers started to steal this land from the Indians.  And over the next 500 years, the Europeans stole almost all of that land in North America.

And yet as soon as you look into the history of the Native American tribes both before and after 1492, you realize that there is no historical truth to any of that.  The territorial boundaries between tribes were never fixed for very long because the tribes were often at war with one another, and when the losing tribes were conquered, they could lose their land to the conquerors. 

In his book The Wild Frontier: Atrocities During the American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee (2000), William Osborn has an Appendix with a list of the "Intertribal Indian Wars" from the 1500s to the 1800s in the area that is now the continental United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  His list includes over 250 intertribal Indian wars for which there is some historical documentation. 

In many of these wars, land previously claimed by one tribe was conquered by another tribe.  For example, as I have indicated in a previous post, French explorers of Canada found that the four confederated Iroquoian-speaking tribes they called the Huron--who called themselves the Wendat--lived in settlements scattered across a peninsula located between Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe northwest of Lake Ontario.  Some of these settlements had as many as 2,000 people.  The total population for about twenty settlements was about 30,000.  The larger settlements were surrounded by palisades to protect them from attack, because the Huron Confederacy was often at war with the Iroquois Confederacy of five tribes settled south of Lake Ontario.  Then in 1649, the Huron were devastated by an invasion of Iroquois warriors fighting with firearms acquired from trading with the Dutch colonists.  Those of the Huron who survived were forced to abandon their villages and leave their native territory.

So, if today you happen to own some land around the southern shore of Georgian Bay, the Native Land Digital map will tell you that your land was stolen by European settlers from the Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee) Confederacy.  But this doesn't tell you that the Iroquois had stolen it from the Huron in 1649.

Similarly, when Ben & Jerry's public relations division (on July 4, 2023) tweeted that Mount Rushmore should be given back to the Lakota Sioux Indians, as the first step towards returning all of the U.S. to its indigenous owners, Jeff Fynn-Paul pointed out the absurdity of such thinking in the light of the migratory history of the Sioux.  When European explorers first recorded the life of the Sioux in the mid-1600s, they were living around Lake Superior--a thousand miles east of the Black Hills.  They were forced to move westward when they were attacked by the Ojibwe and other indigenous tribes.  They then had to steal land from tribes such as the Kiowa who already occupied South Dakota.  Such intertribal warfare over land was part of the way of life of the indigenous tribes.

Moreover, as Fynn-Paul indicates. not only did the tribes steal land from one another, they also enslaved those individuals whom they captured in war.

In his book Not Stolen, Fynn-Paul has pointed to the fundamental mistake in all of this rhetoric of "settler colonialism"--the romantic Marxist myth of history as a continual conflict between the evil people who are the oppressors and the good people who are the innocent victims of oppression.   Near the opening of the Communist Manifesto, Marx declared:

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.  Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden now open fight."

In postcolonial theory, this view of history as a Manichaean battle between good and evil becomes the conflict between the wicked European colonizers who are the vicious oppressors and the virtuous indigenous people who are the innocent oppressed. To believe this, one must ignore the complexity of human history where real human beings act from mixed motives and fall into tragic conflicts where neither side in the conflict is purely good or purely evil.