Living in the U.S., but not on land stolen from the Native Americans

by philg

Today is the anniversary of the Royal Proclamation of 1763, in which King George III told the white settlers in the colonies that they couldn’t steal any more land from the Native Americans. Our Founding Fathers owned a lot of land to the west of the Proclamation Line and, therefore, had a huge financial incentive to secede from Great Britain.

A righteous American will typically admit that the land he/she/ze/they is using was stolen. Here’s an example from the principal of the Lincoln, Maskachusetts 5-8 school:

This morning we had an all school meeting. I began with a land acknowledgement that we are sitting on land that belonged to the Wampanoag Nation and that was forcibly taken.

Note that she does not offer to give the land back to the Wampanoags, who are alive and kicking, and then pay them rent for its continued use. The “land acknowledgement” is sufficient.

What if empty words aren’t sufficient? Where can a person live in the modern United States without being on land that was stolen? South Florida! According The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, the Native Americans never lived in most of South Florida for the simple reason that most of South Florida was a “river of grass” as Marjory Stoneman Douglas put it. Not even a Native American is in sufficient harmony with Nature to live in the middle of a river. When the Spanish arrived, there were some Calusa living on the coast of Southwest Florida, but they hadn’t figured out how to drain the swamp and build condos on it. The Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Palm Beach megalopolis is nearly all on “reclaimed” land. What about the Seminoles?

IN MODERN SOUTH FLORIDA, where just about everyone comes from somewhere else, it turns out that even the Native Americans are out-of-state transplants. Today, the Seminole Indians and their Miccosukee relatives are known as the people of the Everglades. But they didn’t start out anywhere near there. They were driven there. Seminoles began streaming into north Florida from Georgia and Alabama during the eighteenth century, just as the Calusa were dying out. They had little in common with the Calusa. They were known as cimarrones—“breakaways,” or “wild ones”—because most of them split off from the Creek Confederation, and they retained their Creek traditions, worshipping the Breathmaker at annual Green Corn harvest ceremonies. They were farmers and traders as well as hunters and fishermen; they were also some of America’s first cowboys. They visited the Everglades to hunt, but by 1800, their permanent villages only stretched as far south as Tampa Bay. When a Seminole chief issued his famous vow to remain in Florida—“Here our navel strings were first cut, and the blood from them sunk into the earth, and made the country dear to us”—he meant north Florida.

So… any American who is sincere about not wanting to be implicated in the great theft of land from the Native Americans by European migrants (this should not be confused with the scientifically disproved Great Replacement) should join us here in Palm Beach County! (Or, if not as boring as we are, in Miami)

Related:

14 thoughts on “Living in the U.S., but not on land stolen from the Native Americans”

  1. Thought there would be a blog post about Nicole Mann being the 1st space station commander who is female, 1/1000 native, & off white skin color.

  2. @philg can not shake his years as Massachusetts high lobe cone-head and kips stigmatizing Native Americans as if they could not travel to South Florida (most Indian tribes were mobile and did not have notion of continuous private property) and thus considered rightful owner on what they traveled.
    What about 3 Seminole – US wars? Groups of hundreds of Seminoles were fighting IS Army and hiding in Everglades to fight against common-core curriculum that US Gov tried to force on their children (circa 19th century) I think that Everglades are far south enough to be considered Southern Florida.
    And whatever tribe was there before was defeated by the Spanish of course, (who also helped US War for Independence by attacking British is the south).
    https://www.legendsofamerica.com/seminole-wars/
    https://www.legendsofamerica.com/na-seminole/
    Feel free to contribute: https://www.semtribe.com/stof

  3. The Pilgrims were charged with paying for land long before 1763.
    Natives who had been screwed over by a colonist could appeal and receive redress.

    I went to high school in the land of the Wampanoags and studied this history through the time of King Phillip’s War (a century before 1763) and on to the colonists secession from Great Britain.

    Some Colonists and Natives did not get along. There was friction.

    Most of this history told today is horse manure.

    • Yes, but native tribes did not have notion of financial transaction and permanent property transfer separate from might and military power, something that was ironed out in the old world at least over 4,500 years ago. So they often took sold possessions back, came armed to pilgrim’s courts when summoned and sometimes scalped new owners.

    • From the Wikipedia article you cite: “The Tequesta situated their towns and camps at the mouths of rivers and streams, on inlets from the Atlantic Ocean to inland waters, and on barrier islands and keys.”

      That’s about 1% of Palm Beach County, the rest of which was a “river of grass” as MSD put it or a “swamp”. The typical current house or apartment building lot was never previously the site of a Native American settlement.

      (If you have $25 million to spend on a house on a ridge near the ocean, you might find yourself needing a land acknowledgement on the mantle. A peasant in a developer-built community won’t have this issue.)

    • What about undeveloped land today? There are still places in the U.S. that are “seas of grass”. By your logic shouldn’t those sites be freely available for anyone who wants to develop them?

    • It is a moot question because it is no longer legal to drain swamps in the US. But, as a theoretical matter, if a vast swamp were to be drained and then settled by white devils they would still be white devils but they wouldn’t be guilty of having stolen Native American land.

  5. They would be guilty of having stolen the land from whoever previously claimed it. If it is necessary to develop property in order to retain a claim on it, that principle should apply now as well as then, no?

    There is surely some property in the U.S. today that is not wetlands or in some other protected category but is only used for hunting or fishing, or otherwise mostly undisturbed. In which case, it should be up for grabs, no?

Comments are closed.