The Putrid Myth of Stolen Land

The Left is a nest of demons and it must be cleared out.

link to book

Absurdistan has to take a victory lap here - celebrate the wins! The Securities and Exchange Commission has abandoned the idea of monetizing America’s National Parks and public lands and selling them to whoever wanted a piece, leaving outfits elected by hedge funds to manage ‘biological diversity’, ‘health’, safety and access. Hedge funds are pirates, the least likely to care about those lands, and who knows how they would broker them off once public attention fades. To America’s worst enemies, who would love to screw the most envied country that has ever existed, is my guess. Libertarians R Us!

Add this to the killing of an equally stupid, ‘free-money-for-rich people’ scam of burying carbon from the Dakota oil fields, unloosing torrents of public money for investors, and, well, it feels good. Let me hasten to say that all I did was write about these campaigns, here and here but my pieces were used by leaders fighting the scourge, to explain to legislators, governors, senators etc., just how mad these schemes were. Thousands of people doorstepped, legal funds were put together, legislators were swarmed, and senators were visited repeatedly. This was a collective effort.

See? Step up and things change. Without you, nothing will. Yes, you. Neither effort is dead dead, just dead until they reckon they can try again.

The left poisons everything. They start with something somewhat plausible, land protection, climate mitigation and it invariably ends up in chaos and destruction, and always always rich people getting richer off poor people. Green energy is the biggest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich since medieval enclosures.

In the past month, it became clear scholarship has been turned into a kindergarten of thieves and liars. You cannot believe anything. As a prominent business podcaster said this week, ‘we have to assume going forward that all doctoral theses are plagiarized. From here on in, you have to prove it isn’t’. Nor can you duplicate studies. They are all fantasies created by activists. Everything coming out of a lab that feeds government policy is plain untruth meant to feather the nest of whatever activist group funded the study. Where I live they tried to stop tree cutting based on a lie so flagrant it could be disproved by Wikipedia’s first sentence on the supposedly endangered tree.

We live in Absurdistan. Definitionally.

Climate science is a flat-out lie. It may be something to address, but the science has been propagandized to the point where every thinking person has to consider it a lie. Every single country at COP 28 used the most extreme scenario as certain and based their planning on it. The IPCC considers the likelihood of the most extreme scenario RCP8.5 at 5%, not 100%. Hundreds of billions of dollars will be thrown away chasing that lie.

Even in 2018, the liklihood of RCP8.5 was not even 5%, but 0%, since carbon emissions were dropping.

Judith Curry

I won’t even touch the madness of gender equity; castrated children are enough to sicken anyone sane. Wherever you look, climate science, black studies, biology, it is all polluted, reason and facts thrown out the window, the ‘winners’ then stealing ideas, obfuscating science, and trampling the future, destroying a hard-won culture. And there are actual Greek furies protecting this garbage. As a friend said recently the cohort of activist 20-30 year olds are the most vicious, poisonous, people on the planet. They will accuse you of anything, and lie the entire time. Taking anyone with an unapproved opinion down is the apex of achievement, especially if your attack is based on a lie.

Out where I live, an entire regional newspaper chain is going under despite million dollar subsidies. Local newspapers are all polluted with left-wing thinking, I can’t even pick one up, they are so poisonous. I see it on the rack, my eyes bounce off. Most readers agree, so they are dying. The media isn’t dying because of digital and whatever, it’s dying because it was taken over by the left, which daily shoots out spigots of lying, slanderous poison that ruin our lives. Our economy isn’t facing global headwinds or whatever the damned excuse the morons on television are using now, it’s dying because it is being smothered by the left. Where I live could be a sparkling constellation of beauty and pleasure, instead it is a grim Soviet prison, filled with old people dying faster every year. And run by an equally grim, punitive, spendthrift, Marxist that everyone hates. If you protest, your life turns to mud, you are slandered in the “press”, and no one will talk to you. If you have kids in school, well good luck getting a college recommendation letter for your bright kid, from a teacher. Citizens are silenced.

We can’t grow because of all the regulations placed upon us. Every year a new damned cause, mitigating carbon emissions in the most treed jurisdiction in the world has doubled, even tripled the cost of housing in the past ten years. There are so many people on the streets, they are being offered early state-sponsored death. Fentanyl is now given to kids in schools, and no one is allowed to tell their parents.

And of course Indians. The Land Back movement is building because no one contests it. What it means is that Indians (read the hard left) are demanding the “return” of coastal property worth tens, if not hundreds of millions, free of charge. Because: stolen.

Racism is the most poisonous accusation that anyone can throw at an enemy and the left uses it liberally. Its ruthless conscienceless exploitation of race has destroyed the black community, ruined Indian lives, turned promise into misery and poverty. No one goes near an Indian these days. Too freaking dangerous, nothing to talk about, no communal interests, unless of course you are viciously using them for political power. Of the thousands of people I know, fewer than five have been to a reserve or reservation, eaten in an Indian house, been invited to sit in council. Why? They are the worst places in the civilized world. It’s like going into a desperate town in Soviet Russia. Grinding poverty, terrible roads, no vegetables, and hopelessness. I have Indian friends with fantastic ideas that they won’t get off the ground in a thousand years. This is a direct result of the left’s activity, of its ruthless use of native Americans.

It didn’t used to be like that. Jamie’s and my family holds the bloodlines of four indigenous tribes. His eldest son has Metis status, and quite separately, his great grandmother was a full-blood Assiniboine. In the late 1700’s, one of my ancestors married into Joseph Brant’s Mohawk family, and my great grandmother’s cousin was the famous Mohawk poet, Pauline Johnson. My great-aunt married into the Blackfoot. Pauline died of breast cancer in her 50’s plus she was broke. My great grandmother and her friends nursed her through her illness, buried her and erected a statue to her in Vancouver’s glorious Stanley Park. Does all that sound racist to you? Indians, 100 years ago, were part of our world. They walked in and out of our houses. We enjoyed their presence, we had Indian friends, partners, family. Now they are immured in reserve-prisons, created by the worst political operators on earth. Why? The foul stinking poison of the left. Wherever they win, they inflict misery, poverty and death.

I don’t know whether you know Indians, been on their reserves in their houses, or have sat in council. but they are the sweetest people I’ve met, kind, empathic, funny as hell and sharp with it. If I were them, I suppose I’d sign onto the Marxist grift, it’s possible. But one thin wedge in and your entire world goes to shit. This was their choice: Anglo-Saxon-Protestant-discipline or Marxist grift. Whatever demagogue in the tribe who muscled his or her way to power and chose Marxist grift determined their present. I know many indigenous trapped by these demagogues.

It’s polluted our culture. Want to start a business? There’s the climate grift, the conservation grift, the water shortage grift, the low-cost housing that-is-never-built grift and lastly the Indian grift. The Indians here have to approve your land use. If you say anything against any of this, you cannot build, you cannot operate, you cannot make money. Even if you want to “give back” and develop a low-cost housing neighborhood. Twenty years later you are still paying off some damned interest group, stood up by stupid upper-middle-class women who fund the left. Barbra Streisand, for example, has destroyed more hope, more lives than any colonial master. She and her stupid stupid friends who yachted up in the Pacific North West in the 80’s, saw its beauty and decided to “protect” it, have, through the foul stink of the anonymously funded Tides Foundation, immured us in amber, leaving entire neighborhoods drugged and miserable, with no hope.

You probably don’t live in a jurisdiction where you pay attention to civic politics or development permits. But I guaran-damn-tee you that every idea someone has is being killed today, right now, by your bureaucracy. The reason your town or county stumbles along, everything ugly and decaying, crappy buildings, roads broken, people living on the streets, drug or alcohol addiction in every family, is because our bureaucracy is trying to bust us back to the stone age, using climate, Indians and social justice.

Where I live, the Indian grift is pretty far advanced, but it is coming to where you are, and it will destroy every local economy it invades. It is all based on the Stolen Land premise.

Therefore, I am going to list twenty-five flagrant lies about Stolen Land. Every time some grubby 20 year old tells you we have stolen the land of indigenous Americans, use this. Keep it. Send it around. Read it out in town meetings.

Not Stolen, the Truth About European Colonialism in the New World, by Jeff Flynn-Paul, out of Adam Bellow’s stable at Post Hill Press, methodically puts in the ground , every stupid ahistorical wrong assertion of every creepy little leftist liar on the planet.

Let’s review, for the peace of my mind and yours, the facts of history, established fact, by actual math and reason and the writing and opinions of our racist genocidal maniac founders.

A note, Flynn-Paul, like most modern historians de-emphasizes the pervasive daily influence of Christianity, as practiced by everyone whose writing follows. Finally, once you enter the real world as an actual adult with adult responsibilities, you no longer wonder at the cruelty of man, meaning all men and all women, indigenous and not. We can be competitive, greedy, lust-filled, cruel idiots and a full 10% of us are without compassion or conscience. Human life is eternally a battle to stop that ten percent from laying waste to everything good. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were no different. The New World attracted some of the most primitive adventurers you can imagine, while attracting the bravest ‘saints’ of the Great Commission. Everyone who lived then, spent a good deal of time reeling from the massacres, exploitation, and miseries the strong inflicted on the weak. I have a diary entry from ancestors on the frontier in Pennsylvania, their house surrounded in the night by murderous Indians, the war cries, husband and men off to some task, women and children convinced they were about to die, after torture only Indians were capable of imagining. I have other diary entries from other family members, from the 18th C, that are so filled with the praise and love of the “red man”, they are embarrassing in their sentimentality. And these were prominent people, not “activists”. All through the writings of all the founders is to be found affection and respect for the indigenous. I highlight some here but you have to buy the book. It will wash through your mind leaving sanity in its wake.

Flynn-Paul has aggregated many pages of detailed endnotes. I strongly recommend buying the book and going through his impressive research. All of the following points are taken from his work and many are couched in his words.

1. Columbus writing to Isabella: “Your Highnesses may believe that there is no better nor gentler people in the world. Your highnesses ought to rejoice that they will soon become Christians, and that they will be taught the good customs of your kingdom. A better race there cannot be, and both the people and the lands are in such quantity that I know not how to write it…. I repeat that the things and the great villages of this island of Española, which they call Bohio, are wonderful. All here have a loving manner and gentle speech, unlike the others, who seem to be menacing when they speak. Both men and women are of good stature. It is true that they all paint [themselves…...”

2. Rather than advocating irredeemable racial inferiority Columbus advocated their admission into European society as spiritual, racial and social equals….later on Isabella and her heirs ennobled many Indian families, placing them on an equal footing with their aristocracy. Equally my cousin, Pauline Johnson was celebrated by and entertained the English court.

3. The idea of Columbus as a mass murderer originated from the polemical writings of a Friar de las Casas, whose work On the Destruction of the Indies, paid off with a passage of the New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians in 1542. Forced labor was replaced by wage labour in New Spain. In fact, De Las Casas was a great admirer of Columbus, seeing him as a protector of the Indians.

4. The idea of three million at first contact in Hispaniola is absurd; their method of farming so primitive that everyone realistic believes the population was more like 200,000. Any genocide claimed by crackpot “historians” is objectively only one-fiftieth as serious as claimed. Including other factors, that genocide is reduced by 90 percent via disease and or their pretty much constant internecine warfare.

5. Ward Churchill estimates that 125 million in the Americas were reduced by 90% over 500 years, hacked to death by Spaniards and then Anglos and French. This is deeply offensive, lying, bullshit. There were no more than fifteen or twenty million people in all the Americas in 1500. Agriculture was not advanced enough to support a larger population. The ‘cities’ other than the Aztecs’ held only a few hundred. And of the several hundred thousand dead over the following 500 years, 90 percent died from natural causes, like disease, and internecine war. Every tribe was periodically at war with another. Young men were trained first of all to fight, then to hunt. Competition over resources is not a ‘white’ trait.

6. In North America, the proportion of Indians to other ‘races’, stands at the same ratio as during the1700s. Considering the vertiginous rise in population from other races settling in the Americas, that means there are more indigenous alive today than at any other time in history, by several orders of magnitude. Further, Europeans remain a minority in every region that had a dense settlement of indigenous people in 1491.

7. The number of indigenous and Africans enslaved by Europeans during the 16th century was only a few thousand, whereas the Islamic world had already enslaved millions over the better part of a millennium. Slavery was not a white invention. It was a universal plague.

8. At the time of first arrival in North America, the density of indigenous was one per ten square kilometers. In the area surrounding the Great Lakes, I calculate that the density was one Iroquois per 25,000 acres. England had a density of ten people per square kilometer in 1500. England at the time had a much more efficient food system than the few indigenous grower tribes and was producing hundreds of times more calories per square kilometer.

9. The same pattern that disrupted post-Roman populations in Europe seems evident in post-Aztec Mexico. The passive effects of new technology, immediately desired by indigenous, led to bargaining, the banning of the old religious cults and ameliorating old indigenous (and murderous) rivalries.

10. New World societies were roughly 4,500 years behind China, Islam, India and Europe. The Aztecs were in the grip of the biggest cult of human sacrifice the world has ever seen at the time of Spanish landing. That said, Aztec cities were huge, sophisticated and numerous, graced with art, a fiscal system, pictographic writing, finely made gold and copper objects, and high quality pottery. They used intensive terraced farming and had highly productive floating gardens. However, they were similar to the Sumerian city of UR, circa 3000 BC. Their political systems were the same as that of Sumeria, based on a strong King, not parliamentary democracy. Their astronomy was impressive, but no more advanced than Sumerian. The Aztecs had the wheel but were only using it for toys.

11. Same holds true for the Mississippi and southwestern US. Indigenous in North America did not have iron smelting, Roman law, the Greek invention of coined money, the medieval codex (book), the Arab invented Bill of Exchange, the Chinese invention of gunpower. Nor did they have European cannon, the ability to build ocean-going vessels, eyeglasses, etc. And once introduced, they wanted them.

12. That, along with fragile states, vulnerable food supplies, and technological primitivism caused these cultures to dissolve in the face of ‘modern’ inventions, which were so seductive, many indigenous tribes packed up and moved their settlements near European settlements and settled down to trade and farm. Metal tools, firearms, and European food production made their lives a lot lot easier and safer. The wars between tribes over land, which had decimated the numbers of young men for millennia, slowed in frequency.

13. The Pax Hispanica brought to Mexico and South America a peace that saved hundreds of thousands of people from capture, torture, slavery, human sacrifice and refugee status.

14. For many years, left-leaning academics attempted to deny the mounting evidence that Indians of the southwestern United States—including the oft-fetishized Hopi—were, in fact, cannibals. In recent decades, however, our ability to forensically analyze human feces at the molecular level has provided the smoking gun, if you will. As reported in the Seattle Times in the year 2000: sa many as 40 sites scattered around the Southwest contain human bones that show distinctive evidence of having been butchered and cooked—signs consistent with cannibalism.

15. It is now hypothesized that the cliff-dwelling Anasazi people of the American southwest built their homes in such out-of-the-way places because they were being actively hunted by cannibalistic groups who had moved into the neighboring lowlands.

16. Humans were sacrificed for many reasons including propitiating the many gods on their feast days. American Indians sacrificed babies for the afterlife of the chief, the parents who did so, wrung the baby'‘s neck, placed it at the foot of the chief, emerged from the tipi and were ennobled. All through the America’s scenes of horrific torture of each other and Europeans emerged.

17. Credible authorities believe that the number of human sacrifices at the Aztec capital topped twenty thousand per year, with satellite cities sacrificing smaller yet still significant numbers. If the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan contained some two hundred thousand people in 1491, this suggests that a number of captives and slaves equal to fully 10 percent of the population of the city was sacrificed each year. Most of their corpses were dismembered and distributed as food to members of the population, often depending on their social status. The main skull wall in the Aztec capital has recently been revisited by archaeologists and its dimensions measured. It was over 110 feet long, 40 feet wide, and 15 feet high when the Spanish arrived. I personally would have been scrambling to be a servant or even slave, to a Spaniard.

18. The very first group of Spaniards captured by Mexican Indians in 1520 were ritually slaughtered and cannibalized along with their indigenous allies. As reported by the Guardian in 2015, a group of fifteen Spaniards, forty-five colonial soldiers, fifty women, ten children, and “hundreds of their indigenous allies” were captured and put in cages. Like a scene out of a particularly disturbing movie, one or two per day of the Europeans and captured Indians were chosen at random and sacrificed in a gruesome manner, within earshot of the other prisoners. The bodies were then dismembered and cooked, and the flesh distributed to the people of the town.

    

19. Amerindians kept slaves. It is likely that more Africans were kept as slaves by Amerindians than Indians kept as slaves by whites. Next to no academics are brave enough to do research on important topics such as this for the simple reason that their colleagues do not want to hear the whole truth about indigenous slavery. Partly in order to supply the huge markets for sacrificial victims, Mesoamerica was home to a huge and well-documented network of slave markets in the years prior to the Spanish conquest. The idea that the Spanish or the English imported slavery to the New World is therefore utterly ridiculous. Slavery was widespread not only in Mesoamerica but also throughout the Indian tribes of the New World. In present-day Canada, Native Americans routinely enslaved one another. The French were able to take advantage of this preexisting practice, buying slaves from the Indians and sometimes selling them in Caribbean markets—despite the fact that French authorities had made such trade illegal. During their ascendancy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the imperialist Comanche made slave raiding and trading a staple of their economy, until they became the terror of rival tribes for hundreds of miles around.

20. Indians are loudly and wrongly said to be the original environmentalists. The argument is asserted that if we gave land back to the Indians, they would take better care of it. Left to their own devices, groups of indigenous people would create a sustainable, eco-friendly “cottagecore” society of the kind fashionable in hipster circles in recent years. Bob Hunter, a reporter at the Vancouver Sun, and a founder of Greenpeace, propagated this myth: “When the earth is sick, the animals will begin to disappear. When that happens, The Warriors of the Rainbow will come to save them.” Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is ceaselessly rabbited on about and worse, accepted as hard evidence in land use trials. “Indigenous people are the original stewards of all the lands and waters in North America, and there’s an extensive knowledge and management practices that date back millennia,” goes the mantra of the gullible.

21. The truth is somewhat different. “[In Hawaii they] cleared land with fire, introduced animals, diverted streams for irrigation, and trans-formed forested coastal areas into farms and grass-lands, and mudflats into fishponds. The result: over one-half of all endemic bird species became extinct. The Hawaiians ate some and killed others for their feathers to ornament clothing. In New Zealand, early Polynesian colonizers hunted thirteen species of moas—ostrich-like flightless birds, one of which towered over men and women—to extinction and turned their attention to what remained—shellfish, fish, seals, and small birds.”

22. In point of fact: “The irruption of human hunters into the New World, sometime between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand years ago, was the cause of the catastrophic “New World Pleistocene Extinction Event,” which paleontologists have detected in the fossil record. Shortly after the first “Paleo-Indians” arrived in the New World, no fewer than thirty-eight genera of large mammals disappeared. In North America this included giant sloths, short-faced bears, tapirs, peccaries, giant tortoises, American cheetahs, the American lion, saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, various species of camel including llamas, several now-extinct species of bison, the stag-moose, the shrub-ox, horses, mammoths, mastodons, the giant armadillo, giant beavers, giant condors, and thirteen out of fourteen species of American antelope. Meanwhile, in South America, mass extinctions were concentrated in the time period after 8000 BC, which coincides with the first arrival of large numbers of human hunters in that region. South America at the time had large populations of bears, capybaras, llamas, saber-tooth cats, giant sloths, armadillos the size of a hippopotamus, camels, and rhinoceroses. Every single one of these species was gone by about 6000 BC. In all, every South American species larger than one hundred kilograms disappeared forever.

23. The paleo-Indians were responsible for the mass extinction of all the large mega-fauna of the New World, long long before whitey arrived on shore. When every day is a question of survival, philosophical questions such as the long-term ecological outlook take a back seat. More specific: in Wisconsin they fished out the rivers and streams so completely, there was an expression: Kill an Indian, Save a Walleye. This is now used as an example of racism, not the environmentalism (and joke) it was. That is how mean-spirited these people are.

    

    No Indian chooses to live like this anymore

24. Were Indians the original communists? Western property regimes are considered by our sick academies as morally tainted and exploitative from the beginning. Patrick Wolfe, the inventor of ‘settler colonialism’ went further, asserting that the essence of being an Indian was “collectivity,” or holding property in common. He writes that “tribal land was tribally owned—tribes and private property did not mix. Indians were the original communist menace.” This of course, is errant rubbish. D. W. Bushyhead, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation wrote, in his letter to Congress in 1881: “Our own systems of law and land tenure are admirably suited to our people. The statements made to you that we, or any of the Indians, are communists and hold property in common are entirely erroneous. No people are more jealous of the personal right to property than Indians. The improvements on farms may be, and often are, sold; they may descend in families for generations, and so long as occupied cannot be invaded, nor for two years after abandonment. These farms and lots are practically just as much the property of the individuals as yours are. He who does not wish to keep can sell to all lawful citizens. The only difference between your land systems and ours is that the unoccupied surface of the earth is not a chattel to be sold and speculated in by men who do not use it.”

25. Stolen lands claimed in North America were typically hunting grounds. The island where I live was used rarely as residence, but clamming was big in various seasons. Typically, villages would be established on a semi-permanent basis, here for a few months at most. Once hunted, fished or clammed out, the entire village would be pulled down, and they would all move on. Most of the land claims in Canada and the U.S., are based in this false premise of land use. The labor theory of land use held by Marxists is that land only belonged to people when “they mix their labor with it”. In North America few were agriculturalists even long after the whites arrived. The Land Back movement is flat out cheating. There are no written records of even permanent much less temporary settlements. What we experience from native activists is bullying, lying and greed.

The Indian Rights movement has be seen as a flagrant shake-down. Moreover it is a vicious use of innocents by Marxists who have set back the advancement, prosperity and happiness of indigenous peoples by several generations.

Welcome to Absurdistan is reader-supported. Your support made it possible for me to write the pieces that helped shut down the taking of America’s parks for the international rich and the cancellation of a useless carbon pipeline which would be created with public money, again paying the rich with your money.

No one with a job in the so-called real world would have been able to summarize what I have written above. If I was at a university, or employed full-time at a think tank, I would be fired. I would be cancelled socially. No newspaper would publish me ever again. THAT is how important independent journalism is today. If you can afford it, please consider a very cheap annual subscription. And for pity’s sakes, buy Not Stolen. It is wonderful, and truly brave for both publisher and author.