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(This article is not about anything explicitly Catholic. But often liberals complain about how the white man supposedly made this continent worse. They say that the coming of Columbus made life worse for the Indians. We know that he brought many evils along with the *greatest good* — the Good News of salvation. So the Indians benefited. This article points out that there are other ways in which the Indians benefited.)
What’s funny is that the Sioux claim to the land is entirely based on the treaty, not on their possession of the land in 1876-7. What do I mean? I mean that Anglo-American (white) law is the only claim that the Sioux can make against the right of conquest. Here’s why. In 1492, the Sioux apparently lived in the area of North Carolina. They then spent centuries moving north and west until they reached Wisconsin and Minnesota, which is where the whites first encountered them. The Sioux then broke out onto the Great Plains after they got the horse (indirectly from whites). They did not occupy the Black Hills until — get this — 1776. When they got there they found the Cheyenne, who fought to defend their lands and lost. So the Sioux claim to the Black Hills in 1876 was based on the right of conquest followed by exactly 100 years of occupation. The whites wrote up a treat recognizing this as worthy of legal perpetuity.
Fast forward to today. The white claim to the Black Hills is based on conquest followed by, as of today, 133/134 years of occupation. That’s over three decades longer than the Sioux lived there! If we are supposed to ignore this because the Sioux owned the land in 1876, then the whites in 1876 should have ignored the Sioux claim and given it back to the Cheyenne, who also got their butts kicked and were forced to leave their sacred land. *The original treaty* was based on the *Sioux* right of conquest and occupation! The *only* claim the Sioux have against the white right of conquest and occupation is that some white people with high ideals (or deceitful hearts) scribbled some lines on paper about “perpetuity.” The Sioux *have* to cite Anglo-Saxon legalism because otherwise, according to the standards the Sioux themselves used in acquiring the Black Hills, those same hills clearly belong to their white conquerors and occupants. If the Sioux have an acknowledged right to hold that land “in perpetuity,” it’s because white law said so. And Anglo-Saxon law *also* says that when it’s impractical to correct a past injustice — and in this case it’s obvious that we can’t just clear out all the white occupants and give the land back — you pay the victims a commensurate cash settlement. When the Supreme Court awarded the sum and the Sioux rejected it, the government should have turned around and offered the money to the Cheyenne! Heck, if you go back further, it was the Kiowa who held the Black Hills before the Cheyenne kicked them out. *They’re* the ones who should feel vindicated by all this.
Maybe the Indian tribes should thank the whites for putting an end to all of the inter-tribal death and destruction and land theft that went on on this continent before we got here. Peace came — at a very high cost, but it came. You don’t see the Sioux raiding Cheyenne casinoes. And in case you think I’m being insensitive, many of the smaller, weaker Indian tribes may owe their existence to the white man. If they had been left to fend for themselves against the larger, more aggressive tribes, they might have been treated to effective genocide. It has happened. These smaller tribes typically offered their services to the whites as scouts. The white armies that fought the Sioux employed scouts from the Crow and Arikara tribes because they were enemies or at least competitors of the Sioux. Maybe the Sioux should take up their grievances with the surviving Crow and Arikara as well as with Washington, D.C.
And I want to say that, *ALL OF THIS BEING SAID,* I highly admire the Sioux. Red Cloud was, as far as I am concerned, one of the greatest Americans who ever lived. He was the only Indian chief to defeat the United States government in a major conflict. I do not gloat over the catastrophe that befell the Indian tribes when they lost their lands, their independence, and often a large part of their population to the whites. I do abhor attempts to pretend that The White Man has a monopoly on evil. I do abhor attempts to paint life on this continent as all peace and love before whites arrived. It was a dog-eat-dog (and man-eat-dog, as some tribes feasted on dog meat before they went on the warpath) world then. Let’s not boast, as it were, of our civilization’s faults as if they were unique.
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with this one Bonifacius, but the point can also be applied more generally. For instance, there is a great deal of fervor among anthropologists (and a plurality of assent among sympathetic lay white people), for the preservation of indigenous cultural forms, and especially of indigenous languages. But this fervor ignores the fact that cultural exchange between primitive peoples is extremely rapid, with things like word-borrowings and the development of pidgins being commonplace; and the wholesale transfer of forms of religious observences and artisanal techniques occur much more often than most people realize. Thus, tracking the spread of clovis spear points from Alaska down to the southern tip of Chile reveals not “the migration of a people,” but the spread of a technique which was alternatively carried, copied, and traded from place to place as the case may be. The convetional idea of a small, homogeneous, huddled mass of people wandering all over BFE, never forgetting to drop their beloved spear points behing them like the Lone Ranger’s silver bullet, is a notion only a Western anthropologist could conceive.
Therefore, when Native Americans speak of the need to preserve “the” Navajo language or “the” Cherokee culture, they are forgetting that these things never existed in such a definite form as that which they wish to preserve. What these nouns indicate is not a single, classifiable system, but a highly fluid mass of individual elements. Even the tribal identities themselves were very indistinct, with tribes raiding, absorbing, conquering, bifurcating, and joining one another according to the needs of the moment. The effort to preserve the culture or language as it now stands amounts to nothing more than the act of memorializing the very moment when the tribes were conquered by Westerners, or at least the moment when Western anthropologists deigned to take notice of them – the very moment which, given their general attitude, you’d think they would most want to forget. Besides which, the entire sentiment of linguistic preservation is Western in and of itself, for primitive peoples felt no such patriotism toward their native tongue when they really were primitive, and they were (as the rest of this post should show) quite ready to change it when the tongue of a more powerful people proved to possess superior efficacy. The first chapter of the second volume of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West contains a veritable corpus of commentary on these observations.