The New Majority: The rise of transnational indigenous peoples and the new Americas

The 2014 national conference of the National Council of La Raza again presents an opportunity for both introspection and recommitment to the basic tenets of the Chicano Movement’s cultural and political legacy. In a country that still reportedly retains, “a deep-seated fear of the changing demographics in America,” (http://bit.ly/fearofamerica), it is clear that there is neither a “post-racial” nor “post-modern” nonracial or multiracial new reality. The state of “La Raza”, or the People, in Chicano Movement and popular Mexican vernacular, is precarious and its lack of a coherent political transnational strategy or organization is lamentable. Fundamental contradictions continue to plague elected officials, nonprofit organizations and social strategies impacting communities of peoples indigenous to what is now considered the U.S. southwest and Latin America circumventing our right to free, prior and informed consent from the entire process. It is time the NCLR and other remnants of the Chicano Movement recognize the invisible and include the excluded: indigenous peoples throughout the Americas ought no longer be blatantly excluded from the mission and vision of La Raza’s self-proclaimed “largest national civil rights and advocacy organization”. We are the new majority.

America stands on stolen land and borrowed time. While it is commonly acknowledged today that this continent was continually inhabited, occupied, populated, lived upon, governed by and cared for by indigenous peoples before the arrival of Europeans, what is not commonly accepted today is that the descendants of those same indigenous peoples hold any legal title of ownership over the continent. Today, indigenous peoples are perennially cast as “illegal”, “immigrant” and “impoverished”.  In an historic leap of legal and religious acrobatic theory, the dominant nation-state and class of the United States of America decreed that even under indigenous custom, no right of “ownership” ever existed among indigenous peoples giving precedence to tenuous European legal constructs such as the Doctrine of Discovery and Terra Nullius. Clearly, given over half a millennium of genocide, war, invasion, occupation and general wanton destruction of every single Indigenous People on this continent, a gross injustice has been done. In light of the global character and interconnected relationship among invasion and usurpation, colonization and domination across the entire continent, what standing do indigenous peoples whose ancestral territories lie beyond the political borders of the United States hold today? Specifically, what legal and natural standing do “Mexican American Indians” hold less than two centuries after the United States finalized its dominion over what is known today as the southwest of the United States? How ought the dominant European legal constructs of land rights be challenged to reassert a more “natural” and just relation to land among all peoples on these lands?

In truth, seminal U.S. Supreme Court decisions such as Johnson V. McIntosh, 8 Wheat 543 (1823), established an American legal foundation based upon the Doctrine of Discovery, and other European legal constructs which represent indigenous peoples as “savages”, in which indigenous peoples can neither collectively nor individually own title to land, as all rights to land are assumed by the invading state and people.  The logic of the Supreme Court in 1823 and all subsequent property law in the United States is essentially circuitous. Indians are savages. Savages cannot own land. Savages do not even believe in the ownership of land. Europeans are socially, racially and morally superior to Indians. Europeans are civilized. Europeans can own land because they cultivate it and because they can assert their right to ownership. Europeans own all land in existence, known and unknown to them. All lands in the Americas were owned by the European crowns by right of discovery. All land in the United States has been acquired by the colonists of the United States and subsequently the government of the United States by transfer of title from the British Crown to the United States. Proprietorship over land requires the ability to assert ownership through violence and other extra-political means. Indians have lost all wars against Europeans, therefore, Indians have lost proprietorship and sovereignty over their natural territory. The supposed savagery of indigenous peoples is, according to the Doctrine of Discovery and indeed, Euro-American jurisprudence, the justification for the usurpation of the entire continent.

This logic is asserted by the Court in Johnson V. McIntosh,

“According to every theory of property, the Indians had no individual rights to land; nor had they any collectively, or in their national capacity; for the lands occupied by each tribe were not used by them in such a manner as to prevent their being appropriated by a people of cultvators. All the proprietary rights of civilized nations on this continent are founded on this principle. The right derived from discovery and conquest, can rest on no other basis; and all existing titles depend on the fundamental title of the crown by discovery,” (thorpe.ou.edu/treatises/cases/Johnson.html, pp. 2.)

In 1823, only a little more than a decade after the final assertion of American military sovereignty through the War of 1812, title to the vast lands of the American continent was still in dispute. Did indigenous peoples such as the Piankeshaw Nation own their lands, or did the conquering emergent nation-state of the USA? As the seminal land law case upon which precedent for all subsequent proprietary rights are based in the United States, Johnson V. McIntosh explicitly described the logic upon which all Indian nations became, “conquered people, in a territory acquired, jure belli, and ceded at the peace.”  Yet, the sanitized legal question before the Court in 1823 was, “Whether it be competent to individuals to make such purchases, or whether that be the exclusive prerogative of government…,” (http://bit.ly/johnsonindians, pp. 1). Essentially, could land, “belong to savage tribes, in the lands on which they live,” (http://bit.ly/johnsonindians, pp. 1). Based upon the ideological and religious conception of all indigenous peoples as “savages”, the Court found that use and habitation does not establish proprietorship, but instead upheld that,

“However extravagant the pretension of converting the discovery of an inhabited country into conquest may appear; if the principle has been asserted in the first instance, and afterwards sustained; if a country has been acquired and held under it; if the property of the great mass of the community originates in it, it becomes the law of the land, and cannot be questioned.”  (http://bit.ly/johnsonindians, pp.8).

 A country is “held” through the use of force.

This acquisition and holding by conquest is understood in political economic theory as the primitive accumulation of capital without which an exploitative political economy such American capitalism, cannot even be established.

In this seminal high court decision, the U.S. Supreme Court rationalized that, “The title by conquest is acquired and maintained by force,” (ibid).

Clearly the argument sustained by the findings of the Court is that:

1.     Land can only be owned by civilized people;

2.     Indigenous peoples are savages, not civilized;

3.     All lands in the American continent have been discovered and conquered by civilized people;

4.     The title to the lands discovered by civilized people have been maintained by force of the United States of America;

5.     Therefore, all title, ownership and sovereignty over all lands in the United States are held by the government and only the government of the United States can authorize any transfer of title to land in this country;

Among the many daily and monumental problems caused by these legally protected land grabs, are the limitation of access to sacred sites by indigenous peoples. For example, the Ashiwi People (Zuni Nation) have long battled to retain access to sacred sites in what is now private and public property in Arizona, and other “private property” held outside of their reservation. Sacred mountain peaks such as the San Francisco peaks in New Mexico retain sacred importance to many indigenous peoples known today as Pueblos from what is now known as Colorado to Texas. Similarly, indigenous peoples from Mexico retain oral traditions and living customs of pilgrimage to sacred sites from California to Colorado to Texas.

Not so oddly, by December 2, 1823, President James Monroe declared that the United States claimed dominion over all of the Americas.

“asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers”, (Message of President James Monroe at the commencement of the first session of the 18th Congress (The Monroe Doctrine), 12/02/1823; Presidential Messages of the 18th Congress, ca. 12/02/1823-ca. 03/03/1825; Record Group 46; Records of the United States Senate, 1789-1990; National Archives.)

Thus, was established in the same year by the government of the United States, both the sovereign right of European civilizations to conquer and own all lands in the Americas by right of discovery and the end of that right and establishment of a new world order under U.S. domination. By 2010, one effect of this impact of intercontinental domination by the U.S. has been documented by the U.S. Census as more indigenous peoples living in the U.S. identify as indigenous peoples of Mexican, and Latin American origin. To be sure, according to the 2010 Census, the fourth largest “tribe” in the U.S. is referred to as “Mexican American Indians,” and that’s not even counting the 32,000,000 other indigenous Mexicans living in the United States (Figure 8, http://bit.ly/MexicanIndians). Hence, among the highest of concerns in a globalized economy and the all seeing eye of NSA surveillance, CIA networks, puppet governments and lapdog nonprofits around the world controlled by the U.S., is “immigration” and “border security”.  Certainly, the inherited, albeit unintended, legacy of both the Monroe Doctrine and Johnson V. McIntosh, is a burgeoning regeneration of indigenous peoples across this continent who do not fit, conform or obey the racist and narrow legal constructs of “the Indian”.

According to English legal doctrine, the foundational legal and epistemological framework of American law, the finding of Johnson V. McIntosh ought to constitute a false pretense constructed to justify the intent to despoil all indigenous peoples of any right to land ownership with the use of mass violence – otherwise known as robbery. Yet, even under this legal lense, American laws stand innocent, as it would be hard for anyone to prove that Americans at the time did not actually believe that indigenous peoples were actually savages. Over five hundred years later, the surviving descendants of the original peoples of this continent arguably inherit an obligation to resolve this gross injustice because its impact today continues to exact a painful legacy of the domination of one people over many. Early Americans espoused prophetic myths and ingenious schemes with which the political economy of a new nation-state swarmed across the continent with the teaming avarice of its individual citizens. Average hard working Americans readily functioned as the foot soldiers, executioners and pirates of an apparatus, a mode of production, which they did not own – because they dreamed, they could own a piece of it. Simply put, if the Doctrine of Discovery is predicated upon the racist assertion of social and racial superiority of Europeans over indigenous peoples, and this assertion has been disproven as common knowledge today, then how can it still hold binding authority – were it not for the continually immoral use of force?

Our nations rise, our future thrives.

 Indigenous peoples are today thriving across the continents of the Americas and around the world, and indigenous persons who either as a result of colonization or through forced migration have lost land, language and even the majority of original culture are reawakening as well, seeking to decolonize their lives and communities. It is time the NCLR recognize that the 1950’s logic of civil rights era legalities are but a distraction from the true nature of the legal, social and political underpinnings of the Doctrine of Discovery and the advocacy and struggle required in such a transformative period as the one we are currently living. Tomorrow’s America is contested. We ought to bring our own cosmovisions and defense of mother earth to the forefront, for everyone’s sake. To begin with, the NCLR ought to recognize, support and advocate for the full implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples at all levels of government. Secondly, the NCLR ought to conspicuously include leaders and communities of indigenous peoples living in the United States to the forefront of its leadership, advocacy and resource development. Third, the NCLR ought to end its policy of limiting advocacy and engagement to within the boarders of the United States. We are transnational peoples and our countries are plurinational remnants of the fiefdoms of colonization that must either adapt or be transformed by the new majority. This is not a petition for humanitarianism - this is an assertion of right to transnational homelands across geopolitical borders.