Helping Supremacists feel superior

Vincent J. Curtis 

6 Oct 20

RE: Indigenous People – Connected to the Land. Hamilton Spectator of this date.  Written by Beverley O'Neil, and indigenous person, writer, and advocate.

What exactly is ‘Indigenous’?  It’s a slippery idea, and author Beverly O’Neil slipped on it.

She says, “Indigenous people worldwide are connected to the land.”   And “Everything that involved Indigenous cultural activities…relates to Mother Earth.”

What she says is incoherent.  We’re all indigenous to the planet earth.  And it can’t be that Indigenous people worldwide are both connected and not connected to the land.  The indigenous to Europe imports have a more sophisticated sense of the world and reject the idea of a “Mother Earth,” except as romantic poetry.  

O’Neil says: “Canada’s civil law system, which is rooted in British common law traditions, …such laws are not based on Indigenous values, perspectives, and rights and title.”

Indigenous to Britain certainly do have values and perspectives that are different from Indigenous to America.  O’Neil switches unconsciously to distinguish between Indian and European, implying Indians actually had a concept of rights and title that was merely different from British common law.

Famously, this isn’t so.  Indians had no concept of title or rights, save that of conquest.  It was British common law that brought sophisticated ideas of title and rights to North America.  This explains why the band (that ‘Nation’ idea – that’s European too.) holds title to the reserve, but individual Indians do not hold title to individual plots of land on the reserve.  This reflects the traditional Indian idea of land possession, but there is another reason.  An individual could sell his plot on the reserve to a white person, and before long the reserve is owned by white people.

O’Neil employs poetic metaphors to offer romantic visions of idyllic Indian life before the Indigenous of Britain and France came here.  Unsophisticated poetic metaphors, which are in no way comparable to Western philosophy, simply fail to cope with hard reality.  O’Neil offers a romantic dream world that never existed and does not now exist.

Works like those of O’Neil, offered seriously, is one reason why white supremacists feel so superior.

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