Timothy Birdnow

I remember when I first saw the ending of the television show Yellowstone. (Spoiler alert!) In that show the Dutton family had been fighting - often quite literally - to save their huge Montana ranch from developers and speculators, to keep it wild as it had been. The Indians who had lived there and still did wanted that land "back" as if they ever held any real claim to it. (Interestingly in the show Chief Rainwater was a very cosmopolitan guy who had been raised by white parents and thought he was Mexican by birth until he learned he was an Indian then threw himself into the tribal cause - they didn't care about the Dutton ranch but HE did.)

After the assassination of John Dutton (who had become Governor of Montana solely to stop the development) his family found themselves facing the loss of everything - including any hope of selling the property for what it was worth. Development was going to raise taxes and ruin them. So they sold it "back" to the Indians for a dollar and change an acre, or some equally ridiculous price.

The assumption was that it belonged to the Indians. But did it? They hadn't built anything on it, made any sort of improvements to lay claim to it. John Locke, the great English philosopher, set that as the standard for property ownership; you have to use a property and do SOMETHING to prove it is yours. That can be as simple as building a small cabin or even just a monument of some kind. But the Indians did nothing of the sort, just left the land fallow and as nature had made it. Often Indians did not even visit a place for years, maybe decades, yet still claimed it as theirs.

English law provides for what is known as Adverse Possession, colloquially known as"squatter's rights". While that sounds, even to modern ears, a bit unsavory, it was actually a very useful tool in advancing civilization. If a settler found land that was unused and could use it "openly and notoriously" as the law says, meaning everyone knew about it and the absentee owner had ample time to assert his claim to the property, then the property ownership transrfered to the squatter.

This meant that, unlike under Spanish law, say, a rich guy couldn't build a massive empire of land without risking losing it. As a result small farmholdings were common under English law - especially in America, where land was plentiful and cheap. This encouraged building things up, cultivating the land, etc. The Dutton ranch claimed that land by building a ranch, even though most of it was rural. (They had "east camp" - a cabin on wild land - to lay claim to a part of the ranch they seldom used. That part was retained by Jamie and his wife and kid after the sale.) The Indians had never made that claim on the land, had built nothing to justify their claim to ownership.

How do you own land you rarely set foot on and have done nothing with? What makes your claim stronger than someone else's?

At any rate here is an article in American Thinker asking why, if liberals believe all our land is stolen from natives, they don't just give it back. As the author points out, if you find out you possess stolen property you have a moral obligation to give it back. So if part of Harvard was owned by Indians (or all of it - it was "their country" before any white dudes showed up) why don't they turn it over to them?

As Brian Joondeph points out, partly because there is no way to determine who the rightful owner is; the Indians who had been there had undoubtedly displaced other Indians and so forth and so on.

The dirty little secret is that the Native Americans had been in a constant state of war with one another and so it had been for all of history and prehistory - until the white men came along and settled that once and for all. And none of them had any sort of valid claim to most of "their" property. Hunting on forest land does not necessarily give you deed to it. Plenty of people hunt on property that is not theirs - both national forest land and private. My own Ozark Hilton sees it's share of poaching hunters in deer season. I don't care; I don't deer hunt and while I like to see the deer when I go down there they aren't exactly my property but move from place to place. They can just as easily be killed right off my land as on. As long as the hunters are courteous and respectful of my property they are welcome. But that hunting in no way gives them any legal rights to ownership or even an easement.

We need a long national conversation on property rights and need to establish what they mean once and for all. Actually we've had it for a long time, that definition, but the media and the Left for whom they carry water keep trying to muddy OUR waters with their media-carried sewage.

In the end possession is 9/10 of the law and we are the ones who possess it - and that because we came and stayed while they couldn't be bothered to do the same. And we improved it - the other tenth. Teepees in temporary camps do not constitute improving the land. Permanent villages do (as in the Woodland Indians) or adobe houses but not most of the lands that were "taken". And you can't claim land a hundred miles from where you live just because you hunt there.

That was why the Indians were in a constant state of war to begin with; they had no good definition of property, and who owned what. So does the Left and that will cause the same bloody conflicts in the end.

BTW the title of this comes from the Seventies song Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree by Tony Orlando and Dawn which says "I'm coming home I've done my time...and I got to know what is and isn't mine".

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