Basic Call to Consciousness

Legal history of the Haudenosaunee

Continued from last week.

“It is the market, in one form or another, that pulls out from the compact social relations of self-contained primitive communities some parts of men’s doings and puts people into fields of economic activity that are increasingly independent of the rest of what goes on in local life. The local traditional and moral world and the wider and more impersonal world of the market are in principle destinct, and opposed to each other…”

The European “discovery” of North America led to the transposition of European medieval law and customs to the Americas. To be sure, Spanish medieval law differed in some respects from that of England, but an understanding of Medieval Europe is essential to an analysis of the process of colonialism. Medieval Europe is the period of the rise of growing centralization and consolidation of power by the ruling kinships (kings) over vast territories which is specific to the North American experience. It is also the period of the rise and growth of European cities as centers of trade and sources of political power. The European laws of nations, as they were applied to the Americas, were medieval laws.

“Europeans used a great variety of means to attain mastery, of which armed combat was only one. Five principles were available to a European sovereignty for laying claim to legitimate jurisdiction over an American territory and its people: Papal donation, first discovery, sustained possession, voluntary self-subjugation by the natives, and armed conquest successfully maintained. The colony was the means of translating a formal claim to the effective actuality of government, and it was “colonial” in both senses of the ambiguous word. The huddled villages of Europeans were colonies in the sense of being offshoots or reproductions of their parent societies, and these villages exerted power over larger native populations in the sense more clearly implied by the word “colonialism.”

The European invaders, from the first, attempted to claim Indians as their subjects. Where the Indian People resisted, as in the case of the Haudenosaunee, the Europeans rationalized that resistance to be an incapacity for civilization. The incapacity for civilization rationale became the basis for the phenomenon in the West which is known today as racism.

The Europeans landed on the shores of the Americas and immediately claimed the territories for their sovereign. They then attempted, especially in the case of France and Spain, to make peasants of the Indians. The English, who had already experimented with the enclosure system and who thus colonized North America with landless peasants who were driven by a desperation rooted in their own history, at first simply drove the Indians off the land by force.

The European legal systems had, and apparently have developed, no machinery to recognize the rights of peoples, other than dictators or sovereigns, to land. When the Europeans came to North America, they attempted to simply make vassals of the Native leaders. When that failed, they resorted to other means. The essential thrust of European powers has been an attempt to convert “…the Indian person from membership in an unassimilable caste to membership in a social class integrated into Euro-American institutions.”

The dispossession of the Native people was accomplished by the Europeans in the bloodiest and most brutal chapter of human history. They were acts committed, seemingly, by a people without conscience or standards of behavior. To this day, the United States and Canada deny the existence of the lawful governments of the Haudenosaunee and other Native nations, a continuation of the policy of genocide which has marked the process known as colonialism. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, both governments and the governments of Latin America deny the commission of genocide, either physical or cultural.

Continued next week.