Andrews University has issued what has become known as a “land acknowledgment statement,” an exercise in Marxist delegitimization of whites, Christians and people of European origin that has become trendy on Leftist-controlled campuses (which is almost all of them), claiming that the land on which they sit was wrongfully seized from some Indian tribe.
The Andrews University Land Acknowledgement Statement:
“It is extremely important that we recognize and acknowledge that our Berrien Springs campus sits on land that was part of a larger area here in Michigan and elsewhere that was seized from land owned by the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi tribe. As is stated on the Potawatomi website, “Each indigenous nation has its own creation story.” This land seizure was driven by the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, which established the conditions for the removal of the Potawatomi from the Great Lakes area. When Michigan became a state in 1837, more pressure was put on the Potawatomi to move west. The hazardous trip killed one out of every ten people of the approximately 500 Potawatomi involved. As news of the terrible trip spread, some bands, consisting of small groups of families, fled to northern Michigan and Canada. Some also tried to take refuge in the forests and swamps of southwestern Michigan. The U.S. government sent soldiers to round up any of the Potawatomi they could find and would then move them at gunpoint to reservations in the west. This forced removal is now called the Potawatomi Trail of Death, similar to the more familiar Cherokee Trail of Tears. However, a small group of Neshnabek (meaning “original” or “true people”), with Leopold Pokagon as one of their leaders, earned the right to remain in their original homeland, in part because they had demonstrated a strong attachment to Catholicism. It is the descendants of that small group who constitute the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi. This was a sad extension of the deeply harmful effects of what has become known as the “Doctrine of Discovery,” which established a spiritual, political and legal justification for colonization and seizure of land not inhabited by Christians. To learn more about the Pokagon tribe, please go here.”
Every people in the history of the world acquired the land they now have essentially by right of conquest. Every nation came to the place where they currently are and either conquered the people who were there or, if no one was there, stuck a flag in the ground and called it their own, with no more legal niceties than the fact they were occupying it.
The United States has been exceptional in having paid for much of its territory. We often bought it from European powers claiming it, but more often from the native American tribes living on the land.
We purchased the Louisiana territory (all land drained by the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers—most of the west) from France in 1803 for $15,000,000. We purchased Florida from Spain in 1819 for $5,000,000. We purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7,200,000. Finally, Gadsden purchased southern Arizona from Mexico in 1854 for $10,000,000.
We even purchased land from nations after having beaten them in armed conflict. We purchased our Southwestern territory (now New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, and eastern Colorado) from Mexico for $15,000,000 (plus retiring their national debt) after having defeated Mexico in the 1845-46 war. We purchased the Philippines from Spain for $20,000,000 after having defeated Spain in the Spanish-American war of 1898.
On top of having purchased claimed territory from European powers, we also bought Indian land, beginning famously in 1626, with the Dutch purchase of Manhattan Island from the Lenape Indians for sixty guilders in trade goods. In 1844, New York historian John Romeyn Brodhead figured that 60 guilders amounted to twenty-four dollars, and thus it has gone down in history. But it would be over $1,000 dollars in today’s money (and if you invested $24 at 5% interest compounded annually for the 396 years since the purchase, it is many billions of dollars, more than all the real estate in Manhattan is worth).
Although the U.S. paid France $15,000,000 for the Louisiana Territory, which seems like the cheapest real estate in world history (even at the inflation-adjusted price of $342 million), what we were really buying was the right to fight the Indians living in the territory or, if we could, purchase their land. A tally of what the United States spent on tribal land within the Louisiana Territory from 1804 through 2012 yielded $2.6 billion (more than $8.5 billion adjusted for inflation). So the plain historical fact is that the practice was to buy tribal land, even if it wasn’t always done in every case.
The 1933 Treaty of Chicago mentioned in Andrews’ statement was probably typical. $1,032,689.53 (equivalent to $28,078,000 in 2020) was allocated for grants to the tribes removed from Michigan pursuant to that treaty. $9,453 (equivalent to $257,000 in 2020) was appropriated to cover the expenses of an exploratory trip by fifty representatives of the Potawatomi to inspect the land they would be allotted west of the Mississippi.
Some natives moved to northern Wisconsin, rather than moving west of the Mississippi. For years, only the Potawatomi who moved west of the Mississippi received annuities from the United States government. In 1913, however, the government paid the Wisconsin Potawatomi $447,339 (equivalent to $8,750,000 in 2020).
I’m having a hard time viewing this as an infamous crime that Andrews University needs to acknowledge.
Of course, the threat of violence and conquest lay behind all these treaties. But what was the alternative? The nomadic tribes were primitive. Andrews’ statement notes that “Nashnabek” means “original people” or “true people.” One does not need to be an anthropologist to know that every tribe’s word for itself means roughly the same thing; they all thought they were the only real human beings. Is that a point in their favor, or in favor of leaving the continent in their custody and control forever?
The manifest destiny was that this continent would not be left forever to the nomadic tribes who wandered it, and often savagely fought over it, each thinking they were the only real people. The Europeans would bring civilization—cities, roads, canals, factories, mines, dams, wells, private property, permanent fixed dwellings, law, books, literature, written history, theater, science, organized religion and, yes, universities. This was fated to happen, and who in his right mind would want it otherwise?
Was it a tragedy for those tribes that wanted to continue their age-old nomadic customs? Yes, of course it was a tragedy, but it wasn’t a crime. There were certainly individual crimes and atrocities committed along the way--by both whites and the natives--but it was never a planned genocide or anything of the sort. It was complex, as human history usually is.
I would say the people of the upper Midwest, both whites and Indians, had it easy. I’m from Texas, where we had to wrest the land from the Comanche, some of the fiercest warriors and finest light cavalry the world has ever seen. Reading about encounters with the Comanches and Kiowas will make your blood run cold. And history provides us no example of a people who, pound for pound, fought better or were more deadly than the Apache, who for decades terrorized whites who ventured into the New Mexico and Arizona territory.
It wasn’t all torture and murder, of course; there was also love. Most of us whose families have been here a long time have Indian blood. I am 1/8th Creek, from my mother who was a Floridian, and I have Cherokee and Choctaw blood from my father, who was from east Texas. I am not at all unusual; again, most southerners—whites and also many blacks--have Indians in our ancestry.
At the end of the statement, we are again confronted with the “doctrine of discovery” which, we have recently heard, the NAD is planning to address:
This was a sad extension of the deeply harmful effects of what has become known as the “Doctrine of Discovery,” which established a spiritual, political and legal justification for colonization and seizure of land not inhabited by Christians.
The land was not “seized” but purchased pursuant to treaty, and the doctrine of discovery, whatever it may have meant to the conquistadors of the 15th and 16th centuries, had no relevance in 1830s America. The young republic’s leaders in Washington D.C. understood that being Christian did not entitle them to take Indian land without compensation, and compensation was duly paid—and is still being paid in many different ways. Andrews’ statement takes a groundless swipe at Christians, seemingly for the pure joy of bashing Christianity.
One wonders whether anything is being taught at Andrews other than wokism. Hey, Michael Nixon: if you feel sorry for the Potawatomi, instead of hosing the world with Marxist bilge water, go lose some money in their casino in Milwaukee.