40 acres and a mule vs giving natives back their land
40 acres for every Black American would be 1.769 billion acres of the US’s 2.43 billion acre area, for a total of 72% of the land. Combined with the percent of the US that rightfully belongs to natives, we end up with a total of 1.72 times the US’s current size, so we clearly can’t satisfy both without expanding the country. I propose that we draft all white people into digging a secondary subterranean layer, providing the additional required land while providing humane employment for a demographic that sunburns easily.
Your plan involves twice as much work as it needs to.
We only need to dig a subterranian layer below half of the US. We can use the dirt we get from the under-layer to create an over-layer, and if we add the two up we get the same amount of land for half the labor. We can then focus on building infrastructure and housing on the new layers using the labor we would have used to finish the subterranian layer.
Two issues with that. 1. There were few enough OG settlers then that that was not a problem, esp. given the number of natives dead from the European plagues; 2. Not all natives were sharing-caring hippies, that’s akin to the Noble Savage myth, many were bellicose and territorial and wouldn’t have agreed. So we can’t just say, “they consented so long as we share, everyone heard it.”
But we actually have to go beyond the idea of native ownership of land. The idea has usefulness, especially as a means of asserting the rights of currently marginalized and abused minority/nearly extinct populations of North America/Australia/Siberia/the Amazon/etc. (Or as a rebellious slogan, e.g., “There can never really be justice on stolen land.”) But it can also be abused - from non-Middle-Eastern Jews claiming ancestral ownership of Palestine, to developed nations treating immigrants from the Global South (which they had exploited and continue to exploit) as second-class citizens on the basis of native rights.
Instead, we should simply strive for universal equality. Land is a finite resource and we should all have an equal right to its fruits. Imagine an alternative history in which 90% of humans stayed in Africa, and only 10% had settled the rest. Come industrial globalization, would the 10% have a right to serve as landlords for all the world outside Africa and treat the other 90% as tenants?
The natives who had been massacred/deported/reservationed - they should get reparations for what was taken from them, a means to live by 1st world standards, a means to revive their own cultures and languages and let them flourish in the 21st century. But that shouldn’t just take the form of monetary handouts in a capitalist system, which would just make new capitalist exploiters with native blood.
Giving the natives their mules back
