Do We Really Understand How the World Exists Today?

I happen to be reading a brilliant book by a member of the law faculty at UCLA, whose name is Stuart Banner, and the book is, How the Indians Lost their Land — Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2007). The book is a study of the relationships between indigenous peoples and the Europeans who came from England and other Western countries to settle and effectively appropriate millions of acres of land which in theory had been held and used by native peoples for God knows how long.

What Banner explains is that laws were one thing, practices and behavior were often something else. But what ultimately always explained how and why land shifted ownership back and forth between two very different societies had more to do with the relative political strength of each group.

When overseas settlers first began venturing into the interior, they often encountered Indian tribes whose numbers and military strength was greater than their own. As this relationship shifted because of increasing and continuous immigration from outside the North American continent, so landed Indian claims to land were either rejected, modified, or simply ignored.

In the second half of the twentieth century, however, and he first sever al decades of the twenty-first, the relative authority of Indian land claims…