It is a great crying shame that the only people who are seen as the champions of indigneous people’s and their rights are Socialists.This need not be so.Libertarianism has sound principles with applications in this areas.
With the following I wish to sketch out in brief, how this is possible and give some examples.
Homesteading.
Libertarian theory develops a theory of property based on homesteading.Here the first individual who mixes their labour with an unowned resource comes to be it’s Legitimate owner.The Libertarian property ethic is one of original appriopriation.Thus the first user of land becomes it’s owner until they trade with someone else or die.
If someone else-either a private citizen or the state(or it’s agents) uses force to seize the land and claim to be its owner,this is considered illegitimate theft.
Rothbard writing of this in his Ethics of Liberty(Chapter 10) says
“suppose that centuries ago, Smith was tilling the soil and therefore legitimately owning the land; and then that Jones came along and settled down near Smith, claiming by use of coercion the title to Smith’s land, and extracting payment or “rent” from Smith for the privilege of continuing to till the soil. Suppose that now, centuries later, Smith’s descendants (or, for that matter, other unrelated families) are now tilling the soil, while Jones’s descendants, or those who purchased their claims, still continue to exact tribute from the modern tillers. Where is the true property right in such a case? It should be clear that here, just as in the case of slavery, we have a case of continuing aggression against the true owners—the true possessors—of the land, the tillers, or peasants, by the illegitimate owner, the man whose original and continuing claim to the land and its fruits has come from coercion and violence. Just as the original Jones was a continuing aggressor against the original Smith, so the modern peasants are being aggressed against by the modern holder of the Jones-derived land title. In this case of what we might call “feudalism” or “land monopoly,” the feudal or monopolist landlords have no legitimate claim to the property. The current “tenants,” or peasants, should be the absolute owners of their property, and, as in the case of slavery, the land titles should be transferred to the peasants, without compensation to the monopoly landlords”
Another kind of illegitimate claim to land is to claim ownership of land that you or others have no used(and which has not been used at all)
In Summary Rothbard writes(in Ethics of Liberty,Chapter 11)
"THUS, THERE ARE TWO types of ethically invalid land titles: “feudalism,” in which there is continuing aggression by titleholders of land against peasants engaged in transforming the soil; and land-engrossing, where arbitrary claims to virgin land are used to keep first-transformers out of that land. We may call both of these aggressions “land monopoly”—not in the sense that some one person or group owns all the land in society, but in the sense that arbitrary privileges to land ownership are asserted in both cases, clashing with the libertarian rule of non-ownership of land except by actual transformers, their heirs, and their assigns.
Rothbard on Land Theft from the Mexicans.
“This happy exception does not hold for those Mexican lands seized from their owners and redistributed by the conquering Yankees—as can be seen by the recent movement of Mexican-Americans, led by Reies Lopez Tijerina, to return to the heirs of the victims the land stolen from them by the U.S. conquerors. On the theft of land from the Mexican-Americans, see Clark S. Knowlton, “Land-Grant Problems Among the State’s Spanish-Americans,” New Mexico Business (June 1967): 1-13. Also see Clyde Eastman, Garrey Carruthers, and James A. Liefer, “Contrasting Attitudes Toward Land in New Mexico,” New Mexico Business (March 1971): 3-20. On the Tijerina movement, see Richard Gardner, Grito!: Reies Tuerina and the New Mexico Land Grant War of 1967 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).”
Rothbard on the necessity of Just titles to land.
“Largely escaping feudalism itself, it is difficult for Americans to take the entire problem seriously. This is particularly true of American laissez-faire economists, who tend to confine their recommendations for the backward countries to preachments about the virtues of the free market. But these preachments naturally fall on deaf ears, because “free market” for American conservatives obviously does not encompass an end to feudalism and land monopoly and the transfer of title to these lands, without compensation, to the peasantry. And yet, since agriculture is always the overwhelmingly most important industry in the undeveloped countries, a truly free market, a truly libertarian society devoted to justice and property rights, can only be established there by ending unjust feudal claims to property. But utilitarian economists, grounded on no ethical theory of property rights, can only fall back on defending whatever status quo may happen to exist—in this case, unfortunately, the status quo of feudal suppression of justice and of any genuinely free market in land or agriculture. This ignoring of the land problem means that Americans and citizens of undeveloped countries talk in two different languages and that neither can begin to understand the other’s position”.
Rothbard on The Shah’s Land Monopoly.
“The Shah owns more than half of all arable land in Iran, land originally taken over by his father. He owns close to 10,000 villages. So far, this great reformer has sold two of his villages.”
Rothbard on Land Monopoly in Peru.
" A typical example of foreign investment combined with land aggression is a North American mining company in Peru, the Cerro de Pasco Corporation. Cerro de Pasco, having legitimately purchased its land from a religious convent a half century ago, began in 1959 to encroach upon and seize the lands of neighboring Indian peasants. Indians of Rancas refusing to leave their land were massacred by peasants in the pay of the company; Indians of Yerus Yacan tried to contest the company’s action in the courts, while company men burned pastures and destroyed peasant huts. When the Indians retook their land through mass non-violent action, the Peruvian government, at the behest of the Cerro de Pasco and the regional latifundia owners, sent troops to eject, assault, and even murder the unarmed Indians".
as a note he writes
"Sebastian Salazar Bondy, “Andes and Sierra Maestra,” in Whither Latin America? p. 116, says:
From time to time, the Lima newspapers publish stories about such and such a community’s having “invaded” properties of latifundists or miners. The informed reader knows what is happening. Disgusted with being dispossessed, lacking official justice, the Indians have decided to take through their own effort what has always belonged to them"
Rothbard on Ownership of Oil in Land.
"What, then, is to be our view toward investment in oil lands, one of the major forms of foreign investment in underdeveloped countries in today’s world? The major error of most analyses is to issue either a blanket approval or a blanket condemnation, for the answer depends on the justice of the property title established in each specific case. Where, for example, an oil company, foreign or domestic, lays claim to the oil field which it discovers and drills, then this is its just “homesteaded” private property, and it is unjust for the undeveloped government to tax or regulate the company. Where the government insists on claiming ownership of the land itself, and only leases the oil to the company, then (as we will see further below in discussing the role of government), the government’s claim is illegitimate and invalid, and the company, in the role of homesteader, is properly the owner and not merely the renter of the oil land.
On the other hand, there are cases where the oil company uses the government of the undeveloped country to grant it, in advance of drilling, a monopoly concession to all the oil in a vast land area, thereby agreeing to the use of force to squeeze out all competing oil producers who might search for and drill oil in that area. In that case, as in the case above of Crusoe’s arbitrarily using force to squeeze out Friday the first oil company is illegitimately using the government to become a land-and-oil monopolist. Ethically, any new company that enters the scene to discover and drill oil is the proper owner of its “homesteaded” oil area. A fortiori, of course, our oil concessionaire who also uses the State to eject peasants from their land by force—as was done, for example, by the Creole Oil Co. in Venezuela—is a collaborator with the government in the latter’s aggression against the property rights of the peasantry."
Now applying these statements to other indigenous people’s we can see how it applies.Amazonian tribes who first came to own the rainforests being forced out by loggers,Native American’s robbed of their lands by colonial thieves and the US government and forced into reservations(nee:concentration camps) etc.
So from this brief explanation I hope it can be seen how libertarianism can defend this issue.
Summary.
- From Libertarian property theory a legitimate owner is an individual who first made use of land.
- an illegitimate owner is someone or a group of individuals-state or private-who either stole the land(Feudalism) or used forced to prevent others from trying to own unowned land(land-engrossing).
- Some Applications in real life: Shah of Iran,Government’s worldwide claiming ownership of property as ‘public property’,Peruvian indians stolen from by Cerro De Pasco Corporation,Creole Oil Co in Venezuela stealing from the natives there,Israel’s policy towards Palestine,Chiapas in Mexico etc.
- Libertarians oppose Land Grants(individuals or groups or corporations being given land or its privileges by a government )
Examples of Land grants:-Plantations in 16th and 17th century Ireland were the confiscation of land by the Government of England and the colonisation of this land with settlers from England and Scotland linked to Adventurers Act 1642 and Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652 , US Civil war soldiers often received lanfd grants,Between 1783 and 1821, Spain offered land grants to anyone who settled in their colony of Florida ,Atrisco Land Grant,Land grants from Mexicans to Arizonians, Military Tract of 1812 etc.