Let me suppose that you have just about had it with this whole land acknowledgment thing. We do not enjoy the spectacle of the progressive hypocrisy that, over and over, tries to reenact the Land O Lakes butter logo fiasco, in which they got rid of the Indian and kept the land. To be fair, I’ll bet the corporate managers begin all their meetings with a butter box acknowledgement, which, to be fair again, fixes everything.
This book, Not Stolen, written Jeff Fynn-Paul, is truly a bracing read. Everywhere you turn, when it comes to virtually every “white supremacy” or “genocide” story you have ever been told, the actual truth ranges from “outrageous falsehood” to “well, it was not that simple.”
Fynn-Paul covers everything here, from the Spanish settlements south of our current border, to the English settlements on the East Coast, to the infamous Trail of Tears, to the lands that were purchased fair and square, to the impact of rifles and horses on the westward movement of everybody, to the broken treaties, to the treaties that were kept, and he does so in an even-handed and objective way. When there were atrocities, he doesn’t air brush them out, but simply tells the entire story in the way that historians ought to do. This means he also talks about the times the Amerindians were the bad guys who broke the peace.
So his thesis is not that there was “no stealing ever,” but rather that Americans are not currently living on stolen land. The American story is not a story of colonizing genocide. If you have needed to be reassured on this point, get this book and read it. If you knew instinctively that there was something cock-eyed about all the genocide talk, but didn’t know how to answer, get the book and read it. Like I said above, it is truly a bracing read.
There was one detail in the book that was so astonishing to me that I wrote the author to see if I was understanding him correctly. I was, and here is the thing that flabbergasted me. Suppose we start in 1511 and take it down to 1890, and we ask how many Amerindians died violently at the hands of those of European descent, and then we ask the same thing going the other way, what figures do we come up with respectively? The two answers come in at just over 7K and 9K respectively.
Get this book. Highly recommended. You will learn an awful lot, even about the Trail of Tears.