A Free Left Blog

We don’t talk about land much. We don’t talk about it enough. For the whole of human history and indeed the history of the natural world, land has been fought over, often to the death. But now, in our world, land is treated as a commodity to be bought and sold. For the most part its principal value is monetary value. Any meaning attached to land, place and property is subject to market values. This way of treating the land is probably unique to our ‘Western’ civilisation that has now gone global and is impinging upon all aspects of life on our planet. It is often assumed to be a neutral way, but this is not the case. Every way has values, and our way’s principle value is money. This value elbows out other values which attach different meanings to the land, for example those of ‘native’ tribes in the Americas who venerate the earth, in Britain with common land which became subject to ‘ Enclosures ’, and nowadays with the socialised provision of housing under relentl...

I have been meaning to write about the American Indian peoples and their clash with ‘Western’ civilisation almost from when I set up this blog. Some visitors might have seen and perhaps clicked on some of the video links detailing some fragments of Indian history. Many of these are deeply moving, but they are only fragments. I have recently read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee , an amazing book which approaches the clash between Indian and white people from the point of view of the various Indian tribes which were defeated by ‘white’ civilisation. I am now reading another book on the American Indian Wars. However the more I have read, watched, and heard, the more this topic, with its tragedies and dreadful abuses, expands beyond my capacity to deal with it in a blogpost or website article. Like the Lakota (Sioux) man Albert White Hat said of his personal predicament in this video from the terrific PBS series The West , “it’s too much”. There are a great many factors...