Economist Noah Smith recently addressed the question of Indigenous claims in his Substack newsletter (‘No, you are not on Indigenous land Pieces of territory belong to institutions, not to racial groups’, 30/11/24; available at: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/no-you-are-not-on-indigenous-land). Smith is a successful Substack contributor reaching more 286.000 subscribers; his defence of settler colonialism as a mode of domination invites a response.

First, Smith argues that Indigenous peoples are not the first conquerors. This is a venerable and ancient justification for settler colonial appropriation, and Smith rehearses it unchanged, as if he was addressing a nineteenth century audience – that this rhetoric survives unaffected is perhaps a telling indication that settler colonialism remains as a structural underpinning of the settler societies, their imaginaries, and their operation. ‘The United States, like all nations, was created through territorial conquest’, Smith avers, admitting that ‘the U.S. used force to either displace, subjugate, or kill all of those people’, and concluding that to ‘the extent that land “ownership” existed under the previous inhabitants, the land of the U.S. is stolen land’. It sounds like an embrace of a dishonourable historical record, but the inverted commas around ‘ownership’ are strategic and telling. They indicate a determination to question whether the property rights of the Indigenous peoples were enforceable before the settlers took over. Seriously, would Smith add the inverted commas when referring to the ‘ownership’ of financial investments managed by Wall Street firms? Didn’t think so. He seems to be acknowledging an historical process of genocidal dispossession, but he is happy to confirm the logic that underpinned it.

Conquering settlers never ultimately recognise the property of Indigenous peoples; this is what they do. They steal and they know it, but like most thieves I know they pre-emptively accuse their victims of stealing in the first place. Smith reproduces this typical settler colonial refrain without question: the ‘forcible theft of the land upon which the U.S. now exists was not the first such theft; the people who lived there before conquered, displaced, or killed someone else in order to take the land’. There is no record, of course, mere allegation without substance, but somehow stealing something that was stolen is not stealing. Is Smith suggesting that all property should be tested in the same way? Is he a communist? Perhaps he is making an exception for the property of people he does not like. I thought so.

To be sure, Smith adopts lock stock and barrel another of the rhetorical stances of settlers (the settlers were armed). Even if somehow the Indigenous peoples of the land were the first to establish property rights, even if they did not steal the land in the first place (and Smith is ready to acknowledge that this may be the case), their property rights would still be unrecognisable. For ‘every piece of land, there was a first human to lay eyes on it, and a first human to say “This land is mine”’, he fantasises. But, he proceeds, and it is a massive but,

‘by what right did this first human claim exclusive ownership of this land? Why does being the first person to see a natural object make you the rightful owner of that object? And why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough to be the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever?’

‘I have never seen a satisfactory answer to these questions’, Smith adds, resting his case. Conquering settlers also asked these questions. Smith repeats them and has not been able to find answers because he did not look in the right places and because of the inverted commas around ‘ownership’ referred above. The answer is that it is a fundamental characteristic of all property everywhere and at all times that it may be transferred, including across generations. Any economics textbook would do if Smith really wanted to look for answers. Would Smith be prepared to suggest that those who are currently landless should simply take over the landed estates and backyard of those who inherited their possessions? Is he advocating a redistributive transformation for all? Would he stop at real estate? Why should the real estate owned by Indigenous peoples be subject to his redistributive doctrine and other property be exempt? Why not follow the logic of his argument to his ultimate end? He is perhaps being a communist. He sounds like one and all because of those inverted commas. Or perhaps he is advocating for a commons that is limited to the estates of Indigenous collectives. Some rules for some, different rules for others.

He then collapses the property of Indigenous peoples with their sovereignty. He does not recognise its existence either, because enforceable property rights require a recognisable system of governance. Conquering settlers never recognise the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples; this is what they do, and Smith’s reasoning is not exceptional. He has not yet seen ‘a satisfactory explanation of why ownership of land should be allocated collectively, in terms of racial or ethnic groups’, and he cannot see why should ‘notional blood relation to the discoverers or the conquerors of a piece of land’ can determine whether one can ‘truly belong on that land’. Any form of sovereignty is a collective relation, and blood is usually a concern of settlers; Indigenous peoples rely on kin. Is he advocating for dissolving all sovereignty? Now Smith sounds like an anarchist. But perhaps his anarchism stops at the sovereignty of others. Besides, these concerns are curious, because it is the land and collective self-determination of Indigenous people that is currently being taken. Indigenous peoples are not allocating property rights anywhere, so Smith is being pre-emptive at best. It is all quite hypothetical and counterfactual. Indigenous peoples are not saying that one cannot truly belong to land, they are saying that one has to be Indigenous to belong to it as an Indigenous person. Smith may not like it, but as long as there are Indigenous peoples relating to the land as Indigenous people, then he is on Indigenous land.

Smith goes on to critique an imaginary Indigenous ‘ethnonationalism’ that would follow ‘decolonisation’ (his inverted commas, not mine). He is fantasising. There is no such thing. He does so to obfuscate the ongoing dispossessory regime that the settlers have imposed and are imposing. Thieves always accuse their victims of harbouring the intention of being thieves themselves. In any case, Indigenous peoples taking charge is an image that has populated the nightmares of settlers since day one. Smith evokes this nightmare because he is confronted by ‘land acknowledgements’ – he feels threatened by an acknowledgment of Indigenous relations to land. He is then ready, for once, to follow logic all the way and appraises the ‘morality of following the principles behind land acknowledgements to their logical conclusion’: ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘very dark futures’, ‘violent death or second-class citizenhood’, ‘a global nightmare made real, surpassing even the horrors of previous centuries’. Really? He finds it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of settler colonialism.

The political science fiction of political economists is always underwhelming; now that I think of it, everything they write is kind of fictional and unscientific. But are settler genocide, or a reverse ethnic cleansing the only options? The reality is that Indigenous collectives have always welcomed guests , accommodated newcomers, and exercised a sovereign ability to make kin. And the reality is that settlers have at times been genuinely committed to reconciliation processes and to recognising Indigenous self-determination and the sky has not fallen. Decolonisation (no inverted commas) is not a zero-sum game, and recognising an Indigenous relation to land takes nothing away from settlers, who are not Indigenous anyway and cannot ever be (settler colonialism is a relation in which one is settler because another is Indigenous; asking how long before a settler becomes Indigenous is like asking how long should a captain of industry exploit his workforce before they turn into a proletarian, or how long a husband should abuse his wife before he turns into a woman: asking the question is an indication that one has not understood the relation). Raising the spectre of a putative settler refugee of the future is a cheap way to neglect the possibilities of the present.

I mentioned that conquering settlers never ultimately recognise the property of Indigenous peoples, but they may recognise it at first, for the purpose of acquiring a title they invented; this is why at times they sign deeds and treaties, and, as Smith outlines, they may recognise it now. Smith is not an entirely unreconstructed nineteenth-century style settler, after all. They may recognise it now, but still for the purpose of acquisition, of course. Smith concludes his post by considering the circumstances that may allow him to consider recognising Indigenous property and sovereign ability. For example, the Indigenous collectives recognised by settlers could manage their assets like laissez faire neoliberal turbocapitalists. If they did (and at times they do, Smith even mentions a few of these instances), they

‘should definitely have the autonomy to do whatever they want with their lands, including building housing or industry. In fact, we’re starting to see a pattern emerge where Native Americans embrace laissez-faire policies toward industry and manage to poach business from their over-regulated neighbors.’

Deregulation as principle beats even settler appropriation as principle!

Then, instead of ‘a dark world of ethnic cleansing’, Smith would look forward to ‘a bright future where Native Americans and the United States of America exist in harmony and cooperation rather than in conflict’, a predicament that ‘doesn’t just apply to America, but to the whole world’ (of course, by behaving like turbocapitalist neoliberals the sovereign Indigenous collectives may lose their connection to land and would certainly lose their self-determining abilities, as their options would be restricted to one set of behaviour only, an obvious constraint on their freedom to do with their estates what they chose). It looks like a concession, but it is not. Then again, Smith’s concluding passage is not about Indigenous sovereignties; it is about the limits of settler ones. They also do not ultimately hold the sovereign ability to decide on land use and enforce ‘procedural requirements’. It is a threat: if the settlers keep regulating, their sovereignty will also get the inverted commas treatment.