Justice

Are Native Americans the only ones who have the right to be in America?

Comments

Excellent question! Uninhabited land (Iceland, prior to the Vikings) seems relatively problem-free about rights to inhabit (though some cases are controversial as they involve competing nations, e.g. who has the right to inhabit the moon? --see the Moon Treaty). Native populations seem to have a natural primacy or entitlement to habitation that would supersede those who would claim a right to the land by way of conquest or land-use (following a quasi-Lockean notion that a people may lose its entitlement to property if the property is ill used or not used at all). In American history, alas, some Native Americans sold land to Europeans and so they conferred their right to be in America to nonNative Americans, though some of these sales may well be less than voluntary or transparent in implications to Native populations, and some Native lands were taken from Natives on the grounds of war settlements (some Native Americans sided with the Crown during the American Revolution, and so they were considered enemies of the American Republic and subject to be compelled to make restitution). I suggest that Native American rights to habitation historically has been violated in many ways, but some nonNative populations did acquire the right to habitation through a (tarnished) process of exchange.

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