400 Years of African Slavery in America

[Ken]

Ken,
I admit that I didn't know about the 50 treaties (I knew there were some treaties). Of course, where treaties existed, the government had no right to simply step away from them
More generally, I have a middle-of-the-road concept of property rights. Peasants have property rights to the ground they work on. But hunters have no property rights to the ground they hunt in. Big deer hunting as a lifestyle was only possible for a short time, after the Amerindians were provided with European horses and Europeans guns. This lifestyle consumed huge spaces of land in a way that was not sustainable. So, Amerindian big deer hunters tended to claim more property rights than can be justified.

I'm curious how you would regard land rights for nomadic groups. Do they have no property rights at all, since they are generally hunters-gathers, or may engage in minimal horticulture. (The tribe we lived w/ in the Amazon had settled down into semi-permanent village life, but they were traditionally nomadic. There are other tribes in the area that are still nomadic. (These tribes generally fall into the category of isolated uncontacted tribes.) The tribe we were with numbered 59 people when we moved there, and had typically lived in several villages, with a bit over half in one village (where we settled). They also generally moved to a new area every 12 to 15 years. (Previously they might stay in one place for a month or so, then move on.) Building an airstrip in their village largely brought them together, although several family units still maintain a second location elsewhere, and two single brothers have never moved into the main village. They have now occupied that village for around 45 years, probably the longest in their history, unless they were more settled prior to the invasion of that area of the Amazon during the rubber boom. They now number a bit over 100, and the Brazilian government granted them "surface rights" to nearly all of their ancestral village areas, which amounts to a huge land area. (I cannot remember the exact figure right now.)

This is actually an issue that goes more to the heart of European history. Take the 19th Century Mennonite settlements in Ukraine, for example. Were they settling on virgin uninhabited lands? I think not. They were displacing nomadic tribal peoples that were largely Muslim. It was really part of a larger "Great Game" struggle for power and territory between the Russian and Ottoman empires. Importing White Christian farmers was one way for the Russian Empire to assert control over those lands. They were pawns in a much larger geopolitical game. But it was really no different from what White pioneers did to settle the American great plains during the same time period on land that had been previously the home of nomadic Native American tribes. Or what White settlers did in parts of Africa to displace nomadic tribes in places like Kenya, Zimbabwe/Rhodesia, and South Africa.

[temporal1]

Sorry, 500 treaties. No misunderstanding, simple error in typing.

i continue to enjoy reading your views, trying to understand them, from outside the small, youthful, navel-gazing, U.S. PC box that screams domination of all. screaming is a trait of youth.

i was learning a bit about the Battle of Hastings last night. and the few hundred years leading to it.
i’ve long suspected Europeans receive quite a lot more history education than we do in the U.S.
(if it were once true, it may no longer be the case. i don’t know.)

******* ******* *******

Ken,
I admit that I didn't know about the [500] treaties (I knew there were some treaties). Of course, where treaties existed, the government had no right to simply step away from them
More generally, I have a middle-of-the-road concept of property rights. Peasants have property rights to the ground they work on. But hunters have no property rights to the ground they hunt in. Big deer hunting as a lifestyle was only possible for a short time, after the Amerindians were provided with European horses and Europeans guns. This lifestyle consumed huge spaces of land in a way that was not sustainable. So, Amerindian big deer hunters tended to claim more property rights than can be justified.

I'm curious how you would regard land rights for nomadic groups. Do they have no property rights at all, since they are generally hunters-gathers, or may engage in minimal horticulture. (The tribe we lived w/ in the Amazon had settled down into semi-permanent village life, but they were traditionally nomadic. There are other tribes in the area that are still nomadic. (These tribes generally fall into the category of isolated uncontacted tribes.) The tribe we were with numbered 59 people when we moved there, and had typically lived in several villages, with a bit over half in one village (where we settled). They also generally moved to a new area every 12 to 15 years. (Previously they might stay in one place for a month or so, then move on.) Building an airstrip in their village largely brought them together, although several family units still maintain a second location elsewhere, and two single brothers have never moved into the main village. They have now occupied that village for around 45 years, probably the longest in their history, unless they were more settled prior to the invasion of that area of the Amazon during the rubber boom. They now number a bit over 100, and the Brazilian government granted them "surface rights" to nearly all of their ancestral village areas, which amounts to a huge land area. (I cannot remember the exact figure right now.)

“The Zero Sum Fallacy”
“There’s a false notion that poor countries are poor because rich countries are rich.”
- Michael Miller
https://www.povertycure.org/learn/issue ... um-fallacy

There are so many inconvenient fallacies.
Instant gratification folks love sound bites and bullying. The internet empowers it.
Not healthy.

[Ken]

“The Zero Sum Fallacy”
“There’s a false notion that poor countries are poor because rich countries are rich.”
- Michael Miller
https://www.povertycure.org/learn/issue ... um-fallacy

There are so many inconvenient fallacies.
Instant gratification folks love sound bites and bullying. The internet empowers it.
Not healthy.

I'm not sure what this has to do with the topic at hand. But I looked at the link and he is simply wrong. Or more precisely, misses the point. Of course international development isn't a zero sum game and poor countries aren't poor because rich countries are rich. But that is a straw man argument that no one actually makes.

It is, however true that many poor countries are poor due in part to exploitation, neglect, and self-centered polices that are, perpetrated by rich countries and the actions of corporations based in rich countries. Ask HondurasKeiser, for example, if the US government and foreign corporations have any complicity for the poverty and corruption that plagues Honduras and generates so many migrants at our borders.

For my own part, I worked in Guatemala for several years in the late 1980s and for shorter stints in the 1990s and saw many small scale farmers bankrupted and give up to migrate to the US as economic refugee after the imposition of CAFTA (the Central American version of NAFTA) during the Clinton years. The same "globalism" policies that has hollowed out much of the American industrial belt has done the same thing to rural Central America. The US has gotten richer as have Central American elites. But there are also many millions left behind.

[Neto]

Ken,
I admit that I didn't know about the 50 treaties (I knew there were some treaties). Of course, where treaties existed, the government had no right to simply step away from them
More generally, I have a middle-of-the-road concept of property rights. Peasants have property rights to the ground they work on. But hunters have no property rights to the ground they hunt in. Big deer hunting as a lifestyle was only possible for a short time, after the Amerindians were provided with European horses and Europeans guns. This lifestyle consumed huge spaces of land in a way that was not sustainable. So, Amerindian big deer hunters tended to claim more property rights than can be justified.

I'm curious how you would regard land rights for nomadic groups. Do they have no property rights at all, since they are generally hunters-gathers, or may engage in minimal horticulture. (The tribe we lived w/ in the Amazon had settled down into semi-permanent village life, but they were traditionally nomadic. There are other tribes in the area that are still nomadic. (These tribes generally fall into the category of isolated uncontacted tribes.) The tribe we were with numbered 59 people when we moved there, and had typically lived in several villages, with a bit over half in one village (where we settled). They also generally moved to a new area every 12 to 15 years. (Previously they might stay in one place for a month or so, then move on.) Building an airstrip in their village largely brought them together, although several family units still maintain a second location elsewhere, and two single brothers have never moved into the main village. They have now occupied that village for around 45 years, probably the longest in their history, unless they were more settled prior to the invasion of that area of the Amazon during the rubber boom. They now number a bit over 100, and the Brazilian government granted them "surface rights" to nearly all of their ancestral village areas, which amounts to a huge land area. (I cannot remember the exact figure right now.)

This is actually an issue that goes more to the heart of European history. Take the 19th Century Mennonite settlements in Ukraine, for example. Were they settling on virgin uninhabited lands? I think not. They were displacing nomadic tribal peoples that were largely Muslim. It was really part of a larger "Great Game" struggle for power and territory between the Russian and Ottoman empires. Importing White Christian farmers was one way for the Russian Empire to assert control over those lands. They were pawns in a much larger geopolitical game. But it was really no different from what White pioneers did to settle the American great plains during the same time period on land that had been previously the home of nomadic Native American tribes. Or what White settlers did in parts of Africa to displace nomadic tribes in places like Kenya, Zimbabwe/Rhodesia, and South Africa.

I feel for the people who are being displaced at each point in history. I do not know who was there (on the Steppes in what is now Ukraine) before the Tatars, but they were also invaders from somewhere else. (They dominated the Russians during one period of history, before the Russian Empire, and before the Czardom.) It is an endless trail back to some point in time when people arrived in a new area for the first time, where there were no previous HUMAN inhabitants. But some animal rights proponents will also speak of the displacement of animal populations whom they believe to have occupied a given area before humans arrived. Where do you stop? (By the way, the Czar designated Mennonite farmers to go live among the Tatars, and teach them how to farm. Not their traditional way of life, but it was all a part of an attempt to modernize these new land areas. Some of them hated the Tatars, but there were also villages in Crimea where they lived peacefully side by side.)

As concerns the Banawa (the tribe we lived with), they moved to the area they currently occupy only a bit over 100 years ago (judging from what we could gather from their own stories, accounts from related tribes, and from comparative linguistic studies between their language and other languages in the same language family - Arawan). After the initial land demarcation had been done (on the maps, not yet physically marked out), the government decided to extend their territory over farther toward a neighboring indigenous area, to prevent outsiders from being able to claim land between the two areas. This additional land is where another (related) tribe lived, until they were wiped out by the Banawa. (The other tribe were cannibals, and that is the reason given for the massacre.) Our pilot flew over it once on one of our returns (to avoid a big storm in our normal heading). It was uninhabited, and at that time none of the living Banawa had ever been in any of that area.

[Neto]

“The Zero Sum Fallacy”
“There’s a false notion that poor countries are poor because rich countries are rich.”
- Michael Miller
https://www.povertycure.org/learn/issue ... um-fallacy

There are so many inconvenient fallacies.
Instant gratification folks love sound bites and bullying. The internet empowers it.
Not healthy.

I'm not sure what this has to do with the topic at hand. But I looked at the link and he is simply wrong. Or more precisely, misses the point. Of course international development isn't a zero sum game and poor countries aren't poor because rich countries are rich. But that is a straw man argument that no one actually makes.

It is, however true that many poor countries are poor due in part to exploitation, neglect, and self-centered polices that are, perpetrated by rich countries and the actions of corporations based in rich countries. Ask HondurasKeiser, for example, if the US government and foreign corporations have any complicity for the poverty and corruption that plagues Honduras and generates so many migrants at our borders.

For my own part, I worked in Guatemala for several years in the late 1980s and for shorter stints in the 1990s and saw many small scale farmers bankrupted and give up to migrate to the US as economic refugee after the imposition of CAFTA (the Central American version of NAFTA) during the Clinton years. The same "globalism" policies that has hollowed out much of the American industrial belt has done the same thing to rural Central America. The US has gotten richer as have Central American elites. But there are also many millions left behind.

I didn't read the article, but this is a concept that in Anthropology is called "Limited Good". It is described by examples in Latin America, but mainly from "folk societies" in Mexico. It is also related to what are termed "Cargo Cults", especially seen among tribal societies in the Pacific WWII areas where the people regularly saw huge shipments of goods coming in for the foreign military groups. I think that we DO still hear things that fit the general description of "limited Good", where there is a belief that the fact that another person or group has a lot of goods, automatically means that my group will NOT be able to acquire those kinds of goods. It goes beyond economic situations or exploitation, to include the idea that someone who has no connection of any kind to me or my people, or to any market even related to the type of goods I might desire, is the reason for my own lack of goods. (Incidentally, and completely off topic, I have heard some Christian workers present ideas like this in the spiritual realm, as if there is a limited amount of Holy Spirit influence in the world, and specifically that Western missionary efforts must decrease so that the Holy Spirit is free to work through non-Western peoples.)

[temporal1]

“The Zero Sum Fallacy”
“There’s a false notion that poor countries are poor because rich countries are rich.”
- Michael Miller
https://www.povertycure.org/learn/issue ... um-fallacy

There are so many inconvenient fallacies.
Instant gratification folks love sound bites and bullying. The internet empowers it.
Not healthy.

I'm not sure what this has to do with the topic at hand. But I looked at the link and he is simply wrong. Or more precisely, misses the point. Of course international development isn't a zero sum game and poor countries aren't poor because rich countries are rich. But that is a straw man argument that no one actually makes.

It is, however true that many poor countries are poor due in part to exploitation, neglect, and self-centered polices that are, perpetrated by rich countries and the actions of corporations based in rich countries. Ask HondurasKeiser, for example, if the US government and foreign corporations have any complicity for the poverty and corruption that plagues Honduras and generates so many migrants at our borders.

For my own part, I worked in Guatemala for several years in the late 1980s and for shorter stints in the 1990s and saw many small scale farmers bankrupted and give up to migrate to the US as economic refugee after the imposition of CAFTA (the Central American version of NAFTA) during the Clinton years. The same "globalism" policies that has hollowed out much of the American industrial belt has done the same thing to rural Central America. The US has gotten richer as have Central American elites. But there are also many millions left behind.

it wasn’t intended to be a “direct hit” or “home run” comment. it wasn’t intended to diminish/silence them or others.
it was a minor companion thought addressed specifically to PetrC and Neto.

specifically to you, i suggest reading everything you can from forum member Honduras Keiser, and, don’t miss whatever you can locate on Thomas Sowell. (i’m not an expert on either.) i appreciate their experiences and views. they are worth the effort. they aren’t the only ones. just suggested starting places.

[Bootstrap]

“The Zero Sum Fallacy”
“There’s a false notion that poor countries are poor because rich countries are rich.”

Slaves were enslaved because slaveholders owned them. That's zero-sum.

Slaves lost their freedom and their ability to own property or even to be able to decide whether to live with their spouses or children. Masters were able to tell slaves to do whatever they wanted and to take advantage of them in unspeakable ways.

I don't think there are very many slaveholders who would have been willing to swap positions.

[Ken]

“The Zero Sum Fallacy”
“There’s a false notion that poor countries are poor because rich countries are rich.”
- Michael Miller
https://www.povertycure.org/learn/issue ... um-fallacy

There are so many inconvenient fallacies.
Instant gratification folks love sound bites and bullying. The internet empowers it.
Not healthy.

I'm not sure what this has to do with the topic at hand. But I looked at the link and he is simply wrong. Or more precisely, misses the point. Of course international development isn't a zero sum game and poor countries aren't poor because rich countries are rich. But that is a straw man argument that no one actually makes.

It is, however true that many poor countries are poor due in part to exploitation, neglect, and self-centered polices that are, perpetrated by rich countries and the actions of corporations based in rich countries. Ask HondurasKeiser, for example, if the US government and foreign corporations have any complicity for the poverty and corruption that plagues Honduras and generates so many migrants at our borders.

For my own part, I worked in Guatemala for several years in the late 1980s and for shorter stints in the 1990s and saw many small scale farmers bankrupted and give up to migrate to the US as economic refugee after the imposition of CAFTA (the Central American version of NAFTA) during the Clinton years. The same "globalism" policies that has hollowed out much of the American industrial belt has done the same thing to rural Central America. The US has gotten richer as have Central American elites. But there are also many millions left behind.

I didn't read the article, but this is a concept that in Anthropology is called "Limited Good". It is described by examples in Latin America, but mainly from "folk societies" in Mexico. It is also related to what are termed "Cargo Cults", especially seen among tribal societies in the Pacific WWII areas where the people regularly saw huge shipments of goods coming in for the foreign military groups. I think that we DO still hear things that fit the general description of "limited Good", where there is a belief that the fact that another person or group has a lot of goods, automatically means that my group will NOT be able to acquire those kinds of goods. It goes beyond economic situations or exploitation, to include the idea that someone who has no connection of any kind to me or my people, or to any market even related to the type of goods I might desire, is the reason for my own lack of goods. (Incidentally, and completely off topic, I have heard some Christian workers present ideas like this in the spiritual realm, as if there is a limited amount of Holy Spirit influence in the world, and specifically that Western missionary efforts must decrease so that the Holy Spirit is free to work through non-Western peoples.)

When I was in Guatemala, Mormon missionaries would come down and build Mormon churches in local communities, then would recruit members in part by providing generous handouts of food aid and clothing and other goods to villagers who would show up to attend and join the Mormons. There were a lot of jokes among the local Catholics about families who would join the Mormons when they needed food or new shoes but then always come back to the Catholic Church on the important saint's days and such.

That is a small scale version of a whole other issue called "dependency theory" or "aid dependency"

[temporal1]

“The Zero Sum Fallacy”
“There’s a false notion that poor countries are poor because rich countries are rich.”

Slaves were enslaved because slaveholders owned them. That's zero-sum.

Slaves lost their freedom and their ability to own property or even to be able to decide whether to live with their spouses or children. Masters were able to tell slaves to do whatever they wanted and to take advantage of them in unspeakable ways.

I don't think there are very many slaveholders who would have been willing to swap positions.

To repeat, i wrote to PetrC and Neto:
it wasn’t intended to be a “direct hit” or “home run” comment. it wasn’t intended to diminish/silence them or others.
it was a minor companion thought addressed specifically to PetrC and Neto.

slavery has existed throughout history, on every continent, in Biblical times, in present day.
again, i was not referring to slavery in my comment to PetrC and Neto, who are both very aware of the history of slavery. and other “games people play.”

[temporal1]

This summer marks the 400th anniversary of the first African slaves coming to American shores - in Virginia 1619. Twenty slaves were sold by pirates who had taken them from a Portuguese ship they had raided off of Mexico - and that began America's nearly 250 year history of enslaving those of African decent. It may seem like ages ago that slavery was abolished, but for reference, when I was born there were still black people alive who had been born into slavery - and the after-effects of that evil practice still ripple through society to this day.

In terms of moral opposition to slavery, Mennonites and Brethren, while not leaders in the abolitionist movement like Quakers and later Methodists, appear to have been among the faith groups opposing slavery. I would have hoped so - if they were true to their theological heritage, the teachings of Jesus would have compelled them to oppose slavery. The Quakers led the way in this country and England, but four Mennonite brothers signed the first Quaker-initiated Anti-Slavery declaration in the US 1688, in Germantown PA. In 1782 the Brethren church took up a question of a particular member's ownership and impregnation of a female slave. It was decided that the "negro wench" should be set free, and her children schooled and cared for. Not all Anabaptists took up the cause, some opposed it, and those who were Abolitionists were characteristically quiet and non-militant about it. However, a number of Mennonites participated in the underground railroad.

What are the dehumanizing causes of the day that we Anabaptists should be morally attuned to?

Disclaimer:
i have not read this topic until recent posts, 19-ish pages in. i have not reviewed prior posts.
this topic is in “History.” (Referring to “the Americas?” not sure. maybe in part.)
now, if i’m reading correctly, the main question here is about Anabaptists and today’s problems (?) (current events?)
(often, subject lines and OPs do not exactly align.)

In response to the question in bold, i would suggest for all Christians, all moral people, regardless of faith or no faith,
caution to avoid organized political blocs+cults is priority. these human crafted entities, are not moral, not human, not of Jesus Christ.

Beware: they BEGIN with seductive and attractive moral premises. every time.
Jim Jones sounded good to a lot of people.

But, having no souls, having only goals of political power and control of the public treasury, they do not bear good fruit.
They can’t.

Jesus said it best: Perfectly. For slave and slave owner alike:
John 14:6
https://biblehub.com/john/14-6.htm

5“Lord,” said Thomas, “we do not know where You are going, so how can we know the way?”

6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.

7If you had known Me, you would know My Father as well.
From now on you do know Him and have seen Him.”…
amen.

Thomas. Who better represents all we many doubtful impatient imperfect ones.