Inspired by President Barack Obama’s sanctimonious acknowledgment last week that his humble $850 million presidential library in Chicago was built on stolen land, I feel compelled to offer my own poignant but less verbose apology about my own property beginning at my Kansas fence line.
“I earned it.”
I, like numerous owners before me, paid its price. Starting with the homesteaders who took the offer of free land from the U.S. Government on the bet they could make it pay and build their lives here. They broke sod, built houses, paid taxes, fought indians, raised families and fed neighbors. They turned prairie into farms, towns, churches, schools and businesses.
That very government bought this land from France, then secured it for future generations against the threat of hostile natives who were eventually quelled by treaty or defeated by superior forces in open combat. Generations of Americans paid for this land with their blood and their sweat and by force of arms and by victory in war, and eventually by simple purchase price. They transformed it from wilderness into apotheosis. With the help of God, Americans made a miracle here, pursuing freedom for all, creating unfathomable wealth and providing opportunity and welfare for its population unmatched in world history.
My little piece of Kansas part of that legacy.
Mine is a more truthful acknowledgement than the one served up at the Obama Center dedication, where Valerie Jarrett opened by saying, “We honor the Anishinaabe, the Council of Three Fires, the Ojibwe, the Odawa and the Potawatomi nations.” No acknowledgement however of Capt. Nathan Heald, Capt. William Wells, Ensign George Ronan or the 38 soldiers, two women and 12 children, all maimed or killed at the nearby Battle of Fort Dearborn in 1812 by the Potawatomi in their alliance with British forces.
Land acknowledgements like Jarret’s are moral theater for people who like the sound of confession but not the cost of restitution. They solemnly profess that the ground beneath them once belonged to someone else, then proceed to keep standing on it – the oratorical equivalent of a Facebook ‘prayers’ offer in our woefully inauthentic time.
As one commentator quoted by Fox News put it, the real message is, “I want to say I care, but I don’t really care, or I wouldn’t have built this on land which I just said is yours.”
What performative moral fraudsters. Like allowing boys to take girls track and field medals and camp out in their locker rooms. It peppers the New American Left and its leaders like Obama and the mainstay of today’s Democrat party. They beg for mockery of their tissue-paper thin nobility.
My acknowledgement is different because I don’t pretend history never existed. Land has always been contested by force. It defined the borders of the nations of the world. America expanded through war, bargain, migration, law and a frontier ethic that dictated land had to be used, improved and defended. That’s no apologetic fairy tale. It’s our history.
The genius was what came after: title, courts, deeds, mortgages, inheritance, local government, roads, schools and the freedom for ordinary citizens to own property and build wealth. Private ownership turned conquered territory into the most productive republic the world has ever known.
And me – I own a little piece of that miracle. I know how I got here. So spare me the sermon.
