It's Not as Simple as I Thought, But There Is a Solution

When I learned of "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland as a teenager during the 1970s, I remember thinking at first, simplistically, that the Protestants should just leave, since it was obviously the Catholics' place. A bit later, it dawned on me that it was more complicated than that, since people become attached to the place they're from and their parents are from, maybe their grandparents and even great-grandparents. They think it's theirs, too, silly people. They feel rooted in it.

I assumed that the Protestants were descended from British immigrants, you see. I realize now I still don't know almost anything about the roots of Protestantism in Ireland or The Troubles specifically. But at least some of the Irish Protestants are actually Irish going all the way back: their families converted to Protestantism in Ireland after Henry VIII started the Church of England. And some of the ones descended from British ancestry crossed the Irish Sea in the early 17th century.

Which may sound familiar, since it's almost identical to the time frame of U.S. colonization. And that leads me to my other recent realization: that my facile analysis of The Troubles could just as easily be applied to European Americans in the U.S. 

People like me should all just leave this place and go back where our forebearers came from, too, leaving the land to the people who were here before "we" were. We have no more claim on this land than the English-descended Protestants in Ireland have on that land. 

But that idea has the same problems in implementation, and maybe even more so, since many of us are descended from such a greater mix of ancestries than the Protestants in Ireland, we wouldn't even know where to go back to except Europe in some general sense. We feel rooted to this place, we "belong" here, we think.

What can be done about this instead, then?

I wrote about the idea of decolonization payments for your own property and how to begin returning land to Indigenous peoples back in October.

Another idea I've heard about recently is implementing an Honor Tax. One example is this, established by the Wiyot people in northern California. It's not the same as giving back the land itself, but it puts money in the hands of Indigenous groups to carry out their priorities.

I just spent a few hours in front of our Governor's residence protesting the recent state agency approvals of some permits that may lead to building a new Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline across Minnesota. That pipeline is opposed by every Indigenous group in this state. If they were in charge, it would not be built, and our water and land would be safer and we wouldn't be encouraging more oil production and more future carbon from Canada's dirty tar sands.

Coming up with a plan to give all of the land back to Indigenous peoples in some way (similar to what was described in that October post linked above) may be the best way to shift the balance in this country and bring us into right-relation with the land so we can stop destroying our own habitat. 

My state's Democratic governor is currently demonstrating that he has no intent to do anything to stop that destruction.