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Notes to chapter 7 on pages 246–48. 169 7 Politics and Place In discussing The Sign of the Beaver and Take the Long Path in chapter 5, I touched on how these texts skirt, respectively, around questions concerning the colonial appropriation of land in the United States and negotiations over land ownership in contemporary New Zealand. In this chapter, I focus on the politics of spatiality, which are shaped by cultural traditions steeped in the ideologies, beliefs, and practices of imperialism, and specifically of British imperialism. Like other European powers, England regarded the New World as a source of vast wealth in the form of minerals , forests, and farming land; but imperial nations did not all desire the same things or engage in the same processes, and the histories of New Zealand , Australia, Canada, and the United States are marked by peculiarly English inflections. In American Pentimento, Patricia Seed distinguishes between the colonizing vision of England and that of Spain. The English, she says, “had conquered property, categorically denying the natives’ true ownership of their land. Spaniards, on the other hand, had conquered people, allowing sedentary natives to retain their terrain in exchange for social humiliation. Thus regaining soil comes first on the agenda in aboriginal communities once dominated by England, whereas seeking human respect is central to contemporary aboriginal struggles in regions once controlled by Spain.”1 Seed argues that these contrasts can be explained neither by differences between the Indigenous peoples colonized by Spain and by England nor by the historical events associated with first encounters between colonizers “I not understand,” Attean scowled. “How can man own land? Same as air. Land for all people to live on. For beaver and deer. Does deer own land?” —Elizabeth George Speare, The Sign of the Beaver and colonized and the meanings attributed to these encounters, but rather by deep-seated cultural traditions that informed colonial practices. Fundamental to English legal traditions by the seventeenth century was the idea that land ownership was established by the labour invested in planting , fencing, and farming tracts of land, expressed in the saying “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.” Moreover, the investment of capital in land, in the shape of labourers paid to work, was regarded as labour, in that one’s money could be said to be at work. Native Americans who worked on their land, however, were not thereby entitled to own the land, since in the eyes of the colonizers their work did not constitute farming, nor did they give or receive money for labour.2 Territory not fenced off, planted with crops, or in other ways identified as cultivated was regarded as waste land, ideal for the resettlement of England’s surplus population of labourers. The principle that “waste land” should be put to profitable use was employed to justify the seizure of vast tracts of Indigenous territories across English settler colonies, the most extreme expression being the concept of terra nullius, “uninhabited land,” which was applied in Australia to the entire country until 1992, when the Australian High Court rejected this justification for the appropriation of Aboriginal land; nevertheless , as Richard Bartlett notes, “the rejection of terra nullius by the majority of the High Court was empty rhetoric and irrelevant to the existence of native title.”3 Although both The Sign of the Beaver and Take the Long Path set the British preoccupation with using “waste land” against Indigenous conceptions and values concerning ancestral territory, they treat settler values as normative , so that in The Sign of the Beaver Attean’s question “How can man own land?” is a sign of otherness, of the incompatibility of Indian and settler world views, and of the inevitability of Indigenous dispossession. The attitudes of Indigenous peoples to their ancestral lands were and are quite different from those of non-Indigenous settlers. Augie Fleras and Jean Elliott describe as follows how Indigenous peoples of Canada, the United States, and New Zealand regard their land: For aboriginal peoples, land possesses a sacred quality, rooted in an attachment to history, a sense of identity, and a perception of duty towards future generations. In this sense, land is not merely inherited from our ancestors : even more important, it is held in custody for our unborn children . Land and natural resources are not to be exploited and consumed in the pursuit of material gain; they must be protected and conserved. This collective reverence for land and spiritual rapport with it...

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