Brand new state

Land of the Red Folk. Sunday musical excursion #17

Years back, I knew a couple of guys in Wisconsin, one of mixed-race native stock, who’d previously lived in the state of Oklahoma. They called themselves the Oklahomasexuals and were pretty funny guys apart from the bad jokes. For them, the time they’d been down south was a few years in a brand new state, for they were both die-hard cheese-heads.

Oklahoma itself became a brand new state on 16 November 1907. Prior to that it had been known as Oklahoma Territory. Prior to which it had been part of Arkansas Territory and then Indian Territory. Prior to which it had been native American territory, occupied by a multitude of indigenous peoples (there are 26 native American languages spoken there today).

It was the Indian Appropriations Act 1889, followed by the questionably illegal land grab (which is depicted in the Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman film Far And Away) that facilitated the path to statehood. Former treaties with native peoples were effectively ripped up by the terms of the Dawes Act of 1887 and the Curtis Act of 1898. The best that can be said of this legislation is that it sought assimilation of the natives into white society—rather than their elimination.

The motto of the state of Oklahoma is telling: it looks like a simple truism, but far from it. It stems from the very heart of what is Oklahoma and at what Oklahoma is—the classic case of capitalist looting. Its motto is labor omnia vincit, which translates to English as labour conquers all, and it is a direct citation from the philosopher John Locke, whose mantra served the colonists and settlers in the US so well that his doctrines have never been questioned to this day: that by applying his labour to the soil, a man acquires ownership of it.

But this was just the beginning of Locke’s myth-making. He went on to claim that the right to own land, and all the wealth that sprang from it, was established through hard work. When a man has ‘mixed his Labour’ with the land, Locke asserted, he ‘thereby makes it his Property’.

Of course, indigenous peoples around the globe had spent thousands of years mixing their labour with the land, long before European colonists arrived. But Locke, without ever acknowledging that he had done so, created a Year Zero, a unique and arbitrary moment at which a particular person—a European man of property, of course—could step onto a piece of land, stick a spade into the earth, and claim it as his own.

(Monbiot G. & Hutchison P.: The Invisible Doctrine, pp. 13-14)

I’ve no doubt that, were I to pitch up at your front garden this afternoon with a spade in my hand and start digging up your roses, you would raise some vociferous objection, even were I to retort that I planned planting in their place the most wonderful barley, carrots and potatoes, even spinach and tomatoes. If my horticultural ambitions for your modest plot of God’s earth still did not convince you to relinquish it to me, then choice would be little but to back my claims with force and in extremis to still your plaint by killing you. Thus, by only a slight analogy, was how Oklahoma was won for the Union.

It is by this fiction that our song takes shameless pride in vaunting We know we belong to the land—a claim that hardly makes but crass sense until it’s understood that the land now belongs to us.

If Locke’s philosophy has any merit, then its worth lies in the doctrine of negative prescription, not positive prescription: a man who fails to work his land usefully for the prescribed period forfeits his title to it. But he must have right and title in the land to be able to forfeit them. If no man shall be deprived of life, liberty or property except by due process, then nor shall any man be invested with property, except by due process, and that does not include appropriation under duress.

Oklahoma!

Written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II

From their 1943 musical Oklahoma!

Performed by Gordon MacRae (with Shirley Jones, Charlotte Greenwood, James Whitmore and the Company)