In 1978 the writer John McPhee began a series of journeys across the United States to inspect rock formations along the 40th parallel, and to meet the geologists who examined and interpreted them. Fifteen years later he completed Annals of a Former World a masterpiece of cultural, scientific, and historical writing that introduced a generation of American readers to what one reviewer aptly called the “geopoetry” of their continent. McPhee, who for many years taught a legendary ‘Literature of Fact’ writing course at Princeton University, had an exceptional eye for details and his book segues brilliantly from carefully chosen historical incidents to the passages of deep time in which oceans, glaciers and tectonic plates shape and reshape the land itself. Through artful accumulation, he shows how these different processes gave rise to a country that we now call the United States.
One memorable scene in the book recalls land purchases in Pennsylvania. When William Penn arrived in the New World and met the Lenape Indians he concluded almost immediately that they were North American descendants of the Jews. He studied their language “lofty, yet narrow, but like the Hebrew” in order to negotiate treaties on a more even footing. When his relationship with the tribe had attained what appeared to be genuinely mutual understanding, Penn drafted an agreement “under the elms of Shakamaxon” with Tammany, the tribe’s most renowned chief, asserting that their friendship would endure “as long as the sun will shine and the rivers flow with water.” In return the Lenape granted him a tract of land equivalent to the distance a man could walk in a day and a half. Subsequently, after a long period of personal hardship. Penn returned to England, where he died in Berkshire, bankrupt and silenced by a second stroke, in 1718.
After his death, Penn’s son Thomas “a businessman who had a lawyer’s grasp of grasping,” returned to the Lenape with a copy of the treaty, determined to enforce his rights. In what came to be known as the Walking Purchase, Thomas hired two of the best athletes in the colony to extend the limit of his land as far as it could go. On September 19, 1737 his representatives stomped acquisitively for a day and a half walking “sixty-five miles, well into the Poconos.” The Lenape protested at this cynical ploy, but somehow they remained peaceful. When, however, Thomas and his brothers tried to establish a northern boundary that “encompassed and annexed the Minisink” the tribe’s patience ran out. McPhee writes “where they had tolerated whites in the Minisink, they burned whole settlements and destroyed the occupants. They killed John Rush. They killed his wife, his son and daughter. They killed seventeen Vanakens and Vancamps. They pursued people on the river and killed them in their boats. They kindled Hans Vanfleara and Lambert Brink, Piercewell Golding and Matthew Rue. They could not, however, kill their way backward through time. They would never regain the Minisink.”
The history of the Americas is replete with similar confrontations many of which have produced grievances which remain unresolved to this day. Contentious land claims in Canada and the United States continue to provoke political debate – witness the recent violence against protestors at Standing Rock – while indigenous groups throughout Central America have taken multinational corporations to court for treating their ancestral lands with the same contemptuous indifference that Penn’s sons showed towards the Lenape. Likewise, throughout the developing world, there has been a demonstrable correlation between foreign direct investment and human rights violations, often due to disputed land from which indigenous communities have been forcibly displaced.
Like many of these countries, many parts of what is now Guyana have also been appropriated, or misappropriated, in comparable ways. As a recent editorial in this paper notes, these have quite distinct histories and should not be confused. They do however illustrate how quickly what are often presented as narrow legal questions devolve into far more nuanced questions of history. In many cases this is because what is at stake is more complex than what can be shown on a map, or written into a treaty.
Indigenous communities in the Americas often distinguish land from territory. The former can be drawn on a map, or abstracted into a commodity, but the latter remains inextricable from the history of the people who have lived among it. Territory is woven into culture, and cannot be disentangled and ascribed, or transferred, to individual entities. It remains part of a collective patrimony. Seen in these terms, the Walking Purchase becomes a more familiar transaction: the Lenape invited Penn to share their territory, his sons used the invitation to justify a land grab. Most important, perhaps, is McPhee’s observation that once tricked into a bad deal the tribe’s fate is often sealed. No amount of subsequent outrage can take them to the past, they cannot “kill their way back through time.” Sadly this insight remains relevant today, both as we consider the merits of long ignored land claims, and negotiate with foreigners looking to exploit our naivety.
