One of the more odd and hypocritical aspects of contemporary discourse is the way that colonization is viewed as being only negative when white people do it, but when everyone else does it, it is perfectly acceptable. Do the poor people of the world want to overrun Europe and North America? If so, that is perfectly fine, but heaven forbid that an Israeli should seek to build a settlement on some scrap of desert claimed by a Palestinian, or that the United States should feel proud about land that it conquered and obtained via treaty from indigenous peoples. This sort of history is emblematic of a larger failure when it comes to recognizing history, regardless of one’s worldview when it comes to life and its spread. That insight is that there are truly no natives in this world, and that the lands we inhabit are ultimately dependent on the power that we have to either take land or hold it from those who wish to take it from us. Even alternate forms of dealing with land rights, such as deeds and treaties and contracts and the like, spring from the power that these documents have among those who are using them. Without the power to convey certain and reliable ownership, deeds and contracts are not worth the paper they are written on. Ultimately, right depends to a large extent on might, and if one does not secure the might to obtain one’s rights, one will protest them in vain from those who hold the power and hold those without power in contempt.

Whether one looks into the Bible or has a view of life that springs from a view of progressive evolution, the same rough picture can be found concerning the spread of life. The Bible, in its first chapter, speaks of God creating more complex beings over a period of six days, culminating in the appearance of man, who is given charge over a garden to tend and keep it and given dominion (or a legitimate rule) over creation. Evolution, meanwhile, posits that life began somewhere and that it spread first through the seas and then eventually colonized land. In both cases, life began in a discrete place and time and over time spread to conquer the rest of the earth, along with the threat to conquer the immediate environs of our earth as time and technology permit. There were no peoples who sprang from the soil without aid, none who can be considered to be a native inhabitant of any region. We all came, at some long remove, from somewhere else. At best it can be said that we have (if we have) acclimated ourselves to the lands we find ourselves in, but neither we nor anything else in our world is truly native to it.

This is a hard thing to understand. We all want to think of ourselves as natives of land, even though we are not. White people get mocked as nativists in North America when we have lived here for only a few hundred years, but it does not take long at all for someone to live in a place to feel native to it. It may be true that few first-generation immigrants feel at home in a new place, but it is frequently the case that their children feel native, even if the nations where they live remember them as outsiders for far longer. If we examine matters from the scale of geological time (assuming that the dating is even remotely correct), human beings as a whole have been on this earth for only a few million years out of 4.2 billion years, a proportion of one thousandth or so of the time that this earth has existed. Our own species, such as it is, has not even lived a tenth of that period, being between 100,000 and 300,000 years old or so, as it is counted by scientists looking at bones in Africa. During the times that we have record of, at least three different groups invaded the Americas–and the last of the “native” peoples was arriving in Greenland from the North at the same time as the Vikings were coming from the South and East. Native Europeans of the Western Hunter-Gatherer group took the land from the Neanderthals–outbreeding or outfighting them, before themselves being colonized by farmers from the Middle East, later peoples of the Indo-European Yamnaya variety (apparently), and numerous attempts after that from other peoples, most recently by those from the Middle East and Africa. Similar stories can be told of any other region in the world.

Whenever we look at where people live, we see that they live where they have the power to do so. If a people finds itself in original possession of a land but finds its demography shattered by disease and faced against invaders who possess greater social cohesion, strength of will, and military power, the newcomers will find themselves in the ascendant before too long, and will soon consider themselves to be natives of the land once they have become accustomed to its ways. This is not too surprising. The desire for home is a common one for people, perhaps even a nearly universal pull, and it is deeply unappealing for people to hold to the (true) belief that neither they nor anyone else is truly at home anywhere on this earth. Time and circumstances may force all of us to leave the areas where we are from to seek a better life, or a life at all, in another place. We are dragged hither and yon by parents, seek opportunities for education, work, and romance in far-flung areas, and find our desire to set down roots hindered by a world full of grave uncertainty. And no matter where we seek to set our roots personally, the areas where we do so have a history that goes on before us and that will go on after we are gone. And there is no way to be sure that a place where we find a temporary home will be suitable or appealing to those who come after us–assuming there will be others who come after us, for our children or other successors may find themselves having to pull up stakes and go off vagabonding somewhere else looking for a home like the boll weevil or the tumbleweed. The proper question when it comes to how land and power and everything else are divided is: do we have the power and the will to defend what is ours and the ability to obtain what we need, while defending ourselves and our property from those who would take both our lives and our property from us? To obtain and maintain that power is the essential thing.