Land Dispossession

Land dispossession is a recurring theme in the short stories making up Stones from the Creek.  Alchesay keeps the Apache land together by insisting that logging and cattle ranching make more sense than farming on the White Mountain reservation.  Creighton Foraker actively seeks to dispossess the Mexican farmers of New Mexico and is opposed by the Herrera brothers.  Smedley Butler finds himself working for local banana planters who want to seize Garífuna lands for plantations.  And the Creek Indians struggle to find a way around the Dawes Commission's mandate to privatize all the land in Indian Territory.

For me, though, one of the most painful tales of dispossession is in the second Mingo Sanders story, "Scars," which finds him imprisoned and leased to work mining phosphates in the South Carolina Low Country.  I wrote:

Hundreds of mostly young, Black men stood up to their chests in cold water, digging the valuable phosphates from under the soil for the Edisto Phosphate Company, which leased the land from the state.  Some of the prisoners were actually children of the land’s former owners, incarcerated and removing the topsoil of their parents’ own land in order to mine the precious mineral beneath. (Emphasis added for this posting.)

 I am quite certain that I had already thought about this tragic irony before I visited Viet Nam in March 2009.  But on our third day of visits to rural communes in the Red River Delta south of Hanoi I saw this same thing myself.  My journal entry for March 11 tells the story:

Today's commune was crowded with people who were given this visit as a sop to accommodate their anger and frustration.  They are being displaced from their paddies to make the land available for cement quarrying.  Many are breaking stones all day for pennies instead of raising rice, etc.  It is now one of the poorest communes in the country.

 Tam spoke to a woman who had walked 15 km and arrived at 6 am and wasn't getting an appointment.  Her son left the district to get a job (which he hasn't -- he is probably living in an alley somewhere.)  She moved to the mountain where she really doesn't know how to make a living.  The district health officer said they are seeing profound health and nutrition issues as a result.

He also said many people have moved to the mountains and are trying every crop available.  But they don't really know about raising crops in this unfamiliar environment.  They are trying whatever they can, but in order to buy rice, which is, after all the only real food.  This year the experiment with potatoes failed and the government had to distribute rice.

 I remember hearing these stories from Tam and thinking immediately of convict laborers in South Carolina forced to dig underneath their own families' soil to mine phosphate for fertilizing other families' soil elsewhere.  (And here I must thank Tam again.  Had it not been for his empathy in questioning the people visiting our medical mission, and had it not been for his generosity in sharing the stories he heard with me, I would have been standing around doing crowd control and completely missing everything that was in front of my face.)

Now the cement industry of Viet Nam is privately owned but subordinate to the "Socialist" government which has decided that the rich limestone resources of the country are now a greater asset than one commune's rice, especially since Viet Nam is the world's second largest rice exporter.  So all these people can be dispossessed in the name of a larger "socialist" good.

South Carolina, on its face, looks like a totally different story.  An explicitly racist regime dispossessed Black landowners to deny them any home, security or power.  The convict lease system ensured a continuing supply of low-cost labor to white "planters" and industrialists alike.

So if the circumstances appear different, why are the outcomes identical?  I will just say -- again -- that we have to stop looking at "allies" and "enemies", "left" and "right", and start by assessing effects on regular people.