these pages, I discuss many ways that squatting has been used as a tactic throughout the history of the United States. By framing it strictly as a tactic, I tend to steer away from instances of squatting as an ends, though they certainly do exist. While there could be as many types of squatting as there are squatters, I define it here as occupying an otherwise abandoned structure without exchanging money or engaging in a formal permissive agreement. I then focus on ways of seeking title to such squatted properties. Additionally, I cite numerous instances of property resistance that cannot categorically be described as squatting; squatting is only one type of property resistance within a broader pool of tactics in the global struggle for equity. This book is about how property outlaws have demonstrated and continue to demonstrate such resistance in the American context. I specify American for two reasons: (1) Squatting is a different animal in Europe, just as it’s a different animal in India, just as it’s a different animal in Brazil. Because squatting happens in other ways and for other reasons in such places, they are mostly incomparable to squatting in the United States without extensive research and severely elaborate analyses that are beyond the scope of this book. (2) Europe is already famous for squatting, while American efforts have been largely ignored.
But as I said, this work is not only about squatting. Because such actions do not exist in a vacuum, it is necessary to also explore complementary ideas around squatting, such as the social and economic conditions that lead to buildings being abandoned, the philosophies that justify property resistance, and the legal realm that dictates future possession.
Some chapters are more law heavy than others, which compels me to declare that, though I have spelunked for a few years in the clammy depths of U.S. legislation to research this book, I am not a legal professional. I have never attended law school nor been licensed to dispense legal advice; I pieced together my research with the help of trusted attorney friends and law students. Also, because the law is constantly changing, I encourage you to do your own research on local laws in your area before taking any actions described in this book.
a. This is, of course, back when phones were phones and cameras were cameras, and ne’er the two did mix.
b. Although a friend joked that I would do well to call the book Squatting: Fuck Yeah This Punk Shit Is Awesome Do It.
Chapter One:
And Then There Were None:
Indigenous Land Struggles and the Problem of Ownership
“Territoriality is a way of organizing and talking about power. The problem is one of power, not space. There is plenty of the latter.”
—Milner S. Ball[1]
“A judge articulates her understanding of a text, and as a result, somebody loses his freedom, his property, his children, even his life. Interpretations in law also constitute justifications for violence which has already occurred or which is about to occur.”
—Robert M. Cover[2]
When I was a kid, I thought that history was something that had already happened and was over; all the continents had already been discovered, and all the wars had already been fought. It took me years to understand that history is created all the time and that through history we are able to better understand the movements of today.
A history created all the time is an apt way to talk about the American Indian experience, an essential topic to a thorough discourse about land struggles in the United States. Of course, we have all been made aware since childhood that Europeans stole this continent from the indigenous peoples who had lived on it for tens of thousands of years prior. But even when our textbooks were not revisionist or downright racist, Native Americans were still portrayed as a sort of dinosaur—one of history’s great tragedies that anyone alive today could safely and passively lament because the colonizers and Indians of the past were long dead.
Patricia Nelson Limerick eloquently describes the situation in this way:
Since there was no chance of reversing the conquest, it was safe to regret it. Discontent with modern industrial society led to an interchanging of the usual terms: white Americans were the barbarians, savage and unprincipled, possessed by primitive greed; Indians were the genuinely civil people, who lived with an ecological wisdom and saintliness that made white Americans look like childish brutes.[3]
An exploration of American Indian history that goes deeper than a superficial understanding of their abuse is rare. And the story of their past is further obscured to the mainstream when Indians themselves tend to be notably absent from current events. Most of the things we know about Native Americans we learned in elementary school, and those things tended to be reductive stereotypes that we perceived as glaringly obsolete. Images of feathers, headdresses, and loin cloths were and continue to be so painfully primitive to young people trapped in an age of rapidly advancing technology. And all talk of native peoples was relegated to the history books, effectively removing them from the present tense as a people who continue to live and breathe and struggle.
Bruce N. Duthu calls this phenomenon the “dying race” thesis.[4] Europeans employed this thesis as a reaction to the presence of natives that stymied their original plans for colonization in the New World. The “dying race” thesis presupposed the extinction of hundreds of tribes by virtue of performative speech; if the notion were absorbed into the hearts and minds of the public, then it would eventually become true. Many of the historical Indian plights that followed can be traced back to and justified by the dying race thesis.
The tactic was particularly useful in disputes over land, the linchpin of indigenous struggles. Because American Indians tended to view land as a life-giving and life-sustaining force, while Europeans tended to view it as a resource, a commodity, and a source of revenue, the two perspectives on the value of land were irreconcilable.[5] This, of course, was not the only difference between the two groups: In a catch-22 for natives, settlers declared that only Christians could invoke the Doctrine of Discovery, the credo that granted colonizers land simply because they were the first Christians to discover it.[6] The declarations that vested power in Christians were the first of many ways in which colonizers dehumanized natives and habitually branded them as inferior. This narrative has stretched through time to touch even the contemporary struggles of Native Americans.
The first and most pivotal case regarding indigenous peoples in U.S. law was the 1823 case of Johnson v. McIntosh, a case that not coincidentally involved no input from indigenous peoples. Johnson argued that, before European colonization, Indian tribes “held the country in absolute sovereignty, as independent nations, both as to the right of jurisdiction and sovereignty, and the right of soil,” while McIntosh asserted that the tribes were in a “state of nature, and [had] never been admitted into the general society of nations.”[7]
The court favored McIntosh, forcing Indian tribes to relinquish their sovereignty, and endowing natives with a paternally granted “right to occupancy.” Ultimately, this ruling set a precedent, justifying all subsequent maneuvers to disenfranchise Native Americans and set them on an interminable course of federal abuse. According to Duthu, “The decision rationalized the dispossession of a continent from its original owners by creating a legal framework that, at its core, assumed the racial inferiority of Indian people.”[8]
The decision not only shaped indigenous affairs in the United States for the foreseeable future, but it also influenced the legal structure of natives’ place in commonwealth countries, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.[9] This racist ethos is explicitly carved into the language of the courts, illustrating that these attempts to bureaucratically extinguish whole tribes of people was not a subtle one and proved to
