Marx's writings on private property in land reverse the teleological version of the history of property rights. Whereas it was traditionally assumed that as the historically prior form, landed property was the form out of which other forms of private property developed, Marx's approach to these 'antediluvian forms' of property insist that capital is logically prior, and that it takes up into itself these ancient forms (like rent, interest etc) and gives them a new form appropriate to the reproduction of social capital.
Rights to property in land pretend to an ancient lineage, but serve a modern function. The precondition of the wage-labour/capital relationship is that the working class is separated from the means of subsistence, ie the land. In Europe, the historical justification for the monopoly over land is derived from a largely fictitious heritage.
In the new world, where no such historical justification for the exclusion of the mass of colonists from seeking their subsistence in the undeveloped territories of the West existed, first the British and then later the East Coast establishment recognised the rights of native Americans to property in land (a title quite alien to their culture) for the entirely cynical reasons of creating a barrier to the Westward movement of the colonists. The fictitious character of these titles is evidenced in the ease with which they were torn up and renegotiated as suited the needs of US capital.
The US government in particular has been flexible in recognising indigenous claims as it suited them to take more farm land out of production, as it did under the New Deal agricultural policy, and again in the eighties.
Today indigenous rights are selectively applied to create a moral justificiation for the separation of the mass of ordinary people from the land (and therefore from the means of their own subsistence) as a precondition of reducing them to the status of a propertyless and dependent class. In Africa the development of national parks and conservation areas have also been used to expel people from the land.
Indigenous rights have also played a key part in Western policy in the third world. Agitating amongst diaffected populations is a tried and tested formula for pressurising and destabilising governments that are insufficiently subordinate to Western interests. The support given to the US for the marsh arabs of the Shatt-al-arab waterways and to the Miskito Indians were entirely cynical exercises in destabilising the governments of Iraq and Nicaragua at a time when these were an irritant to the West. This strategy has a long history, since the agitation by the British amongst the Kalahari bushmen and the Arabs under the Ottoman Empire. The strategic recognition of indigenous rights, is, all too often, simply a component of the West's imperial policy. -- Jim heartfield