Res nullius, or terra nullius, was a doctrine that basically justified the colonization of massive parts of the world. Honestly, this is something that modern scholars have read back into the colonization efforts. Essentially, it deals with the justification for the taking of land from native populations.
Basically, if a land is not effectively occupied, it is nobody's land. Some of the definitions try to make this more concrete by talking about societies that have not yet advanced to a position where they had not yet mixed their labor with the earth in any permanent way (Frost), but I think it may be more appropriate to emphasize the sparsity of population that usually described most of these places. The land was simply never occupied in truly significant ways, for one, and the obvious fact that when the English colonists took up position in Massachusetts Bay they could easily negotiate for settlement rights.
The land could fit a lot more people than the 5,000 or so that were there, and, especially through technology and trade that the natives did not have, they would be able to radically change the region. We could say that the Europeans were able to apply a mix of res nullius and negotiated settlement: it was obvious that there was enough room for both parties, and it was also obvious that there would be advantages to mixing with the Europeans, so why not negotiate it? Why not be cooperative?
From the perspective of the natives, the sacrifice of some amount of their hunting grounds for new potential allies that could give them trade and technological advances that would put them above their enemies. Moreover, the Wampanoag had just suffered a massive crisis of disease -- oddly enough, disease that may have had no connection to European colonization, and the disease even resulted in a spiritual crisis as their medicine men could not handle or explain it, and it led to many converting to Christianity early on (Wikipedia).
Obviously, conflict eventually occurred, and one can imagine that very similar stories unfolded in many other regions, where the initial settling was met with some amount of peace and acceptance, but it all boiled over, as it eventually boils over.
I believe that when we think about the history of colonization in these terms, it is more understandable. Just as such, most sticking points in history can be tackled when we understand that the problem was less black & white.
But because the interpretation of history can be weaponized for advancing a left or right position, we have to actually resolve it in a more final way.
Cue la raza cósmica.
Perhaps the one thing that makes this a sticking point in North America is the lack of intermixing. The narrative among Latinos, as I understand it, is that they have become la raza cósmica -- the problem of colonization is resolved by bringing all Latino identity into a single racial construct.
Are latinos white? Yes.
Are they Indian? Yes.
Are they black? Yes.
Can more recent immigrants from Asia and the Middle East have children & grandchildren grafted onto the Latino community? Well, that's the plan, isn't it? The Latin Americans are the cosmic race being unfurled by God: all peoples coming together into a post-racial existence.
In a sense, the cosmic race is the post-race.
While I am not sure if this is what was meant by Vasconcelos when he wrote about it in the 1920s, this is how I have understood it from interactions with a limited amount of Latinos that I know. The undestanding is far from scholarly, but just like in most cases, the folk understanding of an idea is often more important than the scholarly version.
The Latin American world solved the problem of the legacy of colonialism through dissolution of racial identity and intermarriage. While there may still be some that think in terms of castizos & mestizos, and it may even be a theme that would one day reemerge, it is effective in making the sins of history be forgotten via the union of victim & offender into a single national identity.
In a sense, it is the most elegant of all resolutions, for it renders conflict irrelevant by making the grief and guilty a little bit of everybody's, and its measuring becomes something irrelevant. It could even be said that the only reason that "native lands" is still relevant among Norte Americanos is because they have not dissolved their differences through intermarriage.
The racial heterogeneity of North Americans, and their obsession with diversity, may actually be what is holding them back from fixing the problem. Nobody can move forward because we are still in the game of counting grievances and using history to jockey for position. We are stuck in a narrative of diversity that is not helpful, instead of a narrative that resolves our identities into a single one.
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