Download Native American Property Law: The Trail of Broken Treaties

Native American Property Law:
The Trail of Broken Treaties.
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Spring 2009
Geranamo
1. Progressive Historians on Native Americans. War
between tribes, save when treaties had been made for a
period, was the normal state of existence, and, almost as
much as gathering food, was the chief occupation of the
white men. James Truslow Adams, M.A Yale University,
and member Massachusetts Historical Society and
American Historical Association, Epic Of America
(Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown, And Company,
1932), 7-8.
The government had to struggle to win actual control over
the territory granted by United States in the treaty ending
the Revolution. Both Great Britain and Spain stood in the
way of this objective . . . The British . . . threatened to set
off another Indian war, for the British intrigued constantly
to stir up the tribes against the Americans. John A.
Garraty, Professor of History at Columbia University, The
American Nation: A History of the United States to 1877
(New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 125.
The enormous Louisiana Territory, originally French, had
been turned over to Spain in 1763. William E.
Woodward, Consensus Historian, A New American
History (New York: Literary Guild, 1937), 306.
Providing an intellectual grounding for the new republic,
gentleman-scholars like Walter H. Prescott, Francis
Parkman, and George Bancroft constructed a patriotic
historical narrative that had no place for Indian tribes,
African-Americans, or the Spanish- and French-derived
cultures of the trans-Mississippi West. In their grand
narrative of American freedom, the seeds of liberty,
planted in Puritan New England, had reached their
inevitable flowering in the American Revolution and
westward expansion. The annexation of Texas in 1845
and conquest of much of Mexico shortly thereafter
became triumphs of civilization, progress, and liberty over
the tyranny of the Catholic Church and the incapacity of
"mongrel races." Since territorial expansion meant
"extending the area of freedom," those who stood in the
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Main Ideas:
Analysis:
Evaluation:
way-European powers, Native Americans, Mexicans-were
by definition obstacles to the progress of liberty. (The
equating of the country's national interests with the
liberation of mankind and of its antagonists with hostility
to freedom has infused the rhetoric of American statecraft
to the present day, often to the bemusement or annoyance
of other nations.)17 Eric Foner, New Left Professor of
History at Columbia University, The Story of American
Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998),
77-8.
17. Joyce Appleby, et al., Telling the Truth About History (New York,
1994), 104-12; Dorothy Ross, "Grand Narrative in American
Historical Writing: From Romance to Uncertainty," American
Historical Review, l00 (June 1995), 652; Thomas Hietala, Manifest
Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca,
1985), 164-65; Major L. Wilson, Space, Time, and Freedom: The
Quest for Nationality and the Irrepressible Conflict 1815-1861 (Westport, 1974), 32.
Main Ideas:
2. Progressive Historians on Land Acquisition.
Analysis:
Andrew Jackson insisted that the Indians receive fair
Evaluation:
prices for their lands and the government bear the expense
of moving and resettling them. John A. Garraty, 264.
Andrew Jackson was not a blind hater of the red men.
Ideally he would have liked them to abandon their
"savage" ways and become farmers. Since few were
willing to do so, as President he pushed the traditional
policy of "removing" them from the path of western
settlement, a policy that seems heartless to modern critics
but which most contemporaries thought the only humane
solution if the nation was to continue to expand. John A.
Garraty, 263-4.
The Indians (Cherokees) then appealed to the President for
help; but he refused to interpose between them and the
laws of Georgia . . . More than five million dollars were
paid them for their lands; but they still clung to their
homes. John Clark Ridpath, Professor of History at
Indiana Asbury University, A Popular History of the
United States of America (New York: Nelson & Phillips,
1877), 430.
3. Textbook. Up to 1805, Indiana's territorial governor,
William Henry Harrison, had negotiated a series of
treaties in a divide-and-conquer strategy extracting Indian
lands for paltry payments. But with the rise to power of
Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, the Prophet,
Harrison's strategy faltered. A fundamental part of
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Main Ideas:
Analysis:
Evaluation:
Tecumseh's message was the assertion that all Indian
lands were held in common by all the tribes: "No tribe has
the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers
. . . Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as
well as the earth? Didn't the Great Spirit make them all
for the use of his children?" Taking advantage of
Tecumseh's absence on a recruiting trip, Harrison
assembled leaders of the Potawatomi, Miami, and
Delaware tribes to negotiate the Treaty of Fort Wayne in
1809. After promising (falsely) that this was the last
cession of land the United States would seek, Harrison
secured three million acres at about two cents per acre.
James L. Roark, Professor of History at Emory University,
Michael P Johnson, Johns Hopkins University, Patricia
Cline Cohen, University of California, Santa Barbara,
Sarah Stage, Arizona State University, Alan Lawson,
Boston College, and Susan M. Hartmann, Ohio State
University, The American Promise: A Compact History
Third Edition Volume I: To 1877 (Boston, Massachusetts:
St. Martin's, 2007), 243.
The Treaty of Greenville (1795) brought temporary peace
to the region, but it did not restore a peaceful life to the
Indians. The annual allowance from the United States too
often came in the form of liquor. "More of us have died
since the Treaty of Greenville than we lost by the years of
war before, and it is all owing to the introduction of liquor
among us," said Chief Little Turtle in 1800. " This liquor
that they introduce into our country is more to be feared
than the gun and tomahawk." James L. Roark, 225.
The Cherokee of Georgia responded with a unique legal
challenge to being treated as subjects. More than any
other southern tribe, the 17,000 Cherokee had
incorporated white political and economic practices into
their tribal life. Spurred by dedicated missionaries, they
had adopted written laws, including a constitution of 1827
modeled on the U.S. Constitution. Two hundred of the
wealthiest Cherokees had intermarried with whites and
had adopted white styles of housing, dress, and cotton
agriculture, including the ownership of a thousand slaves.
They had developed a written alphabet and published a
newspaper as well as Christian prayer books in their
language. James L. Roark, 276-7.
Immigrants swarmed to the middle colonies because of the
availability of land. The Penn family encouraged
immigration to bring in potential buyers for their
enormous tracts of land in Pennsylvania. From the
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beginning, Pennsylvania followed a policy of negotiating
with Indian tribes to purchase additional land. This policy
reduced the violent frontier clashes more common
elsewhere in the colonies. James L. Roark, 110.
Main Ideas:
4. Peaceful Natives. But tribal warfare was not like the
Analysis:
warfare of white men. Indians sought not to exterminate
Evaluation:
their enemies or to claim territory but rather to steal horses
and to prove individual prowess. They considered it
braver to touch an enemy than to kill or scalp him. This
pattern of conflict on the Plains discouraged political
unity. Gary B. Nash, New Left Professor of History at
University of California, Los Angeles, Julie Roy Jeffrey,
Goucher College, John R. Howe, University of Minnesota,
Peter J. Frederick, Wabash College, Allen F. Davis, New
Left Professor of History at Temple University, Allan M.
Winkler, Miami University of Ohio, The American
People: Creating A Nation And A Society (New York:
Longman, 2001), 423.
Native American involvement in the European trade
network hastened the spread of epidemic diseases, raised
the level of warfare, depleted ecozones of animal life, and
drew Indians into a market economy that over a long
period of time constricted their economic freedom. Gary
Nash, Race, Class and Politics: Essays on American
Colonial and Revolutionary Society (Chicago, Illinois:
University of Illinois Press, 1986), 25.
Until 1861 the Indians of the Plains had been relatively
peaceful, but in that year the invasion of their hunting
grounds by thousands of ruthless miners, and the advance
of white settlers along the upper Mississippi and Missouri
frontier, together with dissatisfaction at their treatment by
the government and the breakdown of the reservation
system, resulted in numerous minor conflicts. In 1862 the
Sioux of the Dakota region devastated the Minnesota
frontier and massacred and imprisoned almost a thousand
white men, women, and children. Retribution was swift
and terrible and fell indiscriminately upon the innocent
and the guilty. For the next 25 years warfare was constant, each new influx of settlers driving the Indians to
acts of desperation, which brought on renewed outrage
and punishment. Samuel Eliot Morison, Progressive
Professor of History at Harvard, Henry Steele Commager,
Progressive Professor of History at Amherst College, and
William E. Leuchtenburg, Professor of History at
University of North Carolina, A Concise History Of The
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American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press,
1983), 396.
The Iroquois decimated the Hurons of the Great Lakes
region in the mid-seventeenth century as part of their drive
for beaver hegemony.40 Gary Nash, (1986), 25.
40 Bruce G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the
Huron People to 1660, 2 vols. (Montreal, 1976).
Main Ideas:
5. Andrew Jackson. President Jackson also did not
Analysis:
approve of assimilation; that way lay extinction, he said.
Evaluation:
In his 1833 annual message to Congress he wrote, "They
have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral
habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential .
. . Established in the midst of a superior race . . . they must
necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere
long disappear." Congress backed Jackson's goal and
passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, appropriating
$500,000 to relocate eastern tribes west of the Mississippi.
About 100 million acres of eastern land would be vacated
for eventual white settlement under this act authorizing
ethnic expulsion. James L. Roark, 376.
Ignoring the Supreme Court's decision, an angry President
Jackson pressed the Cherokee for removal west. "If they
now refuse to accept the liberal terms offered, they can
only be liable for whatever evils and difficulties may arise.
I feel conscious of having done my duty to my red
children." James L. Roark, 277.
President Jackson's rationale of Indian removal appears in
his Farewell Address of March 1837: "The states which
had so long been retarded in their improvement by the
Indian tribes residing in the midst of them are at length
relieved from the evil, and this unhappy race —the
original dwellers in our land — are now placed in a
situation where we may well hope that they will share in
the blessings of civilization." Lewis Cass went the
General one better, piously invoking the theory that God
intended the earth to be cultivated. Cherokee cultivation
evidently did not count. Samuel Eliot Morison, Professor
of History at Harvard, The Oxford History Of The
American People (New York: Oxford University Press,
1965), 451.
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