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Native American Property Law: The Trail of Broken Treaties. e:\front.3\native.property.short.3dp 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 1 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 2 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 3 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 4 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. 5