Some hoped to “save” the Native Americans through religion, or to “civilize” them by teaching them white ways. Other humanitarians suggested that the best approach would be to fully integrate the tribes into white society.
These latter concerns were expressed in the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act (or simply the Dawes Act), which called for the breakup of the reservation system and the treatment of Native Americans as individuals rather than as tribes. Congressman Henry Dawes believed that private land ownership would help Native Americans become “civilized” and assimilated. Under the act, formally communal land from the reservations was distributed to individuals in 160-acre allotments, and these individuals were guaranteed U.S. citizenship after twenty-five years. The surplus land that remained of the reservations after these allotments had been made was sold to white settlers and land speculators. In practice, much of the land parceled out to Native Americans wound up in white hands after poverty forced many Native Americans to sell their plots. As a result, many Native Americans were left homeless, destitute, and dependent on federal aid for survival. Though passed with good intent, the Dawes Act had disastrous effects: it disintegrated tribal communities and deprived Native Americans of millions of acres of land, clearing the way for American settlement in the process.
Why didn’t private property allow Natives to prosper, but instead lead to ruin? Or, is this passage leaving something out that offsets this reform? Or is it a straight up lie?
This section says it all. they took communal land (which would still be the property of the indians) and split it up into arbitrary allotments, giving each indian one allotment and selling the remainder to other people. this is theft and redistribution, not private property!
they took communal land (which would still be the property of the indians) and split it up into arbitrary allotments, giving each indian one allotment and selling the remainder to other people. this is theft and redistribution, not private property!
Isn’t this the same method that was done to the pilgrims by Thomas Dale, when they had no concept of private property, that allowed them to thrive?
I do not know the specifics of that situation, but I would be surprised to learn that the forcible theft and redistribution of land helped the pilgrims survive.
As has already been pointed out, the Dawes Act has nothing to do with property rights. And forcing communal land to be held privately is no better than the reverse since there’s a reason that the land was used communally to begin with. Property lines on the 2-dimensional, contentinal land mass stretched over the spherical globe called Earth was an alien concept the nomadic Native American tribes just as it is to the Bedouin. No one ever tried parceling up the Arabian desert and assigning “ownership” to various Bedouin tribes.
Let’s make an analogy. Imagine you want to build a “floating city/resort” in some territorial fishing waters somewhere. Now, when you park your barge in the middle of the fishing waters, the fishermen are going to start complaining when the surrounding yachts and jet-skis alter the migratory patterns of the fish, driving them off. I’m not aware of any pre-existing law regarding things like this (converting a common resource for one use into a private resource for another use) but I think we can all agree that the principle of the matter is that those who had prior use (the fishermen) have better claim to the use of the waters than the latecomer, even though the latecomer is doing something completely oblique to fishing. The latecomer ought to either get or buy permission from the fishermen to use the waters in some other way than they have been customarily used because the new use interferes with the already ongoing use.
The problem that the Native Americans faced was that the latecomers were heavily armed with weapons that were a couple millenia advanced beyond their own. It would be like medieval knights trying to hold off an invasion by the US military circa 2011. They didn’t stand a chance. And precisely because they could be exploited, they were. The Dawes Act was no less exploitative than the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Imagine the Feds step in on behalf of the floating city/resort and passes a law giving each fisherman a 10 square mile plot of water where the territorial fishing waters used to be. Such plots would be utterly worthless and would quickly be purchased for a pittance by the owner of the floating city/resort. Where’s the “property rights” in that??
@JJ: There’s another reason that he didn’t mention that the Native Americans might have said something like “every pine needle, every square inch of land is sacred to us”, namely, as an argument for why white settlers ought not to encroach upon their land any further than they already had. It strikes me as a last-ditch appeal to conscience, something along the lines of “Since you won’t respect our material rights in property, since you won’t respect our security in our persons and since you won’t respect our liberty to move about our territorial lands as we have by long custom, at least look into your own consciences and respect what is sacred to us just as you would want us to respect what is sacred to you. You say you are devoutly religious believers in the God called Christ and surely you can understand how it would feel if we were to pitch our tents over your cemeteries, burn down your sacred buildings or graze our animals over your holy sites.”
The only problem with that is, the only really hard hitting cases of stuff like that were either embellished or made up by people who weren’t native Americans, as Woods said, to be used as bludgeons to bash the rest of us over the head. Kind of like people who claim asking for another investigation into 9/11 is “offensive to the victim families.”
It’s not offensive to them. It’s offensive to the people who claim it’s offensive to them. It’s offensive to those people and their “the government is always right, you should trust your government” incredulity. The problem is no one cares what they think. So they have to put their own sentiments into the mouths of people that are listened to.
Have you ever been to a reservation? The land that the Indians were allowed to keep was generally the most marginal land. It is a little difficult to thrive and prosper when it is near impossible to even grow a subsitence garden.
Another aspect that has not been mentioned is that the Indian tribes are the oldest examle of welfare dependency on the north american continent. When they signed treaties that gave up vast territory part of the deal was the government put them on the dole. They became dependent on government commoditites for subsistence. What has a century of welfare done for the Indians? It has kept them in abject poverty. What is the poorest per capita place in the US ? The pine ridge reservation.
I remember Rothbard’s lectures on American Economic History and he talks about the disastrous policies of the Department of the Interior west of the Mississippi (I think it was called the Bureau of Land Management back then). Apparently the “200-acre farm” of yore is perfectly practical in the Northeast due to abundant water supply and good soil. The DI created a policy that land would be split into 200 acres and given to settlers west of the Mississippi. 200 acres is not enough land for most ranches and farms due to less water. This caused a breakdown in private property. So add that to the growing heap of reasons why American Indians failed pretty miserably.
Did you watch the video above? “Commonly owned” is a highly misleading way to describe it.
I wasn’t referring to the Native Americans in that instance. I was referencing Dilorenzo’s work on the pilgrims in How Capitalism Saved America. Dilorenzo states that Dale was sent to be deputy general of Virginia in the early 1600s to “save” the pilgrims who were dying by the hundreds. Dale got there, divided up the land into 3 acre plots, and, as follows with private property, proudction increased and living standards rose. Why did the pilgrims thrive, but not the Native Americans?
You’re looking at it backwards. Despite the abundance of game and wild food in the North American continent, the Pilgrims were starving while the Native Americans were thriving. Why were the Pilgrims starving in a land of abundance while the indigenous people were thriving? The answer is that the English settlers were agrarians. They expected to build a stick-house, open a shop and earn a living. I’m not familiar with all the details but the fact is that they were transplanted more than a month’s journey by sea (itself a highly uncertain adventure) from their nearest trading partner. The North American continent was wild and abundant in natural resources but the most efficient way to utilize those resources without all the tools of European society (of which they had only what they could carry aboard ship) was probably to live as the Native American tribes in those areas lived.
I also can’t comment on Dale’s role in “saving” the pilgrims but I have a sense you’re exaggerating and misunderstanding DiLorenzo’s point. Can you type the thetical paragraph from DiLorenzo?
Unfortunately, I only rented the book from the local library. I know that it was the first page on the chapter regarding the Pilgrims. To the best of my memory, Dilorenzo was merely illustrating the “free rider problem.” If I’m exaggerating, then it’s unintentional; it’s been a while since I read the book, but I think that’s the gist of what he was saying.
As far as I can tell, I’m not looking at it backwards. I should have been clearer: Why did the pilgrims thrive, but not the Native Americans?
In that question, I meant the pilgrims in the 17th century, after private property reforms by Dale, and Native Americans in the 19th century, after private property reforms by the Dawes Act.
