Native Americans and property

Economics Political Theory
1

From my Sociology textbook:

For example, when Europeans first encountered them, native Americans had no sense of land ownership. From a real-estate perspective, the Europeans must have been very exited. (“All this land and nobody owns it?”) The issue was not a language barrier: Native Americans could simply not understand the concept of people owning land, pieces of the earth. Acting on their concepts of ownership, Europeans thus began the process of displacing native peoples from their homelands and even attacking them when they resisted.

Now, this passage seems to be self-contradictory. How can native Americans have no concept of property and be “displaced for their homelands,” at the same time? And I take issue with the complete homogenization of the Native American cultures. But I can see what he’s trying to say. Can anyone substantiate this claim? Was communal property prevalent amongst various native American cultures?

2

What is the point of that example within the framework in the text?

3

To show cultural differences. But I find it hard to believe that native Americans had “no sense” of property (the corny, “how can you own the earth” nonsense).

4

Well, it depends. A lot of Native American tribes were nomadic, and it’s understandable that a nomadic society would have no concept of land as property.

5

It is certainly not my strong point, but I would imagine that they had a different / less concrete sense of property (I am painting in very broad stereotypical strokes). I think for the most part (outside of Mexico) the NA natives were nomadic (?). But I wouldn’t be suprised if they “owned” to some degree tools, tents, etc. Likewise I bet to some degree they got into some territorial disputes w/ other tribes. It should be easy to look up.

The important thing is the way they thought of property though.

6

It should also be noted as to how they understood the contracts involved when making the deals with the Europeans (language, etc). Even if they screwed up at 1st, I would think after awhile they figured out what the contracts / property meant.

7

Native Americans and Europeans both had a concept of property ownership. Try taking his bow and a native American would demonstrate all the requisite forms of slighted ownership quite violently. Real estate for many native Americans had no economic value due to its abundance and so was not conceived as property by them. However, the conflicts between tribes that resulted in displacement prior to the arrival of Europeans shows, particularly in the West, at least a collectivist idea of property ownership (in the sense of a ‘homeland’).

Many of the cultural differences between Europeans and native Americans are due to the enormous abundance of land in the Americas. For example, conflict between European powers was moving towards total war whereas native Americans didn’t generally wipe each other out. It was just too easy to pick and go somewhere else.

Even animals demonstrate property rights. Give your own dog a juicy steak and you might be able to take it from him. Give it to a strange dog and watch what happens when you try and take it back. This sense extends from the reality of all life = corporeal entities that occupy physical space and must consume scarce resources to survive.

8

In a profession with a 44:1 ratio of “liberals” to “conservatives”, if a Sociology textbook said anything else about the subject it would be a sure sign of apocalypse.

9

For me the important issue is whether or not newcomers from Europe were justified in taking possession of land in North America.

Were railroad corporations justified in exterminating the buffalo in the Great Plains, or was this extermination a violation of property rights?

10

when Europeans first encountered them, native Americans had no sense of land ownership

A fiction created to justify the seizure of lands from the native Americans and then later on by socialists to describe an idealized society without individual property rights (which never really existed).

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/property-rights-among-native-americans/

11

The book Chief Joseph talks about this issue amongst the Nez Perce indians. How the natives felt was that the you could not make claims on the earth any more than you could your mother (as it was the Earth Mother, get it). They also felt it unwise to “dig into your mother’s scalp” ie, agriculture. Not all natives continued the old ways, but many/most of them wanted to.

The US government made a deal giving large portions their territorial homeland to themselves, leaving other large portions to remain in the hands of the natives. But the settlers really didn’t care. As the nomadic tribes left for the winter to the southern lands, settlers came up and started putting up fences. When the natives came back, obviously things started getting tense.

So the US government, under civilian pressure, signed a new deal with the tribes practicing the new way, for the old tribes land. None of the chiefs from the old tribes signed this new deal. But the government, under civilian pressure, had to give the land to the settlers. War broke out, with the Nez Perce on the run for 3 years.

The Nez Perce had general concepts of mine/yours; my teepee, my horses, my food. But they also had many communal aspects to property. If a person needed something from his neighbor, it was most likely no problem. If the “owner” was away, one could go into their teepee and take what he needed, with respect of course. And if the “owner” had a problem he was basically told to get over it.

This actually caused a problem. After the settlers moved in, but before the exile, the settlers found this practice deplorable. And basically the settlers made the government institute theft laws. Even if the “owner” was perfectly okay with the person coming into his house, the government was forced to prosecute the “theif.”

That’s why us socialists make a distinction between “ownership” and “control.” Ownership, to me, entails a form of control with a legalized claim. Control is more general, and doesn’t have all the historical and legal connotations of ownership.

12

There are two myths in this passage.

First, to suggest that the American Natives had no concept of ownership just another leftist academic myth. Certainly there was a sense of land ownership amongst the Cherokee when President Jackson sent them packing in the famed Trail of Tears. There are also instances of Natives establishing “property rights” regarding Buffalo hunting and hunting grounds. Native tribes also warred against each other over land. However, the best example of Native ownership has to do with the Columbia River in the Northwestern United States. The Natives established property rights regarding salmon fishing, and had rules regarding who gets to fish and when. Unfortunately, the colonizing Europeans ignored this and there was a tragedy of the commons type of situation regarding the salmon - driving the salmon to near extinction.

Second, the diminished Native population was not the result of “white aggression” as commonly taught in academia. Rather, the reason that the Natives were so decimated was because the Europeans gave them smallpox. Remember, the Europeans (along with the Africans and Asians) had years of genetic buildups to resist infectious diseases. The Black Death of the 1340’s-1350’s either immunized most of the Eurasian population or killed them in the process. The Native Northern and Southern American populations were virgins, so to speak, regarding their ability to handle diseases; infectious diseases decimate virgin populations - killing 90% of the Natives. This explains why Cortez took over entire empires with only a handful of troops. Additionally, the fact that the Natives were dying en masse (due to smallpox) - while the colonizing settlers seemed to be fine - catalyzed the colonization process and demoralized the Natives. This can also explain the widespread conversion of Native spiritualism to Christianity.

I am in no way defending the mass-murder of the colonizers, but the crimes inflicted against the Native population were just government sanctioned (Jackson’s purge of Natives, broken treaties, The Spanish Crown’s sponsorship of Cortez, etc). The whole smallpox thing can hardly be blamed on capitalism or private property. It’s just that the whole thing - Natives not believing in ownership - conforms to the Marxist interpretation of history as taught by every social science department in the country.

To be completely honest, I’ve never encountered a market friendly professor in any realm of the social sciences in my entire academic experience. They are all ignorant of economics, and are just cultural marxists. You can learn from them, but take everything they say with a grain of salt.

13

I would argue that it wasn’t that they had no understanding of land ownership. IT’s that the volume of people to land available ratio was nothing like that of Europe and people now and people then cannto comprehend living in a place where land is essentially super-abundant.

In a sense Indian’s did own land. They cultivated wildlife and wild growth in broad geographical regions. Various examples of tribe conflict can be shown to occur where different groups clashed over the same geographical area’s.

14

I think they were closer to use-theory of ownership rather than the GPS-coordinate theory of ownership.

15

The Mayan indians of Central America would mark the corners of their property with large rocks and build their homes on top of their ancestors graves.

16

Tom Woods in 33 Questions said that Natives didn’t have property rights when resources were abundant, but if the resources started to dwindle they would institute property rights. You can read every page but one on Amazon. It’s question 3.

17

I think that Russell Means http://russellmeans.com/ would either become agry or laugh outright at the idea that Native Americans had no sense of land ownership. I only wish that they all would have claimed their land on behalf of their gods, then perhaps history might have been different, perhaps. You know, a lot of this stuff still goes on today, for example, in the Amazon. Perhaps that would be a more pressing topic.

18

This. It also seems that medieval and ancient Europeans were (often) closer to use-theory of ownership.