New at Reason

David Weigel | April 13, 2006

Amy H. Sturgis consults the tribal elders and asks: Were the native Americans patsies?

Comments

|4.13.06 @ 1:17PM|#

Articles like this are why I enjoy Reason and H & R even though I disagree with about half the policy recommendations. Thank you for publishing this, especially on a day I was home sick with the 'flu. Thanks again.

|4.13.06 @ 2:32PM|#

Karen,
Hope the article helped your recovery from the flu.
I didn't realize we made policy recommendations here. I thought our attitude was, "If it's policy, we don't recommend it"
Like a lot of hillbillies, my great-great grandma was Cherokee, so this article caught my eye.
As a thread kicker, is it true native Americans had less of an appreciation of private property than Europeans?

|4.13.06 @ 3:48PM|#

Ruthless, I do not know the answer to that but I think that would depend on what tribe, lifestyle, etc. The Mongols and Bedouin have very little concept of land ownership because in the lifestyle they lead, staying rooted in one place means death whereas the Dutch not only owned the land they transformed it.

|4.13.06 @ 5:01PM|#

Kwix,
Come to think of it, Lewis and Clark encountered a pretty wide range attitudes among the tribes.

|4.13.06 @ 5:48PM|#

As a thread kicker, is it true native Americans had less of an appreciation of private property than Europeans?

The various Indians varied in that as much as did, and do, other native Americans.

Come to think of it, Lewis and Clark encountered a pretty wide range attitudes among the tribes.

I highly recommend Thwaite's "Early Western Travels," published in, IIRC, 1905. It's around 30 volumes of "eye witness" stories, articles and semi-advertising of all sorts from the 1600s through the late 1800s. The writing styles range from erudite to grammar-free phonetic spelling.

Anyway, one of the stories involved an Indian, in what is now the NW US, who had gotten caught stealing something, and some of the military whites wanted to hang him, while others pointed out that stealing was normal, culturally approved behavior to the Indian, and that just getting caught and returning whatever he had stolen was considered debasing punishment in itself.

The attitude was something like: if someone can steal your stuff, then you're an incompetent owner and deserve to have your stuff stolen. If you get caught stealing it, then you're an incompetent thief and deserve to give it back. Rather odd, perhaps, but certainly more civilized than locking people in cages.

|4.13.06 @ 5:54PM|#

Just because they were nomads does not mean that they had no sense of property. It was just that land could not fall under the category of property since they could not pack it and take it with them.

fyodor|4.13.06 @ 7:10PM|#

Maybe it's cause I'm not a scholar, but I was never aware of American Indians being thought of as "patsies"!! Noble savages, perhaps. But maybe it comes down to the same thing, as they manipulated their environment more than often given credit for.

|4.13.06 @ 9:02PM|#

Mr. F. Le Mur,
Dyn-o-mite!

|4.14.06 @ 9:48AM|#

Maybe it's cause I'm not a scholar, but I was never aware of American Indians being thought of as "patsies"!!Noble savages, perhaps.

I've never thought of them as 'patsies,' nor have I ever thought of the various Indian tribes/nations as equivalent to each other; if anything they differed from each other more than the European countries differed from each other.
And I doubt that sports teams named themselves after Indian tribes because they thought the tribes were patsies!

Ruthless - check out those books, if you can find them. They're quite fascinating but undeservedly obscure.
The coolest stories involved groups of people, often without common backgrounds or langauge, working together to make a buck: escaped slaves + Indians from mutually hostile tribes + whites from various countries = $$$.

|4.14.06 @ 9:57AM|#

Just because they were nomads does not mean that they had no sense of property.

Modern western property laws and 'rights' are based on an intrinsic (genetic) sense of property, which isn't even unique to humans (most non-herbivorous animals, mammals at least, have territories from which they'll expel competitors).
Ideas like "I was here first, so it's mine" and "I made it, so it's mine" are typical in kids, and those basic ideas are the basis of formalized into western law.

|4.14.06 @ 10:07AM|#

basic ideas are the basis of formalized into western law
Or something to that effect...