Troy D. Smith
In this installment of our
series about the cultural differences that non-indigenous writers should
be aware of when writing about American Indians, we're going to discuss
attitudes toward property.
Perhaps you have heard
these things said about Indians: A) They had no sense of personal
property. B) They had no concept of owning the land.
How
true are those statements? Well, the answers are complex... but North
American tribes definitely had outlooks about property and ownership
that were far different from the European approach.
First
off, you can't really say Indians did not have personal property. Let's
say you were an Indian man (from any tribe, really)... and you had made
your own tools and weapons. Well, those are yours, and you would
definitely not appreciate someone just wandering into your domicile and
taking them. On the other hand, you might not be as attached to them as
most Europeans were to their own goods, and you might feel an obligation
-and in some instances social pressure -to give them away pretty
easily.
Owning the land? That's different. Traditional
indigenous cultures did not recognize human ownership of land, or the
lives of the animals on it. They did recognize the right to
use
that land, or those animals -although often more in a communal context
than an individual one (the technical Western word for that, by the way,
is usufruct rights.)
Certain regions might be claimed
by some tribes as their hunting grounds. This didn't mean they owned the
land or animals, but that their tribe claimed the right to use them-
often more than one tribe made such claims. Sometimes that worked out
okay, sometimes it didn't. So far as the animals were concerned, if you
killed one you conducted a ritual in which you thanked either the animal
itself or the spirit (or
manitou, in Algonquian tribes) that
represented that species for granting you the gift of its life, and it
was expected you would use that gift respectfully. If you did not, or
were ungrateful, you risked the spirit's wrath on you or, since there
was a sense of communal responsibility, on your village or tribe. You
did
not assume you had an innate, divine right to take those lives because you somehow owned the creatures themselves.
Let
us now assume you were a member of a tribe that practiced agriculture
(which most did.) Your village would have the right to use a certain
area, and usually each family had a portion of their own to work.
Another portion was set aside as a common garden, which belonged to the
whole village. Needy people would often be fed from that section.
Among
some tribes, everything was common. The Cherokees would distribute the
grain to all the families in a village each corn harvest, each according
to what it was expected they would need to get through the winter -and
the rest was burned as a sacrifice. No one accumulated anything, and
there was no concept of profit. If the winter was worse than anyone
expected, everyone would suffer together.
Sitting Bull
(who was Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux), after the famous Indian victory at the
Little Bighorn, worked for awhile in Buffalo Bill's traveling Wild West
Show. As a member of the troupe he traveled widely, and one thing
flabbergasted him in the large eastern cities, especially New York. He
saw something there he had never encountered before.
There were children who were hungry and had no homes. At the same time, there were rich people.
This
would not have been possible in his own culture. Anyone in need would
be provided for out of the common stores. The whole village would
prosper as one, or the whole village would suffer as one; some people
having an abundance while others starved was unthinkable. Sitting Bull
was known to take the money he received as wages for his performance in
the show and pass it out indiscriminately to the street children.
As
I mentioned in our last installment, about leadership, prestige was
gained -not by how much you accumulated -but by how much you gave away.
Warriors would take great risk to capture enemy horses or other goods
-then often pass them out as gifts when they returned to the village,
gaining social stature for doing so. Even as Cherokees had their Green
Corn Ceremony, tribes in the Pacific Northwest had a ritual they called
the potlatch. A potlatch was given -sometimes to commemorate a special
occasion, sometimes not -in which a feast was thrown, and at the end the
hosts gave away all or most of their belongings. There, too, there was
social stature to be gained in doing so.
18th century Scotsman Alexander Hewatt said this of the Cusabo tribe of South Carolina:
"As for riches they have none, nor covet any;
and while they have plenty of provisions, they allow none to suffer through
want; if they are successful in hunting, all their unfortunate or distressed
friends share with them the common blessings of life."
Early
on, these differing approaches caused misunderstandings between Indians
and settlers. The Puritans, for example, introduced domestic animals to
New England, in the form of cattle and swine. It was not the custom at
that time to build an enclosure for your stock, they were allowed to
roam free -the wise Puritan built a fence around his garden, to keep the
animals out. The wandering animals trampled down or ate the Indians'
crops -which they did not appreciate, and caused much friction. On the
other hand, Indians were prone to kill the roaming creatures and eat
them.
Let's say you're a Wampanoag Indian, traveling
through the forest, and you encounter a pig or a cow. A white settler in
that context might ask "Gee, I wonder who this beast belongs to." A
Wampanoag would think: "these woods are my people's hunting ground, and
look, here is a four-legged creature. Let's eat it -clearly we have the
right to do so." But to the settler, that Indian has become a poacher
and a thief.
Of course, the trade opportunities
presented by Europeans caused a lot of change. Here come these new
folks, and they have lots of things that you value: steel tomahawks,
steel sewing needles, guns, coffee, sugar, colored beads that were
worthless to the Europeans but for your purposes far superior than
colored shells for use in decoration or spiritual ceremonies. There had
always been trade among Indians, in fact there were extensive trade
routes centuries before Europeans arrived. But never had there been such
unique trade items, that an Indian could not make himself. They started
off as luxuries, but -as luxuries are wont to do -soon became
necessities. The Europeans want furs? we'll give them furs (deer were
hunted almost to extinction in the American South, mostly by Indians, by
1800.) They want captives they can use for slaves on their plantations?
Our limited warfare has always produced a handful of captives- let's
make war on each other continually, to get ever more captives to trade
(this led to great social disruption, and the bloody Westo and Yamassee
wars of the late 1600s / early 1700s.)
From the George Washington
administration onward, Americans tried to "civilize" the Indians. One
way to do this was to break them from their tribal, communal, shared
ownership ideas and teach them to be individuals, and to compete with
each other. In fact, Thomas Jefferson proposed that Indians' land could
be acquired without bloodshed if the U.S. government established trading
posts among them, and introduced them to credit. They would soon find
themselves overextended, the government could call the credit in, and
the Indians would have no choice but to sell their lands as payment. His
plan can be found
HERE in a letter to then-military-governor of Indiana William Henry Harrison.
In
the late 19th century the "Americanization" process was sought through
implementation of the Dawes Act, or allotment. Tribes were
discorporated, as was their communal ownership of land; instead, each
individual family was given a plot of land to work on their own like
good ol' American yeoman farmers. This had two immediate effects: 1)
there would always be a whole lot of land left over, which would
previously have belonged to the tribe in common, but which the
government now took and redistributed to settlers, and 2) since Indians
now had individual ownership, white people could buy those claims from
them if the Indians were financially hard-pressed (which they were),
which would not have been possible when the whole tribe controlled the
land. This resulted in even more Indian land passing out of Indian
hands. There were also unanticipated social effects, such as a breakdown
in community (Indians were not loners, and had always tended to live in
large groups; breaking the land up into individual, far-flung farms
made each family a lonely island) and in gender roles (the government
viewed each family's "head of house" to be the husband/father, even in
tribes where traditionally it was women who controlled agriculture.)
We'll actually go into that in more detail next time, when our topic will be "Gender."
