Writing about Indians When You're Not One: Property

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."

Writing about Indians When You're Not One- PART TWO: BALANCE

 

Troy D. Smith

There is a Lakota expression that no doubt some of you are aware of: mitakuye oyasin. This phrase has traditionally been used in Lakota prayers, and since the Lakota language has, in the 20^th century, become in some ways an unofficial lingua franca of the Pan-Indian movement (and Powwow Circuit), the expression is known and used by Indians of many tribes, and their non-Indian allies.

Its literal meaning is something akin to “all my relations,” another way of saying “we are all related.” Even though every Indian tribe, and every region, differs from others, there are some basic principles that practically every indigenous nation of North America shares (the same way that there are certain European cultural traits, even though specific European nations and regions might differ in significant ways.) One of these principles is eloquently summed up by mitakuye oyasin: everything is connected. Not just all human beings, but each human being and all other forms of life, and the earth itself. It’s like we are all strands on one big web; vibrations on one strand will affect the whole thing, one way or another.

Knowledge of this connectedness leads to an overarching need to maintain balance at all times, in every way, and this need is reflected in many aspects of American Indian religion, culture, and daily life. Failure to understand the concept of balance among native nations led many European settlers –and many non-Indian writers –to misunderstand the thoughts and actions of Indians. In Part One of this series, I talked about KINSHIP; this time around I’m going to expound on that sense of balance and how it has been (and continues to be) manifest in American Indian culture.

The most obvious manifestation is in regard to consumption and interaction with the physical environment. Most modern audiences are aware that, traditionally, Indians have been known for “not taking more than they need, and using everything they take.” This is the ideal (although, like all ideals, it has not always been lived up to.) This is why Indians of most tribes had rituals in which they thanked the spirit of the animals they hunted for providing them with food; failure to do so would upset the balance, and the spirit would punish the hunter –or his village, since Indians had a sense of community responsibility.

As I said, that was the ideal. Some scholars speculate that the “mega-fauna” that once proliferated in North America (mammoths, for example) may have disappeared due to overhunting –though others argue that climate change at the end of the last glacial period played a larger role. Some historians have suggested that the American bison may have already been on the road to extinction due to Indian hunting practices –whether that’s true or not, one can’t deny that the tactic of goading entire buffalo herds to plunge off cliffsides (when your tribe can only use a fraction of that meat) does not not fit the general idea of Indians as ecologists. Nor can it be denied that, once Southeastern tribes became heavily invested in the deerskin trade in the 18^th century, deer were overhunted nearly to extinction.

Such practices, though, can probably best be described as aberrations from the cultural ideal of balance. Another, and related, application of balance pertained to agriculture and property. In most tribes, a person gained prestige –not by how much they accumulated –but by how much they gave away. A successful raid on an enemy horse herd might provide you with several new mounts that you could give as gifts when you got back home, gaining status in the tribe. Of course, if you were a young man, you could parlay those horses into a new wife –in which case your new father-in-law would have horses to redistribute and prestige to gain. Excess agricultural goods were often considered the property of the village in general, and were redistributed according to everyone’s relative needs. Among the Cherokees, for example, at the annual Green Corn Ceremony after the harvest, each family was given the amount of grain it was estimated they would need for the year, and everything that was left over was burned as a sacrifice to the spirits. Tribes in the Pacific Northwest redistributed wealth via a ceremony known as the potlatch.

The point is, balance requires that everyone be provided for equally. Early European colonists could not wrap their minds around this attitude, which they considered wasteful and unnatural. Conversely, when Sitting Bull traveled with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, he was flabbergasted when he saw starving and homeless children in Eastern cities. How could this be possible? In his culture, either the whole tribe prospered or the whole tribe suffered. Either way, they did it together, as one community.

Thomas Jefferson understood that the secret to defeating the Indians was disrupting these traditional approaches. As early as the late 1700s, when Jefferson became the first U.S. Secretary of State, he was recommending that all tribes be removed west of the Mississippi; however, he believed it would be morally wrong to physically force them to do so, therefore he had an alternate plan. Establish government funded trading posts in Indian country, and introduce the natives to certain goods –sugar, coffee, manufactured goods –which would start off as luxuries but quickly come to seem like necessities. Then introduce the Indians to the concept of credit, which they’re not going to understand at first… once they are deeply in debt, call in that debt, and their only choice will be to sell off their lands to pay it (so much more civilized an approach!)

In other words… manipulate the Indians into abandoning their tradition of maintaining balance. The same approach was used when getting Southeastern tribes entrenched in the slave trade (raiding other tribes for captives they could sell as slaves to the English) and the deerskin trade.

Throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries, Indian spiritual leaders preached that their people’s only hope was to abandon the white man’s way of doing things and go back to the traditional ways –including an appreciation for balance. Prophets from Neolin to Tenskwatawa to Handsome Lake to Whitepath to Wovoka made this call.

Balance also comes into play when discussing justice. If you kill another member of your tribe, you must forfeit your life; a kinsman of the victim can assume the role of Blood-Avenger and execute you. If you cannot be found, a close relative will do in your place. The blood price does not absolutely have to be paid by you personally, but by your family or clan –again, community rather than individual responsibility.

In most cases, the guilty party did not attempt to escape justice –knowing that to do so would doom a family member instead. Among the Choctaws, executions were very ritualized… the killer would appear at the appointed place of execution (he was given an extension if an important ball game was coming up- this was the South, after all), along with a second- usually a brother or close friend. The killer was dispatched with a single blow to the head –a bullet in later eras –and his second would catch him and gently lower him to his burial shroud, spread on the ground. Although technically illegal in the late 1800s, many Choctaws continued to do things the traditional way- one recorded account tells of a promising Choctaw baseball player, bound for the majors, who came home to Indian Territory to answer with his life for a drunken killing. Another tells of a Choctaw enlisted in the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War who took leave in order to go home for his execution.

Balance must be kept.

Of course, some accused killers kept an eye to their own self-preservation; Cherokee James Vann was a creative example. Vann, the son of a Cherokee woman and a Scottish trader, was a prominent warrior during the Chickamauga Wars. While in his late teens, he killed the member of another clan during a drunken brawl, and was therefore liable for blood revenge. His mother’s brothers hid him out. Finally, when he ventured out one day with one of those uncles, a dozen or so members of the opposing clan closed in on them, prepared to take their revenge. Vann quickly drew his pistol –and blew his own uncle’s brains out. The other clan members were surprised and frustrated (though not as much as the uncle)… they immediately realized there was now nothing they could do, and no way they could touch the impudent young warrior. They had lost a member of their clan, and now a member of the killer’s clan was dead. Balance was restored. I imagine, however, that Vann had trouble finding traveling companions after that.

The same principle applied in war. If another tribe attacked you and killed five of your people, you were obligated to raid them back, and kill five of theirs. Of course, sometimes the young warriors in the retaliating party would go overboard and kill more than five of the enemy, so there would be a vengeance raid coming their way later. This is why many tribes were in a perpetual state of war –but suffered relatively few deaths each year. The goal was not to find your enemy then annihilate them –it was to restore balance (again, this was the ideal, and sometimes there were large-scale casualties. Especially after the arrival of Europeans, when tribes started jockeying for favored trading status and sometimes decided to get rid of their rivals –but these cases indicated the abandonment of traditional principles.)

Once tribes started interacting with European (and later American) settlers, cultural differences would lead to further friction. Let’s say some miners kill half-a-dozen Indians. Those Indians’ tribesmen were not necessarily going to go to the trouble of finding the specific miners who committed the deed; they were going to kill the first half-dozen or so white people they found. Conversely, if some Indians attacked a farm and killed a family, and the local white authorities demanded that the specific killers be handed over, they were usually not going to be met with cooperation. The idea of having no choice but to find the specific killers was foreign to the Indians. Guilt and responsibility belonged, not to the individual, but to the community –and so did the responsibility of maintaining balance.    

Next time - August 10 -my subject will be "Indians Are People."

[Troy D. Smith is Assistant Professor of History at Tennessee Tech, where he teaches American Indian history.]