Indian and European Ideas of Land Ownership

The argument I am about to make regarding Indigenous Americans and Europeans settlers runs a high likelihood of being dismissed as juvenile, or romantic. Of being called a glorification of a long gone lifestyle stemming from a dissatisfaction with current society. I say that is partly true, that my argument comes from a dissatisfaction with current society, and if it is called romantic, or distanced from the fact of the disappeared cultures, well, that is part of my point. There is no way now for either I, or the reader to view that culture, in action and determine what is fact or fiction. That culture is gone. Forever.

Edmund Morgan, in reference to the failures and starvation of very early English colonies in America as compared to these American Indian cultures, writes in his book "American Slavery, American Freedom":

"If you were a colonist, you knew that your technology was superior to the Indians'. You knew that you were civilized, and that they were savages . . . But your superior technology had proved insufficient to extract anything. The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did. . . . And when your own people started deserting in order to live with them, it was too much. . . . So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields. It proved your superiority, in spite of your failures And you gave similar treatment to any of your own people who succumbed to their savage ways of life. But you still did not grow much corn. . . . "

This is quoted from A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, on page 25. In this book, he mentions how many years after those colonies eventually began to thrive, in the mid eighteenth century, large tracts of land which were occupied by poor farmers, sometimes by families which had been upon that land since it was vacated by Indians a hundred years before, were arbitrarily divided amongst the wealthy of the English colonies. The new "owners" of the land then began to charge rent to the farmers which had previously inhabited the land, and were ignored. As a result, the local government stepped in with arrests, and revolts followed. Revolts followed because people then still understood that terms of ownership of land are arbitrary and imaginary. That to say "I own this land, which I have never seen, and have no intention to inhabit," is to say nothing.

Unless backed by enough other individuals who believe your authority to make such arbitrary decisions. As eventually became the case. As is still the case, though today broad land acquisitions are not made so arbitrarily. Land is still held by the wealthy who do not inhabit it, though it is inherited, bought, or sold. The principles are the same--it is still an imaginary idea which only exists because of people's allowing it to.

In Native American culture there was no such thing as ownership of land, inasmuch as we know it today. One might be said to have rights to land if one inhabited it and lived from it, but to say "I own that land over there, and you must increase my wealth in order to inhabit it," would be to utter insanity. Such ideas were completely foreign. Might this be part of why, in colonial America,

". . . Whites would run off to join Indian tribes, or would be captured in battle and brought up among the Indians, and when this happened the whites, given a chance to leave, chose to stay in the Indian culture. Indians, having the choice, almost never decided to join whites."

Hector S. Jean Crevecoeur, the Author of Letters from an American Farmer in the 1700's, wrote, "There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to anything to be boasted among us, for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans."

Of course, the Native American cultures were decimated, completely destroyed, and so there is no way to verify these statements completely, no studies to conduct on preference of Indian to European culture. The Indians were wiped out in order to continue to propagate this idea of land ownership, yes, but might this act of genocide also have been conducted to remove all alternatives to that system.? To remove the close and available proof of the inferiority of the system?

Or was it, as indicated by the statement from Edmund Morgan, an act of contempt? Perpetuated in hatred of the success of "inferior" people, not in sustaining their food supply, but in sustaining their psychological well-being? Retaining the right of each individual to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and at least the capability to support himself?

I think these are all the causes, and I think they deserve more thought.