I would also be interested in a cite for the OP.
I wish I could find where I read it but it could be in three or four books, none of which was designed to make it easy to go back and find something like that (ie not a social science type thing where a certain chapter was on Indians as thieves).
Would you be willing to make a distinction between stealing from your own people and stealing from unrelated people (other tribes or whites). Perhaps it’s just a normal part of warfare and they were to an extent constantly at war with certain tribes and the whiteman.
Nope, on many levels. For one, there were (are) literally hundreds of different tribes in North America. They were not homogenous - they did not think the same, believe the same, act the same. What you are trying to do in this thread is akin to asking “Americans steal, agree or disagree?”. It’s unanswerable, at least to any meaningful degree. If you want to ask something specific, like “Did the Oglala band of Lakota Souix indians under the leadership of Crazy Horse have a concept of personal property?” you may get a meaningful answer.
You put it in the context of not having any concept of personal property at all. If that were the case, there could be no such thing as “stealing.” If the current possessor of a particular object didn’t regard it as his personal property, then taking it would not constitute stealing. While some human societies may share material goods more than others, they couldn’t function unless there were some recognized conventions about who got to use which items or territories at a particular time.
In some groups, I understand it was a convention that if someone expressed admiration for something you owned, as good manners you had to give it to him. However, I’m sure if someone abused this privilege it would lead to resentment. And of course, this doesn’t mean there was no such thing as private property.
Indian groups could not maintain good relations with neighboring groups if they took things without permission. Of course, if relations were hostile, as they often were, taking goods from that group would be par for the course. But it’s that way with any human societies. Whites often took property from Indians by force or subterfuge. That of course doesn’t mean they didn’t have a concept of personal property.
I did; didn’t I. My fault…shouldn’t have put it so black and white.
Vocabulary hijack:
In Spanish Law, there is robo (stealing) and there is apropiación indebida (taking something which is not yours, but more of a borrow without permission thing). For example, taking a car to sell it for parts would be the first, whereas a joyride would be the second. If Joe Johnson grabs my CDs it’s a robo and he can get a fine or prison; if my brother borrows them without asking for permission it’s apropiación and he gets punished by never being allowed to live it down. I would say that grabbing something that’s communal property without making sure nobody else is using it at the time is more of a very light case of apropiación (you have the right to the thing, but were impolite about using that right) than anything resembling robbery.
Google gives me “misappropriation” for apropiación indebida, but - is misappropiation a legal term in American or English Law?
The whole “if a guest admires something the host is obligated by politeness to give it to them” thing is common in many cultures. But what people don’t understand is that giving gifts creates social status. Giving gifts proves you’re a big shot. Accepting gifts proves you’re second-class.
Also note that the vast majority of Native Americans were farmers, not hunter-gatherers. Remember how Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn? How could he do that unless he came from a farming culture?
As for Indians granting land title, remember that “Indians” weren’t a monolithic group, and didn’t see themselves as a monolithic group, nor did they see Europeans as a monolithic group. If your nation is fighting another nation, accepting help from a third nation to defeat them isn’t foolish, just because the third nation comes from a far-away land and have strange ideas and look funny.
Also note that due to depopulation, many lands during the colonial period were practically empty, and so local chiefs would allow friendly European colonists to move in to empty land that might otherwise be claimed by hostile enemies. That’s how the Pilgrims got their start–they literally moved into an abandoned Indian village, complete with cleared fallow fields. And the local chief decided to let them stay, because why not?
It wasn’t theories of land ownership and occupancy that caused the European takeover of North America. It was first a population crash caused by waves of diseases that North Americans had no resistance to, followed by simple military force. It wasn’t like, if my tribe doesn’t have a concept of individual land ownership, and some strangers come in and start building villages and farms in our land, we shrug our shoulders and move west, because hey, nobody owns Mother Earth. Instead we grab out weapons and fight them. The problem comes when the strangers win the battle, and the next, and the next, and pretty soon the next time a stranger shows up and tells us to leave, we’re pretty sure that unless we leave we’re going to lose the next battle. So our choices are to fight and die, or evacuate.
Bolding added.
I know you couched this as a hypothetical that did not occur. Nevertheless, the bolded phrase disturbs me and I am unwilling to let it go unremarked. As a member of the Lenape people, I ask that you consider 500+ years of history before you put those three words together in that sequence, whatever the reason. Thank you in advance. IMHO, of course.
they did fight over the best hunting grounds and habitable places, right?
If by “hunting grounds” you mean “farmland”, then yes. Indians were mostly farmers who lived in villages.
By the late 1800s, sure, most Indians were now hunter-gatherers, but that’s only because they’d been expelled from their ancestral homes and forced into a nomadic lifestyle. The Indian Removal Act was passed in 1830, which expelled the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes” from the Southeast US to west of the Mississippi.
Even the famous horse-riding buffalo hunting plains Indians of the late 1800s had ancestors who were mostly farmers.
no, i mean stronger tribes generally occupied the best land(s)