American Indians: False Myths

1
American Indians False Myths

• John McArthur
• January 2007
• Changes Jan 2008

2
False Myths

• False Myth One Indigenous Populations
  Historically had Either a "Different" or More
  Communal Sense of Property Ownership
• There is little historical basis for this myth.
• There is ample historical and anthropological
  research to indicate that pre-colonial indigenous
  populations had a highly developed sense of
  individual private property, including that of
  land, and that the forces for the cooperative
  collection or ownership of these rights were
  primarily economic, and not cultural, in nature.

3
Private Property Rights

• In the past, most if not all North American
  indigenous peoples had a strong belief in
  individual property rights and ownership.
• Frederick Hodge (1910) noted that individual
  private ownership was the norm for North
  American tribes.
• Likewise, Julian Steward (1938, 253) asserted
  that among Native Americans communal property was
  limited.

4
Private Property and Incentives

• Anthropological records show that North American
  Indians had a rich institutional history
  centering on property rights.
• For example, equestrian hunters who rode into
  stampeding buffalo herds marked their arrows so
  that they could tell who launched the lethal shot
  and therefore who would be rewarded with the
  choicest cuts of meat.
• Bruce Johnsen documents that American Indians
  even owned some salmon spawning streams as a
  result, the salmon were better husbanded.

5
Early 20th Century

• Frances Densmore (1939) concluded that the Makah
  tribe in the Pacific Northwest had property
  rights similar to Europeans.
• These early 20th-century historians and
  anthropologists had the advantage of actually
  interviewing tribal members who had lived in
  pre-reservation Indian society.

6
Historical Distortions

• By the late 1940s, however, these original and
  first-hand sources of information had died, and
  false myths and historical distortions began to
  take dominant shape.
• By the mid1960s, the tone in many college
  history books, history-inspired films and novels,
  and even speeches had completely changed.

7
Typical Characterization

• A typical historical distortion is found in a
  best-selling 1965 college textbook, The Stream of
  American History.
• Indians had little comprehension of the value of
  money, the ownership of land . . . and so land
  sharks and grog sellers found it easy to mulct
  them of their property(208).

8
Myth Taken as Fact

• Gradually more people came to believe that
  American Indians had been historically communal,
  non-property oriented, and romantic followers of
  an economic system more harmonious with nature.
• Today, tribal leaders, politicians, and various
  interest groups in both the U.S. and Canada often
  repeat these myths as fact during tribal
  conferences and congressional hearings.

9
How Did The Myth Start?

• Terry Anderson (1995) attributes the beginning of
  the myth to settlers seeking farm land in the
  Great Plains, who interacted only with nomadic
  tribes that did not view land as an important
  asset.
• These settlers mistakenly inferred a lack of
  interest in property rights among all tribes.
• This fiction was further propagated in the 19th
  century by East Coast newspaper journalists, dime
  novelists, and Washington politicians who, in
  spite of writing about Native Americans, often
  had little contact with tribal groups.

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Myths

• As with any pre-twentieth-century diversified
  culture, there was no standardized system of
  property rights among the local indigenous
  people.
• For the static farming-based tribes,
  landownership and related property rights were
  highly developed.
• Among the farming bands in southern California, a
  family member would gain private ownership over
  land by a classic homesteading process of
  required improvement for purposes of farming.

11
Private Property to Land and Hunting Areas

• Among almost all North American farming tribes,
  land was considered private and either
  individually or family owned as long as
  improvements were made and the land used.
• Once pelts became an important trade item, the
  fur-trapping natives of Canada and the northern
  regions of the U.S. quickly established small
  family ownership over prime trapping territories
  and beaver houses.
• Property rights were so well developed that a
  starving native could legally kill a beaver to
  eat, but he had to leave the fur and tail for the
  rightful owner.

12
Contractual Agreements

• When Indians and Europeans shared similar local
  economies such as small-plot farming, typically
  the two cultures had a clearly understood and
  agreed-upon set of mechanisms to support the
  contractual sale of cropland or water rights.
• For example, in their relations with the Mahican
  Indians the colonizing Europeans recognized the
  fee-simple rights of cropland by the Mahican
  owner and always approached the lineage leader
  for purchase in order to start their own farms.
• This conclusion is repeated by many other
  researchers who have examined actual deed
  transactions in early colonial times.

13
The Horse

• Among nomadic hunting tribes, the horse, once
  acquired from the Spanish, gradually became the
  most valuable and, therefore, privately owned
  asset of an individual.
• Horses were individually marked, and they were
  regularly sold, traded, or leased.
• A stolen horse, if recovered in a retaliatory
  raid, would be returned to the original owner.

14
Valuable Asset

• The horse became the Indian's most important
  source of wealth.
• In Canada in the early 1800s, a buffalo horse
  cost more than 10 guns--a price far higher than
  any other tribal possession.

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Indian Buffalo Hunt by Charles Marion Russell
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Nomadic Hunting Tribes

• Firearms, another important factor of production
  for these tribes, were also valued, clearly
  marked, and individually owned.
• Ownership of land, however, although important
  for farming tribes, was irrelevant as a factor of
  production for these nomadic tribes and thus
  culturally and economically immaterial.

18
Slaves

• Individual slave ownership and trade were also
  prevalent among pre-colonial indigenous tribes
  throughout North America, extending to the end of
  the nineteenth century.
• By the early 19th century, for example,
  intertribal slave markets, particularly in
  Canada, were well defined, with transaction
  prices indexed in terms of either blankets or
  copper plates.
• Similarly, the plains Indians considered slaves
  and, in some cases, wives, as private property
  that could be bartered for horses and other
  commodities.

19
Raiding and Trading

• The Shoshoni formed larger war parties than their
  enemies.
• The Shoshoni developed trade relations with the
  Comanche on the east side of the mountains, who
  served as middlemen, trading horses and metal
  obtained from the Spanish for war captives.
• These captives were sold as slaves to the
  Spanish, and many were transported to the
  Caribbean Islands.

20
Slavery in Utah

• The Mexicans and Utes generally preyed on the
  weaker Paiute peoples, seizing women and children
  in raids.
• In turn, the Navajos raided the Utes for slaves.
• At its peak in the 1830s and 40s, Mexican trading
  parties regularly traveled the Old Spanish Trail,
  trading guns, horses, and trinkets for Native
  American slaves and selling the captives at
  trail's end.
• Women and girls, prized as domestic servants,
  brought the highest prices--sometimes as much as
  200.

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Understanding the Myth

• Property-related difficulties between Native
  Americans and immigrant Europeans in the 17th to
  19th centuries were rarely caused by any
  cultural or philosophical differences regarding
  the fundamental notions of property rights and
  ownership.
• Disagreements primarily arose when the local
  economies of Native Americans and Europeans
  differed in their productive activities and thus
  in their perceptions about the types of local
  assets and factors that were valuable and scarce
  and therefore subject to private ownership and
  legal trade.

22
False Myth Two Land was Taken from Indians

• Land was often taken from Indians but not until
  after 1830.
• U.S. policy toward Indians in the late 18th and
  early 19th centuries recognized the Indians'
  right to use and occupy land.
• The United States was liable to pay the tribe
  when it decided to extinguish the Indian use and
  occupancy (Kickingbird and Ducheneaus 1973, 7).

23
Fair Dealing

• Perhaps the most thorough legal scholar of Indian
  property rights, Felix Cohen, referred to this
  early period as one of "fair dealing" (1947, 46).
  
• By 1947, he estimated, some 800 million had been
  paid for Indian lands, and paying "800,000,000
  for a principle is not a common occurrence in the
  world's history."

24
False Myth 3 Fur Traders as Drug Dealers

• Some historians claim that French and English fur
  traders got Indians hooked on European goods
  (liquor?).
• Economics 101 Trade is mutually beneficial and
  increases wealth.
• Europeans wanted the pelts, and Indians benefited
  greatly from the European goods.

25
New England Tribes

• Charles Mann in 1491
• Europeans had been visiting New England for at
  least a century. Shorter than the natives, oddly
  dressed, and often unbearably dirty. They were
  irritatingly garrulous, prone to fits of
  chicanery, and often surprisingly incompetent at
  what seemed to Indians like basic tasks. pp.
  33-34.

26
Gains from Trade

• But they also made useful and beautiful
  goodscopper kettles, glittering colored glass,
  and steel knives and hatchetsunlike anything
  else in New England.
• Moreover, they would exchange these valuable
  items for cheap furs.
• It was like happening upon a dingy kiosk that
  would swap fancy electronic goods for customers'
  used socksalmost anyone would be willing to
  overlook the shopkeeper's peculiarities.

27
Gains from Trade?

• During the spring and summer Indians, who did the
  vast majority of the actual trapping, were
  received at the fort to sell their pelts.
• In exchange they typically received metal tools
  and hunting gear.
• Alcohol became another payment mechanism.
• Native addiction to alcohol became another
  inducement to fur trading, with their lack of
  European cultural history of being inured to it
  and which may be related, as some claim, to a
  lack of a form of biological resistance to
  extreme drunkenness that could be exploited.

28
Drug Dealers?

• To call the European traders drug dealers is a
  great distortion of the nature of the trade that
  occurred between Indians and the Europeans.
• No doubt that some Indians abused alcohol, but
  such a view regards Indians as being unable to
  make rational decisionsas children who needed
  paternalistic protection.
• In truth, American Indians wealth increased
  greatly from the use of European products that
  they received in exchange for pelts.

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Disease

• Although American Indians benefited greatly from
  trade with the Europeans, there was a tragic
  downside to the contact--the spread of disease. 
• Bacterial isolation from the Euro-Asian continent
  rendered Native Americans' immune systems
  defenseless to common European diseases such as
  small pox and rubella.

31
False Myth 4

• Superior military technology is often alleged to
  be a major factor in white domination of Indians.
  
• Although Indian and white war technologies were
  often different, it is not obvious that one side
  or the other had systematically better
  technology.
• In the early years, Indians' bows and arrows were
  a match for whites' muskets.

32
Mann, 1491

• It is true that European technology dazzled
  Native Americans on first encounter.
• But the relative positions of the two sides were
  closer than commonly believed.
• Contemporary research suggests that indigenous
  peoples in New England were not technologically
  inferior to the Britishor, rather, that terms
  like "superior" and "inferior" do not readily
  apply to the relationship between Indian and
  European technology.

33
Noisemakers

• the natives soon learned that most of the
  British were terrible shots, from lack of
  practicetheir guns were little more than
  noisemakers.
• Even for a crack shot, a seventeenth-century gun
  had fewer advantages over a longbow than may be
  supposed.
• Colonists in Jamestown taunted the Powhatan in
  1607 with a target they believed impervious to an
  arrow shot. To the colonists' dismay, an Indian
  sank an arrow into it a foot deep, "which was
  strange, being that a Pistoll could not pierce
  it."

34
Repeating Rifles

• Even in later years when whites' technology
  improved markedly with fast-loading rifles and
  repeating rifles, the differential closed
  rapidly.
• Indians usually were able to obtain new weapons
  (from both private traders and even the
  reservation agents of the Bureau of Indian
  Affairs) almost as soon as they were available to
  whites.
• Moreover, as Custer's troops discovered, white
  technology was not always superior.

35
Plains Tribes

• William Tecumseh Sherman stated that "fifty
  Indians could checkmate three thousand troops"
  (quoted in Debo 1989, 221).
• Frontier army officers often called the horse
  warriors the "finest light cavalry in the world,"
  and historians have repeated the judgment ever
  since (Utley 1967, 7).

36
So Why Were the Plains Tribes Defeated?

• Two factors undermined the military capacity of
  the Plains Indians
• (1) Devastating epidemics of new diseases
  repeatedly struck the Plains killing American
  Indians by the thousands.
• (2) Destruction of the buffalo herds

37
No Immunity

• Diseases attacked entire communities
  simultaneously, leaving no healthy members to
  care for the sick, follow game, or gather
  firewood and water.
• Faced not only the primary effects of the
  disease, but also a combination of starvation,
  exposure, and dehydration, death tolls climbed.
• Some bands, forced to move to find food, were
  compelled to abandon sick relatives to an almost
  certain death.

38
Devastating Effects

• Mortality rates of between 50 and 90 percent were
  common whenever a new disease struck, including
  smallpox, measles, cholera and others.
• Pawnee tribe had about 25,000 in the 1820s but a
  series of small pox epidemics struck the tribe,
  killing thousands
• Lost half their population within a few months
  during the summer of 1833 and at least two
  thousand more in 1837-38,
• By 1840, tribes population was around 6,000 and
  by the 1850s they numbered about 4,000

39
Extermination of the Bison

• Although White hunters clearly were responsible
  for the final decimation of the bison population,
  historians who blame the eradication on these
  hunters fail to ask key questions, including
• If the bison herds were so vast in the years
  before the commercial hide hunters, why were
  there so many reports of starving Indians on the
  Plains by 1850? And ..., given our standard
  estimates of bison numbers, why is it that the
  hide hunters are credited with bringing to market
  only some 10 million hides, including no more
  than 3.5 million from the Southern Plains?
  (Flores 1991).

40
Indian Over-Hunting

• Answer clearly appears to be that buffalo were
  already being systematically over-hunted
• The Shoshoni and other tribes destroyed the
  buffalo population in the Columbia and Snake
  River areas west of the Rockies before the end of
  the first quarter of the eighteenth century
  (Butler 1978).
• Sioux had depleted the buffalo populations east
  of the Missouri by the end of that century (White
  1978).
• Both tribes moved into the northwest Plains in
  pursuit of the herds that existed there, adding
  large numbers of effective hunters to the
  existing population of bison hunters.

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Control of Bison in 1850s

• Blackfoot controlled access to and hunted
  remaining herds on the tributaries of the upper
  Missouri
• Teton Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and the
  Crow competed for the Powder River herds
• Comanche, Southern Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and Kiowas
  hunted the herds in the Upper Arkansas and Red
  River valleys.
• Outside these regions, the remaining nomads were
  impoverished

43
Starvation on the Plains

• Assiniboine were reported to be starving in 1846.
• Sioux that remained East of the Missouri were
  destitute by 1853.
• In the spring of 1855 those bands, as well as
  the Assiniboine and Cree, subsisted solely on
  wild berries, roots, an the occasional putrefying
  carcass of a drowned bison that washed downriver
  (Isenberg 2000).
• Gros Ventre in similar condition in the late
  1850s.
• The quest for wealth brought the bison hunters
  not prosperity but poverty (Isenberg 2000).

44
White Hide Hunters

• White hide hunters moved into the Plains in the
  last half of the 1860s, and "the buffalo herds
  were systematically destroyed between 1867 and
  1883....
• With their food supply gone, and the
  buffalo-hunting culture in ruins, Indians faced a
  choice between starvation and the reservation"
  (Mishkin 1940).
• An estimated 10 million hides were taken during
  this 16 year period.

45
End of the Bison

• The northern herds were gone by 1883
• More than a quarter of the Blackfeet starved to
  death in the winter of 1883-84.
• Probably nothing illustrates the Plains Indians
  reliance on the buffalo as well as the speed with
  which they were subjugated after the bison herds
  were decimated.

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False Myth 5

• False Myth Five Indigenous People Historically
  Practiced a Philosophy of Environmental
  Protectionism
• The myth that somehow indigenous people were more
  attuned to nature and less inclined to maximize
  their personal or tribal wealth is one of the
  most persistent and perplexing legends of the
  modern era, and one that has obtained almost
  religious proportions in modern times.

50
Environmental Ethic?

• The impression that American Indians were guided
  by a unique environmental ethic often can be
  traced to the speech widely attributed to Chief
  Seattle in 1854.
• But Chief Seattle never said those oft-quoted
  words.
• They were written by Ted Perry, a scriptwriter.
• According to historian Paul Wilson, Perry's
  version added "a good deal more, particularly
  modern ecological imagery."
• For example, Perry, not Chief Seattle, wrote that
  "every part of the Earth is sacred to my people."

51
Responding to Relative Prices

• When assets were valuable, private rights became
  explicit and Indians were careful to manage these
  assets, just as Europeans of the same time
  didbut when assets such as buffalo and timber
  were considered plentiful and replaceable, people
  tended to aggressively and wastefully harvest
  them, possibly to extinction in some cases.
• In spite of modern myths, the Indians never
  viewed buffalo herds as an asset to be maintained
  and renewed, and by 1840, intensive hunting had
  driven buffalo from significant portions of its
  original habitat.

52
Wasteful Harvests

• Where game was plentiful, Indians used only the
  choicest cuts and left the rest.
• When the buffalo hunting tribes on the Great
  Plains herded hundreds of animals over cliffs in
  the 17th and early 18th centuries, tons of meat
  were left to rot or to be eaten by
  scavengers--hardly a result consistent with the
  environmental ethic attributed to Indians.
• Samuel Hearne, a fur trader near Hudson's Bay,
  recorded in his journal in the 1770s that the
  Chipewayan Indians would slaughter large numbers
  of caribou and musk ox, eat only a few tongues,
  and leave the rest to rot.

53
Mega Fauna

• Generally the demand for meat, hides, and furs by
  relatively small, dispersed populations of
  Indians put little pressure on wildlife.
• Anthropologist Paul Martin believes that the
  extinction of the mammoth, mastodon, ground
  sloth, and the saber-toothed cat directly or
  indirectly resulted from the "prehistoric
  overkill" by exceptionally competent hunters.

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Tragedy of the Commons

• A recent article by Jack Broughton published in
  the Ornithological Monographs examines the
  Prehistoric Human Impacts on California Birds.
• Broughton notes that explorers in California
  during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
  were amazed at the abundance of artiodactyls,
  marine mammals, waterfowl, seabirds, and other
  animals . . . and the incredible wildlife
  densities reported in their accounts are
  routinely taken as analogues for the original or
  pristine zoological condition (2004, 1).

56
Over Hunting

• Broughton documents the decline and rise of bird
  populations between 2600 and 700 years ago.
• With these data, he tests the hypothesis that
  bird populations declined and disappeared because
  of hunting by humans.
• He concludes that the evidence of depression
  based on declining relative abundances provides
  fairly secure evidence of exploitation depression
  or direct harvesting based mortality (44)

57
Over Hunting Prior to European Arrival

• Broughtons data show that Native Americans and
  the wildlife on which they depended were not
  immune to the tragedy of the commons.
• He found this phenomenon with birds we also know
  that before Europeans brought Great Plains bison
  to near-extinction, the buffalo population was
  already being systematically overhunted by
  Indians fighting over tribal territories (Benson
  2006, 56).

58
American Indians are Human

• My arguments are not criticisms of Native
  Americans.
• Rather, I show that Native Americans are human
  beings who respond to incentives.
• Indeed, American Indians have a long history of
  (1) rapid adaptation to changing circumstances,
  (2) negotiating and/or fighting in an effort to
  establish exclusive property rights to scarce
  resources, (3) exploiting natural resources, and
  doing so excessively when they are unable to
  establish property rights to those resources, (4)
  economic competition and trade, and (5)
  individual autonomy as opposed to communal life.

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Further Reading

• PERC Reports, June 2006 http//www.perc.org/perc.p
  hp?subsection5id804
• Terry L. Anderson and P.J. Hill, The Not so Wild,
  Wild West, Stanford Univ. Press (2004)
  http//www.perc.org/perc.php?subsection2id1
• Terry L. Anderson, Dances with Myths, Reason
  (Feb. 1997)
• http//www.reason.com/news/show/30146.html
• Terry L. Anderson, Sovereign Nations or
  Reservations? An Economic History of American
  Indians, Pacific Research Institute, 1995.
• John Baden, Richard Stroup, and Walter Thurman,
  Myths, Admonitions and Rationality The American
  Indian as a Resource Manager, Economic Inquiry,
  Vol. XIX (Jan. 1981)
• Bruce Benson, "Buffalo Wars An Economic Analysis
  of Intertribal Relationships on the Great Plains
  http//garnet.acns.fsu.edu/bbenson/