[PEN-L:2945] Re: selling Manhattan

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" <rosserjb@xxxxxxx> 02/05 3:06
I would note that among most tribes there was at least
a rudimentary sense of tribal ownership, if not of personal
ownership..  Certain tribes had primary rights in certain
territories and this was often decided by intertribal
warfare.  Sometimes a home base involved some kind of
tribal burial grounds.  I note that Lewis Mumford in his
_The City in History_ claims that burial grounds were the
original nuclei of urban settlements (cemetary by the
church in the center of town) and also the original form of
landed property.
     But, again, I doubt that anybody on this list knows
what was the actual conception of the Indians who "sold"
Manhatten to the Dutch and any efforts to claim what they
did think is pure fantasy.
_________

Charles: We may not know exactly what the indigenous conceptions were, but archeology, anthropology and paleo-history
are not based on pure fantasy. There were definite cultural rules just as we are sure that they had languages with grammars, though we may not know the exact grammar. We know what they didn't have, which was a conception that was the same as the Dutch. Thus, when I did legal research for the land recovery project of the Yuroks of Northern California, I argued that the early land transfers to whites should be voided for failure of meeting of the minds, which is necessary for a contract; and other theories based on the anthropological principle that whatever the Yurok coneption of land, it was not of European capitalist private property. There is quite a bit of ethnography on what the Yurok conceptions of land were ( Waterman ; Kroeber, a famous student of Boas ). There are lots of sacred spots etc. such that the land becomes a giant library of the tribe's history. The land was a repository of indigenous knowledge in conjunction with myths and the whole culture. There is likely !
to be some similar affirmative evidence of the Manhattan groups' conceptions. It is not fantastic  that indigenous Manhattan  conception would not meet with a Dutch mind (conception)  as necessary for a contract ,and it is possibly less fantastic than theories about long economic waves.


Charles Brown