[PEN-L:2960] Re: selling Manhattan

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" <rosserjb@xxxxxxx> 02/05 3:45 PM >>>
Charles,
     In most locations the tribes that were in place when
Europeans first showed up were not the first tribes to
inhabit or claim as "tribal territory" that land.
________

Charles: "Territory" is a term referring to the land within a state. The groups around Manhattan didn't have states.

______
 So, if
the tribes there when the Europeans arrived have permanent
property rights because they had no concept of property
________

Charles: They had property concepts. They didn't have PRIVATE property concepts in land. Property means relations between people with respect to things, with respect to production. They had an organized relationship to the land, but the form of organization was not private property relations.
__________



 and
therefore could not sell their property, what are the
rights of the tribes that they displaced, often by warfare?
_________

Charles: Assuming arguendo that your claim of violent displacement is true, that's between them. The Europeans ain't in it. But every European claim of indigenous "savagery" as in warfare worse than what the Europeans did, IS SUSPECT as European propaganda as an excuse to displace them.
__________

__________



Such a "transaction" looks no better than the thefts by
warfare by most of the Europeans and arguably worse than
the transactions where the Europeans actually paid, as with
the Dutch for Manhatten, even if the "sellers" did not know
what was going to be the long term result.
_______

Charles: The European claims that regarding indigenous transactions worse than European transactions are suspect as evidence from biased witnesses. Europeans had an ulterior motive to portray indigenous peoples as "savage" as an excuse for taking the land as "unsettled by humans". The Europeans are in no position to judge the situation and say, "their 'crime' justifies our crime ( I refer to the indigenous "crime" arguendo, for the sake of argument, but I don't accept it as anything but a fantastic and grandiose false generalization).

Charles Brown


Barkley Rosser
On Fri, 05 Feb 1999 15:28:47 -0500 Charles Brown
<CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> >>> "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 likel!
!
!
y !
> 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
>

--
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
rosserjb@xxxxxxx