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Sovereign Nations or Reservations? Indian Economies : An Economic History of American Indians
Debunking the romanticism surrounding American Indian culture, the author sets the record straight by showing that Indians had property rights, contracts, and market exchange and were unnaturally deprived of these rights when the U.S. government put them on reservations. IP.
- GenresEconomics
Hardcover
First published September 27, 1995
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March 17, 2022
How you feel about this book probably depends on your politics. As a foreigner, that is non-American, I step very gingerly into such an arena. The author's academic field is the property rights school of political economy, which becomes an increasingly obvious drawback when he insists he is writing a history.
I have to begin by following the author's strongly expressed view that the term “Native American” should not be applied to “American Indians” - it appears on page 6 of his preface. He makes plain that he was born in America (that is, the United States) therefore he is a Native American. Unfortunately he chooses to ignore that American Indians have nothing to do with India, or the East Indies – that was fifteenth century Spain's lack of geographical knowledge. Never mind, it's a minor point.
As I read through the book I came to feel that this was an author who had formed a hypothesis, did his research, and then cherry picked from the results to back it up. For instance he concentrates on the Plains tribes. The Cherokee, Creeks, Choctaws, Seminoles, Iroquois, and many others receive very little attention. Why? This is supposed to be “An Economic History of American Indians.” Perhaps the eastern tribes failed to fit in to the author's economic and political theory and were therefore best ignored.
His views on the Bureau of Indian Affairs point towards an intense dislike of any government influence from Washington. Big Government, FDR and the New Deal seem not to be subjects to mention with any degree of approval. In fact the Bureau of Indian Affairs is depicted as an organisation of self-seeking civil servants with a main intent of securing their jobs and salaries and doing little of value to help the Indians. Similarly the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 was little more than a plan to create a further bureaucratic level of political control by establishing constitutions for tribes based on the American constitution.
He points out that life for the Indians was never lived in some sort of Arcadia with the Indians as the careful custodians of the environment. However, he goes on to jump from there to insisting that they were in fact proto-capitalists with a strong sense of personal property and property rights. It is never clear how he achieves this given the difficulty of reconstructing the society of a pre-literate culture. The only evidence he seems to use are the observations of mainly nineteenth and early twentieth century European and white American travellers and academics, and to assume that post Civil War Indian society can be used as a measure of earlier times seems confusing. The European and later white American invasions of First Nation lands so altered that society as to surely make comparisons invalid.
During his discussion of the effect the introduction of the horse had on Indian culture, especially economic culture, he insists on including the idea that the destruction of the buffalo herds was the result of over hunting by the Indians. The need of railway companies and the American government to have huge migrating herds removed so as to facilitate economic trans-continental travel and goods shipment, and the need for the government to eradicate the Plains Indians' chief protein food supply and force them on to reservations do not receive even a consideration. It is something of an absence from an economic history.
On the whole I felt that as a history it stumbles for lack of an unbiased opinion. Whether it works as a politico-economic polemic depends on whether you sit on the right or the left side of the fence.
I have to begin by following the author's strongly expressed view that the term “Native American” should not be applied to “American Indians” - it appears on page 6 of his preface. He makes plain that he was born in America (that is, the United States) therefore he is a Native American. Unfortunately he chooses to ignore that American Indians have nothing to do with India, or the East Indies – that was fifteenth century Spain's lack of geographical knowledge. Never mind, it's a minor point.
As I read through the book I came to feel that this was an author who had formed a hypothesis, did his research, and then cherry picked from the results to back it up. For instance he concentrates on the Plains tribes. The Cherokee, Creeks, Choctaws, Seminoles, Iroquois, and many others receive very little attention. Why? This is supposed to be “An Economic History of American Indians.” Perhaps the eastern tribes failed to fit in to the author's economic and political theory and were therefore best ignored.
His views on the Bureau of Indian Affairs point towards an intense dislike of any government influence from Washington. Big Government, FDR and the New Deal seem not to be subjects to mention with any degree of approval. In fact the Bureau of Indian Affairs is depicted as an organisation of self-seeking civil servants with a main intent of securing their jobs and salaries and doing little of value to help the Indians. Similarly the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 was little more than a plan to create a further bureaucratic level of political control by establishing constitutions for tribes based on the American constitution.
He points out that life for the Indians was never lived in some sort of Arcadia with the Indians as the careful custodians of the environment. However, he goes on to jump from there to insisting that they were in fact proto-capitalists with a strong sense of personal property and property rights. It is never clear how he achieves this given the difficulty of reconstructing the society of a pre-literate culture. The only evidence he seems to use are the observations of mainly nineteenth and early twentieth century European and white American travellers and academics, and to assume that post Civil War Indian society can be used as a measure of earlier times seems confusing. The European and later white American invasions of First Nation lands so altered that society as to surely make comparisons invalid.
During his discussion of the effect the introduction of the horse had on Indian culture, especially economic culture, he insists on including the idea that the destruction of the buffalo herds was the result of over hunting by the Indians. The need of railway companies and the American government to have huge migrating herds removed so as to facilitate economic trans-continental travel and goods shipment, and the need for the government to eradicate the Plains Indians' chief protein food supply and force them on to reservations do not receive even a consideration. It is something of an absence from an economic history.
On the whole I felt that as a history it stumbles for lack of an unbiased opinion. Whether it works as a politico-economic polemic depends on whether you sit on the right or the left side of the fence.
Displaying 1 of 1 review