Perhaps the Indians, like you and SwordSmyth, should have paid much more attention to my Signature. History does have a way of repeating itself.
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Stuart Banner, a law professor, does not deny that between the early 17th century and the end of the 19th, nearly the entire land area of the United States was transferred from Indian to non-Indian ownership. But in How the Indians Lost Their Land, he offers an avowedly revisionist account of the way this happened. Previous scholars, he claims, have overemphasized the direct seizure of Indian land, failing to recognize that the process of acquisition proceeded mainly through legal forms: namely, purchase by individuals, groups or governments, and the signing of treaties between Indians and the United States. Banner criticizes traditional accounts for denying that Indians had their own concept of private property and were tricked into selling land, and for maintaining that whites believed the native inhabitants had no real claim to land ownership. Actually, Banner insists, there were strong reasons to purchase the land and not simply to seize it. The early settlers lacked the power to dispossess the Indian population, and throughout the colonial era, with the French competing with the English for Indian loyalty, wholesale expropriation would have been politically counterproductive.
Indeed, Banner argues, colonial governments and authorities in London generally tried to prevent settler intrusion onto Indian land before it had been purchased. This policy culminated in the Proclamation of 1763, which declared the entire continent west of the Appalachian mountains off-limits to white settlers. Of course, settlers ignored the Proclamation, as did land speculators like George Washington, who instructed his agents to buy as much Indian land in the west as possible while keeping ‘this whole matter a profound secret’ because of its illegality. But Banner’s point is that government officials were committed to dealing with Indians in a legal, orderly manner. Even speculators like Washington paid Indians for their land.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Indians-L.../dp/067402396X
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