DID THE COMANCHE AND OTHER AMERICAN INDIANS FAVOR COMMUNAL OWNERSHIP?

By: Ryan BoisjolieLuke Freeby

Barrett Nikodym

Objectives

Students will… Understand the unique and the varied lifeways

of Americans Indian Tribes in the United States Know that American Indians developed

extensive and diverse systems of legal rights in regards to private property prior to European contact based upon number factors peculiar to each tribe

Key Terms

Property Rights

Rules of the Game

Scarcity

Foodways

Where are the tribes located?

From Left to right: Pueblo, Comanche, Choctaw, Iroquis (Southeastern Canada North Eastern United States)

How geography determined economic and foodway systems

The impact of contact & the push west

Does anyone have any ideas why Colonists moved west?

Push Factors Scarcity of land

Pull Factors “Unowned” land

Perpetuating the Myth

Pre-Reservation American Indians and their voices lost by 1940s Perpetuated by best-selling textbooks, like Baldwin and Kelley’s

The Stream of American History (1965), who wrote: “Indians had little comprehension of the value of money, the ownership of land…and so land sharks and grog sellers found it easy to filch them of their property.”

Other academic books, like Wilbur Jacobs’ Dispossessing the American Indian (1972), suggested that Indians saw land as a “gift from the gods” and not subject to private ownership.

Further fueled by early settler contact with Great Plains’ Indians who then reported back to the East where journalists, dime novelists, and politicians spread such misconceptions. Would lay the groundwork for later conflict, treaties, legislation, and codification.

Anthropologists and Historians extrapolate from limited data and observations in formulating grandiose conclusions about pre-contact American Indian societies.

Myth vs. Reality

Land reformers eyeing land in the West believed civilization impossible without the incentive to work that came only from individual ownership of a piece of property and even charged Indians as being communists.

A Cherokee letter to Congress (1881) Senator Henry Dawes visits the Cherokee Nation (1885) Not only were such ideas false, but they also ignore the

unique differences between American Indian concepts of property, property rights, land use, communal ownership, and overarching economic systems.

Pre-contact American Indians were both highly entrepreneurial and acutely aware of the economic forces around them. The problem lay in that they labored under an overarching regime of fragmented, non-uniform, and non-standardized systems of laws, contracts, and language.

Property Rights

All known tribes prior to contact recognized individual rights in personal goods. Most agricultural tribes recognized exclusive rights in land, some hunting-gathering tribes found such property rights less necessary. The key here is that property rights were developed to meet each tribes’ needs.

Some eastern tribes held exclusive use of cultivated fields and land their homes occupied. But any member of the village had general use of non-agricultural lands, like fishing ponds, berry-picking areas, and hunting territories.

In Great Lakes region family territory systems governed hunting rights in land. These appear to have included inheritance within families, rules, and sanctions against trespass.

Further Examples

In the Northwest, bands held exclusive rights to land through use and occupancy. This included the right to exclude or allow others to use the land. Land was held communally—meaning they were subject to the community’s governance—but not in common, which implies land was available without limit to the first appropriator.

In the Southwest, plots of land were assigned by the village headman in return for assisting in irrigation canal construction and maintenance. Plots could be passed to heirs and loaned to others, though they were generally not sold or traded. Rights rested on continuous use.

In the Great Plains, where tribes were less sedentary, only seasonal or temporary land rights were recognized, often in the form of garden plots, as long as the individual wished, but reverted to the village for reassignment after death.

Comanche Economics

Dependent upon extended family, living in adjacent tipis.

Economy was focused on products, animals, and vegetables.

Domestic sphere: berry-picking, hide tanning, trade specifics, marriage, nanawoku (adultery), and even murder

Public sphere: Communal hunting, intertribal trade, and peace.

Individuals, not tribes owned horses

Impact of Horses on Comanche

How did horses help the Comanche?

Horses could carry heavy loads and travel fast

Allowed American Indians to increase food supplies

Could now track down a buffalo easily

Hunting and conducting warfare easier on

horseback

Previously they hunted buffalo on foot

Impact of Horses on Comanche

Horse became a measure of wealth

and valuable for trade

Saved the Comanche time

Did not change Comanche hunter-

gatherer lifestyle.

Comanche Property Rights

Each division had civil or peace chiefs and war chiefs Head civil chief usually most influential

Had no strong central government Band leaders had little authority Based on democratic principle

Did not recognize private ownership of land Instead owned communally by Comanche

Did not use land for farming, only hunting No need to fence off land Instead, enforced land for hunting

Conclusions

Nearly every significant element of Anglo-American property law was present in American Indian property-rights’ systems.

Trading and selling were rare. Why? George Snyderman opines.

Land was more than just a piece of property to be bought, sold, traded, or exploited. In their own words.

Newcomers did not share the same attachments to the land.

Mobile hunting groups had less need to develop/recognize property rights in land.

The horse actually incentivized mobile tribes to remain mobile rather than sedentary.

Myth and misconception fuel false assumptions.