Changes in the Land, Chapter 4

1
Changes in the Land,Chapter 4

• ISS 310 People and Environment
• Spring 2002
• Prof. Alan Rudy
• 1/22/02

2
Property, Wealth and Mobility

• The need for diversity and mobility led New
  England Indians to avoid acquiring much surplus
  property, confident as they were that their
  mobility and skill would supply any need that
  arose. (54)
• KEY Cronon is interested in COMPARISON more than
  JUDGEMENT.

3
KEY TERMS

• How does Cronon use the terms
• Labor?
• Improvement?
• Usufruct?
• Sovereignty?
• Property?
• Alienated Property?

4
Key point - ethnocentrism

• Europeans (and remember these were NOT poor
  immigrants neither indentured servants nor
  slaves wrote the accounts Cronon uses) saw
  Indian poverty as the result of Indian waste
  underused land, underused natural abundance,
  underused human labor, (56) and especially
  underused MALE labor.
• Bible Quote on page 73.

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Meaning for Todays World

• The ideas of improvement and the inefficient,
  wasteful (non-)use of resources underlie our
  whole economy and federal natural resource
  management system.
• USDA
• Dept. of Agriculture
• Dept. of Forestry -- Multiple Use
• Dept. of Interior
• National Parks
• Bureau of Land Management -- Multiple Use
• Bureau of Reclamation
• Dept. of Defense
• US Army Corps of Engineers -- Dont waste a drop

6
Social Relations w/Nature and Others

• Key It is not just nature that is managed for
  efficiency and against waste, the same is true of
  social programs -- witness welfare, mass transit
  and MSU.
• most English colonists displayed a remarkable
  indifference to what the Indians themselves
  thought about Indian rights of land tenure. (58)
• This was historically also true of International
  Development programs during the Cold War.

7
PROPERTY

• Unless the people I live with recognize that I
  own something and so give me certain claims over
  it, I do not possess it in any meaningful
  sense.
• To define property is thus to represent
  boundaries between people equally, it is to
  articulate at least one set of conscious
  ecological boundaries between people and things.
  (58)
• 5 minute writing assignment
• Property for the Indians meant ______ because
  ______.
• Property for the Colonist meant ______ because
  ______.

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5 min. BREAK

• BREAK
• BREAK
• BREAK
• BREAK

9
NATURAL vs. SOCIAL PROPERTY RIGHTS

• NATURAL PROPERTY RIGHTS to land lay in the kinds
  of relationships which centered around common
  holdings and use.
• CIVIL and PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS coevolve (in
  the European schema) with agriculture, the state,
  technological improvement and trade.
• HOBBES, LOCKE, ROUSSEAU and THE STATE OF NATURE.

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Individual Ownership vs. Collective Sovereignty I

• Indians
• Individual property defined by the community
  within which they lived.
• Communitys territory defined by relations with
  other communities.
• But territorial uses, and rights to them, varied
  with changing seasons and social moves!

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Individual Ownership vs. Collective Sovereignty
II

• Indians
• Sachem power largely via social relations and
  reciprocal gift exchange.
• Also, importantly, there were elaborate
  inter-community kin networks!
• Sachems owned land less as personal real
  estate than as symbolic possession of a whole
  people. (60)

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Individual Ownership vs. Collective Sovereignty
III

• Colonists
• Individual property defined by the community
  within which they lived -- importance of where
  they came from in England!!
• Communitys territory defined by grant from King.
• Territorial rights, and uses did not vary.
• Indians and Colonists
• Indians could contract with many Englishmen to
  share use of an area -- but Englishmen thought
  that meant exclusive use.
• In section, why is a bird a fish and some deer
  are fish but winter moose and beavers are not
  fish? (63-64)

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What This Means

• For Indians
• Hunting, planting, gathering and fishing have
  different spatial and temporal usufruct rights --
  were constantly being renegotiated.
• Place names were not so much nouns as verbs --
  about what could be done not who owned it.
• Key Quote on page 67 and another 68.
• ISSUE
• Political Negotiations over Sovereignty
• Economic Transactions over Property.

14
Finally

• Conceptions of land tenure mimicked systems of
  ecological use. (72)
• Private property does not mean you can do with it
  what you will, only that you can keep others from
  doing legal things on/with it.
• Property becomes separated from its natural
  qualities, from its value in use, from its value
  in exchange.
• It becomes an abstract thing that must be
  catalogues and documented.