Governmentality in Indian Territory

In the eighteenth century all European powers laid claim to North American terri­tory over which effective control was clearly in the hands of Indian tribes, and Native Americans were often the dominant powers in areas where the young United States hoped to expand.

The inability or unwillingness of governmental forces to rein in US settlers indicates the degree to which white Americans consistently disavowed Native American claims to their own lands. Indians were seen as a nuisance or a threat, but irrespective of treaty and law, they were rarely seen by settlers as holding legal and legitimate title to desirable lands. In part this was due to the different views that Indian people and white settlers had about proper land use. The Indian people of the Old Northwest, for instance, reserved extensive shared tracts for hunting. But in the imagination of white Americans, if land could be cultivated, and was not, it was being wasted. Enlightenment theories of land use that predated the United States supported this position and suggested that by leaving land fallow, Indian people ac­tually gave up their claims to that land. So even when federal law was against them, squatters often felt justified in occupying Indian land.^[2332]

Nor was it only individual settlers who ignored native claims. Time and again, both state and federal governments proceeded as though those claims were in­valid.

Just after the Revolution, the United States coerced treaties from the Iroquois League of Six Nations, and from the Delaware, Huron, and Miami tribes, while failing to consult with other tribes occupying lands that the United States surveyed for white settlement. When tribes in the old Northwest refused to cede their lands in the 1790s, President Washington ordered military action against them. Thomas Jefferson never consulted the tribes of the Mississippi Valley when he purchased their land from France, nor did France consult them when selling it, despite the fact that France had treaties with many of them acknowledging tribal authority over their own lands. Although the United States agreed to honor France's treaties with resident tribes, Indian people were not treated as partners in the negotiations.

On the contrary, the fact that Indian people rather than Europeans occupied a region was seen as legitimating American expansion into that territory. White people in Europe and in America shared the belief that there was a “natural” racial hierarchy that placed white people above non-white people due to the alleged superiority of white “civilization.” Because “civilization” was really a code word for whiteness, Native Americans (and later the racially mixed residents of Mexico) could not be “civilized.” Settlers then used this reasoning to justify taking their lands.^[2334]

The conflation of civilization and land ownership also shaped the federal government's foreign policy decisions. One reason for the scant Spanish pres­ence in Florida in the 1810s was because of Seminole dominance in the colony. Yet Americans used the absence of Spanish authority as justification for seizing Florida, passed from Spain to the United States via the Transcontinental Treaty— and not a treaty between the Seminole and the United States.^[2335]