Leonard Cohen wrote:The French gave the Iroquois their name.
Naming food is one thing, naming a people is another,
not that the people in question seem to care today.
If they never cared, so much the worse for me:
I'm far too willing to shoulder the alleged humiliations
of harmless peoples, as evidenced by my life work
with the A-------s.
-
Beautiful Losers
(check out
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois#Name )
Although it wasn't his "life work", at some point Cohen did have
to immerse himself in American Indian history and culture before
writing BLs.
And while I'm no authority, I definitely get the impression that
"...one of the few traits that might be applied sweepingly to most
American Indians" is the "belief in a personally acquirable magic power."
And that
...the widespread concept of ownership of land in common
by a related group of people might be another such trait.
These attitudes were overwhelmed in emerging societies elsewhere
in the world by other sets of notions drawn from other primitive world
views, but they gained the ascendancy in America. Operated upon
by untroubled time, they became distinctively Indian.
(- Indians - William Brandon - American Heritage Library)
Many of the conflicts with land ownership were complicated by misunderstandings.
For the American Indian, there was no concept of ownership of land.
How could one sell land that one did not own? It was not a new land,
it was an old land; and they were merely existing on it. It belonged to God,
not to man. How could one sell land belonging to God? When they found out
that they did sell land and were presented with legal documents, they had
no idea of the consequences of the document.
-
http://catlinclassroom.si.edu/interviews/al-murray.html
Some of our chiefs make the claim that the land belongs to us.
It is not what the Great Spirit told me. He told me that the lands belong to Him,
that no people owns the land; that I was not to forget to tell this to the white people
when I met them in council.
- KANAKUK, KICKAPOO, ADRESSING GENERAL WILLIAM CLARK, 1827
-
http://www.taiska.net/nativespirit/wisdoms.htm
As I say, I am no authority. And Indian land rights is very much a live topic
in the U.S. and Canada today, so of course there are revisionist and
conspiracy theories related to it all over the internet. And I am not able
to evaluate their merits and demerits.
For one seemingly contrary view, from PERC, see
http://www.perc.org/about.php?id=802
eg, quoting from there,
Likewise, Julian Steward (1938, 253) asserted that among Native Americans communal property was limited,
and Frances Densmore (1939) concluded that the Makah tribe in the Pacific Northwest had property rights similar to Europeans.’
These early twentieth-century historians and anthropologists had the advantage of actually interviewing tribal members
who had lived in pre-reservation Indian society.
About PERC -
"Defies categorization" - is an understatement about PERC.
However, "American Indian" is something that should also defy
easy categorization. And while what that PERC article says
that Frances Densmore concluded about the Makah tribe
is undoubtedly true, the PERC article is not very convincing
in following it with the sweeping generalization that
...By the late 1940s, however, these original and firsthand
sources of information had died, and false myths and historical
distortions began to take dominant shape. By the mid–1960s,
the tone in many college history books, history-inspired films
and novels, and even speeches had completely changed (Mika 1995). ...
("False myths"? -- vs. true myths?)
But the main reason I find at least this aspect of that article
hard to take is that, even though I've only spent a little time
on these things, using a few books I happen to have, and
surfing the internet, nevertheless everywhere I have looked
I have run into native and non-native quotes from long before
the late 1940s that absolutely support the "false myth" that
the notion of individually owned land was completely alien
to native American Indians, who had, instead of it, a notion,
quite alien to most of us, except for Cohen, something
like a temporary, conditional, tribal leasing of land from God.
(Generally a good place to find almost any anthropological
counter case you may happen to want is Papua New Guinea.
Eg the Kapauku Papuans are a virtually stone-age tribe there
who, evidently for the last 10 or 20 thousand years, have had
a virtually capitalistic economy. (- look up Leopold Pospisil))
