Monday, December 3, 2012

How the West Was Lost by Native Americans




 This is a neat presentation that displays the rapid process in which the USA established land tenure and extinguished aboriginal rights. We remember the conflicts, but the reality is that only a government can establish land title that allows alienation to the individual. Those same Indian bands today have reserves but have continually failed to address tenure for their members of lands within the reserves for fear that in the long term the land will be lost. The reality is that in the long term we are all dead and the land passes on.

Regardless this was only possible because of the weakness of the Indians themselves after the massive die off that took place between 1492 and 1600 which outright emptied the lands themselves of viable populations for establishing a larger polity.

It is sober reminder of the impact of depopulation and also the central role of government in creating land title. The speed in which it was done reflected the reality that the Indians themselves accepted that there were simply not enough of them anymore.


How the West Was Lost by Native Americans

HOW THE WEST WAS LOST BY NATIVE AMERICANS


Serena Dai
Jul 19, 2012

Everybody knows that Europeans took a lot of land from Native Americans, but this animated GIF by Tumblr user sunisup gives a great sense of just how fast the people living in North America were pushed west after Christopher Columbus "discovered" the continent. 

She turned an old graphic by Louisiana State professor Sam B. Hillard into a mini-movie that viscerally demonstrates the gradual chopping away of Native American land through cessions, or a surrender of territory to another entity. The green represents Native American land, and any part that turns white was ceded. She writes: "Made because I was having trouble visualizing the sheer scale of the land loss, and reading numbers like 'blah blah million acres' wasn’t really doing it for me." Numbers wise, the amount of green land shown after 1895 is about 2.3 percent of the original size.

Hillard got his information from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of American Ethnology. The history of Native Americans is complicated, so the graphic only documents land that was ceded. Any land that was ceded but then later turned into a reservation may shop up again later in the time lapse. Whatever the in-between negotiations, it's clear the land disappeared quickly. The difference between 1784 and present day Indian reservations is striking.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The Name of the Article should be, How Non-native American Occupiers and Terrorists stole the Native Americans Land.