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