Word: landed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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True, the immigrant civilization sometimes obtained land honorably, by treaty or purchase. But even in many of these cases it often appeared that the Indians did not fully understand the game. Basically, says Wilbur Jacobs in Dispossessing the American Indian (1972), "the Indian saw the land as supernaturally provided for man's use and not subject to sale or individual ownership." Some Indian leaders would attest too late that they had no power to "sell" land, not as the white man understood the word. In exchange for lands conveyed by treaty, the Indians often got little more than unenduring...
...protect the Indians against usurpations that Congress in 1790 adopted the so-called Nonintercourse Act. This law provided that no Indian land could change hands without congressional approval. In fact, the act mainly reserved to the Federal Government those further immense acquisitions of Indian territory that would be made in the 19th century. The leader who set the pace and policy for the relentless official land-grabbing that accompanied western expansion was Andrew Jackson. The Tennessean vaulted to the White House on the reputation he had won partly by clearing the Southern states of Indians as a major general...
...most of the current cases, the Indians do not contend that the property they claim was taken by force or fraud. Instead, they argue that certain voluntary transfers of their land after 1790 never received the congressional ratification required by the old Non-intercourse Act. Because congressional approval is definitely required, and the lack of it is easily proved, the Justice Department has concluded that the Indians have a solid case...
...conscience. They deserve above all else a chance to reclaim the identity, dignity, pride and esteem that have too often been taken away from them. Indeed, the mood of the Indians suggests that the recovery of such intangibles is not a small item in their renaissance goals. In the land cases, the Indians' willingness to settle out of court, even with the law on their side, forces one to wonder whether the stunning size of the claims has not been intended mainly to arrest the attention of the nation, to prick its conscience, to arouse a more thoughtful response...
Probably no other country would take quite so seriously land claims that propose, in effect, the impossible rolling back of history. The inherent absurdity of such a proposition might be clearer, say, in a suggestion that Australia be handed back to the aborigines. Even the angry blacks of South Africa are not openly challenging the right of possession held by descendants of the whites who invaded that land long ago. Surely one of the oldest realities of the earth is that the dispersal of all population has been by conquest, dispossession and conquest again. And if history could be unwritten...