Reason, Cultivation, and (In)Voluntary Land Transfers

In searching for a “hot spot” in Life of Black Hawk this week, I found myself settling on a passage that both J. Gerald Kennedy and Mark Rifkin discuss:

My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, as far as is necessary for their subsistence; and so long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have the right to the soil—but if they voluntarily leave it, then any other people have a right to settle upon it. Nothing can be sold, but such things as can be carried away. (56)

This passage is such a hot spot because it not only shows the strong ideological differences between white and Native American conceptions of land ownership but also contradicts the dominant narrative about Native Americans.

 

In the introduction to the text, Rifkin explains that “rationalism enables Black Hawk to understand the ethics of land conservation” (xxii). Black Hawk’s rationalism contradicts white expectations of natives as “savages” and places him right in the middle of the debate about racial difference that Reginald Horsman discusses in Race and Manifest Destiny. Horsman asserts, “Before 1815 the prevailing intellectual view in America as well as in Europe was that environment, not innate racial differences, accounted for the marked gaps in achievement between different peoples and different nations” (98). Even Thomas Jefferson took a “classic Enlightenment position” about Native Americans, writing that “proofs of genius given by the Indians of N. America, place them on a level with Whites in the same uncultivated state” (Horsman 107). Black Hawk’s explicit mention of “reason” both supports and contradicts Enlightenment thinkers. The capacity to reason is an inherent human capability that all races share, thus this passage seems to be in agreement with the Enlightenment thinkers who argued against inherent racial differences. However, the passage also shows that different environments won’t always lead to differing abilities. Just because Black Hawk’s reason led him to a different understanding of land ownership does not mean his reasoning capabilities are inferior to a white person’s; he should not have to be equated to a white person who is still in an “uncultivated state.”

 

Black Hawk’s use of the word “cultivate” also has the double-sided effect of supporting and contradicting white ideology. Whites who first came to America saw it as their Christian prerogative to cultivate and tame the wilderness, and cultivation additionally became a measure of progress and civilization. White Americans used agriculture and cultivation as another marker of their superiority over the Native Americans. Horsman explains, “Ignoring the extensive agricultural development among the Indian tribes with which the United States was in contact…placed the whole confrontation in the simple context of a primitive hunting society, on a lower stage of human evolution, encountering an American agrarian society at the highest stage of human development” (107). Both Horsman and Rifkin point to the inaccuracy of this narrative. Rifkin argues that Black Hawk’s presentation of the story of the origin of corn forges “a connection between the hunting grounds and the fields of Saukenuk by portraying hunting not as the antithesis of cultivation but its (differently gendered) partner” (687). As with Black Hawk’s “reason,” his conception of “cultivation” is not inferior to that of white people, it is merely different. Like white Americans, he highly values cultivation, so much so that he believes cultivation gives people a right to land, whereas paying for land does nothing.

 

A final important element I saw in the Life of Black Hawk passage is the mention of “voluntarily” giving up land. Rifkin explains

If legitimate settlement follows upon others “voluntarily” vacating the territory, the text calls into question the validity of U.S. jurisdiction by repudiating not simply native assent to a particular sale but the possibility of construing the sale of Indian territory as ever consensual in light of the fundamental alienness of such a transfer to indigenous philosophies and spirituality. (684)

Indian removal and land treaties are partially problematic because Native Americans simply don’t see land as something that can be bought and sold. However, even without that difference in ideology, “voluntarily” giving up land still remains an important sticking point. Even if white Americans refuse to believe that land cannot be sold, their treaties are predicated on Indians voluntarily giving up their land, which gets at one of Maureen Konkle’s arguments in her article. She explains, “Since the treaty, duplicitous or not, required the presumption of Indian autonomy in order to be construed as legitimate, it also allowed for Indians’ resistance to U.S. governmental authority: Indians could choose not to sell” (460). White Americans had to find ways around this freedom of choice in order to take the land they wanted. Black Hawk’s whole story focuses on the consequences when Indians fight for the land that they never voluntarily left in the first place.