What Is Echo-Hawk's Challenges To The Legal Principle

Improved Essays
Native lands are surplus lands.
This is the tenth legal principle out of 13. The principle describes that Native lands can be taken by anyone as “there is enough room for everyone.” Colonist made it sound like Natives had enough land for themselves, and Natives doesn’t need their land as it wasn’t being used by Natives. Perhaps, it must be available for others to take. Europeans simply viewed Native land as a vacant places waiting for them to farm and take the land away from Natives. Additionally, they saw Native Americans as “inferior” and worthless to take over their territories without their agreement.
Echo-Hawk’s challenges to the legal principle by questioning if the doctrine would ever think of taking the land from other rich landholders

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Camilla Townsend’s book, “Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma,” describes the detailed story of Pocahontas’s life and how the various Natives lived in sixteenth century Virginia. The Natives lives were ultimately altered when English colonists arrived. The English had specific intentions in mind; colonize the area, become great merchant traders, and convert the Natives to Christianity. The colonists were willing to achieve these even if it meant overwhelming and destroying the Indian culture around them.…

    • 705 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    French And Indian War Dbq

    • 374 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Between 1754-1763 the French and Indian War caused conflict between Britain and America in many areas like in politics, economics, and ideology. Land in North America occupied by different countries(Doc A). Countries like Britain, France, Spain, and Russia all occupied territory in North America in 1754. This changed over the course of the French and Indian War. By 1763, all of the French land was taken by the Spanish and English.…

    • 374 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Trail Of Tears

    • 1021 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Why the Trail of Tears? The Trail of Tears was the name, given by the Cherokee Indians, to the forced march from their lands in the southeastern United States to the Indian Territory during 1838-1839. This event is a huge black spot in American history. This is only one instance in the history of man where domination of a weaker race of man occurred.…

    • 1021 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Essay On Yakama Wars

    • 797 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Some Native Americans did not believe land could be bought or sold. Some tribes, like the Nez Perce, refused to give up their ancestral lands (Nez Perce Wars). In the textbook “Washington a State of Contrasts”, it notes that tribes “did not own land individually” but instead “used natural resources to provide food and shelter”. Also, the Native Americans and white settlers used their lands differently. The settlers didn’t mind changing the land to make money, whereas the American Indians proposed using the land, but not changing it (Carlson and Green 85).…

    • 797 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    When European immigrants began traveling to the Americas not only did they believe it was Asia, per Columbus’s ventures, they believed the land was free to take. There was this preconceived notion of land among Europeans that land was personal property, used for economic & material needs…or wants. Lands that weren’t being actively controlled or used for things like agriculture, resource extraction, industry, or homesteads were fair game to take and anyone could use it for whatever they pleased. Their Native American counterparts, did not see land as something that could be “owned” but communally used and there were rights granted amongst themselves to which tribes could hunt, reside, and grow there. Access to the lands were closely linked…

    • 1015 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    To get to were we are today the United States had to expanded on lands that wasn't exactly theirs. This is know as manifest destiny. They bought the land to say it was their that that was not the end of manifest destiny. In the Us during the time 1800 Manifest destiny is greed.…

    • 758 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    On May 28th of the year 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed off on a law named the Indian Removal Policy. This granted the United States Government the right to negotiate with the Native American tribes about relocating the Natives from their current home to land west of the Mississippi River. This law was beneficial to the Native Americans on several accounts. The law ended immediate conflict between the Native Americans and the European American Settlers harassing them, it gave them new land to settle instead of just leaving them with no place to go, and even though some relocations were forced instead of voluntary, the law stated that the Native Americans would be provided with protection and aid during and after their relocation.  The…

    • 1408 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Until European colonists arrived in America, much of the land was occupied by various Native American tribes and other indigenous…

    • 1539 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This Land Is Your Land

    • 1007 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Americans dehumanized the Indians piece by piece. The natives became unworthy to live wherever they pleased, even if they did have their land stolen from them. Maybe Woody Guthrie songs should have went more like this: “You thought this was your land, but now it’s my land, from California to the New York Island, from the redwood forests to the gulf-stream waters, this land was taken from you and given to…

    • 1007 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    It is pretty simple, the natives were there first, therefore they get the land. Indians discovered America hundreds of years before the British. The British did not find new land, they found already owned land. If the Americans wanted the land, they could have paid the natives for it or tried to make some sort of trade. Instead, the British barged in acting like they owned the place.…

    • 2378 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Natives already had claim over the land, they were there first rightfully it was their land. The people of the United States had for the most part immigrated to the country and had no actual right to those lands. They used the idea of Manifest Destiny to give themselves the right to take over land that already belonged to someone else, claiming it was their destiny to expand westward and spread republican democracy. The United States did not want other countries to take over the land west of them, viewing it as a danger to their way of living.…

    • 799 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Settler Colonialism Essay

    • 712 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The goals of settler colonialism led to the mistreatment of Native Americans, Mexicans, Africans, and African Americans, and because of the history of the country as well as the nature of U.S. government, these groups of people are still discriminated against today. The persistence of such a structure, in regards to Native Americans, is due to the fact that indigenous people who originally resided on the land that white Americans claim as their own have not left, the white colonizers are still present, and the two groups still do not necessarily see eye to eye. The fact that the effects of settler colonialism, along with settler colonialism itself, have persevered over time have led to distorted concepts of what it means to belong in U.S. society. One effect of settler colonialism is the existence of Indian Reservations.…

    • 712 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    The colonists knew that the native Indians had knowledge of the land and hoped that they could learn and trade with them. However, the colonists also believed that should it be necessary, they had the right to defend themselves and wage war. As the number of Puritans and Quakers in New England increased, so did the need for land and according to the New Englanders, because the Native Americans had no legal documentation that followed English guidelines, they had no rights to it.…

    • 1944 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In the Native American society, personal goods such as tools were considered yours only if you created them yourself. Even if something was owned it was considered readily replaceable. Despite their easy nature of personal goods, land was different. The land which crops were grown and the area their wigwams stood on were, in their minds, possessed by them in spite of the fact that they moved every couple of months to a new area. They also believed that their main hunting and gathering lands were theirs to claim.…

    • 1758 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Race and racial inequality have powerfully shaped American history from the very beginning. Americans think of the founding of the American colonies and, later, the United States, as driven by the quest for freedom when initially, religious liberty and later political and economic liberty. Still, from the beginning, American society was equally founded on brutal forms of domination, inequality, and oppression which lead to the foundation of two models of minority exclusion known as Apartheid and Economic/political disempowerment. Apartheid meaning “state of being apart” is “An official policy of racial segregation, involving political, legal, and economic discrimination against nonwhites” (Wk:3, Lecture 1). Originated in South Africa apartheid…

    • 1290 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays