(3 of 5)
Such suits are conceivable, if not probable, in other land claims, of which half a dozen are pending on the Eastern seaboard alone. A total of 350,000 acres has been claimed by the Wampanoags in Massachusetts, the Pequots and Schaghticokes in Connecticut, the Narragansetts in Rhode Island, the Oneidas in New York. The Catawbas of South Carolina contend they are entitled to 144,000 acres that embrace the cities of Rock Hill and Fort Mill. The roll call of litigant tribes is like a Whitmanesque iteration: Miccosukee, Sioux, Cheyenne, Chippewa. Seven Oklahoma tribes—Kaw, Ponca, Tonkawa, Pawnee, Otoe, Osage, Creek—are shaping up a suit to assert a collective claim to the bed—and attendant water rights—of the Arkansas River. Of hundreds of controversies, however, most turn not on claims to land but on issues of land use, of rights to minerals and water, of fishing and hunting rights, of tribal sovereignty. Some involve prickly political questions that stem from the unique legal status that is supposed to exempt Indians from control or taxation by state and local governments. The Mescalero Apaches of New Mexico have won their claim to immunity from ordinary state licensing procedures in the sale of liquor on their reservations. In Minnesota, the Chippewas (one of whose honorary chiefs is Vice President Walter Mondale) have won the right to issue tribal auto license plates.
In the land cases, of course, the Indian Renaissance is rattling one of the uglier skeletons in the open closet of American history. That much land occupied by the Indians was taken by force or fraud is an old, richly documented story. The tale, if sad, is not surprising, given the way of civilization wherever it has encroached on simpler societies. It may be, as many historians argue, that American settlers were driven by an unusual hunger for land. To pioneering Americans, in fact, the right to property was rarely distinguished from the right to liberty. It was the irresistible pursuit of both—of land as the embodiment of liberty—that put the U.S. astride the continent and dispossessed the Indians from coast to coast. When justification was needed along the way, it was taken alternately from a claim to divine approval and from John Locke's argument that civilization obtained its right to the land by the investment of its toil, the promise of its superiority.
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 "protection."