Native acceptance and permission to build settlements

Last updated: 2/29/2024

Native acceptance and permission to build settlements trading posts and missions within recognized Indian domains Indian homelands brushed up against one another their edges and peripheries creating zones of shared and contested indigenous dominion The lines drawn between Indian polities more often than not took precedence over newer bound aries drawn between themselves and Europeans even long after Spanish French and English arrival As it turns out my scholarly concern with Indians borders as out lined above grew out of frustrations in the classroom teaching American history frustration with two things particularly One is the conceptual notion that as soon as Europeans put their first big toes on the American coast all the Americas became a borderland up for grabs to the first European taker a notion that denies Indian sovereignty control of the land and basic home field advantage The second thing that set me off was the way in which our textbooks encourage this cockeyed vision of America with their maps Taking these two issues in turn the concept of borderlands sometimes appears to be used alongside or in place of frontiers but either when way we map it out on the ground it remains essentially a European defined space In American history borderlands frontiers hinterlands and back country customarily refer to the edges and peripheries of European and Euro American occupation and the limits of their invasion expansion conquest and settlement where Europeans and Euro Americans confront Indians or rival European powers Like frontiers borderlands appear just beyond the reach or sphere of centralized power associated with imperial European governance Like frontiers borderlands are zones in front of the hinterlands of Euro American settlement or in between rival European settlements think of the Spanish borderlands that are caught between the core of Latin America and the expansionary Anglo American world Either way they are supposed to be untamed unbounded wilder nesses waiting to be taken in hand by civilized Euro Americans Frontiers and borderlands are far from the imperial cores of France Spain Britain and later the United States and by definition are absent of a monopoly of power or violence So on the one hand these are spaces into which Euro Americans go without the force of the state or military near at hand Such conditions by implication are what make it possible for Indians to stand on equal ground to negotiate and to struggle for advantage But critically Indians ability to stand their ground and to thing to do with capabilities of their own