Enclosures of Land and Sovereignty

Abstract

This essay cautiously compares the dispossession of Native lands in the United States with the enclosure of the English commons, in light of the transfer of political sovereignty that occurred in the case it explores. The federal policy of dividing American Indian nations' tribal lands into privately owned parcels led to the loss of Native lands and obscured the colonial nature of federal power. Following the implementation of this late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century program, known as allotment, non-Indian people gained ownership of millions of acres of Indian territory. Two neglected shifts accompanied this commonly noted loss of land. First, allotment eroded the sovereignty of Native nations while extending the authority of the colonizing power, the federal government. Second, the program indirectly reinforced a tendency to think that it was race, rather than political difference, that defined Indian people and Indian nations. Placing Native people into the schema of U.S. race relations obscured their status as colonized subjects and members of sovereign nations. Allotment thus simultaneously expanded federal power and veiled its colonial nature.

Finance and Foreclosure in the Colonial Present

“…28 As David A. Chang puts it, allotment "reinforced a tendency in the United States to think that it is race, rather than political difference, that defines Indian people and Indian nations." 29 Focusing on the assimilation of individual Indians, allotment further dismantled sovereign nation-to-nation relations -already underway with the unilateral legislation in 1871 that ended US treaty making with tribes -and aimed to transform the "vanishing Indian" into a racial minority. The Dawes Act also stipulated that the United States would operate as the trustee for individual Indian's lands and natural resources and for the monetary assets generated by leases to those lands and resources, as private industry extracted oil, coal, timber, and grazing rights.…”

Enclosures within Enclosures and Hurricane Reconstruction in Cancún, Mexico

“…non‐profitable) to the private sector, they sought to shift it to individual unit owners. As a result, Cancún's case exemplifies an instance in which the logic of enclosure implies the transfer of sovereignty from the public realm into the private sector and the subsequent transfer of responsibility (Chang :7).…”

Disowned by the Ownership Society: How Native Americans Lost Their Land

“…Washington considered these to be "surplus" and encouraged their sale to non-Indians (Bobroff 2001) with proceeds going to the U.S. Treasury. The result was a stunning enclosure of approximately 90 million acres of tribal land between 1887 and 1934-land that was privatized but not into Indian hands (Chang 2011). It was done with moral fervor, argued before Congress as the "Indian Homestead Act," and showcased as a step toward full U.S. citizenship for Indians (Davies and Clow 2009).…”

“…This iconoclasm—that Indian land alienation was more voluntary than coerced—is both theoretically interesting (dissenting from Lieberson's broad empirical findings) and intriguing as revisionist social history. Native landholdings of North America were not spared compulsory enclosures (Chang ; Geisler and George ; VanDevelder ); Indian nations were forcibly removed, subjected to military containment, deceived by treaties, and defrauded of their landed birthright by unscrupulous non‐Indians. And though there were pragmatic moments in which Anglo‐Americans found it in their interest to pay Indians for land rather than mount armies against them, the longue durée is a different story.…”