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Chapter 3
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Changes in the Land, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Natural vs. Unnatural Change
Systems and Interdependence
Property Ownership, Commodities, and Profit
Colonization and the Limits of Understanding
Human vs. Environmental History
Summary
Analysis
Maintaining a mobile lifestyle was easy for indigenous communities because all their possessions could be easily transported with them. Europeans who viewed Native people as impoverished were misinterpreting the true situation. Early colonial writing was filled with criticism of the way that Native people lived; writers charged Native people with being lazy, foolish, wasteful of the land, and prone to pointless suffering. Again, English colonizers used Native hunting and gathering as an excuse to steal the land, claiming that indigenous communities “squander[ed] the resources that were available to them.”
Here it again becomes clear that Europeans developed ideas and arguments about Native life that served their agenda of stealing resources from—and thus strategically disempowering—Native people. It’s also clear how deeply they misunderstood aspects of Native life, seeing their few belongings, for instance, as poverty, rather than as a strategic adaptation for a nomadic life.
Themes
The colonizer John Winthrop claimed that there were two modes of land ownership, natural and civil. He held that people acquired natural citizenship by inhabiting and cultivating land. However, this was inferior to civil ownership, which was adjudicated by law. According to this theory, only the cornfields that Native women cultivated “naturally” belonged to them—the whole rest of the country was free for the taking. In reality, of course, this was an excuse that colonizers used to seize land they wanted. They did sometimes acknowledge indigenous ownership of the land, such as when they bought land from indigenous communities. Regardless, it was consistently obvious that the colonizers did not care what Native people themselves thought about land ownership.
As this passage shows, there was a lot of hypocrisy and internal contradiction in the way that colonizers dealt with indigenous land ownership, which further proves that they tended to choose interpretations that suited their goal of taking over the land. If it seems as if sometimes colonizers believed Native people owned their land and sometimes they didn’t, this is because they adjusted their “beliefs” in ways that benefitted them.
Themes
The consequence of this is that there are few records in the historical archive about Native people’s views on land ownership during the colonial period. Even the word “property” is contentious and can be used to uphold a European political perspective. The concept of property only works if the society in which a property relation occurs agrees on its meaning. For indigenous people, two key concepts were at play: ownership and sovereignty. Ownership involved respecting a person’s right to property within a given community, whereas sovereignty meant those outside the community—such as other tribes—recognized a set of territorial rights. Europeans struggled to understand these interlinked concepts.
Native villages had to respect one another’s right to occupy the land they (temporarily) inhabited. This was often arranged via the village’s leader—the sachem—although colonizers tended to overemphasize the sachem’s authority, even mischaracterizing indigenous communities as monarchies. The truth is that sachems were not like European kings. Social power within communities was dictated by complex kinship networks that expanded across villages. Overall, there was more “flexibility and movement” than in European political institutions. A village “owned” land in the sense that others respected the sovereignty of their sachem. Borders between settlements were “precise” and colonizers observed that villages sometimes made land deals and transfers with one another.
This passage illustrates how easy it is to transpose one’s own cultural framework onto a different one. Seeing that Native villages had leaders (sachems), some colonizers chose to interpret these leaders as equivalent to the European monarchy and aristocracy. However, in reality these roles were incredibly different. Dangerous miscommunication and misunderstanding can result from assuming too much similarity or reading another context through one’s own preexisting frameworks.
Themes
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However, land was not “sold” by sachems, something that confused several colonizers. Transfers of land were “diplomatic” deals, not economic ones. Within a given village, people were considered to own things they had personally made and used. This meant that women owned things like baskets and hoes, whereas mean owned bows, arrows, and canoes. However, there was also “little sense either of accumulation or of exclusive use.” Ownership was related to how something was used and colonizers remarked on how “generous” Native people seemed to be with their possessions. Giving away possessions was efficient, helping to establish a norm of “reciprocity.”
The difference between owning and exchanging land in the way the Europeans did versus using and exchanging it in the manner of Native people might seem trivial, even semantic. But the differences Cronon outlines here are actually crucial. A “diplomatic” arrangement rather than an economic one bespeaks a higher level of cooperation and also meant that Native people were not incentivized to acquire more land than they needed.
Themes
Yet while exchanging possessions was useful, the same was less often true of land. Native communities didn’t think of themselves as owning a particular patch of land in a permanent way, as they moved from place to place—“What families possessed in their fields was the use of them.” They had rights of ownership, but these shifted when the community moved away. Communities did return to certain patches of land, but colonizers chose not to recognize indigenous people’s rights to the land because it fell outside of what Europeans defined as ownership, which depended on permanent settling and agricultural cultivation. This was very different from the Native system of property rights, which was flexible and shifted according to “ecological use.”
Again, the idea of possession is so deeply ingrained into Western culture that it might seem natural to many readers in the present. However, this is actually far from the case. While no human is entirely free from possessions (in the sense of objects they keep around and use), how possessions are defined—what it actually means to own or use something—has always fluctuated across different historical and geographic contexts.
Themes
Native people’s understanding of their rights to animals was similarly flexible and complex. Animals that were abundant and easy to catch were owned by whoever killed them, but those that were rarer or needed to be caught using traps belonged to the person whose trap they were caught in. Overall, Native people believed that they had property rights to the products of the land, which meant that these rights shifted with the seasons. This conception of property ownership was actually common among both hunter-gatherer and agricultural communities all over the world, but it was very different from what the Europeans believed.
Again, the idea of owning animals is very normal in Western society, such that many readers would not question the idea that a person could own cows in a dairy farm or a pet cat. Yet for Native people, this was not an obvious fact at all. While Native people did kill animals for food, clothing, and other resources, they did not think of themselves as “owning” them until the very moment at which they were killed.
Themes
These ideas about ownership were shown in the names Native people gave to places, which usually reflected these places’ agricultural features or else pointed to where plants, fish, and animals could be found. This was a marked contrast to English place names, which tended to reflect the identity of a place’s owner. Some Native place names reflected boundaries of territory. However, borders soon became a problem after the arrival of the Europeans, as the two groups of people did not have the same understanding of what land boundaries meant. When Native people negotiated an exchange of land, whoever authorized the exchange had to speak on behalf on the entire kin group who had rights to the land.
Although Cronon doesn’t mention it specifically here, this passage illustrates an important difference in the way that indigenous people and Europeans conceptualized their place in the world. Europeans thought of themselves as separate from—and having authority over—the natural world. Native people were more inclined to see themselves as part of the natural world, which from a scientific perspective makes more sense.
Themes
Furthermore, Native people believed they were granting the Europeans land rights that were “specific,” contingent, and conducive to Native people continuing to practice hunting and gathering. Indeed, the Native system of land rights simply did not include the right to “exclusive” use of land. The Europeans, meanwhile, essentially decided to overrule the Native system of land rights as “not real.” When a purchase took place, colonizers interpreted it through the framework of European law only. When colonizers purchased land, they did not believe they were purchasing the rights to use the land in certain specific conditions (per Native law), but rather chose to believe they were buying the land itself. This “inevitably” resulted in significant ecological change.
From a contemporary perspective, it might seem extraordinary that Native people initially allowed colonizers access and use of the land (a little like letting a stranger squat in your house!). Yet as this passage shows, part of the reason why indigenous people were often willing to do this was because of their particular understanding of what it meant to have property rights. They saw these rights as flexible and need-based rather than permanent and thus didn’t anticipate Europeans claiming they “owned” the land forever.
Themes
It is misleading to assert that only Europeans had a sense of private property whereas Native people didn’t. There were actually similarities between the understandings of property held by Native people and those of the colonizers, and the result of their interaction was what tends to be called “the New England land system.” Colonizers believed they gained a right to land in two ways: by buying it from Native people or receiving a grant from the English monarch. In their view, the latter was always the ultimate authority. When colonizers purchased land from Native people, it was an exchange between two sovereigns—yet the colonizers would then subsequently choose to ignore Native sovereignty once the purchase took place.
This passage illuminates another important problem in negotiations between Native people and Europeans. While Europeans were willing to concede to Native ideas, laws, and customs to a certain degree, they ultimately only truly respected their own system of authority (manifested in the monarchy). This was not a promising basis for fair negotiation, let alone cooperation.
Themes
Over time, the colonizers began to regulate the sale of Native lands and eventually came to conclude that “for Indians to own land at all, it had first to be granted them by the English Crown.” Settlers were obligated to pay a kind of rent to the monarch for use of land, but this was often very little. The royal charter also established boundaries that were fixed and “objective,” rather than the flexible and contingent kind used by indigenous people. The Massachusetts Bay Company was provided a significant grant of exclusive land use and profit, rights that lasted “for ever.” This set of rights was diametrically opposed to Native people’s conception of land rights.
By breaking down each step of the process like this, Cronon shows how something extraordinary—a group of people moving to another continent, taking the land for themselves, and establishing their legal system as the only valid form of authority—actually did happen over the course of the colonial period. Of course, there is missing information about how this was actually achieved, which was via ecological and economic factors that are discussed later in the book.
Themes
The question of how to divide up the land granted by the King was left to the colonizers to adjudicate. The land in a given town would be permanently divided up among residents. This reflected the colonizers’ belief that “individuals should only possess as much land as they were able to subdue and make productive.” This meant that a wealthy people who had lots of servants and cattle were accordingly given more land. As a result the class system that existed in Europe was transferred over to the New World. The land ownership granted here was both “permanent” and “private”; colonizers argued that this form of ownership would lead to the land being used in the most effective manner.
One of the myths about colonial life in America that still proliferates in some forms today is that it was to be a classless society, unlike the rigidly hierarchical systems back in Europe. While this was certainly the desire of some settlers—and while there were crucial differences in the class systems in the New and Old Worlds—this passage shows that this fantasy of classlessness was far from the reality.
Themes
Some land was held in common; the percentage of private to public land varied from town to town. Yet overall, New England towns were defined by the belief that land was a “private commodity,” not publicly shared space. Over time, deeds stopped reflecting what a given piece of land could be used for and instead defined it by its “objective” geographical measurements, with use not mentioned at all. Overall, the colonizers’ approach to land was defined by viewing it as a commodity. Of course there is an extent to which is this is a simplistic generalization, glossing over the reality that the colonizers’ notions of property evolved over time.
Again, from a contemporary Western perspective, treating land as a commodity might seem like an obvious idea. Contemporary life is significantly shaped by the idea of owning land as property, a concept that manifests everywhere from national broader control to paying rent. Yet this idea is not a natural one and was largely not part of indigenous political ideology.
Themes
While compared to later American towns these early colonial settlements may look like “subsistence communities,” compared to the Native communities that preceded them they were very much market societies. The towns featured markets where commodities were traded; some good were shipped back to Europe or to the Caribbean and some were taxed. However, the most significant way in which colonial towns differed from subsistence communities is that they were fixated on “improv[ing]” the land, which meant regarding it as capital. Colonizers sought to increase the value of the land they owned by making full use of it, increasing the soil’s fertility, acquiring more animals, and so on.
Colonizers regarded it as self-evident that land should be used in a way that maximized profit. This meant that more goods were produced than was necessary for survival, which in turn meant an intensification of activity that wore down the land. Of course, in reality none of this was necessary or even a self-evident good, as the contrast with indigenous ways of life demonstrates.
Themes
In Two Treatises of Government, John Locke compares indigenous people’s way of life to that of Europeans. He points out that Native people acquire what they need to survive and own what they use. In contrast, Europeans seek to accumulate capital, including in the form of land. In the case of colonial New England, the result of this European ideology was a transformation of the environment.
As this passage shows, it is important to remember that an understanding of the differences between European and indigenous ways of life is not only something known in hindsight—people realized it at the time, too, even if their impression may have been distorted by ideology.
Themes
Locke argued that Native people had not properly cultivated the land because they were not motivated by “money and commerce,” which were not features of their cultures. Yet this analysis missed the reality that Native people were actually not impoverished, because they essentially had everything they desired. They did not rush or overwork themselves and lived a satisfying life. However, this depended on having control of the land, which—once the property-obsessed Europeans arrived—was taken from them.
It would be too simple to interpret this passage as meaning that poverty is a state of mind. This is not the case and when Native people later faced real poverty as a result of colonization, no attitude shift could have mitigated this problem. Instead, the Europeans’ inclination toward greed made them mistake having enough for having too little.
Themes
