| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Stuart Banner. How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier. Cambridge: Belknap Pres of Harvard University Press. 2005. Pp. 344. $29.95.
Stuart Banner has written an intriguing account examining the dynamic and convoluted territorial, legal, political, and economic relationships among indigenous nations and colonial nations, particularly Great Britain, and its principal successor, the United States, and the individual states that engaged in multifaceted affairs with tribal peoples. He provides, especially in the first two-thirds of the book, a fresh perspective—utilizing a variety of high quality original and secondary materials—on one of the most crucial questions that has animated indigenous/nonindigenous relations since the arrival of Europeans: how and why did Native peoples lose ownership of ninety-eight percent of their lands to non-Natives?	1
This powerful question has generally occupied the attention of many people inside and outside the academy, but very few have explored it to the depth that Banner has. In fact, this is such a fundamental question that I think many scholars and commentators have simply assumed that it had long ago been answered. Banner's detailed analysis, however, particularly of the English colonial period into the early American period, shows that it needed this kind of substantive historical and legal treatment. Banner's essential thesis is that this staggering land transfer always and on every occasion "included elements of law and elements of power" (p. 4). Hence, the study has ample discussion of how these two forces were utilized by whites slowly but inexorably to gain the upper hand in terms of both sovereignty "over" tribal nations and proprietary rights "to" Indian lands.	2
Along with his fundamental question are a number of important subsidiary questions that Banner also addresses: what were the methods used by non-Indians to acquire land from Indians? Were Indians coerced, or did they voluntarily surrender title to their property, or was it some combination of the two? How did Indians understand the concept of property ownership in comparison to whites? When and why did Indians go from being recognized as "landowners" to being mere "occupants" or "tenants" of their lands? What is the relationship between "sovereignty" and "proprietary rights?" What role did the doctrine of "conquest" play in Indian land loss? How and why did white methods of land transfer change over time? How could the Indians in selling or losing so much land find themselves by the 1930s—when the land losses generally terminated—much poorer than they were before their land sales? And how did these land cessions vary in different regions of the country and with different tribes?	3
These are rich and timely questions, as land issues continue to be a hot topic in Indian Country, and Banner comes at them armed with archival, governmental, and other enlightening data. His study ranges broadly, from the early 1600s to the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, but he keeps his focus almost solely on the English/Euro-American/Indigenous relationship. Unfortunately, he pays little attention to the roles that Holland, France, or Spain played in the administration of their own land policies vis-à-vis tribal nations during the colonial era.	. . .

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