Matt Mrozinski 7 June 2011 Prof.

Tina Chanter PHL 245: Reason and Society Social Contract Contradictions: What About the Indians? Countless iterations of the Social Contract tried to define Indian societies as savage and confine them to the State of Nature. On the contrary, Native Americans have satisfied every single criterion of Civil Society set forth by Western philosophys most pronoun social contractarians, especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke and shared no likenesses to their depiction as savages in the States of Nature. Archaeological record hypothesizes that the influx of he Bering land bridge as early as 20,000 BCE,1 and Native American creation myths hold over various different cultures that they have been there since the beginning of time. I propose the idea that these immigrants were hominoid creatures truly in the State of Nature, and they evolved into the first Civil Societies of North America and came to posses Reason, organizing into the Social Contract, and even promoting capitalism. Interestingly enough, they were built on tacit consent just like Lockes image of civil society. I will show how these civil societies were directed by the general will, a touchstone of true sovereignty in Rousseaus eyes. His beliefs of first occupancy thereby should establish the right to North America that the Indians duly posses. Did the European colonists use force to establish a right to conquest? Undeniably so, but Europeans also contacted North Americans prior to Columbian contact. Norse colonization was attempted in 1000 CE and failed, and what ever happened to the postColumbian Lost Colony of Roanoke? Was not American government structured to reflect aspects of the Iroquois Confederacys ideas of representative democracy,2 which also developed without

Don Alan Hall, Who Was First: Ancient Immigrants into the Americas (Online: Mammoth Trumpet, 2007), http://www.cabrillo.edu/~crsmith/bering.html 2 Bruce E. Johansen, The Six Nations: Oldest Living Participatory Democracy on Earth. Accessed 3 June 2011, http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/index.html

Mrozinski 2 the influence of the Roman Republic that also inspired the Founders? It will be soon be evident that every aspect of American Indian culture defined by social contractarians used to establish their place in the state of nature is used to wrongly keep them in the custody of the State and to take their land. Native Americans major refutation of the Bering Land Strait migration theory is based on the misinterpretation of data. Archaeologists propose that the land bridge flooded as late as 12,000 BCE, thus ending the migration and the dating the earliest evidence of Native American occupancy at 25,000 BCE; critics of this theory such as Vine Deloria, cite archaeological evidence of American Indian artifacts radiocarbon dated to 38,000 BCE3 and instead propose that Native Americans have occupied their land since the beginning of time. However, many fail to see that the land bridge was opened two times in the archaeological recordbest estimates place these openings between 75,000-45,000 BCE and 25,000-12,000 BCE.4 The land bridge theory presents that Native Americans only descend from migration that occurred during the bridges second opening. If populations of late homo sapiens sapiens begins to outnumber Neanderthals in Europe approximately 60,000-40,000 years ago,5 one could suppose, hypothetically, that if the migrations were composed the of less evolved Archaic homo sapiens that populated the Earth from 500,000-10,000 BCE6 occurred primarily during the land bridges first opening, modern humans would emerge in these regions at a rate comparable to modern homo sapiens sapiens in the rest of the world. In light of this evidence, the Mohawks claim to
3

Vine Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (New York: Scribner, 1995) 110. 4 Emergence of People in North America accessed 3 June 2011, http://imnh.isu.edu/digitalatlas/geog/native/text/history.htm 5 Evolution of Modern Humans: Early Modern Homo Sapiens accessed 4 June 2011, http://anthro.palomar.edu/homo2/mod_homo_4.htm 6 Richard Dawkins and Yan Wong (2004) Archaic Homo Sapiens in The Ancestors Tale: A Pilgrimage to the dawn of evolution (New York: Mariner Books, 2004) 62.

Mrozinski 3 have counted 33,120 winters in their calendar7 does not seem too farfetched to serve as a ballpark guess of when the savages could be seen as modern men by a sympathetic eye. We see in John Lockes Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government, in the section concerning Property: Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.8 He believes land that was not generating income via labour was lying in waste, and that the purpose of property is capitalism and trademoney comes into the equation as a lasting thing men could keep without spoiling.9 Indians who do not join in the common money lay in waste.10 Beyond Lockes shallow understanding of Indigenous history, land has been worked for both agricultureboth to trade and sustain societyand religious purposes. Complex systems of divided labor permitted agriculture to advance in manners technologically equivalent to European agriculture techniques, including but not limited to irrigation, nutrition, and intertribal trade of surplus. Incan societies at the time of contact employed soil conservation methods and aqueduct networks to water crops while also raising livestock.11 Indigenous peoples all over the Western Hemisphere had figured out how to grow complete nutrition for themselves,12 independently developed monotheistic belief systems and chiefdom governments, promoting some to devote their land in religious

The Bering Strait Myth: Issues of Native Circle accessed 3 June 2011, http://www.nativecircle.com/mlmBSmyth.html 8 John Locke, An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government, in The Social Contract ed. Sir Ernest Barker (London: Oxford University Press, 1961) p. 17. 9 Locke, True Original, 29. 10 Locke, True Original, 27. 11 Incas, Accessed 5 June 2011, http://public.wsu.edu/~dee/CIVAMRCA/INCAS.HTM 12 John Vivian, The Three Sisters, accessed 6 June 2011, http://www.motherearthnews.com/Nature-Community/2001-02-01/The-Three-Sisters.aspx

Mrozinski 4 monuments.13 Indians were as capable of overhunting and over-farming as the Europeans were, and at the point of Columbian exchange they were clearly advanced beyond the state of nature and equivalently established into civil society and polities; capitalism had already existed in the New World before Columbus arrived, Europeans engaged in it with Native Americans, and it progressed to serve their own agenda. Social advancements in Indian governments did not stagnate at their Pre-Columbian states. In Rousseaus Social Contract, he acknowledges that might does not make right and people have only the duty to obey legitimate power.14 Native Americans before the time of Columbian exchange demonstrated examples of a body politic complete with patriarchs, as previously mentioned. These supposed ancient governments responded to pressures to become civilized as an alternative to land concession, and in the early 1800s the Cherokee Indian nation in Northwest Georgia began to emerge as a symbol of success in the governments attempts to civilize Indians, who picked up the concepts of propertyeven to the extent of owning plantations, mills, and trading establishments,15 and this was well after the fur trading tribes in the northern colonies had established their economic preeminence in Columbian exchange. The Cherokees had deliberately integrated areas of white society to earn respect as a civilized nation and thereby preserve their tribal integrity and land against further white encroachment.16 Treaties emerged from Cherokee/United States relations as if equal governments were conducting the negotiations: land solemnly guaranteed through 1798, Chief Justice John

13

Mississippian and Late Prehistoric Period: Southeastern Prehistory accessed 5 June 2011, http://www.nps.gov/seac/outline/05-mississippian/index.htm 14 Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, in The Social Contract ed. Sir Ernest Barker (London: Oxford University Press, 1961) 173. 15 Ronald N. Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacskonian Era (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002) 2. 16 Satz, Indian Policy, 2.

Mrozinski 5 Marshall ruling that the right of first occupancy superseded first discovery claims by Europeans in 1823.17 Native Americans rights of first occupancy and first discovery, which Rousseau acknowledges as legitimate over the right of might, should have been protected. In an interesting twist and a counterexample to Humes criticism, which finds disdain with Lockes theories basis in tacit consent, Indian negotiations involved tangible consent in the form of contracts, treaties, and negotiations. In an interesting twist, unlike any other social contract, in which Lockes critics, such as David Hume proposes that its power is in its provisions for tacit consent, Indian treaties were elicited to serve as the tangible consent for conceding huge parcels of sacred and tribal lands (not without the assistance of alcohol). Assuming these agreements occur between legitimate governments, consent from somebody too intoxicated to give consent, according to most date rape laws, is not consent. Indians had no rightful place in the system of paternal power that Locke confined them to because of their natural state. Parents in societies, says Locke on paternal power, retain a power over their children and have as much right to their subjection as those who are in a state of nature,18 that is to say those in the state of nature are naturally inclined to be subjects of other men as if they were their parents. Even though these were delegated with the assistance of the social lubricant alcohol, every other aspect of civil society and the social contract involves tacit consent, which even included Indian communities concerning intrapolity affairs. The growth of property in their societies would have necessitated Lockes theoretical preservation of property clause, which happened all without being recognized by social contractarians and the rest of the world as sovereign civil polities. These civil polities had been established through an ancient process of negotiation, intertribal treaties, and conquest in their
17 18

Satz, Indian Policy, 3. Locke, True Original, 41.

Mrozinski 6 own rightif not the first discovery warranted Indian land rights all over the continent, they certainly had established conquest over their own. Perhaps it was Rousseaus declaration of the right to kill [] only when we cannot enslave enemies19 that spurred Jacksons removal policy. As quickly as the Cherokee Nations civilization grew large enough to participate with the US government, they were forced by Jacksons military into Oklahoma, following the Chocktaws peaceful settlement for allotment (from the Indian Removal Act of 1830), setting the precedent for how the other civilized nations were expected to behave, resistance bucked to a westward death march in the winter of 1832-33.20 Nearly two centuries later, an eerie memory of the Five Civilized Tribes lives in history books and Oklahoma. The general will of the Native American people was always answered by their sovereign tribal polities. Rousseau indirectly legitimatized the rights of Indian occupancy from the very beginning. While never citing first occupancy and first discovery himself, he laid the theoretical groundwork that future archaeological research would prove these rights belonged to the Indians. They had clearly adapted their ways of life to include property, capitalism, breeches, and other markers of western civilization. Locke believed that these freedoms preservation required man to leave the state of nature and join civil society, alas Native Americans bought into these theoriestheories that were written by the same men who ensured their perpetuity in the state of nature, and therefore confinement to subpersonhood. Oppression only operates when the subdominant class is dehumanized. Pitting a nation of people against a concept so grandiose and dogmatic as manifest destiny, it was mere gardening for Jackson to uproot these thriving sovereign nations and plant them in the desert sand to shrivel up and die, as he had already captivated the emotional desires of his body politic.
19 20

Rousseau, Social Contract, 177. Satz, Indian Policy, 78.