Street, was named for the wall the Dutch built to protect New Amsterdam from
the Weckquaesgeeks, evidence that the Dutch hardly imagined they had bought
Manhattan from its real owners. But our history books leave out this part of the
story. The authors of one book, American Pageant, may actually know that the
Dutch paid the wrong tribe. The way they phrase it, however—the Dutch
bought “Manhattan Island from the Indians (who did not actually ‘own’ it) for
virtually worthless trinkets”—again merely invites readers to infer that Native
Americans did not believe in land ownership and could not bargain
intelligently.^82
Europeans were forever paying the wrong tribe or paying a small faction
within a much larger nation. Often they didn’t really care; they merely sought
justification for theft. Such fraudulent transactions might even have worked in
their favor, for they frequently set one tribe or faction against another. The
biggest single purchase from the wrong tribe took place in 1803. All the
textbooks tell how Jefferson “doubled the size of the United States by buying
Louisiana from France.” Not one points out that it was not France’s land to sell
—it was Indian land. The French never consulted with the Native owners
before selling; most Native Americans never even knew of the sale. Indeed,
France did not really sell Louisiana for $15 million. France merely sold its
claim to the territory. The United States was still paying Native American
tribes for Louisiana throughout the nineteenth century. We were also fighting
them for it: the Army Almanac lists more than fifty Indian wars in the Louisiana
Purchase from 1819 to 1890. To treat France as the seller, as all our textbooks
do, is Eurocentric. Equally Eurocentric are the maps textbooks use to show the
Lewis and Clark expedition. Even the newest maps still blandly label huge
expanses “Spanish Territory,” “British Territory,” and “French Territory,”
making Native Americans invisible and implying that the United States bought
vacant land from the French. Although the Mandans hosted the expedition
during the winter of 1804-05 and the Clatsops did so the next winter, even
these tribes drop out. Apparently Lewis and Clark did it all on their own.
Some recent textbooks still chide Natives for not understanding that when
they sold their land, they transferred not only the agricultural rights, but also
the rights to the property’s game, fish, and sheer enjoyment. “To Native
Americans, no one owned the land—it was there for everyone to use,” in the
words of The Americans. Nonsense! American Indians and Europeans had
about the same views of land ownership, although Natives did not think that