Customer Reviews

How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier

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Stuart Banner has taken a complex, 400+ year history of American Indian Land Acquisition and has abstracted the legal basis and the prevailing sociocultural worldviews of settlers, governments and aborigines to produce a work that we, today, can use to understand "How the Indians Lost Their Lands." This is a must read for anyone who has any official involvement with Native American Indians, or anyone who is interested in their, and our, history.

I speak as a supposed expert in European international relations (the USA included) between approximately 1500 and 1950 AD. My current project concerns the positions that the USA has occupied in the formerly European, now global, international system that has developed from its initial foundations in the late medieval European era. My thesis is that the USA both has mainly (in fact, overwhelmingly) benefited from the preceding achievements within this system, and has more or less systematically exploited its advantageous position within the system to its benefit.

I say this not as self-advertisement, as it must seem, but as truth in advertising. Having read Banner's work carefully, I think it fits
perfectly within my general thesis and supports it. But that is not why I am recommending it to the general reader. I do this because as a general educated lay reader in this field, I think it is a very good book--well written, sensible, careful in supporting his argument with evidence, allowing for other views, and above all fair with opposing views while at the same time coming out clearly with an important interpretation and thesis of his own.

Sincerely,

Paul W. Schroeder
Professor emeritus of History and Political Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Chqampaign