Customer Reviews

Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, and Manifest Destiny (Native America: Yesterday and Today)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an important book. It is well written, well organized, and well documented. It should influence a number of fields - history, economics, and law most of all. Professor Miller's thesis is that a very well-developed and refined legal doctrine - the Doctrine of Discovery - provided the grounding for the seizure and settlement of the North American continent by European nations. However ethnocentric, racist and self-serving it may have been, it adequately served as justification for what was little more than a crude land-grab. Despite its moral and widespread appeal to nationalists, financiers, and settlers, it would never pass muster today. But, for all the harm and pain it wrought, it was then allied with historical forces that made it unstoppable and inexorable. Euro-Americans must today live with this history, however unpalatable.

Professor Miller is helped by his willingness to be interdisciplinary in his exploration. He himself is an Associate Professor at the Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, as well as being Chief Justice of the Court of Appeals for the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. As a citizen of the Eastern Shawnee tribe of Oklahoma, he has the ability to step outside the Eurocentric paradigm of legal reasoning on which so many of our notions of real property rest. But he also relies on a rich vein of historical literature with which he treats in a commendable way.

The subject, however, is one which calls for an even broader sweep than he has been able to master, and an understanding of economic theory as it existed prior to the 20th century would have been very helpful to him. Classical economics - extending as it did from Adam Smith to the culminating figure of Henry George -- is really what he further needed. Understanding of some of its basic tenets would have served this scholarly treatise well, but at least is now an invitation for a new realm of historical exploration.

The strongest advocates of the classical economics tradition today mostly go by the name Georgists, after its culminating figure, Henry George. This approach can offer further insight to what is the weakest part of a very good book. But exploring this dimension can be done at another place and time; Professor Miller can't be expected to know every academic discipline. Lawyers appreciate that title to land is multifaceted, sometimes understood as a "bundle of rights." One element of this so-called "bundle," separable in ways that can offer promising compromises, is the occurrence of economic rent, or ground rent. A Georgist approach would grant use of land to one group, and collect the ground rent to pass to another. It's an often-cited solution that deserves more examination for today's difficult Indian land claims. Those wishing to explore this tradition can go to [...]rg, and to any number of links therefrom.