Land ownership makes no sense

Yes, not the same as our idea of land ownership, but it looks like these weren’t necessarily one-sided agreements:

Bret Devereaux has a good blog post on what he calls “systems of war”:

The oldest way of war was what Native North Americans called – evocatively – the ‘cutting off’ way of war (a phrase I am borrowing from W. Lee, “The Military Revolution of Native North America” in Empires and Indigines, ed. W. Lee (2011)), but which was common among non-state peoples everywhere in the world for the vast stretch of human history (and one may easily argue much of modern insurgency and terrorism is merely this same toolkit, updated with modern weapons). The goal of such warfare was not to subjugate a population but to drive them off, forcing them to vacate resource-rich land which could then be exploited by your group. To do this, you wanted to inflict maximum damage (casualties inflicted, animals rustled, goods stolen, people captured) at minimum risk, until the lopsided balance of pain you inflicted forced the enemy to simply move away from you to get out of your operational range.

Early Dutch settlers near Albany settled on the former hunting grounds of the Mahicans, who were friendly, and got raided by the the Mohawks, as an escalation of an intermittent war between those two tribes:

Mahicans were even relocating their villages to be closer to the Dutch, in an attempt to form a trade and defensive alliance. Call it friendship or self-interest, by 1626 the Mahicans and Dutch had established a closeness.

This closeness was probably what led Daniel van Crieckenbeeck, the commander of the fort, to ignore explicit orders forbidding interference in intertribal affairs, with results that would redound to the present. One spring day in 1626, a Mahican party of more than two dozen men—like the Dutch “in figure, build and share,” as one writer described, their hair “jet-black, quite sleek and uncurled, and almost as coarse as a horse’s tail,” and probably, given the period and the time of year, wearing deer skins loosely about their bodies and tied at the waist—came into the palisade of rough-cut logs and asked Van Crieckenbeeck for Dutch aid in their fight against the Mohawks. The man who asked this favor was most likely a tribal leader named Monemin. Van Crieckenbeeck had his orders; the West India Company had clearly instructed Willem Verhulst, head of the province, that “he shall be very careful not lightly to embroil himself in [the Indians’] quarrels or wars, or to take sides, but to remain neutral …” On the other hand, Van Crieckenbeeck surely felt responsible for the well-being of the handful of young couples, including a number of pregnant women and perhaps some infants, in the midst of the forest thousands of miles from home. It stood to reason that helping the Mahicans now would yield a firm ally in the future. So he agreed. The Mahicans led the way, and he and six of his men followed, disappearing into the pines.

Three miles from the fort, they were inundated by a storm of arrows. In one swift, bloody assault, a band of ambushing Mohawks put an end to the Dutch-Mahican alliance and, by the way, altered the history of the world. Van Crieckenbeeck, three of his men, and twenty-four Mahicans, including Monemin, took fatal hits. The Mohawks made a show of their victory, and nicely capped the terror they had caused by roasting and eating one especially unfortunate Dutchman named Tymen Bouwensz.

In response to news of this, Dutch settlers on what is now Governor’s Island banished their previous director (who everyone hated) and voted that Peter Minuit would be their new leader, who was the one who bought Manhattan Island.

With no concept of permanent property transfer, Indians of the Northeast saw a real estate deal as a combination of a rental agreement and a treaty or alliance between two groups. Indian nations were divided and subdivided into tribes, villages, and other communities. They were often at war or in fear of attack from other groups, and often entered into defensive alliances with one another, which involved sharing certain tribal lands in exchange for the strength of numbers. This colored the way the Indians saw their land deals with the Dutch and English. They would give the newcomers use of some of their land, and in exchange they would get blankets, knives, kettles, and other extremely useful goods, and also a military ally. That this was how they viewed land deals is illustrated neatly by several cases—such as one in South Carolina in the 1750s between the colonial governor and Cherokee leaders—in which the Indians refused any payment at all for the land. As they saw it, the protective alliance was payment enough.

This was probably what the Mahican Monemin had in mind when he approached the unfortunate Daniel van Crieckenbeeck: he was asking the Dutch to fulfill what he understood to be part of the bargain in the land deal at Fort Orange, to help him in a battle with his enemies. Van Crieckenbeeck may have understood this was a part of the Mahican notion of property transfer and tried to do what was expected of him, in defiance of his orders.

So these were agreements with one group to fight another group, at a time when early colonists and Native Americans were roughly equals. Violence was part of the deal. Sometimes, it was living up to the terms of the deal.

Apparently most records of the Manhattan deal were lost, but other transactions were very complicated:

On behalf of his patrons, Van Slichtenhorst bought several estates from the Indians during his time in the Dutch colony, and none of these transactions was remotely straightforward. Beginning days before the sale and continuing for years after, Van Slichtenhorst had to host as many as fifty Indians at a time, feeding them and providing a steady supply of beer and brandy for the sachems. In addition to the sellers and their retinue, in one case there was actually an Indian real estate broker who also demanded, as part of his commission, to stay “8 or 10 times” at Van Slichtenhorst’s home, along with several women.

So our ideas about what these deals actually involved might be considerably simplified.

Quotes from The Island At The Center of the World, which is about the history of the Dutch colony in what is now New York.

Same is said of Māori in New Zealand.