American Indian Cessions

There is considerable irony that the United States government's efforts to extinguish the usufructuary rights of indigenous American-Indian peoples, often regarded as a necessary pre-requisite for the government to create landowners by subdividing the land surface into discrete parcels and conveying title to those parcels individuals, corporations, and states, should have modern relevance.

Treaties between representatives of the United States and representatives of American-Indian tribes have a geographical and historical expression. Designed to extinguish aboriginal title, they are a source of continuing controversy, perhaps inevitably so, because there is no equivalent in Anglo-American law to such title. Virtually all treaties have been the subject of litigation and virtually all have been the subject of scholarly debate. Some of the litigation and debate focuses on the nature of the implied sovereignty in a particular treaty, some on the nature of the rights ceded in a particular treaty or the corollary, the nature of the rights that were not ceded, and some on the adequacy of compensation for the rights that were ceded.

Bibliography

Kappler, C. J. Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, vols. 1–7. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office)

Early Recognized Treaties with American Indian Nations

Indian Land Cessions in the United States, 1784-1894