Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2010
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 30:3 (Spring 2010).
Abstract
Paul VanDevelder has written a lively and fast-paced account of some of the major examples of the United States' acquisition of American Indian lands and assets. He focuses largely, though, on the Northern Plains, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, and the modernday example of the taking of tribal lands via the Pick-Sloan Garrison Dam project. He depicts graphically the destruction the dam and its reservoir have brought to the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota and the inundation of some of the richest farmland in America. In fact, he shows that ninety-two percent of the land taken to control the Upper Missouri River came from Indian nations and peoples. VanDevelder claims that this was the express strategy Colonel Lewis Pick and the Corps of Engineers used to sell their plan to Congress instead of the competing Bureau of Reclamation Sloan plan, which primarily would have taken land from white farmers and ranchers.
From these events, the author turns to the Doctrine of Discovery, John Locke and other philosophers, and the views of America's Founding Fathers on Native peoples and nations and how the United States dealt with Indian issues. The book moves quickly through Indian Removal and Manifest Destiny policies as American hegemony swept across the continent.
Comments
Copyright © 2010 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.