Purchase and/or Conquest - How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law
and Power on the Frontier by Stuart Banner Harvard, 344 pp,
£18.95, November 2005, ISBN 0 674 01871 0 ‘They fell upon their
own knees, and then upon the Aborigines.’ The old quip about the
Puritans who settled colonial New England offers a succinct and
not inaccurate summary of white-Indian relations in the United
States. Despite the twists and turns of official policy – from
Thomas Jefferson’s efforts to assimilate Indians by teaching
them to farm (even though they had been doing so for centuries),
to Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal, Grant’s ‘peace policy’ and
Roosevelt’s Indian New Deal – the fact is that whites from the
outset coveted Indian land and eventually succeeded in acquiring
almost all of it, sweeping aside periodic resistance with
brutally effective violence. Stuart Banner, a law professor,
does not deny that between the early 17th century and the end of
the 19th, nearly the entire land area of the United States was
transferred from