Indian Economy

The Indians spoke in terms of perpetuity; As long as the mountains shall stand or the rivers shall run, etc. They did not speak of ownership in absolute terms did they? Ownership in a mortal world is of necessity limited, it cannot go on forever. Think of the U.S. and it relations with the Indians. They wrote and signed treaties that borrowed the perpetual language from the Indians but they could not possibly have honored those treaties in a society that spoke of ownership and land rights as absolute.

Today the legal definition of "forever" is finite. Not even grave sites are ownership in perpetuity. I might suggest that Indians could speak of perpetual things because they didn't own things. Some have said they owned things in common, but I think that misses the point, Indians didn't own things in common, they simply didn't own anything - at least not in the absolute terms we think of ownership today. I have no rigorous academic basis for this claim but my sense is that Indians saw themselves as stewards toward the Earth and their possessions. A steward recognizes that someday the rightful owner of their stewardship will come calling. A steward has an eye toward the future and the eventual passage of their possessions on to someone else. Forever is only attainable through the passage of many deaths. It is the transition then, from one death to another life, that is the critical link towards perpetuity, not only how one manages life and resources from birth to death.