Types of Freedom
For British, freedom was directly tied to property. In the early republic the way people perceived each other was based on being the "right" kind of person. According to Eric Foner, in the eighteenth-century it was assumed that only certain kinds of people were fully capable of enjoying the rights and benefits that freedom bestowed. The idea of Liberty rested on one general idea... the idea of self-direction or self-government. Economic independence was a prerequisite to political independence.(22) You see, only those who owned land were deemed able to control their own destiny and therefore would not suffer the influences of those who might try to "buy" their loyalties. In the eyes of British, Indians did not "own" any land and therefore were not capable of exercising the rights of freedom. They were excluded from being a part of the "certain kinds of people" category.
Since Indian people had already worked out relationships with the land and environments for thousands of years prior to the arrival of the British, (so many years that most of them have Creation Stories that tell of them having roots in those places), they must have been chuckling to themselves about the complete ineptitude of the newcomers. There are always different views and ideas of one another.
Eric Foner talks about different kinds of freedom, the freedom "to" and the freedom "from", the freedom "of"; and then there's "for" freedom as in "marching for freedom". Today, most of us take freedom in any form for granted, especially freedom to move about and go about one's daily business. For instance, my son must be careful as he operates any motor vehicle that he is not stopped for "driving while black" in his terminology, but it's "racial profiling" in legal terms. Or, the poor treatment currently experienced by the Dine People (Navaho), who can't leave the reservation and do their weekly shopping in the next town over without being repeatedly stopped and questioned as to whether or not they have been drinking – on a Saturday afternoon, just after leaving the supermarket, with bags of groceries visible in the car, because the driver is a Dine (23). I suppose this would be "driving while Indian."
We must teach students to view time periods through the lens of the times they are studying. Our ideas of today are in most cases not the ideas of yesteryear. Beginning with Columbus' arrival on these shores, Indian people across America were denied rights and self direction based on ideas of land ownership and usage. That coupled with warfare and loss of those lands proved their undoing. Was it because in the early years of our republic it was deemed that only certain kinds of people were considered capable of enjoying and exercising the rights of freedom? The "other" had at some point in time become racialized.
I posit that ideas drive behaviors/actions. Ideas of who could and could not enjoy the benefit of liberty/freedom became a way to disenfranchise those on the fringes with no political voice. And if they also had things that were wanted by others, then those things could be gotten with sometimes bribes, sometimes coercion, and sometimes, just plain trickery and deceit.
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