Indian reserve systems in the US and Canada stand as unique structures of property ownership oft-considered analogous – in perhaps colloquial rather than rigorous terms – to “communist” organizations of society and land ownership. This paper seeks to collate and classify the valuations of these unique conditions as expressed both explicitly and implicitly by a variety of actors, among them advocates for the strengthening of private property structures with the First Nations Property Ownership Initiative (or Act), American and Canadian government figures, and Native communities.
Reserves, which are typically held in trust by the federal government rather than owned in fee-simple plots, were imposed upon Native populations by North America’s hegemonic powers following colonization, and can be seen as expressing in their structure the residues of a number of sometimes contradictory colonial interests, by turns assimilative, ambivalent, and genocidal (Brockman, 1992, p. 134; Carmichael, 2016, p. 64, 149). In Canada, reserves were designed to racially segregate and concentrate Native populations to facilitate programs of surveillance and control carried out by government-appointed Indian agents (Nestor, n.d.). Thereafter, policies imposed under the Indian Act variously attempted to instill a work ethic and societal organization of individualist capitalist agrarian cultivation, albeit while actively limiting Native participation within market systems (Nestor, n.d.; Arneil, 2018, p. 513). With the preceding in mind, it does not seem apparent that the communal properties of reserve systems constituted a deliberate structuring on the part of governmental powers. My intention here is to nonetheless provide a characterization, sourced from the words and actions of individuals, of the ways in which the communal structure uniquely incurred upon reserve lands engenders both contextually subversive possibility, and constraint.
Reserves as “communist”
Framings of the Indian reserve system as “communist” date as far back as the late 1800s, when Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) Deputy Superintendent General Hayter Reed characterized the planned subdivision of reserve lands into discrete parcels as an important means of dismantling the “tribal or communist system”; a framing that in its matter-of-fact equivocation between two arguably disparate forms of societal organization speaks to a view of communism as primitive and archaic – a symptom and cause of “retarded progress” in the words of Reverend John McDougall, a prominent advocate in the assimilation of Native peoples towards an individualist and capitalist way of life within Canada (Arneil, 2018, p. 513; Carmichael, p. 137).
Such equivocations between native and communist societies are echoed, with inverse valuation, in the deep interest and inspiration Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels took in past and contemporaneous ethnographic histories of Native peoples (Foster, Clark, & Holleman, p. 8). Marx in particular, having delved into a wide variety of ethnographic accounts by his late 30s, had come to view “the primitive age of every people” as correspondent to an unconscious but nonetheless present “socialist tendency,” and saw in the social organization and communal property structures of Native tribes – the Iroquois among them – a valuable and vibrant “communal nucleus” meriting regeneration at a larger scale (Foster, Clark, & Holleman, p. 10-11). Such inspirations were part and parcel of Marx’s explicitly non-linear view of human development, which in maintaining a critical stance towards sequential progress as necessarily correspondent with increased enlightenment, found valuation and hope in the subversive persistence and resilience of ways of life oft-considered outmoded (Foster, Clark, & Holleman, p. 10, 13).
Though associations of Native reserve communities with communism from within Native communities are not especially common, Mi’kmaq lawyer Pamela Palmater of Eel River Bar First Nation has held the collective holding and management of land as an indispensable component of Native North American culture, and notes the deleterious effects enacted by the US-implemented Indian General Allotment Act of 1887 (or Dawes Act) as bearing cautionary import in light of more recent attempts to facilitate the privatization of reserve lands under the FNPO (Wright, 2012). The first and most infamous of several attempts to systematically dismantle Native communal ties to land and encourage individualist values through forced land subdivision, the General Allotment Act was put into law with the intention of easing the assimilation of Native people into American society by curbing communal land relationships specifically on the basis that such forms of ownership were correlated with the valuation of “kinship” over individual self-interest and economic development (Eswaran, 2023, p. 281). The Act saw the division of all but a few reserve lands into acreage parcels of varying sizes, which were meted out individually to community members of the former reserves, with a remainder of “surplus” land sold off to white settlers (Eswaran, 2023, p. 281). Native land holdings in America dropped by more than half – from 138 to 48 million acres – in the decades following, after which the Dawes Act was repealed in favour of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (Eswaran, 2023, p. 281).
Canada’s hegemonic powers have undertaken similar programs of assimilation centered around the imposition of individualistic private property ownership upon Native people, albeit in more limited form than the almost total subdivision of land weathered to American reserve lands by the Dawes Act (Eswaran, 2023, p. 282-282). In Canada, the forced adoption of fee-simple ownership was selectively assigned as a component of what was termed “enfranchisement” under 1857’s Gradual Civilization Act (Eswaran, 2023, p. 282-282). “Enfranchisement” was triggered by the attainment of education by any Native male of age 21 or older, and entailed the loss of Indian status and allotment of a 50 acre privatized parcel of the enfranchised individual’s former reserve land; the 1867 Indian Act imposed similar conditions, with loss of status a mandatory condition for degree attainment until 1961 (Eswaran, 2023, p. 282-283).
A more wholesale application of enfranchisement was proposed in 1969 through then-Minister of Indian Affairs Jean Chretien’s White Paper, which charted the complete privatization of reserve lands and cessation of Indian status and the Indian Act, with attendant forfeitures of government responsibility towards Native people; this attempt faced steadfast rejection from Native communities, and was subsequently never carried out by the Canadian government (Eswaran, 2023, p. 283).
While Native bands and tribes of North America have been characterized as possessing distinct and varied historical relationships to private property, Carmichael (2016) notes that the societal structures of both the relatively “communistic” Plains nations and the apparently more private-property-oriented bands of coastal British Columbia were both considered transgressive enough to attract the scrutiny of government actors (p. 83). According to Eswaran (2023), historical Native North American agriculture was subject to a form of communal ownership in which plots were assigned to family “for use only” and were otherwise considered collective property of the community – a sort of “usufruct” right notably discrepant from traditional Western property rights, despite attempts by FNPO advocates to frame such rights as evidence of historical Native private property systems (p. 276). Further, neither individual nor collective community was possessed of the right to sell or dispose of land plots, nor was any ownership permitted of unused land – in contrast to the Western system of pre-emptive, speculative land ownership (Eswaran, 2023, p. 276).
Interestingly, a recent study conducted with 22 small, modern Indigenous groups spanning North America, South America, and Siberia found a communal ethic of sharing to be consistently present in a manner almost completely uncorrelated with specific geographic, environmental, and economic conditions (Eswaran, 2023, p. 277). The aforementioned practices of land-relation described are further characterized by Eswaran (2023) as externalizations of a core Native belief of “belonging to the land,” which serves to animate overarching terms of understanding both in relation to the environment as well as to fellow community members, engendering an elevated communal empathy and concern; a “culturally induced cooperative behaviour,” which Eswaran further connects to a tendency among Native populations – particularly those residing on reserve – to place an inordinately high valuation upon interpersonal relationships in comparison to non-Native populations (p. 278).
The communist-fearing governmental attitude directed towards communal Native social structures finds points of comparison and contrast in the controversial presence of Doukhobors within Saskatchewan, whose “utopian colonies” figured similarly as a subversive collectivist presence within the Canadian context; both Arneil (2018) and Carmicheal (2016) place Native and Doukhobor populations in tandem as contemporaneous “backwards” subjects whom governmental powers wished to rehabilitate from engagement in a “communistic” social structure (Arneil, p. 502; Carmichael, p. 73). Interestingly, a letter of request sent a year following the arrival of Doukhobors to Canada in 1900 asked that any provision of land “for settlement and agricultural purposes” assigned to them be subject to terms of ownership “not upon your general conditions for emigrants, but upon the conditions given to your Indians – that is, the land to be held by the community and not by the individual members” (Janzen 1990, pp. 108-109). Supported by the Russian anarchists Leo Tolstoy and Peter Kropotkin and Canadian socialist James Mavor (who was assigned as liaison between the Doukhobors and the Canadian state by Tolstoy and Kropotkin), Doukhobors sought to live and work upon collectively held landholdings, and were subsequently subject to similar evaluations and assimilative programs of control as were applied to Native populations, including the seizure and segregation of Doukhobor children – of the Sons of Freedom subsect in particular – in hopes of breaking cultural continuity by curbing parental influence (Arneil, 2018, p. 502, p. 511).
Attempts to curb the communal ethic of the Doukhobors, set in motion through the cancellation of communal homestead entries in 1907, were eventually successful in inculcating moderate Community Doukhobors to accept “many aspects of state authority,” resulting in a functional integration – or assimilation – into Canadian society (Carmichael, 2016, p. 136, 137, 243, 258-59). Yet the Native reserve system, viewed as equally subversive in its communal structure, largely remains intact, particularly within Canada (Carmichael, 2016, p. 259). That these allegedly “communist” reserve systems remain present today despite the dismantlements charted during the period in which Hayter Reed lived, can be taken as suggestive of the subversiveness – and potential – of such a system residing alongside the largely capitalist organization of fee-simple lands within North America.
Engagements, valuations, and charted modifications of the reserve system
Varying stances and interactions occuring in relation to North American reserve systems speak to ways in which such systems figure within the individual and collective imagination, with reserve systems variously serving as sites of perceived opportunity as well as limitation.
Facilitated by capital incurred from on-reserve business initiatives – primarily Native-run casinos – Native tribes within the United States have sought the purchase of fee-simple land which is transferred to collectively-held trust-status, thereby appending the bounds of tribal reserve lands (Florido, 2012; Sahagun, 2003). Implicitly, such an act of transference suggests a valuation of trust-status as possessive of distinctly desirable traits unequally held by fee-simple lands. Such initiatives have also been met with concern by members of adjacent non-Native communities, in part owing to projected losses in revenue and oversight over transferred lands (Florido, 2012). Such developments, though state-facilitated, can in their disruption of capital accumulation arguably constitute a sort of politics of the act as delineated by Marx-influenced Yellowknives Dene First Nations member Glenn Coulthard – a tact of Native resistance against state-primacy through which the limits of engagement and sovereignty afforded to Native tribes and bands by hegemonic government powers may be tested, clarified, and possibly confronted and altered (Gardner & Clancy, 2017).
Such an approach is cast against what Coulthard terms the politics of recognition by which governmental powers seek to superficially embed and reconcile Native rights with those of the state towards an ultimate end of facilitating access to Native lands and natural resources (Gardner & Clancy, 2017). Attempts by hegemonic governmental powers to privatize reserve land and instill an ethic of capitalist individualism in North American eventually developed a relatively attenuated character with the dissolution of the US’s Indian Allotment Act and Canada’s program of enfranchisement under the Indian Act, perhaps best indicated by the ultimate abandonment of Jean Chretien’s White Paper in 1967 in the wake of broad outcry from Canadian Native populations (Eswaran, 2023, p. 283). Presumably, with the increased development of a civil rights consciousness throughout the 20th century came an increasingly gentle approach to governmental advocacy for forms of Native cultural and economic assimilation, which are nevertheless motivated by interests of an ultimately similar character to the pro-capitalist, anti-communal interests that informed the implementation of the now-dissolved Acts and proposals (Eswaran, 2023, p. 282-283).
Schmidt (2018) characterizes aspects of the First Nations Property Ownership Act/Initiative (referred to hereafter as FNPO) as indicative of such an approach, arguing that proponents of the FNPO utilized narratives of pre-contact Native private property regimes – rooted in an arguably specious equivocation between historic human territoriality and the modern concept of state territory – to rationalize the introduction of slate-wiping measures bundled into FNPO adoption (Schmidt, p. 908, 910). Said measures would act to impose conditions continuous with previous assimilationist government interests, such as requiring that bands opting into the act privatize the whole rather than a portion of their reserve lands (Schmidt, 2018, p. 908, 910). Schmidt holds that such changes enacted to reserve systems would functionally render them into the legible form of federal municipalities, constituting, in Schmidt’s words, “a kind of turn-key colonialism in which the realignment of internal mechanisms of governance appear as external recognition of Aboriginal property” (Schmidt, 2018, p. 910, 913-914).
Glen Coulthard characterizes the Liberal (LPC) and Conservative (CPC) parties of Canada as having respectively perpetuated two distinct forms of engagement with Native bands (Gardner & Clancy, 2017). In Coulthard’s opinion, the Harper-led Conservative party’s socially conservative hesitancy to recognize Native rights in any consequential sense ultimately undermined the party’s neoliberal, pro-market interests, while the Liberal party has been distinctly more willing to attain access to Native lands through a pragmatic recourse to controlled, limited accommodations and superficial recognition (Gardner & Clancy, 2017).
The FNPO, which the CPC began funding shortly after coming into power in 2006, has, in the opinion of Pasternak (2015), constituted a grounds for the staging of dynamic agreement and conflict between heterogenous Native, state, and non-state interests in relation to reserve property regimes (Schmidt, 2018, p. 902, 908; Pasternak, 2015, p. 179). The FNPO as proposed would allow Canadian Native bands the option of opting-out of the Indian Act and transferring reserve lands to fee-simple title (Pasternak, 2015, p. 179). At a 2010 conference centering around the proposal, former Kamloops Indian Band Chief and “major proponent” of the FNPO – Manny Jules advocated for the initiative largely on the basis that the act would ease participation of First Nations within the market economy by allowing band members the ability to attain credit on home mortgages to fund economic development (Pasternak, 2015, p. 179).
Elsewhere, Jules has cited the Nisga’a’s treaty-facilitated land title system – which allowed for the issuance of fee-simple title to Nisga’a band members on a portion of territorial lands in 2009 – as a key influence guiding the FNPO’s proposal (An Interview, 2010, p. 1). A 2013 article by Richard Wright covering the varied opinions surrounding the import and implications of the Nisga’a system provides a telling view of the dynamic tensions and valuations produced by the unique collectively-held structures of reserve systems. Echoing Jule’s mortgage-centered economic development stress, pro-capitalist, pro-business aspirants on Nisga’a First Nation reserve are depicted as chafing against a lack of property ownership rights, which, among other things, hinders their ability to mortgage their homes out to fund the development of a first, second, third, or – in the case of entrepreneur Bonnie Stanley – fourth business (Wright, 2013). A former business owner, Esther Adams, wishes to apply for land ownership to buy a house in nearby Terrace for the purpose of renting out; Bert Mercer, who works as economic development officer for the Nisga’a Lisims government, expresses an interest in real-estate investment, modifying “fixer-uppers” in the same town (Wright, 2013). Mercer works a stable government job and is described as very nearly having paid off his house, while Bonnie Stanley, who runs three businesses on-reserve, is also said to own her home in full; the implicit messaging of endless aspirational growth and accumulation above and beyond the apparent accomplishment of basic indicators of stability and shelter here is striking: one house is not enough, one or two businesses are not enough, no clear end is charted for individualist capital accumulation (Wright, 2013).
In light of the article’s focus, as mediated by quotes from local Nisga’a members and concerned critiques made by Pam Palmater, a clear conflict between pro-capitalist and pro-communal factions is made legible (Wright, 2013). Wright notes the contextually unusual nature of such an ideological clash occurring within the capitalist economy of Canada, in which private ownership of land is taken as a given by, in Wright’s words, “any individual citizen who can scrape together a down payment and rustle up a mortgage” (Wright, 2013). Indeed, that such arguments are able to play out on relatively even ground accentuates how private property discourse on reserves varies from the rest of Canada; the history of structural and legislative difference has perhaps allowed the primacy of economic growth, taken relatively for granted elsewhere in Canada, to be expressed at relatively low tide on reserve – if so, this could hold potentially positive implications, ideologically, for the adoption of sustainable practices on-reserve (Wright, 2013).
Though increased personal wealth may or may not arise from the proposed entrepreneurial ventures charted in Wright’s article, the pro-business stress expressed by the likes of Stanley, Mercer, and the FNPO’s proponents is unlikely to fully reflect or sustain the values and preferences of all community members. Returning to Pasternak’s (2015) coverage of Manny Jule’s FNPO advocacy, substantial import can be taken from Jule’s choice to cite two Native fishing rights Court victories, framed as precedent-setting for the FNPO, as triumphs for individual rather than collective rights (p. 180). Pasternak (2015) takes this framing as speaking to a “central principle” animating Jule’s priorities which places him at a fundamental separation from Native individuals and communities in opposition to private property legislation, who are instead, Pasternak forwards, oriented towards the prioritization of collective territorial title (p. 180).
Relatedly, those of a communal-centered mindset may oppose the FNPO on the basis that factors sustaining of wellbeing may be uniquely facilitated by the collectively-held circumstances of reserve land, in a manner which could see marked adulteration from a shift to a system of fee-simple land tenure. Tanuro (2014) stresses the importance of a redefinition of social wealth in charting forward a sustainable, eco-socialist environmental ethic (p. 16). In a 2023 article, Mukesh Eswaran forwards such a redefinition, arguing for the decoupling of income as a primary wellbeing indicator within the context of Native communities in North America (p. 267). Towards this end, Eswaran (2023) proposes a simplified theoretical model predicting levels of well-being of a theoretical Native community of common language and culture under conditions of collective vs. fee-simple private property ownership, assuming a fixed amount of land present between the two scenarios (p. 270-271). Though noting the natural variation in perspective and priorities existent among the breadth of North American Native populations, Eswaran attempts to present an economic model which, in accounting for a valuation of culture, social relations, and land-attachment, attempts to provide a simplified, partial reflection of the world views of “at least some Indigenous communities” (p. 269-270).
The legitimacy of the values assigned to the theoretical community within Eswaran’s model are premised upon the review and collation of a selection of primary and secondary sources from Native “elders and scholars,” which are taken as representative of broadly present, reoccurring tendencies within Native culture – primary among them an ethic of sharing and a core orienting belief of belongingness to land rather than land belonging to the individual (2023, p. 270-271, 274, 277). Additionally, Eswaran (2023) cites a study on the relation between general life satisfaction and specific domain-centered satisfaction conducted among 316 Native households within Canada, which found general life satisfaction exerting considerably greater correlation with “social, cultural, and land-use” domains than with finance (p. 275). Resulting from Eswaran’s (2023) model are several propositions, among them that the privatization of communal Native land into discrete parcels results in increases in individual time devoted to food production with attendant decreases in group-based cultural activities and private leisure time – constituting a negative externality weathered to community members (p. 272, 274).
Ultimately, while Eswaran (2023) holds that privatization of the theoretical Native community’s land is likely to result in increases in private production output and personal income (in a manner correspondent to a real tendency for fee-simple Native-owned lands to bear higher agricultural productivity as compared to tribal trust reserve lands), such increases are wholly uncorrelated with increased welfare (p. 280, 282). In fact, Eswaran espouses that the reallocation of time from cultural production to private food production, in addition to the atomizing reorganization of social relations under land subdivision, is likely to decrease overall welfare among community members through the disassembly of “culturally induced co-operative behaviour” (p. 280). Eswaran’s (2023) propositions arguably find tangible historical validation in the broadly negative consequences of the past privatization of Native lands conducted under the Indian General Allotment Act of 1887– which, unlike Eswaran’s model which holds the amount of land constant between communal and privatized scenarios, saw active declines in Native ownership of land, suggesting yet greater losses to wellbeing (p. 180, 181).
In further discussing the unique orientation of self to land present within many Native communities – which is framed as the core belief adulterating the positive application of land privatization for Native communities – Eswaran (2023) quotes Egan and Case, who forward the importance of such worldviews as charting alternate ways of understanding one’s own relationship to land, in a manner which can act to denaturalize a profit-based commodity conception of the environment, resonating with Marx’s inspiration taken in “primitive” cultures as possessive of valuable, admirable understandings of land-relation and social organization (Eswaran, p. 275; Foster, Clark, & Holleman, 2018, p. 10-11).
Conclusion
For better or worse, reserves exist as islands of subversion and altered discourse within the capitalist North American context, in a manner bearing possibly substantial potential in both modeling and germinating alternate relations to land, environment, and social structure.
Wright’s (2013) article in particular makes apparent that capitalist vs. communist concerns play out in microcosm on reserve, albeit often under differing framings and reference points and with distinctive histories. The capitalist impulse naturally exists on reserve, as does the communal; heirs to an unchosen legacy will inevitably develop their own values and desires and occasionally choose to “defect”, as indicated by the eventual integration of Community Doukhobors discussed earlier in this paper (Carmichael, 2016, p. 258-259). Given the primacy within North America of what Tanuro (2014) terms a “productivist” ideology of economic participation – “the freedom for capitalists in competition with each other to invest and produce more and more” – it should come as no surprise that many Native band and tribal members – as ideologically variable as any other group of people – would wish to participate in hopes of bearing the fruits of capitalist growth (p. 16).
Yet, that private property and market economy participation assume an attenuated precedence on reserve – such that pro-privatization and pro-market initiatives, taken for granted off-reserve, still bear some controversial import and have not yet been widely implemented – speaks to the continuity of ideological priorities differing from those of the greater capitalism-suffused North American context, as attested to by the likes of Eswaran, who stresses belongingness to land as a key worldview common among Native people that is meaningfully distinct from the Western norm (2023, p. 277-280). If this is the case, it could constitute reserves as areas of high potential for adoption of the sort of eco-socialist ethic proposed by Tanuro (2014), given a relatively low valuation of “productivist” ideology on reserve and among Native communities (p. 16). The communist country of Cuba was famously recognized in 2006 as the sole country in the world to pass minimum sustainability requirements; in listing various of Cuba’s conditions rendering it amenable to realizing sustainability, Lane (2012) names Cuba’s system of collective rights, common state-trustee ownership of land, and a culture with relatively low valuation of consumerism (p. 156, 162).
No two areas are alike, and much differentiates the conditions of Cuba and North American Native reserves, but it seems possible that the seeds of similar – to be analyzed, stewarded and expanded upon – could reside here. Coulthard speaks to these possibilities – and the incisive work required in their consummation – in identifying a need “to work critically to re-establish non-capitalist and decolonial social relations and legal traditions that have survived through generations of Indigenous communities,” stating further that, “it’s not just about land; it’s about the legal and customary relationships that emerge from our connection to the land that are integral to imaging new formations beyond private property” (Gardner & Clancy, 2017). In this manner, reserves and the communities residing within them still resonate with Marx’s view of Native cultural groups as representative of “human community and property forms … against the commodity economy of capitalism” (Foster, Clark, & Holleman, 2020, p. 16).
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