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State Structures In Native American Society

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Essay n°2: the early thinkers and the Native American Societies

This essay is trying to seek elements of answer to the question of the absence of state structures in Native American societies in the writing of Lafitau, Jefferson and Locke. It will also deal with the advantages that the Europeans colonists gained from this disorganization.

Joseph François Lafitau, a very famous French Jesuit priest made a big contribution in the elements we today have about the period of the American colonization. He is still known today, as the father of anthropology. Lafitau in his famous book Customs of the American Indians compared with the Customs of Primitive Times published in 1724 made a deep study of the customs of the Iroquois (a tribe from North …show more content…
Locke, in his work called the Second Treatise of Government used the concept of State of Nature to describe the social organization of the Indians. For him, this “simple organization” and the lack of state structure was directly coming from the laws of nature, themselves coming from God when he created the world. These laws of nature were really basic such as "no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions”. He thought that in the state of nature, everyone had to protect his life and his freedom against all. He here meets the thesis of Hobbes who described the state of nature as the ‘war of all against all’. But he also made a clear distinction between the state of nature and what he called the state of …show more content…
But that this reign of the natural order ended when humans decided that they wanted to be governed. He thus thought that, if men could accept to be governed, they had the right to rebel themselves against their government if their natural rights were threatened. For Locke, the state of nature did not end after that the ‘social contract’ was established between the citizens and their represents. On the contrary, this has to be extended to the relations of the ‘civil government’ with the smaller tribes and the others communities such as the Indians.

This Lockian ideals were very present in the mind of one of the first president of the United States of America: Thomas Jefferson. He himself admitted that the American declaration of independence wrote in 1776, was greatly inspired by the Second Treatise of Government.
In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson refuted the environmentalist theories that claimed the the inferiority of the Indians because of the climate and the geography.
However, when he became president, he pursues a policy that used the lack of structure of the Indians. In 1808 he declared

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