Julia Lewandoski

The 1763 Treaty of Paris, the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo excluded Native Americans from negotiations over North American land and sovereignty. Yet, because they upheld property rights from prior empires, they created unique legal conditions for Native Americans to claim and defend territory. Three case studies of indigenous groups—Abenakis in Quebec after 1763, Louisiana’s petites nations after 1803, and Tongva and Tataviam peoples in California after 1848—reveal that these peoples seized imperial transitions as key moments to repurpose settler property as a tool of survival. Native Americans transformed property processes, often designed to exclude them, into political channels to assert sovereignty and defend land. Accounting for this history reveals the resourcefulness and creativity of indigenous actors, probes the flexibility of the legal institution of property, and reframes the trajectory of settler colonialism in North America as temporally irregular rather than linear.

In the late eighteenth century, the United States and Canada sought to confine Indigenous land negotiations to land cession treaties. But at centers of prior Spanish and French imperial settlement, they considered Native nations already conquered and did not make treaties, leaving them without protected land or political recognition as settlers rushed in. To survive, these Native nations turned to settler legal systems and land titles to defend their territories. “Land Tenure Survival” demonstrates this distinctive settler colonial pattern—and creative Indigenous response—through three case studies: Abenakis and Sokokis in Quebec, Petites Nations peoples in Louisiana, and Tongva, Tataviam, and Chumash communities around Los Angeles. A companion digital project displays Indigenous property maps. “Land Tenure Survival” accounts for historical processes beyond the familiar paradigm of land cession treaties, removal, and reservations. It positions settler legal systems, past and present, as sites of Indigenous creativity, land reclamation, and political resurgence. And it frames the nineteenth-century transition from imperial borderlands to bounded nation-states as a long, messy process of negotiation and accommodation, during which Indigenous nations repurposed French and Spanish legal regimes to rebuild their own futures.