lish common law. And yet, Indians believed that a person could own the products of the land; for example, a farmer could own his crops, hunters could own the fruits of their hunting, and those who made artifacts could own them. In addition, some Indian peoples believed that you could manipulate the environment in limited ways without forcing fundamental changes in it -- for example, by burning trees to create grasslands rich in game. Indian ideas about government once were dismissed by most Western observers as primitive or even savage -- though, of course, there were notable exceptions, including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Today, by contrast, most scholars who study Indians treat their ideas about government and politics with as much respect as their colleagues devote to the study of the Founding Fathers, John Locke, or the constitutional jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court. Some Indian peoples, such as those of the Iroquois Confederation, did possess what we would recognize as democratic methods of governance, emphasizing reasoned deliberation, fostering political argument and oratory, recognizing the participation of women in politics, devising parallels to what we call federalism, and stressing the need for supermajorities, consensus, or even unanimity in reaching key decisions. Other peoples, such as the Inca of Peru or the Maya and the Aztec of Mexico, created vast empires whose authority was grounded in religion and which exerted almost totalitarian power over their subjects equal in efficiency to that of any European empire. Indian ideas about law are similarly different from European ideas, but recent scholars, such as Professor John Phillip Reid of New York University Law School, have come to recognize that Indian peoples did possess legal systems, even without written codes of laws, records of judicial decisions, or formal systems of legislatures and courts. We need not explore this issue in depth; i...
