American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches

Front Cover
U of Minnesota Press - 299 pages
"The modern regulations and pervading attitudes that control native rights in the Americas may appear unrelated to the European colonial rule, but traces of the colonizers' cultural, religious, and economic agendas remain. Patricia Seed likens this situation to a pentimento - a painting in which traces of older compositions become visible over time -and shows how the exploitation begun centuries ago continues today. Seed examines how the goals of European colonialist in the Americas. The English appropriated land, while the Spanish and Portuguese attempted to eliminate "barbarous" religious behavior and used indigenous labor to take mineral resources. Ultimately, each approach denied native people distinct aspects of their heritage. Seed argues that their differing effects persist, with natives in former English colonies fighting for land rights, while those in former Spanish and Portuguese colonies fight for human dignity." -- Book jacket.
 

Contents

An Introduction
1
1 Owning Land by Labor Money and Treaty
12
2 Imagining a Waste Land or Why Indians Vanish
29
Hunters as AngloAmericas Partial Fiction
45
4 Ownership of Mineral Riches and the Spanish Need for Labor
57
The Cost of Preserving Native Farmlands
72
Iberias Partial Truth
91
The Moral Boundary between Natives and Colonizers
113
8 Indians in Portuguese America
135
The Impact of Independence on Colonial Structures
151
Colonial Language and Images Today
163
Contemporary Aboriginal Communities Human and Resource Rights
179
On the Names of Some North American Aboriginal Peoples
193
Notes
197
Index
287
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