The Shawnee Leader Who Almost Built A Native American Nation — And Why His Plan Was The Last Real Chance
Others may have been selected partly for their willingness to sign.
The financial inducements offered — money, goods, continued annuities — created incentives for individual chiefs to agree to terms their communities might not have accepted through their own decision-making processes.
Tecumseh’s critique of this system was not simply that specific treaties were made through fraud or coercion, though some were.
His critique was more fundamental: the entire framework was wrong.
The concept that individual chiefs could sell land that belonged collectively to all Native peoples was itself the problem.
His comparison of land to air and water was not merely rhetorical.
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