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21 c h a p t e r o n e Bamboozled perhaps his idea of ornament does not attempt to meet conventional standards, but it satisfies the soul of its creator —Zora Neale Hurston, The Sanctified Church (1981) If it had been different in the beginning, it would be different now. —Henry Finney, as told to author W hile working on this book, I watched the movie Far and Away, starring Tom Cruise as the son of a poor Irish farmer and Nicole Kidman as the daughter of a wealthy landowner, set in the 1800s. (I had seen it before.) It focuses on Europeans, both rich and poor, who were driven to leave their homes in Europe and come to the United States, seduced by the promise of land ownership. I was particularly intrigued by the lengths people would go to claim and name land for themselves and their families. At one point in the film, when Cruise’s character realizes that he may never own land if he stays in Ireland, he remembers his father’s dying words: “land is a man’s very own soul,” which in his mind, justified any action he might take to claim land for himself. The movie culminates in a sweeping depiction of the race for land under the Homestead Act of 1862 that saw thousands of European Americans risk injury and even death in order to stake their claim on the most desirable parcels of land in the West. Considered to be one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history, the Homestead Act, captured in this cinematic moment , highlights the European American struggle and desire to own land, a particular way of thinking that embedded in our psyches the “truth” that land (and more specifically land ownership) is directly connected to what it means to be an American. But there are some holes in this story. This piece of history does not exist in a vacuum. While I allowed myself to be swept up in the very human 22 b ambooz led experience of survival in a new frontier, I also thought about the Trail of Tears (1838–39) when the forced removal and relocation of thousands of Native American peoples also resulted in injury and death. In 1830, when many of the characters portrayed in Far and Away were still standing on European soil, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the removal of Indians from their lands and the implementation of reservation policies that reduced the size of their traditional lands. Consequently, Indian tribes left the Ohio and Mississippi valley, many unwillingly, and headed west. Approximately 17,000 Cherokees walked from Georgia to Oklahoma in what came to be known as “The Trail of Tears.”1 They lost their homes, their livelihoods, and in many cases their lives. At the same time as the characters in Far and Away began to consider the overseas voyage to the North American continent, Hispanos (this term specifically identifies people of colonial Spanish descent who live in the Southwest) in New Mexico were struggling to hold on to their land grants protected by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848). This peace treaty between the United States and Mexico was supposed to transfer ownership of 525,000 square miles of land (including parts of present-day Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah) to the United States in exchange for $15 million (equivalent to well over $300 million in today’s dollars).2 In addition, and most importantly for these descendants of Spanish settlers, Mexicans and Metizos, the treaty was supposed to ensure the safety of preexisting property rights of Mexican citizens in the transferred territories (DuBuys 1985). Instead of guaranteeing the right of Hispanos to have land on which to live, grow, and thrive, the treaty allowed them to be systematically disenfranchised of their land.3 This process of disenfranchisement included undercutting some land grants, such as Las Trampas in New Mexico, a community land grant where equal portions of land were given to each farmer and his family (similar to the distribution of land to families under the Homestead Act). But, like many promises that the United States failed to honor, the people of the village of Las Trampas lost their one useful economic resource and were now landless, living in an amazingly rich landscape that was no longer theirs (approximately twenty-one thousand acres of the Las Trampas land grant are now in possession of...

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