Land of Anarchy.

When Europeans first encountered Native American communities in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they often commented that Indians lived without government in a state of nature much like the animals of the forest. To Europeans, Indians did not seem to have parliaments, courts, or laws. Tomas Ortiz, a Dominican priest from Spain, wrote in 1525, "There is no justice among them. . . . They are unstable." The Spanish jurist Juan Gines de Sepulveda wrote that the Indians observed no written laws. Instead, he said, they maintained "barbaric institutions and customs." Since the native cultures in America did not appear to have these familiar legal and political institutions, many Europeans presumed that Indians lived in anarchy, that is, in a state of society without a working system of security and order. Some Europeans even suggested that Indians were intellectually incapable of...