The Treaty of Grouseland, 1805

The Treaty of Grouseland, signed in 1805, was between the U.S. government and the Miami nation. The treaty sold lands in southern and northeastern Indiana, as well as northwestern Ohio. The U.S. side was led by Indiana Territorial Governor (and later the 9th President) William Henry Harrison while the Miami representative was Chief Little Turtle, an experienced leader and veteran of the Northwest Indian War. This war was fought against U.S. colonizers ignoring previously established borders and taking Native lands for themselves. These colonizers were trespassers on Miami lands straining natural resources and disrupting Miami hunting and gathering. American colonizers did not see any issue with this. There were no villages on the land they were using.

To an American in the 1800s, and to us today, owning land means having a legal right to it. This often takes the form of a physical deed proclaiming ownership of it. You can then build on this, farm it, use it for businesses, or even sell it to someone else. Native peoples saw land as a shared resource, something belonging to and used by the community rather than individuals. Crops planted would be tended by and used for the whole of the village instead of individual planters. Hunting grounds would be shared by all members of a community, or even by different communities belonging to the same nation. Sometimes different nations even made agreements to share such hunting grounds, even those that were openly hostile. Lands used for hunting were left mostly untouched for exactly these reasons. Colonizers would then assume the lands were empty and take them for themselves, unknowingly and often uncaringly trespassing on Native lands and disrupting their way of life.