American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In the Second Treatise Locke remarks that ”in the beginning all the world was America,” viz., “uncivilized.” Roy Harvey Pearce contends that during centuries of native dispossession, ”virtually all Americans were, in the most general sense, Lockeans,”primarily in their attitudes toward land and private property. James Tully argues that Euro-Americans are at present Lockeans in the sense that Locke provides “a set of concepts we standardly use to represent and reflect on contemporary politics." Tully, Michael K. Green, and an increasing number of historians accord Locke’s Second Treatise a prominent role in American Indian dispossession. Richard Drinnon, Francis Jennings, Russell Thornton, and David E. Stannard do not assign the Second Treatise as influential a role as Tully, but place it in a context, unlike Tully, of historical genocide, an American Holocaust. In this paper I address two different interpretations of Locke’s social and political work: first, the generous interpretation that Locke did not have disparaging things to say with regard to American Indians and that his works do not exhibit ethnocentric arguments; second,the interpretation popularized by James Tully that Locke’s agricultural argument was developed with the intention of taking American Indian land without consent, that Locke’s work is in large part responsible for the dispossession of the American Indian. I argue that a generous reading of Locke does not adequately portray his attitude toward American Indians. At the same time, however, interpretations placing Locke’s political arguments as central to the history of dispossession are not entirely warranted. Most commentators focus exclusively on Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. I present a more comprehensive analysis and argue that, considering the religious and political aspect of Locke’s theory of knowledge, it is the Essay that has had a more lasting influence for American Indians.