What is property?

"At the same time, reformers considered individual land ownership to be the key toward the "civilization" of Native peoples, all of whom lacked (at least in the reformers' collective imagination) any kind of genuine concept of property. Ethnographers, meanwhile, carefully catalogued the cultural property of their subjects. Stories, languages, and artifacts were what made Indians "Indian." ¹¹ By the end of the century, this realist logic had cast racial identity itself as a kind of property: property that could be passed down through biological ties, property that could be accounted for in the capitalistic economy of pain, property that Indians (though perhaps not African Americans) could not only possess but be dispossessed of."

-Elliot 1998

I found that this particular passage from the article to be indicative of the struggle or fight between the "reformers" and the "ethnographers". The reformers were interested in assimilating the native people not to have them join them because in truth they were probably thought of to be as lowly as the African slave, but to be able to assign specific plots of land to them. In this ability they could give the native people's a small plot of their original land and then take the remainder for themselves. However, it could be argued that property isn't just land, but stories, culture, language, and artifacts, and in the assimilation of the native people's the reformers were also hoping to take away that type of property as well, so that the native people's could be civilized. The ethnographers are seen in this excerpt to be fighting to document and maintain the culture property of the native people's but what they are forgetting is that the land is just as important to native people's as their artifacts, language, and stories because the land helps them to maintain their culture. If they are all placed onto small plot of land their way begins to frat because the majority of the native people's were nomadic across large plots of land and without it they could not properly practice and continue their culture. 

-Ciara Williams