The Bear, Pages 244 - 301 Summary

Ike is now twenty-one and has inherited the title to a significant amount of land which he would share with his cousin, McCaslin. He decides, however, to relinquish his rights to the land because he wants to break the pattern which, he claims, has brought a curse upon the south. The curse came with the white man's arrival in America and seems to be centered around the idea of ownership. Before white men arrived in the Americas, the natives had no concept of owning land, let alone buying and selling it. These were notions imported from the West which soon came to dominate America. The natives bought into these concepts too and some of them, like the Indian chiefs, profited greatly from selling land that they actually never owned. Land ownership is a foolish concept because it...