FRONTIER PANEL – INDIAN
BAD DEAL AT THE TRADING POST
For the American Indians, their own sense of identity & their
own fate have been largely out of their hands for hundreds of
years. The very term “Indian” used to describe them in itself is
a misnomer. It came about because Christopher Columbus, on
landing in the New World in 1492, thought he had reached an
offshore island of the East Indies - & the people he fund here
have been miscalled Indians ever since.
believe that the hideous custom of scalping originated with
Indians, this is how the Indians learned about scalp taking.
Despite frequent clashes between Indians & settlers, the
“Indian problem” didn’t seem insolvable so long as there was
plenty of elbow room along the frontiers. When the new U.S.
emerged in the 1770s, there was even talk of friendly Indian
tribes forming states of their own & sending representatives to
Congress.
To Indians, of course, Columbus could hardly have
“discovered America.” The Indians knew it was here all the
time. They were the descendants of people who, in prehistory,
migrated from Northeast Asia, arriving in the Americas
probably by way of the narrow Bering Strait & Alaska.
Eventually they spread out over most of the North & South
American continents.
Our new nation’s official policy toward Indians was first
outlined in the Northwest Territory Ordinance of 1787, which
said in part: “The utmost good faith shall always be observed
toward the Indians; their land & property shall never be taken
from them without their consent; & in their property, rights, &
liberty, they never shall be invaded or disturbed unless in just
or lawful wars authorized by Congress.”
Aside from their distant ancestry, however, few
generalizations can be made about these “native Americans.”
Countless clichés notwithstanding, there never was a “typical”
member of any other group. In reality there were hundreds of
different Indian nations & tribes which followed diverse
customs & ways of life. They spoke hundreds of different
languages.
But these lofty ideas were soon betrayed as more settlers
came across the Atlantic & needed more living space. In 1830
Congress passed an Indian Removal Act. This empowered the
U.S. President to remove all Indian tribes east of the
Mississippi River & resettle them west of the river. If these
tribes would surrender their ancestral lands to the U.S., the
Indians were told they would get new lands out west, “lands
that will be yours forever.”
Some Indian groups – such as the Incas of South America &
the Aztecs & Mayans of Mexico – developed brilliant,
sophisticated, settled civilizations. Others remained more or
less nomadic – moving about & depending on hunting,
trapping, & fishing for survival. Some tribes were warlike,
others peaceful. They were never a totally unified people.
Traditionally each Indian identified himself as a member of a
tribal grouping – as a Cherokee or a Comanche or a Mohawk,
for example – rather than an “Indian,” the word that the white
man assigned to all of them.
Whatever their identity & style of life, the world of the
American Indians began to crumble when the Europeans
arrived. First came the adventurers eager to plunder the riches
of the New World. Whole Indian tribes were conquered,
enslaved & forced to work on the newly established plantations
& the mines. Gunfire & “Old World” diseases (such as
smallpox & cholera) soon annihilated entire Indian populations
in parts of Central & South America.
Then came the European settlers. Some of their dear
leaders, such as William Penn of Pennsylvania, treated Indians
with considerable fairness & respect. But most others didn’t
bother. The governor of New Netherland (today parts of New
York & New Jersey) offered a bounty on each Indian scalp
brought in. According to some anthropologists who do not
Some tribes, such as the Seminoles of Florida, fiercely
resisted removal. But most of the Eastern Indian tribes
reluctantly gave in. In some cases they were driven off in
chains. Their old, their young, their wounded & sick died by the
hundreds on the bitter ‘trail of tears’ westward.
As it turned out, that was only Phase 1 of the Indian removal
in U.S. history. Phase 1 came when a growing American
nation realized that the western half of the continent wasn’t just
“wastelands fit only for Indians.” Pioneers in covered wagons
pushed back the frontiers in search of gold & silver or to take
out new homesteads & grazing lands. What has become
celebrated in U.S. history was the “winning of the West” was
for the Indians the losing of their West – to go along with their
earlier losing of their East.
“Up to 1868, writes anthropologist Peter Farb, author of a
recent book on the American Indians, ‘nearly 400 treaties had
been signed by the U.S. government with various Indian
groups & scarcely one had remained unbroken. The Indians
were promised new lands, then moved off them to some other
place… All of which led the Sioux chief Spotted Tail to ask
wearily: ‘Why does not the Great White Father put his red
children on wheels, so he can move them as he will?’”
The Indians of the plains & prairies depended on the buffalo
for their very existence. But they saw the great herds
slaughtered by white hungers. Smallpox & cholera killed
thousands of Indians. Faced with extermination, the Indians
fought back in desperation, often in shocking ways. Bu the
atrocities were hardly one-sided. According to a U.S. cavalry
lieutenant who took part in the final roundup of the Apaches:
“In treachery, broken pledges… lies, thievery, slaughter of
defenseless women & children, & every crime in the catalog of
man’s inhumanity to man, the Indian was a mere amateur
compared to the ‘noble white man.’ His crimes were retail, ours
wholesale.”
Moreover, an Interior Department study found that most
Indians were “extremely poor” in both wealth & health & that
most were not adjusting to the dominant culture around them.
So federal police on Indians took a new tack when Congress
passed the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. This law
restored tribal land ownership & called for an orderly decrease
in federal control & supervision over Indians, with a
corresponding increase in Indian self-government on tribal
affairs.
Except for isolated Indian victories – such as the SiouxCheyenne massacre of Custer’s 7th Cavalry at the 1867 Battle
of the Little Big Horn in Montana – one after another Indian
tribes was eventually crushed. By 1890 the Indian Wars were
over. All Indian tribes had been herded onto reservations
where, technically the Indian tribes were (& still are) regarded
an independent (though conquered) nations within our larger
nation.
More than 50% of America’s farm products today consists of
plants used by the Indians before Columbus planted his flag.
They include beans, chocolate, corn, cotton, peanuts,
potatoes, pumpkins, tobacco & tomatoes. To combat illness,
the Indian has given us arnica, cascara, cocaine, ipecac, oil of
wintergreen, petroleum jelly, quinine & witch hazel. Botanists
have yet to discover in 400 years, any medicinal herb that was
not used by the Indian. That’s what they gave us. Here’s what
we gave them: High infant mortality rate, short life expectancy,
dependency on handouts, loss of pride, much illness, &
unemployment as high as 80% in some tribes. The 600,000
remaining American Indians are struggling to hang on to the
lowest health, education & economic rungs in American life as
a result of U.S. governmental policies.
For most practical purposes, however, the Indian tribes
became wards of the federal government. The Bureau of
Indian Affairs, originally a part of the War Department &
transferred in 1849 to the Interior Department, served as
trustee for all Indian reservation lands in the U.S. The Bureau
has remained the principal federal agency responsible for the
social & economic welfare of reservation Indians.
In theory the reservations should have enabled Indians to
live more or less the way they always had – in a tribal social
structure organized in close harmony with nature. In practice,
they didn’t. A reservation simply couldn’t provide the freedom
& the resources of the wide-open plains & mountains.
Indeed, some Indian Affairs officials believed that
reservation life amounted to perpetuation traditional Indian
attitudes at a time when the old patterns of Indian life were no
longer really possible.
So efforts were made to encourage Indians to abandon their
old ways & give the white man’s way a try. In 1887, Congress
passed the General Allotment Act (also known as the Dawes
Act). This law split reservation land into individual parcels,
giving each Indian his own private lot.
But the Dawes Act also provided that after parceling, all
Indian land left over could be sold to all comers. This, plus the
fact that many Indians didn’t understand anything about the
ways of private property & real estate values, helped open the
way to large-scale land swindles. In 1887, Indian lands in the
U.S. totaled 138,000,000 acres. By 1934 this total had been
reduced to 56,000,000 acres. And the Bureau of Indian lands,
much of the “critically eroded.”
THE AMERICAN INDIAN – AN IMMIGRANT BAD DEAL AT
THE TRADING POST – MORE!!