Читать книгу The American Kaleidoscope - Lawrence H. Fuchs - Страница 17

Chapter Four

“GO BACK TO THE COUNTRY FROM WHENCE YOU CAME”

Predatory Pluralism and the Native American Response

WHEN in the early nineteenth century Pawnee Indians first encountered Anglo-Americans, the whites proposed a treaty, promising blankets, guns, and knives made of steel in exchange for land. The head chief of the Pawnees declined the offer. His robe would keep him warm, even in winter; his arrows would kill cattle, his stone knife would cut meat for eating. “Go back to the country from whence you came,” he said, “We do not want your presents, and we do not want you to come into our country.”¹

There was no question of assimilation or integration. “The Great Spirit has made us all,” the Seneca chief Red Jacket said in 1805, “but he has made a great difference between his red and white children.”² The whites agreed.

The early encounters between the English settlers and the Indians on the East Coast in the seventeenth century established the terms of the American system of tribal pluralism throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and much of the twentieth. Although early white settlers tried and usually failed to get Indians to work for them, they did not want their labor first of all. They desired their land. To possess the land became their overwhelming obsession. They negotiated for it or they seized it. Coercion became the dominant strategy of acquisition. If Indians refused the colonists’ offers for land or resisted their incursions into Indian lands they were pushed out, or even captured and held or sold as slaves. Roger Williams thought that the Massachusetts Bay Colony belonged to the Indians. He would have established a system of pluralism based on respect for the tribal integrity of the indigenous population. William Penn bought title from the Indians. But Williams and Penn were exceptions.

The authors of the American Constitution made the Indians’ position clear. They, not the colonists, were the outsiders. Most Indians were not taxed and not counted as part of the population that determined apportionment of representatives. Congress was granted the power to regulate commerce not only with foreign nations but also with Indian tribes. They were, in effect, aliens in their own lands. Still, Indians were a force to be reckoned with, and making war against them was not always the most effective policy. Where conquest was not likely except at great cost, negotiation made sense. Beginning in 1778, when the first treaty was signed between the Continental Congress and an Indian nation (the Delaware), and until the treaty system was abrogated in 1871, the U.S. government negotiated nearly four hundred treaties with Indian nations.

Many treaties conceded that some land should remain Indian and agreed that certain fishing and hunting rights be maintained. But substantial acreage was gained without a fight. Whites clothed their avarice in high-minded phrases about fair treatment. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which established a system for incorporating western territories as states, affirmed an Indian policy based on “good faith”; Indian “lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful ways authorized by Congress.” The promise of good faith was never fulfilled. The white settlers ignored it as they pushed the frontier farther west. The Congress was left to decide what is “just and lawful,” but Congress most often responded to political pressures emanating from land-hungry whites.

The ambiguous and shifting positions of Thomas Jefferson reflected the continuing (albeit tenuous) hold of the ideals of the Northwest Ordinance but even more the general white attitude of disdain for Indians and lust for their lands. One year before the ordinance, Jefferson embraced the view of tribal rights in a letter to a European friend. “It may be regarded as certain, that not a foot of land will ever be taken from the Indians, without their consent. The sacredness of their rights is felt by all thinking persons in America.”³ Ten years earlier, when the Indians were labeled “merciless savages” in the Declaration of Independence, he also wrote that “nothing will reduce those wretches so soon as pushing the war into the heart of their country. But I would not stop there. I would never cease pursuing them while one of them remained on this side of the Mississippi.”⁴ By the time Jefferson became president, he had abandoned both his 1776 and his 1786 positions and had been converted to an assimilationist approach. Writing to Andrew Jackson, he advocated that the Indians be guided “to an agricultural way of life.… In leading them thus to … civilization … I trust and believe we are acting for their greatest good.”⁵ By his second inaugural address in 1805, Jefferson was still an assimilationist: “Humanity enjoins us to teach them agriculture and the domestic arts.” But, concerned that Indians would oppose his policies, he complained that they had “a sanctimonious reverence for the customs of their ancestors.”⁶ He then abandoned the policy of assimilation and ordered his representatives on the frontier to acquire all Indian lands east of the Mississippi. By 1808, Jefferson told some Cherokees who wished to retain their lands in the upper South and become citizens of the United States that it would not work. He urged them to move west of the Mississippi. By 1812, he had reverted to his 1776 position, predicting that the Indians “will relapse into barbarism and misery … and we shall be obliged to drive them with the beasts of the forests into the Stony [Rocky] Mountains.”⁷

Andrew Jackson both reflected and stimulated the hostility of whites on the frontier toward the Indians. In 1833, in his second inaugural address, he justified a policy of white expansion: “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than twelve million happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization and religion?”⁸

The tidewater planters and rich merchants on the East Coast, who sought peace with the Indians, were losing to the democracy of the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians. The Federalists, who had wanted peace on the frontier, failed to win the frontiersmen’s votes and hence sputtered out as a political party, effectively removing Northwest Ordinance sentiments as a force in making Indian policy. Their influence persisted, however, on the U.S. Supreme Court, where one of their principal leaders, John Marshall, sat as chief justice. Marshall interpreted constitutional law as consistent with the promises of the Northwest Ordinance that called for a benign form of tribal pluralism. In 1831, the Marshall Court listened to a complaint from the Council of the Cherokees against the Georgia Guard, which had carried out provisions of a series of harsh state laws against the Cherokees. The guard had terrorized them, put them in chains, tied them to trees, and thrown them into jails. The Cherokee nations sought to qualify as a “foreign state” in order to appeal to the Court’s jurisdiction. When, in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), the court refused jurisdiction, Marshall asserted in benevolent paternalistic obiter dicta that the Indian nation is “a distinct political society … capable of managing its own affairs and governing itself.” Such societies are “domestic dependent nations,” whose “relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian.”

The repressive laws against the Cherokees were tested again the following year, when representatives of the American Board of Missionaries on Cherokee land, who refused to take an oath of allegiance to the state, were arrested by the Georgia Guard, convicted, and sent to prison. This time Marshall, writing for the Court, did assume jurisdiction, and in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) established that the Cherokee nation “is a distinct community occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter, but with the assent of the Cherokees themselves, or in conformity with treaties and with acts of Congress.”⁹

Marshall’s pronouncements clearly had not reflected the election returns. On the frontier, the policies of removal and extinction—the predatory version of tribal pluralism—were far more popular than his legalisms. Jackson had led the campaign for the Congressional Removal Act of 1830, which authorized expelling eastern tribes from their lands in exchange for guaranteed land west of the Mississippi River. A few of the Cherokee nation leaders, acting without the approval of the tribal government, sought to avoid open conflict by agreeing to a treaty that ceded their eastern homeland in exchange for western land. The rest—about three-quarters—of the Cherokees refused to leave and were forced to take a long march to what is now northeastern Oklahoma, when about four thousand died on “the trail of tears.”

Between 1810 and 1821, more than a half million Euro-American settlers poured into Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana; almost a half million others moved into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Many were squatters, “pre-emptors,” who found land, farmed it, and claimed it as their own. In 1841, Congress legalized this widespread practice through the Pre-emption Act. One hundred thousand Indians, removed from the East before the Civil War, obliged western tribes to give up hunting grounds to make room for them and eventually for more whites.

One Norwegian settler wrote home in 1835 about his success in planting “Indian corn” in New York State. But he could purchase public land in Illinois at $1.25 an acre, and planned to move there. In the U.S., “whether native born or foreign, a man is free to do with it [land] what he pleases.” He urged a friend to emigrate: “Even if many more come, there will still be room for all.”¹⁰ The frontier to him was a symbol of the American founding myth of asylum and freedom. But to the Sauk-Fox leader Black Hawk, settlers were liars and cheats. “We told them to let us alone; but they followed on and beset our paths, and they coiled themselves among us like the snake.”¹¹

Millions of acres were granted to whites through the Homestead Act of 1862 and, indirectly, through land grants to the railroads after the Civil War. In the Northwest, the Oregon Donation Act encouraged raids on Indian lands. In Texas, savage wars were fought by Comanches against the Texas Rangers and the American cavalry; in Colorado, Indians fought for their ground against gold prospectors; in Kansas and Nebraska, they gave up most of their land through treaties.

Confined by treaty and harassment to reservations after the Civil War, many tribes swept across the plains and waged war so effectively against the U.S. Army that General William T. Sherman, the Civil War hero, said fifty Indians could hold off three thousand soldiers. On the plains, white hunters’ relentless slaughter of the buffalo to feed laborers on the railroads and to get hides to sell defeated the Indians. Between the end of the Civil War and 1885, when the buffalo became nearly extinct, the Indians in North America, whose population may have been as high as twelve to fifteen million north of the Rio Grande in 1491, were reduced to fewer than 250,000, and to 210,000 by the 1920 census.

Driven back to reservations, decimated by war, disease, and consequent social disorganization, the Indians were unable to prevent the declaration by Congress, in 1871, that “hereafter, no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty.” Tribal pluralism based on mutual respect, envisioned by the Northwest Ordinance, had long since been abandoned and predatory tribal pluralism was no longer needed, although several Indian massacres lay ahead. Some whites sympathetic to the Indians’ plight concluded that the “Indian problem” could only be solved if Indians left the reservations altogether and deserted tribal life. Schools were established for Indian children (the most famous, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania) and were deliberately located far from Indian communities to separate Indian children from their parents’ way of life.¹²

The goals of assimilation and rejection of tribal pluralism led to the breakup of the reservations through allotment of plots of land to individual Indian families. The General Allotment Act of 1887, or the Dawes Act (named after Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee), gave the president authority not only to distribute a reservation among Indian families but also to permit white settlers to take over unallotted surplus land. Although some tribes—including the five tribes in the so-called “Indian Territory” of Oklahoma, earlier removed from the East, and the Osage—were exempted at first because of their strong resistance to the allotment scheme, most Indians on reservations were subject to allotment, and after passage of the Curtis Act in 1898 virtually all Indians, including the five tribes not on reservations, became eligible for allotments of public land.

Advertising himself as a friend of Indians, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Chief No Shirt that if Indians would only work hard and earn their living they could become rich and successful just like whites.¹³ But most Indians were unpersuaded. They preferred to keep tribal identities. The old Potawatami Chief Simon Pokagon pulled a red, white, and blue rope to ring a new Liberty Bell at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, but most rejected white overtures.¹⁴ Even though they were now few in number, psychologically demoralized, and physically weak, they resisted assimilation just as they had fought against removal and conquest. But, unable to function effectively as individual landowners on the terms set by the highly individualistic, competitive market society, most sold the land allotted to them or lost it through foreclosure. In forty-five years land still in Indian ownership was reduced by more than half. Instead of becoming independent farmers, large numbers of Indians became landless and penniless on the most arid land of the West.

The climax of the campaign to assimilate by separating them from their trust relationship with the federal government came in 1924 when Congress granted citizenship to all Indians (more than half already had citizenship), partly in recognition of their services in the armed forces in the war. But the policy of assimilation was pronounced a failure in a 1928 study of the Institute of Government Research (Brookings Institution). A report, known after the project’s director, Lewis Merriam, as the Merriam Report, opposed forced assimilation. After the 1932 election its recommendations found a sympathetic hearing in the Roosevelt administration, particularly from the commissioner of Indian affairs, John Collier, a white man who had worked for the Indian cause for many years and whose proposals for recognizing anew the right of Indian tribes to be distinct functioning political entities were embodied in the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Funds were allocated to buy back some of the land lost through the allotment policy (ninety million acres, or two-thirds of the land held by the Indians in 1887), and reservations were urged to enact tribal constitutions to enable them to fulfill the functions of self-governing nations once more.¹⁵

But Indian reorganization, based in large measure on the philosophy and promise of a just system of pluralism linked to the territorial integrity of tribes, was not honored consistently. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, the federal agency charged with fulfilling the government’s trust responsibility, leased Indian land to outside companies under contracts that did not protect Indian rights and sometimes even were signed without knowledge or consent of the Indians themselves. And the bureau bowed to congressional pressure for assimilation by continuing the Indian boarding school system, which sometimes took Indian children away from their parents for many years at a time and kept them from learning about their traditional cultures or languages.

In 1953, less than two decades after passage of the Indian Reorganization Act, the House of Representatives passed a resolution proclaiming as the policy of the United States the speedy abolition of federal supervision over the tribes and subjection of Indians to the same laws, privileges, and responsibilities as all other citizens of the U.S. A process aptly known as “termination” had begun. The resolution spoke of giving Indians “equal rights” and of “freeing them from all the disabilities and limitations specifically applicable to Indians.”¹⁶ But, subject to state taxes and hunting and fishing laws, Indians would lose federal protection over their lands and the right to self-governing sovereign status.

Not until the 1970s and 1980s did white Americans return to support for tribal pluralism, based upon the original promise of the Northwest Ordinance and the judicial opinions of John Marshall. The American civil rights consciousness was responsible, in part; so was the growing recognition among whites of the history of oppression of the Indian tribes and also the new assertiveness of Indians themselves in claiming their rights both as American citizens and as members of tribes that possessed a unique relationship to the polity as a whole.