Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863 - W. Dirk Raat - Страница 14

Every human group has a creation myth. White Americans are no exception. Their most popular origin myth concerns the frontier: Europe was crowded; North America was not. Land in Europe was claimed, owned and utilized; land in North America was available for the taking. In a migration as elemental as a law of physics, Europeans moved from crowded space to open space, where free land restored opportunity and offered a route to independence… . Thrown on their own resources, pioneers recreated the social contract from scratch, forming simple democratic communities whose political health vitalized all of America. Indians, symbolic residents of the wilderness, resisted— in a struggle sometimes noble, but always futile. At the completion of the conquest, that chapter of history was closed. The frontier ended, but the hardiness and independence of the pioneer survived in American character.

Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest¹

At first there were few white people, and they were all going west; then, as wise old Nana knew, the lure of gold, discovered far to our west, brought them in hordes. Though most of them went on, some stayed to burrow into Mother Earth for the ore sacred to Ussen. Nana was right in thinking that gold was to bring about our extermination.

Ace Dalugie, patriarch of the Mescalero Reservation Son of Juh, Leader of the Nednhi Apache²

This is a study of relocation and removal of Indian groups in the Greater American Southwest centering on the events of the nineteenth century. Relocation, of course, is not only a nineteenth century phenomenon in American history. During World War II there were ten concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority, of which the largest was the Poston War Relocation Center in Yuma County (now La Paz County) in southwestern Arizona. Most of the Japanese Americans living in California, 110,000 of them, were moved to Poston and other centers, including the Gila River War Relocation Center 30 miles southeast of Phoenix. Del Webb built Poston on the Colorado River Indian Reservation over the objections of the tribal council (just as the Gila River Center, located on the Gila River Indian Reservation near Sacaton, Arizona, was built over the strong objections of that reservation’s American Indian government). It is a sad irony of western history that Indians, who themselves had been rounded up 80 or so years ago to be relocated and imprisoned on unfamiliar and hostile terrain, would now be forcibly hosting a new generation of Japanese American prisoners.³

Relocation policy was not only targeted at Japanese Americans and Indian communities, tribes, and bands, but at nuclear families and individual family heads. The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 encouraged Native Americans as individuals to leave the reservation and assimilate into the general population, i.e., urbanization of the indigenous person. The law provided for moving expenses, vocational training, four weeks of subsistence per diem, and other grants as long as the recipient went to a government designated city. By 1960 over 31,000 indigenous individuals had moved to cities. Alas, the long term effects were devastating with individuals and their families suffering from isolation, racial discrimination, and segregation. However, an unintended result was the formation of the American Indian Movement in 1968, a group that was directed by “urbanized” Indians.⁴ But, of course, the removal and relocation of 1863 is the concern of this work.

Obviously, to understand that year the reader should study events that occurred both before and after 1863, and that is what this study does. But there can be no denying the importance of that year. For example, 1863 was the date of the Emancipation Proclamation; when Lincoln, attempting to foster patriotism during the Civil War, declared Thanksgiving a national holiday; the beginning of the Long Walk of the Navajo; the year of the Numa (Paiute) Path of Tears; the death of Mangas Coloradas and an acceleration of the Apache wars; the Bear River Massacre of Shoshone men, women, and children; when the Comanche leader Quanah Parker became a warrior; and when precious mineral seekers encroached upon Yavapai, Mojave, Apache, and Yaqui lands. It was also when Anglo farmers near the Gila first began to appropriate water from the O’odham communities.

That year also saw the Territory of Arizona established (divided from New Mexico Territory), and the founding of the city of Prescott (gold had been discovered at Lynx Creek outside of Prescott), and the building of Fort Whipple, near Prescott. Even before the arrival of federal officials in Arizona 20 Indians had been killed outside of Fort Whipple in spite of the peace treaty that had been signed by the federal government and the Yavapai. After 1863 Arizona’s Yavapai would lose their lives, their freedom, and their land. As an aside, I should mention that Mormon settlers and authorities were in the center of many of these events that took place in Utah, southern Idaho, Arizona, southern California, western Nevada, Sonora, and Chihuahua.

The year 1863 is a mid-century marker between the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the enforcement of which led to the removal of several Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw from their eastern homelands to Indian Territory in eastern Oklahoma, and the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 29, 1890. The latter symbolizes the end of the Indian wars when the US Army killed as many as 150 men, women, and children at the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.⁵

Finally 1863 is a time of civil war in the United States when northern Union soldiers fought their southern Confederate brothers in the bloodiest of conflicts. The inhabitants of the Southwest were not unaffected by events in the East. Many troops were reassigned to either northern or southern armies, and fighting between non-Indians and Native Americans stopped in some places, while elsewhere inter-tribal warfare ensued⁶ and volunteer forces initiated the massacre of many indigenous groups.

The Civil War marked the end of that phase of Indian removal between 1830 and 1860 when land was expropriated from the native inhabitants of the lower South, stretching from South Carolina to east Texas (the “Cotton Kingdom”) and the original proprietors were sent west of the Mississippi. Millions of acres of conquered land were surveyed and put up for sale by the United States, a privatization of the public domain that created one of the greatest economic booms up to that time. The expansion of cotton and the movement of slaves and slavery south and west continued the general trend of western expansion (and westernization) in general.⁷ Surprisingly, the year 1834 also saw the passage by the US Congress of the Intercourse Act in which most of the land west of the Mississippi, excluding Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, was declared to be Indian country.⁸ The Civil War years would witness a diminishment of that promise.

With the discovery of gold in California in 1848, “argonauts” travelled across southern Arizona through the Yuma crossing at the Colorado River headed for the gold fields of California. They soon backtracked through Nevada and Arizona, and by 1863 were encroaching on the lands of the Paiute, Mojave, Yavapai, Apache, and O’odham nations. Lust for precious minerals, arable lands, and water would soon lead to the almost inevitable confrontations between industrialized and non-industrialized peoples.

Until the nineteenth century most of the world boundaries between states were not fixed. Most treaties were accords designed to prevent conflict or solidify alliances. Until the Treaty of Greenville (1795) in which annuities were institutionalized, treaties with the Indians of North America were primarily used to maintain a balance of power between France and England. After Greenville, the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the discovery of gold in Georgia (1828), and the initiation of Andrew Jackson’s policy of forced ethnic cleansing (1829), treaties were negotiated between the US and the indigenous population in order to acquire the land of the latter. In 1871 Congress stopped negotiating treaties, and by 1924 extended citizenship to American Indians.

Throughout all of this, because the Commerce Clause (Section 8) of the US Constitution reserved to the federal government the right to regulate commercial relationships and land ownership “… with the Indian Tribes,” questions and issues concerning the use and ownership of the lands of the native peoples was left up to the bureaucrats and politicians in Washington, D.C. to decide. This has been the situation from 1790 onward to today.¹

By the nineteenth century Europeans and Americans began to arrange treaties between themselves or with local rulers, and from the early to mid-nineteenth century mapmaking and the map were essential to this process. The survey maps of the General Land Office made relevant the shape of the territory, and that shape would eventually gain tremendous political importance.

Akin to the Cotton Kingdom, the Greater Southwest was surveyed and mapped before the conquering troops arrived, only to be followed by gold seekers, farmers, entrepreneurs, Protestant missionaries, and Mormon settlers. And the US government was very busy negotiating treaties with Mexicans, Navajos, Shoshones and others. Treaty-making had taken on a new role, that of paving the way for settlement and development of indigenous lands, and the formalization of the subordination of tribal peoples. While the treaties may have failed from the indigenous perspective, these accords did meet the needs of the newcomers.⁹

The Indians, as obstacles to development, had to be removed. By mid-century the US government had already developed the concept of the reservation. Derived from English Indian policies, this treatment of segregating tribes in separate communities differed sharply from the Spanish and Mexican ideas of assimilation and incorporation of the Indian as a national citizen. In 1858, the commissioner of Indian Affairs described the reservation system this way: “concentrating the Indians on small reservations of land, and … sustaining them there for a limited period of time, until they can be induced to make the necessary exertions to support themselves.”¹⁰

As noted earlier, the geographical area under study is called the Greater Southwest, territory that is often referred to by geographers and ethnohistorians as the Gran Chichimeca. Anthropologist Charles Di Peso defined the Gran Chichimeca as comprehending all of that part of Mexico that is situated north of the Tropic of Cancer to 38 degrees north latitude, including Baja and Alta California, New Mexico, southern Utah, southern Colorado, and western Texas (see map, Figure 0.2). This writer would extend the line north to 42 degrees north latitude or the northern boundaries of California, Nevada, and Utah (including the Great Basin area) with the northern boundary extending from California to 97 degrees west longitude near Wichita, Kansas (see maps, Figures 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5).

Figure 0.2 Charles Di Peso’s La Gran Chichimeca: The Greater Southwest (including Central Rockies and Great Basin).

Figure 0.3 Indigenous Communities of the Greater Southwest. Abridged from Map 1-a, Native Tribes of North America, Map Series No. 13 (University of California Press).

Figure 0.4 Tribal Communities of the Northwestern and Central Parts of the Greater Southwest.

Reproduced from “Key to Tribal Territories” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 11, Great Basin, ed. by Warren L. D. Azevedo (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1986), p. ix.

Figure 0.5 Tribal Communities of the Southern Part of the Greater Southwest (Arizona, New Mexico, and Northern Mexico).

Reproduced from “Key to Tribal Territories” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 9, Southwest. ed. by Alfonso Ortiz (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1979).

More importantly, this is an ecological and historical zone of cultural interaction. It was here that Mesoamerican societies made commercial contact with the Indian cultures of the US Southwest. For example, in pre-contact time turquoise and buffalo hides came from Chaco Canyon to be exchanged for Macaw feathers and chocolate from Guatemala and Mesoamerica. This was where Anglos first confronted Spaniards in North America. This was the homeland of the Tejano–Mexicano conflict prior to 1845, or the area where Geronimo roamed freely between two nation states after 1850.

For the purposes of this study history does not stop at the border, even though there has been an international boundary since 1848. Not only did Geronimo and the Chiricahua Apaches fight, hunt, and raid in this region (paying no heed to the boundary), but treasure seekers, settlers, surveyors, munitions dealers, US Army Indian scouts, and others constantly travelled back and forth. O’odham traders exchanged goods and slaves between Mexico and the Gila Indians in the north. The Yaqui Indians of Sonora sought refuge in southern Arizona. Mormon pioneers and colonists went out from Zion in the Salt Lake Valley northward to southern Idaho and southward and westward to southern Utah, Nevada, southern California, Arizona, and Chihuahua, Mexico. The history of Gran Chichimeca, named by the Aztecs for their “barbarian” neighbors who lived a nomadic life in the region, is the story of cultural, economic, and social interaction from Mesoamerican times to MexAmerica today.

Finally, it should be noted that the theme of “relocation and removal” must be expanded to include its global and contemporary dimensions. The cultural struggle between westernized and non-westernized people or between colonial and indigenous peoples is both world-wide and on-going. The ideological, spiritual, and economic imperatives of colonial expansion were not exclusively European, and the occupation of indigenous lands took place throughout India, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Thus it is that immigrants from North India confronted the Veda (forest dwellers) of Sri Lanka; the Japanese government refused to recognize the Ainu who inhabited Hokkaido in the northern archipelago until the 1990s; the Bushmen or desert-based hunter-gatherers of southern Africa face extinction today because of limited resources and outsider populations; and the Yanomami and Uru Eu Wau Wau of the Amazon Basin are confronted with challenges to their traditional way of life from scholars, tourists, loggers, miners and other developers.¹¹

In the annals of Indian–white relations in southern South America, the Selk’nam Genocide is often recalled. When the Selk’nam was first encountered by Europeans in their homeland of Tierra del Fuego they were a hardy and vigorous people. They lived mostly undisturbed until the late 1800s, when an influx of gold prospectors and sheep ranchers who desired their land started to make intrusions. Bounties were placed on their heads. One hunter boasted that he had received a pound sterling per corpse, redeemable with a pair or two of ears. In a brief time the Selk’nam were reduced from four thousand to around three hundred, and resettled on reservations administered by missionaries. The last speaker of the Selk’nam language died 40 years ago.¹²

In North America confrontations with indigenous groups include Canadian authorities and the Inuit in the Arctic as well as the Blackfoot on the Canadian plains and the Innu of Labrador. And, of course, most individuals are familiar with the struggles between Europeans and the Maori of New Zealand, the aboriginal Tasmanians, and the Aborigines of Australia.¹³

But if the nineteenth century history of indigenous peoples was one of “struggle,” the twentieth century story bears witness to the idea of “survival.” Even this dichotomy is too simplistic. Not all nineteenth century Indians of the Southwest were victims of the colonizers. Human relationships are complex and some disruptions in native life were due to indigenous factors and pressures from other tribal groups. For example, several White Mountain Apaches and Chiricahuas chose to live on the reservation and adopt the white man’s way of life, and held no brief for Geronimo and the other rebels. Chief Chatto, an accomplished Chiricahua raider, served as first sergeant of Apache scouts during the final campaign against Geronimo. As for the colonizers, the voices of the past are many and many soldiers, like Brigadier General George Crook, held a grudging admiration for Geronimo and his Apache followers. To only consider the indigenous peoples as victims and the colonizers as victimizers is to strip native societies of agency.

If anything, Indian people have found new ways to remain distinctive despite the power of global economies, colonial militaries, and national governments. The “vanishing American” of the late nineteenth century refused to be vanished! Reports by non-indigenous observers of cultural demise and death were wrong in the 1870s, misguided in the 1920s, and overly pessimistic today.

While many groups are losing their languages, many societies have continued to survive even stripped of their language.¹⁴ While the boarding school experience from 1878 to 1930 discouraged the use of Indian languages by their pupils, the Navajo, Hopi, Comanche, Sac and Fox code-talkers of World War II revived their tribal tongues. Contemporary technology is being used to initiate language comeback programs, ranging from apprenticeship programs pairing fluent elders with young students to YouTube videos, or native speaker’s language-learning apps for Indian students with iPads.¹⁵ For example, the summer of 2013 saw the release of the classic George Lucas “Star Wars” movie that was dubbed by Navajo voice actors, a use of native language designed to appeal to a younger generation.¹⁶ Evidently, while the colonial empires that first colonized indigenous societies no longer exist, the native groups have persisted.

No better example of that persistence can be found than that of the Apache painter, muralist, and sculptor Allan Houser. Born in 1914 near Fort Sill, Oklahoma, he was the first of his Chiricahua community to be born outside of captivity. He lived 80 years dying in 1994. He is a likely candidate for the title of “best Southwestern Indian artist of the 20^th century.” His materials are varied and diverse—sculpting with marble, bronze, alabaster, steatite, limestone, painted steel, wire, wood; painting in oils, tempera, acrylic, casein, pastels, and watercolors—and his themes are equally varied. His six to nine foot Ga’an statutes reflect the confidence of Apache spiritualism, and his smaller works depict family and everyday life. This is the optimism of the survivalist, not the pessimism of the defeated.¹⁷

This then is a two-part story, of a difficult and often unsuccessful struggle to overcome powerful, outside forces, and the contemporary one of an internal and cultural determination to survive in the face of forces seeking their destruction. From the struggle with surviving have come renewal and regeneration, and this new person called the American Indian.