Aboriginal Americans

“ Furthermore let it be noted that, according to his explicit statement, the aboriginal village organization had broken down utterly, and the Indians were living in new places in conformity with new economic and social requirements. No wonder modern informants frequently cannot look past the period of upheaval and give us a clear picture of untouched aboriginal life before the white man came! ”

“ It is time for us now to turn to the aboriginal tribes, to inquire what had been and were their territorial rights before and while they were being ground in the mill by rival European nationalities, all intruders. ”

“ By this firm administration of equal justice the Aboriginal population, instead of being, as formerly, a hostile, treacherous, and troublesome race, had become harmless, docile, and in some degree useful to the settlers. ”

“ Reliable and learned authors who have made the aboriginal race of America an object of deep study and research, have arrived at the conclusion, that the numerous tribes into which they are divided, belong not to the same primitive family or generic stock, but are to be ranged under several well-defined heads or types. ”

“ It is painful to turn from reviewing the progress of the European population and their descendants established in this portion of America, to contemplate the condition and prospects of the aboriginal tribes. It cannot, I fear, be affirmed with truth, that the difficult problem of reconciling the interests of an inferior and native race with those of an intrusive and superior one, has as yet been satisfactorily solved on this continent. ”

“ In numbers they did not at any time exceed 20,000 souls, if they ever reached that number. Precarious subsistence and incessant warfare repressed numbers in all the aboriginal tribes, including the Village Indians as well. ”

“ In every case of extensive immigration, with the excess of males and chiefly of hardy young adventurers, the same result is inevitable. On the American continent it has already produced a numerous race of half-breeds, descendants of white and Indian parentage, apart from that other and not less interesting “coloured race,” now numbering upwards of six millions in the United States alone, the descendants of European and African parentage. In the older provinces of Canada, the remnants of the aboriginal Indian tribes have been gathered on suitable reserves ”

“ The plan of removing the Aboriginal People who yet remain within the settled portions of the United States, to the country west of the Mississippi river, approaches its consummation. It was adopted on the most mature consideration of the condition of this race, and ought to be persisted in till the object is accomplished, and prosecuted with as much vigor as a just regard to their circumstances will permit, and as fast as their consent can be obtained. All preceeding experiments for the improvement of the Indians have failed. ”

“ No aboriginal nation or people has ever yet been discovered, to my knowledge, which has not professed to have a mysterious ancestry of a mythical character. It is interesting to mark the analogies and the differences between their various systems. Although among some tribes who have lived much in communication with the whites, their cosmogony has been confounded very much with the Mosaic or Scripture account, so that it is now often difficult to distinguish clearly the aboriginal from the imported, yet all the Americo-Indian tribes have more or less preserved their traditions on this subject. ”

“ For this purpose the United Band of Temperance Aboriginals was formed, blankets were distributed, moralising influences were brought to bear, and I am proud to be able to state my opinion, founded upon, statistics, that in the course of fifty years from the present time, not a single intoxicated aboriginal will be found in the length and breadth of the colony. ”

“ But the frequent conflicts that have occurred between the colonists and the Aborigines within the limits of the colony of New South Wales, make it, I think, sufficiently manifest that the Aboriginal tribes are neither a conquered people, nor have tacitly acquiesced in the supremacy of the settlers. The rights of the Aborigines of this district if the testimony which has been adduced as to the civilization and capacity be true, cannot, I should imagine, differ from those of other Aboriginal tribes within the limits of the same government. ”

“ The opinion assumed, rather than advocated, by a large class of writers on this and kindred subjects is, that the aboriginal inhabitants of any country are the proprietors of every part of its soil of which they have been accustomed to make any use, or to which they have been accustomed to assert any title. This claim is represented as sacred, however ignorant such natives may be of the arts or of the habits of civilised life, however small the number of their tribes, however unsettled their abodes, and however imperfect or occasional the uses they make of the land. ”

“ From such sources we derive the most authentic information we possess of that transition period in the condition and fortunes of many of our aboriginal tribes when the intrusion of Europeans upon them with their tempting goods and their rival schemes, which equally tended to dispossess them of their heritage, introduced among them so many novel complications. Some of the narratives of the whites, who, under the conditions just referred to, lived for years and were assimilated with the Indians, present us occasionally by no means unattractive pictures of the ordinary tenor of life among them. ”

“ If the household contained any captive of the aboriginal race, such a one, by renouncing his ancient customs and creed, and accepting the language, the faith and the law of the conqueror, retained life and comparative liberty. And, moreover, all ethnological investigations confirm the belief that the aborigines of India were of the negro, or what is commonly called African family. ”

“ For even if the aboriginal peoples of America could be assumed to be as strictly indigenous in their habitat as the negroid peoples are generally held to be in theirs, you have still to explain an isolated outburst of civilisation in Central America marking off an extraordinarily restricted area, comparatively speaking, from the vast continental expanses north and south. But the ethnical problems of the Negro and the American are not even so far analogous ”

“ The house-communities of the southern Slavs are full of interest for the student of the early phases of social evolution, but the Mandan round-house and the Zuñi pueblo carry us much deeper into the past. Aboriginal American institutions thus afford one of the richest fields in the world for the application of the comparative method, and the red Indian, viewed in this light, becomes one of the most interesting of men; for in studying him intelligently, one gets down into the stone age of human thought. ”

“ Some of these various objects are the more interesting, as furnishing, so to speak, the last proofs of the aboriginal skill which, in proportion to the increasing intercourse of the savage tribes with European civilization, is rapidly diminishing, and in all the principal colonies may be considered as already extinguished. ”

“ The purification of our aboriginal history, by casting out the mass of trash with which it is so heavily freighted, is forced upon us to save American intelligence from deserved disgrace. Whatever may be said of the American aborigines in general, or of the Aztecs in particular, they were endowed with common sense in the matter of their daily food, which cost them labor, forethought, and care to provide. ”

“ No tests of this sort have ever been made upon Indians, but such facts as the inventiveness of the Eskimo, the artistic development of the people of northern British Columbia and southern Alaska, and the relatively high civilization of the cold regions of the Peruvian plateau suggest that the Indian in this respect is more like the white race than the black. Perhaps man's mental powers underwent their chief evolution after the various races had left the aboriginal home in which the physical characteristics became fixed. ”

“ The large accessions to our Indian population consequent upon the acquisition of New Mexico and California and the extension of our settlements into Utah and Oregon have given increased interest and importance to our relations with the aboriginal race. No material change has taken place within the last year in the condition and prospects of the Indian tribes who reside in the Northwestern Territory and west of the Mississippi River. ”

“ There is in the nature of the aboriginal races a religious fervour which apparently forms an integral part of their character. They are also submissive and inoffensive, and it can be understood how any invading and warlike tribe would, without difficulty, conquer and control people having this mild disposition. ”

“ If the mother-in-law is near other members of her tribe at such a time, they endeavour to conceal her, but they are not at liberty to say that her son-in-law is approaching, nor may they mention his name. Even at the Aboriginal Stations, where the Aboriginals are, one may say, civilized, and to some extent weaned from their prejudices, and where nearly all their ancient customs are in disuse or forgotten, this one lingers; and a woman will for some reason always avoid the sight of a certain man of the tribe. ”

“ In the one case, the petty tribes among which the land was originally divided consented to mix, and dissolve, and be digested as it were together, in order to revive again for a more glorious career; while in the other, the aboriginal societies have adhered stiffly to their distinctive characters, and failing to submit to the regenerating process, cling together in indigested portions, rather than assimilate into one great whole. ”

“ It is essential that they should be saved from being destroyed by contaminating influences, because, after all, I dare say, even in the wildest parts of the north-west, the primitive native is suffering from contact with the lower type of white people—miners, stockmen and others—who invade his territory. ”

“ We are bound to remember that we are under the very gravest obligations toward them, and that the white race, in entering their country and requiring them to change their aboriginal mode of life, incurs the duty of providing for their future welfare and of taking care that in no respect whatsoever are their circumstances deteriorated by changes which are thus superinduced. ”

“ The letter began: "I beg to acquaint your Excellency that a successful intercourse has been effected among those sanguinary tribes of Natives who have for so great a period infested the settled districts, and known as the Oyster Bay, Little Swanport. Ben Lomond, Cape Portland, and Piper's River Aborigines." Mr. Robinson further ventures to assert that" the whole aboriginal population could be brought together by the same means that has hitherto been adopted." ”

“ It is not so much the ultimate destruction of the aboriginal race, as it now exists, that my uncle seems to have hoped might be prevented, nor did he apparently deplore that such a thing should take place eventually. ”

“ The aboriginal inhabitants are still numerous in the mountain districts, and along some parts of the eastern shores, but they, are said to be much oppressed by the Chinese colonists, and also by the authorities. ”

“ The colonists must not supplant and destroy the aboriginal inhabitants, nor must they come simply as teachers, but they must abide as those whose home is to be there, who as residents bring them the arts and practices of civilized and Christian life, and whose extended and continued example illustrates the power and benefits of the life they bring. ”

“ This, no doubt, in some degree has its influences, while, on the other hand, the native laws to which they were obedient are removed, and the power of the chiefs is destroyed, so that the aboriginal is placed between two influences, the one to which he had always been subject is destroyed, and a new law of which he knows nothing is substituted, and thus he is left in a position of doubt and perplexity, while the food, drink, clothing, and vices of the whites soon gain supremacy. ”

“ The causes which in other parts of the country have conspired to sweep the Indian from the path of the white man seem inoperative here, where the aboriginal proprietors are regarded rather as peons under the protection of the dominant race, and are allowed to set up their small camps of tulé lodges in convenient out-of-the-way places, where they spend the autumn and winter in hunting, fishing, and gathering seeds and piñon nuts, working at fair wages on ranches through spring and summer. ”

“ We have learned that the remnant of an aboriginal people, now living in the inhabited pueblos of the West, present us, in their primitive usage, with the fading outlines of a culture once widespread in the section of country we have examined. Many of the early sedentary tribes have vanished completely. Traditions state that other tribes have moved southward into regions unknown. ”

“ Although they are a different type of people from, and superior to the mainland aboriginal, being Polynesian in strain, and naturally village dwellers and horticulturists as well as fishermen, the Torres Strait tribes, whose islands have been closely reserved, afford an example of the degree to which natives can be developed to self-dependence. ”