Indians of the United States

“ In a Report for the protection of the Western Frontier, submitted to Congress by the Secretary of War, we have a very fair exposé of the conduct and intentions of the American Government towards the Indians. Although the Indians continue to style the President of the United States as their Great Father, yet, in this report, the Indian feeling which really exists towards the American people is honestly avowed ”

“ As the United States spread westward, it became evident that there was no place where the Indians could be forever isolated. In recognition of this fact the United States began to consider the Indians less as foreign nations and more as a part of our country. ”

“ But after making all due allowances for these conditions, it still remains difficult to understand how so great a number of languages have become established amongst a comparatively small population. At no time, since the discovery of America, have the total numbers of Indians within the regions now forming the United States, exceeded five hundred thousand men, women and children. In 1829, it was estimated that the Indian population slightly exceeded three hundred and thirteen thousand. ”

“ The early colonists had three enemies to contend with: the original inhabitants of the land, the Spanish settlers in the South, and the French in the North and West. Its dealings with the aborigines has been one continuous series of conflicts, the red man being driven back step by step until to-day he holds but a small fraction of his once great territory. Yet the Indians are probably as numerous to-day as they were originally, and are certainly better off in their present peaceful and partly civilized condition than they were in their former savage and warlike state. ”

“ Contrary to general belief, the Five Civilized Tribes, living in what was then Indian Territory, were working, building houses, fencing lands, and progressing. In other sections of the country as well there was progress to be noted. We do not need to confine our observations to the Apache country, Oklahoma or California in order to prove that the disinclination of many Indians to work, was entirely due to the fact that the Indian was suddenly removed from savagery and placed in civilization. Practically all Indians were self-supporting, prior to white domination. ”

“ They are plainly within its spirit, and, in our opinion, fairly within its words, 'any tribe of Indians.' Although sedentary, industrious, and disposed to peace, they are Indians in race, customs, and domestic government, always have lived in isolated communities, and are a simple, uniformed people, ill-prepared to cope with the intelligence and greed of other races. ”

“ In short, they are a peaceable, industrious, intelligent, honest, and virtuous people. They are Indians only in feature, complexion, and a few of their habits; in all other respects superior to all but a few of the civilized Indian tribes of the country, and the equal of the most civilized thereof. This description of the pueblo Indians, I think, will be deemed by all who know them as faithful and true in all respects. Such was their character at the time of the acquisition of New Mexico by the United States ”

“ These considerations are in all fairness to be taken into account when we examine, whether cursorily or thoroughly, the often humiliating and often discreditable course of policy which the United States Government has pursued with the Indians as a people, or with particular tribes of them.
Neither can there be any doubt that the Indians have in many ways, as a race, — with the largest comprehension of their tribes, and with reference to the amount of general good, — received a sum of benefits from our Government and its people. ”

“ The negotiations then went on quietly and deliberately, the Commissioners giving the Indians all the time they desired. The Indians were apprehensive of their future. They saw the food supply, the buffalo, passing away, and they were anxious and distressed. They knew the large terms granted to their Indians by the United States, but they had confidence in their Great Mother, the Queen, and her benevolence.
They desired to be fed. Small-pox had destroyed them by hundreds a few years before, and they dreaded pestilence and famine. ”

“ The Indians were not infrequently overborne or deceived by the agents of the government in these transactions; sometimes unquestionably, powerful tribes were permitted to cede lands to which weaker tribes had a better claim: but, formally at least, the United States accepted the cession successively of all lands, to which Indian tribes could show color of title, which are embraced in the limits of any of the present States of the Union except California and Nevada."—Report on Indian Affairs, 1872, pp. ”

“ During the War of 1812 large numbers of negroes in the South took advantage of the general excitement to make good their escape from bondage. The Indians welcomed them and shielded them from bands of slave hunters that made sallies into the Spanish territory for the purpose of recapturing them. In this the Indians were aided by the British, who saw an opportunity to make trouble for the republic on its southern border, while the United States troops were occupied on the Canadian frontier. A British agent built a strong fort on Spanish soil on the Appalachicola River. ”

“ Some months later, on March 26, 1929, the Board of Review in an opinion advised that Indians born in the United States who had naturalized in Canada come within the act of 1928 and General Order 109 because the term "Indian" is ethnological rather than political. ”

“ The hope, of course, is that eventually the Indians will be assimilated by the rest of our population and be able to live normal lives as United States citizens. Without intelligently directed help this process will take a long time, and during that period the Indians will continue to suffer. ”

“ Although there are still more than two hundred thousand Indians in the United States, by far the greater part of them have adopted the dress and customs of the white man and are engaged in peaceful occupations. ”

“ And, although these exertions may appear to be limited in their operation towards a reform, yet when we take into view the numerous tribes of Indians within and circumjacent to the United States, there is reason to hope, that the instruction already afforded to several tribes, and the advancement they have made in some of the most useful arts of civilized life, will have a stimulating influence on their more distant brethren. ”

“ The inevitable result is that they go back to the old life.”
253 CHAPTER XXV. INDIANS OF THE NORTHWEST The Indians of the great Northwest, are today of many diversified and small bands, chief among which are the Crows, Utes, Nez Perces, Paiutes, Northern Cheyennes, Blackfeet, and Yakimas, and various Columbia River bands. Linguistically they are Athapascan, Salishan and Shoshonean stocks with remnants of other stocks along the Pacific coast. Practically all of them live on reservations. ”

“ In a word, the Indian has always been a formidable savage, treacherous, cruel, and cunning to an extreme degree, no doubt, but a desperate and dogged fighter, with a natural instinct for war. It must be remembered, too, that he was far more formidable in 1790 than he is to-day, with the ever-rising tide of civilized population flowing upon him and hemming him in. When the Constitution came into being, the Indians were pretty well out of the Atlantic States, but beyond the Alleghanies all was theirs, and they had the unbroken wilderness as their ally and their refuge. ”

“ When the white man finally arrived in 1492, there were fifteen or twenty million Indians in North and South America. Some still lived by hunting, some by fishing, others by gathering the seeds, roots and other plant products offered by nature. But millions of the Indians were highly developed agricultural people. The Pueblo Indians of the Southwest, the Indians of the New England states whom our first colonists met, the Mayas and Aztecs of Mexico, the Incas of South America, and many others had made surprising progress in a comparatively short time. ”

“ From the best official estimates, there are in the country about 275,000 Indians. Of this number, 56,630, or only about one-fifth, receive subsistence from the government. Perhaps a majority of the whole number are self-sustaining. The tribes in the Indian Territory are said to compare favorably in moral, social and material condition with many of the white communities in the neighboring States. Schools, courts, church organizations and local legislatures are among their cherished institutions. ”

“ The conduct of the people of the States towards the Indians appears the more unreasonable and the more iniquitous, when it is considered that they are dwindling fast away of themselves; and that in the natural order of things there will not probably be a single tribe of them found in existence in the western territory by the time that the numbers of the white inhabitants of the country become so numerous as to render land one half as valuable there as it is at present within ten miles of Philadelphia or New York. ”

“ Robbed of their homes and hunting-grounds, and driven by the encroachments of the whites to distant regions, which hardly support existence, the Indians, day by day, gradually decrease before the accumulating evils of body and soul, which their civilized persecutors entail upon them. With every man's hand against them, they drag on to their final destiny; and the day is not far distant when the American Indian will exist only in the traditions of his pale-faced conquerors. ”

“ The Indians will learn their ways, will live as they do, will become as they are. There will be no more great war dances, no more fights with other powerful tribes; it will be as if the Indians had lost all bravery, all courage, all confidence.' He hated the voices, he hated the dream; but all his power, all his big medicine, could not drive them away. He was the strongest man on all the North Pacific Coast. ”

“ They are found in Kansas and Nebraska, in New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and upon the Pacific coast. The ninety or one hundred thousand Indians thus characterized will bear comparison, on the three points of industry, frugality, and sobriety, with an equal population taken bodily out of any agricultural district in the Southern or border States. In general intelligence and political aptitude they are still necessarily below the lowest level of American citizenship, if we exclude the newly-enfranchised element and the poor white population of a few districts of the South. ”

“ The great difference in the condition and character of the Indians over the Canada line and our own, can only be accounted for by the different treatment they have received. The Canadian Indians are, on the whole, a harmless, honest people, who, though they are gradually disappearing before the white man, bear him no ill-will, but rather the contrary. ”

“ Whereas Indian tribes have actively influenced the public life of the United States by continued cooperation with Congress and the Department of the Interior, through the involvement of Native individuals in official Federal Government positions, and by leadership of their own sovereign Indian tribes ”

“ The Indians of America owe very few obligations to the white people that have settled among them. The latter have endeavoured to exterminate the former, and by violence or fraud, to get possession of their territories. They have slaughtered a great part of the American Aborigines in open war, endeavoured to enslave the rest, and multiplied so rapidly, and spread themselves so regularly over the face of the transatlantic world, as to render the Indian mode of procuring subsistence exceedingly precarious. ”

“ Shortly afterwards he went to some of the inhabitants, and said to them. When white man’s child die—Indian man be sorry—he help bury him—when my child die—no one speak to me—I make his grave alone—I can’t no live here.—He gave up his farm, dug up the body of his child and carried it with him two hundred miles through the forest, to join the Canada Indians. ”

“ As we celebrate American Indian Heritage Month this year, we take note of the injustices that have been suffered by American Indian people. Even today, few enjoy the full bounty of America's prosperity. But even as we look to the past, we must also look to the future. Along with other Americans, American Indians and Alaska Natives will face new challenges in the coming century. We can ill afford to leave any of our people behind. Tribal America must figure as prominently in our future as it has in our past. ”

“ No society is immune from the darkest impulses of man. And too often religion has been used to tap into those darker impulses as opposed to the light of God. Three years ago in our state of Wisconsin, back in the United States, a man went to a Sikh temple and, in a terrible act of violence, killed six innocent people -- Americans and Indians. ”