Native Americans

“ As part of our American family, Native Americans will never be left behind under this Administration. Together, we will strengthen the relationship between the United States Government and Native Americans.
Native Americans are a testament to the deep importance of culture and vibrancy of traditions, passed down throughout generations. This month, I encourage all of our citizens to learn about the rich history and culture of the Native American people. ”

“ The culture and heritage of our native Americans are unique. In renewing the spirit and determined dedication of the past 200 years we should also join with our native Americans in rebuilding an awareness, understanding and appreciation for their historical role and future participation in our diverse American society. ”

“ We must also sympathize with the Whites in Kenya Colony in their opposition to a filling of their country with cheap Hindu labor. As Americans we can understand the Negro and recognize his cheerful qualities, but we can have little sympathy with the Hindu whom we have expressly barred from our Pacific Coast. These Hindus, with the Chinese, have ruined the native races of many of the Polynesian Islands. They have been for ages in contact with the highest civilizations, but have failed to benefit by such contact, either physically, intellectually, or morally. ”

“ As the first people to call our country home, American Indians and Alaska Natives have a noble history in this land and have long shaped our Nation. During National American Indian Heritage Month, we celebrate our commitment to respect and preserve the rich Native American traditions and cultures. ”

“ Throughout our history, American Indian and Alaska Native peoples have been an integral part of the American character. Against the odds, America's first peoples have endured, and they remain a vital cultural, political, social, and moral presence. ”

“ All this is encouraging, and leads us to hope that this people may escape the general destruction which, in North America especially, has fallen upon the aboriginal tribes with the advance of the Anglo-Saxon race. ”

“ Present Restricted Domain.—The Arctic seaboard, Greenland, Alaska; numerous reservations and some unsettled parts of the United States and Canada; most tribes of Mexico, Central and South America are partly intermingled with the whites and blacks and still partly in the tribal state. By far the greater part of the native tribes never progressed beyond the savage state, except in the United States and Canada, where during the past quarter century, and particularly during the last decade, the Indians have rapidly advanced in civilization. ”

“ There will be a most graphic reproduction of an American Indian camp, showing the red man in his natural state. Then there will be two acres devoted to the American Indian as he is to be seen under the paternal care of the government. Types of all the leading tribes will be portrayed in their native habitations and engaged in their characteristic industries. ”

“ Since we have drawn the distinction between adapted and indigenous folk-song, the question naturally arises whether there exists in America a truly indigenous folk-song at all. It has been agreed that America, having been colonized by Europeans, possesses no native culture whatever, except such as the Indians may have had. The Indian, indeed, has the best claim to the name American, being indigenous, or at least so early a colonizer as to have constituted virtually a native race. ”

“ American Indians and Alaska Natives have made invaluable contributions to our common heritage; in every field of human endeavor, from the arts, sciences, and humanities to politics, religion, and public service, they have added immeasurably to the strength of our civilization. ”

“ The Reservations of the various Indian tribes are scattered irregularly over the United States; from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota on the north and north-west, away to the Territories on the other side of the Rocky Mountains, down to New Mexico and Arizona, there being none in the southern states bordering the Atlantic. But there are Red Men of different tribes located, as the Americans would say, in the States to the east, such as New York. ”

“ They are therefore known to the native Indians wherever they exist, and we may be the more sure that they do not spread over the intervening areas where they have never been found, and where the natives know nothing of them. ”

“ For several years past the government of the United States, as is well known, has been engaged in removing the Indian tribes, resident within the States, to tracts of wild but fertile land, situated beyond the verge of white population. ”

“ Whereas in the infancy of the United States, the founders of the Republic expressed their desire for a just relationship with the Indian tribes, as evidenced by the Northwest Ordinance enacted by Congress in 1787, which begins with the phrase, `The utmost good faith shall always be observed toward the Indians’ ”

“ 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 native Indian tribes were retreating before this irresistible march of the white man, or were settling on reservations selected for them by the government. For years they retained their right to roam about, and kill the game which still abounded, but which was rapidly becoming less as the white settlements increased. In addition to their hunting and fishing, the industrious Indians added to their comfort by manufacturing native baskets, brooms, handles for axes, hoes and similar articles, which they sold to the friendly settlers for food and clothing. ”

“ However little we may be interested in the American Indians personally, their experience touches us more nearly, as an exemplification of the experience of our own ancestors. Our primary institutions root themselves in a prior gentile society in which the gens, phratry, and tribe were the organic series, and in which the council of chiefs was the instrument of government. The phenomena of their ancient society must have presented many points in common with that of the Iroquois and other Indian tribes. ”

“ Yet the Indian of the American wilds is no more primeval than his forests. Beneath the roots of their oldest giants lie memorials of an older native civilisation; and the American ethnologist and naturalist, while satisfying themselves of the persistency of a common type, and of specific ethnical characteristics prevailing throughout all the widely-scattered tribes of the American continent, [2] have been studying only the temporary supplanters of nations strange to us as the extinct life of older geological periods. ”

“ We, the Creeks and Cherokees, have the same kind of title and patent for our lands from the United States, which guarantees this Territory to us for a home, under our own form of government, by people of our own race, as long as 'grass grows and water runs.' And I think, therefore, we shall live forever on our lands. I should like—and I express the wish of our people—that every Indian tribe should come here and settle on these lands, that this Territory may become filled up with Indians, to the exclusion of others who may be inimical to our race and interests. ”

“ Between these tribes, and connecting the extremes by insensible gradations, were the partially Village, and partially Horticultural Indians; such were the Iroquois, the New England and Virginia Indians, the Creeks, Choctas, Cherokees, Minnitarees, Dakotas and Shawnees. The weapons, arts, usages, inventions, dances, house architecture, form of government, and plan of life of all alike bear the impress of a common mind, and reveal, through their wide range, the successive stages of development of the same original conceptions. ”

“ As we gaze on in mute admiration, we behold the race of the red man receding westward before that same power pictured in this wonderful face: now the Indian tribes pass the Rocky mountains, they come within the roar of the Pacific, and, growing less and less, they at last vanish away into the uncertain mists of the ocean—a lost people, who have served the purpose for which they were created, and disappeared from our continent to make room for a nobler humanity. ”

“ The first two classes of tribes always held the preponderating power, at least in North America, and furnished the migrating bands which replenished the ranks of the Village Indians, as well as the continent, with inhabitants. It remained for the Village Indians to invent the process of smelting iron ore to attain to the Upper Status of barbarism, and, beyond that, to invent a phonetic alphabet to reach the first stage of civilization. One entire ethnical period intervened between the highest class of Indians and the beginning of civilization. ”

“ Nor is it necessary to consider those, now extinct, that occupied the country when first settled by white men. For the same general characteristics, now presented, pertain to all the North American races. The Indian tribes are rapidly retreating or vanishing before the steady, irresistible march of civilization, and the growing grandeur of the great Republic in North America. The line, where the echoes of the Indian’s yell blends with the shout of advancing pioneers and the sound of the wood-chopper’s axe, is continually moving westward. ”

“ It is expedient with respect to the condition of the North American Indians, to take into consideration some of the circumstances relating to their languages, customs, and superstitions; particularly such of them as may appear to have remote analogies with the observances of other races, or with the more advanced state of civilisation that existed in the fifteenth century, among the tribes who had conquered the aboriginal inhabitants of Mexico, Central America, and Yucatan. ”

“ The prospects of living on amicable terms with the numerous and formidable tribes of Indians infesting our frontier borders, in fact, occupying the whole extent of country from the British possessions in the north to Mexico in the south, and from beyond the Rocky mountains on the east to the Pacific ocean on the west, is certainly anything but flattering. ”

“ He has come, if he does not lie, from a far country, a land very beautiful to the eye, a land of many villages and much people, but who are not so wise and warlike as we are. He has left his father and mother, and wife and children, and the bones and burial-place of his ancestors, to listen to the wisdom of the Indians, and to be instructed by them in the history of their tribes. ”

“ The evidence of Indian occupation and cultivation throughout the greater part of this area is sufficient to suggest the hypothesis that the Indian here first attained to the condition of the Middle Status of barbarism, and sent forth the migrating bands who carried this advanced culture to the Mississippi Valley, to Mexico, and Central America, and not unlikely to South America as well. ”

“ 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. ”

“ THE LAW OF HOSPITALITY AND ITS GENERAL PRACTICE.
When America was discovered in its several parts the Indian tribes were found in dissimilar conditions. The least advanced tribes were without the art of pottery, and without horticulture, and were, therefore, in savagery. But in the arts of life they were advanced as far as is implied by its Upper Status, which found them in possession of the bow and arrow. Such were the tribes in the Valley of the Columbia, in the Hudson Bay Territory, in parts of Canada, California, and Mexico, and some of the coast tribes of South America. ”

“ 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. We are at peace with all of them, and it will be a source of pleasure to you to learn that they are gradually advancing in civilization and the pursuits of social life. ”

“ These immigrants, the ancestors of all the tribes of Indians, spread from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Over most of the territory in both Americas they remained at the hunting stage of savage life, although they generally supplemented their hunting by a certain amount of cultivation of the soil, and although in places they developed into advanced and very peculiar culture communities. ”

“ I could tell you a great deal more about the Indians, especially of the Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws, and other tribes, which have been removed by the government of the United States to a fine country northwest of Louisiana, where they have schools and churches, and cultivate their lands, and live much like white people. ”

“ It is surprising how few details connected with the races that inhabited the older settlements of our country are reached even by the researches of Historical Societies. The materials for the future poets and historians of America are in this department singularly meagre, though it might almost be supposed that the very tracks of the retreating tribes might at this early day be still visible on the soil. Wherever any particulars of the intercourse between the first settlers and the Indians are preserved, they are highly curious, and often very diverting. ”