4- NativeAMericans

The Indian Question:
-The vision of the Puritans: Indians are associated with the devil.
“Indian heathenism and alleged laziness came to be viewed as
inborn group traits that rendered them naturally incapable of
civilization.”
-Their decimation due to epidemics, such as smallpox,was
interpreted by colonists as a sign of God so they could take
the land.
-For John Winthrop God was making room for colonists.
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query
Did Indians have any future?
-Thomas Jefferson 1781: Indians were to be civilized or exterminated.
-Civilization=converting into farmers. Indian societies and cultures
viewed as residual. Their only chance was to adopt the culture of the
white man, the one that had proved successful on the continent.
-Jefferson’s secret agenda: make the indians run into debt so they had
to sell their lands.
-What if they refused to become farmers? That choice was interpreted
as recalcitrant barbarism. In that case they were subject to removal
or extermination
Andrew Jackson, veteran from the Indian Wars against the Creeks,
becomes president in 1828
-The policy: support the states in their abolition of Indian units and
laws. Accordingly, states open Indian territory to settlement. Jackson
claimed the federal government could do nothing.
--The eternal question:
what to do with them?
Jackson’s facts:
Efforts to civilize the Indian had failed
They had become a “wandering” state
They had set up “independent” nations which could not be tolerated
Jackson’s suggestion:
REMOVAL ACT (1830). Affecting 70 000 Indians:
Provided “an exchange of land with any of the Indians residing in
any of the states and territories, and for their removal west of the
River Mississippi”.
The act set up a district west of the Miss. River “to be guaranteed
To the Indian tribes as long as they shall occupy it”
They would be free to live in peace “as long as the grass grows or
Water runs”
The Trail of Tears as painted by Robert Lindneux in 1942.
Interpretations of the Removal Act 1830
It was Jackson’s just and humane solution; a way of protecting
Indians/whites. Done in the name of progress and civilization.
Jackson’s reasoning:
“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 …
filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?”
Alexis de Tocqueville as witness:
“Three of our thousand soldiers drive before them the wandering
races of aborigines; they are followed by the pioneers, who pierce the
woods, scare off the beasts of prey, explore the courses of the inland
streams, and make ready the triumphal march of civilization”
I confess that in America
I saw more than America;
I sought the image of democracy itself,
with its inclinations, its character,
its prejudices, and its passions,
in order to learn what we have to fear
or hope from its progress.
www.tocqueville.org/
The Cherokee’s Trail of Tears
Names the process of relocation in the Oklahoma territory, then
occupied by other Indian tribes.
Cherokees were dispossessed and removed violently and cruelly.
They were not allowed to take anything with them.
March to Oklahoma in the heart of the winter--sickness and high
mortality rates
The meaning of the removal: separation from a sacred place.
The Plains Indians and the Buffalo
The threat of civilization: the railroad--iron horse--traversing the
country.
Once more: What to do with the Indians:
Exterminate them or subject them to the laws and habits of industry.
Railway companies lobbied the government to secure rights of way
The effects of the railroad:
Frightened the buffalo from the plains where it used to graze. Plains
transformed into buffalo killing fields (no food).
The Ghost Dance 1890
Believed to bring back the restoration of Indian ways, land and the
Buffalo
What is the ghost dance?
--Native Americans do not consider ghost-dancing a separate
religion, but a form of prayer that can be practiced by any tribe.
--It enjoyed only a short period of intense popularity and was said to
have died out, but ghost-dancers can still be found today,
particularly among the Lakota and some east-coast tribes.
Wovoka – Paiute spiritual leader
and creator of the Ghost Dance
--The whites feel intimidated--Sitting Bull dies in the exchange of
Gunfire.
--Big Foot, Sioux chief, tries to escape. Together with his people,
he is escorted to a camp near a frozen creek called Wounded Knee
--Wounded Knee Massacre
Wounded Knee Massacre
Chief Big Foot lies dead in the snow.
He was among the first to die on December 29, 1890
Civilian grave diggers bury the Lakota dead in a mass grave
Francis Amansa Walker--Father of the Reservation System
Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1871–72)
Relocation on reservations--free fire zones
Advantages of reservations:
--would provide “a rigid reformatory discipline for Indians”
--Indians would not be allowed to “escape work”
--Indians would be required to acquire industrial skills
Why the program was necessary:
--Indians were “unused to manual labor”
--Their deficiencies: forethought, intellectual tastes, self-discipline,
Self-control of their strong animal appetites
--They were like children and needed to be shown the way to
civilization
Indians were corralled in a number of ways
--culturally, intellectually
--also physically: they could not leave the reservation without a permit
John Collier and The Indian New Deal -1933
--Appointment as Commissioner of Indian Affairs by Franklin
Roosevelt in 1933
--Recognized that “We Took Away Their Best Lands, Broke Treaties”
--The new philosophy: let the Indians be Indians
--As a critic of individualism, Collier admired the sense of community
he found among Indians. The Indian way of life had a lot to teach
whites.
--A critic of the allotment policy and its side-effect: the destruction of
the Indian communal way of life. For Collier, Allotment had been
“much more than just a huge white land grab; it was a blow, meant to
be fatal,at Indian tribal existence”
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5058/
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu
/native_voices/voices_display.cfm?id=95
John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs
His critique of government boarding schools