Native Americans:
The 1800’s to the Present
It’s pretty hard to help others if you don’t know there is a problem or what the historical background to that problem looks like. It’s very hard to know what to do if you don’t first find out what current conditions look like, what kind of proposed solutions have already been tried, or what kind of efforts are currently underway to bring about change.
The betterment of living conditions for Native Americans has never been a simple matter. There are umpteen layers of governmental bureaucracy to navigate for even the simplest policy changes to be implemented.
Besides an unwieldy oversight structure, social reformers must also deal with the general population’s ignorance and indifference toward Native Americans, if not to say outright bigotry and kill-the-Indian syndrome.
Furthermore, Native Americans were relocated from their bountiful ancestral homelands (taken over by settlers) and forced onto the least desirable land; the “Badlands” of South Dakota are part of the Pine Ridge Reservation. The reservations tend toward hot and arid lands—baking summers and blizzard-filled freezing winters with deplorably inadequate clothing and shelter.
Such lands often are of little or no value for farming or any other kind of agricultural or horticultural enterprise. In short, Native Americans were forced to live on the least desirable reservation lands that no one else wanted while their own beautiful life-sustaining lands were stolen from them.
These lands sustained westward-moving settlers, either sold to them or made available through homesteading practices. The first wave of soldiers and settlers did the killing; the second wave took over the lands soaked with Indian blood and containing the sacred bones of their ancestors going back numberless generations.
Essentially, “after the surrender” the indigenous populations became wards of the government, somewhat like orphans in an orphanage. And, like orphans, people on the outside did not care much about what went on inside the “orphanage”—the reservation–where starvation conditions prevailed and abysmal abuses of authority went unchecked.
Indians on reservations could starve to death and no one seemed to notice. Although the government promised food rations, these were often slow to arrive. The rations that got through were much reduced in quantity and quality. Sometimes the rations were non-existent because dishonest Indian agents would steal these supplies and sell them for personal profit.
The Indian food rations were then much delayed (if anything arrived at all) and at times was so moldy as to be thoroughly spoiled and inedible: flour came with worms and meat with maggots. While the unscrupulous agents got rich many good Indian men, women, and children succumbed to diseases brought on by severe malnutrition or starved to death outright.
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Over the decades, the American government would change its “Indian policy” a number of times, often replacing one wrongfully inappropriate approach with a worse one. Whether oversight agencies treated the Indians like “wards of the court” or tried to encourage a measure of self-sufficiency, the results were the same: little or no improvement in the lives of the Indians.
All the terrible evils that accompany poverty and hopelessness continued unabated. Reservations tend to be isolated and distant locales in the first instance, far away from cities and state capitals where important decision-making takes place, to say nothing of economic and educational opportunities. These reservations might as well have been on another planet.
Disease, hunger, minimal education, and lack of jobs still plague the reservations. Alcohol-in-a-bottle, a drink introduced by Europeans, took a heavy toil as people left with no hope turned to the bottle to drown their feelings of desperation.
Even today, alcoholism remains a serious problem, while Native American teenage suicide rates have skyrocketed: an indication of what life must feel like when young people are forced to live without a sense that things will get better and that other people care. The rate of teenage suicide is about eight to ten times that of the national average.
Besides the traditional social ills associated with alcohol and drunkenness, the spread of drugs throughout the nation have created a whole set of new problems, especially for the younger generation. Where once a society of the bravest warriors protected the people, gangs now exist with the inevitable violence and anti-social behavior associated with such a life-style.
Besides the obvious physical deprivations, the years following the surrender involved tremendous cultural and psychological harm as well. Frequently Indians (today, “Native Americans”) were forced to give up their beautiful sacred ancestral homelands where the bond between the people and the land run deepest, until the two merge and become indistinguishable from one another. Their ancestors lived there for generations, and were buried in these lands.
The indigenous people were closely bonded with the land in every cultural, historical, and spiritual way imaginable. The loss of their traditional lands was thus doubly devastating, both in terms of economic and spiritual impact.
Instead of living on lands rich with bird, fish, and animal life—with water, meadows, hills, and forests where deer, bear, coyote, raccoon, and many other animals lived in large numbers—they were forced onto miserable reservation land that no one else wanted.
To add insult to injury (or perhaps to hasten their disappearance) the government often sent Native Americans to a climate opposite of their natural upbringing: the Apaches of the dry deserts of the Southwest were sent to Florida to live in tropical high humidity. Predictably, new diseases killed them at an astonishing rate–to say nothing of an incurable homesickness which contributed to their rapidly worsening physical and psychological plight.
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This pattern began many long years ago. In the 1830’s the Cherokee Nation (along with other tribes) were sent to Indian country, Oklahoma, with its flat mostly barren plains, from the lush green hills of Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, and other areas of the southeast.
The Navajo people, the Dineh, were taken from Canyon de Chelly in the Four Corners region and forced march to Bosque Redondo, an area wholly unlike the land they loved and the beautiful environments in which they had been raised.
They were forcibly removed from land rich in natural resources where they and their ancestors had thrived for many generations, to a place of hunger and deprivation, of starvation and disease. To make sure the Navajo moved and to break their resistance, the army killed their herds of beautiful horses and gratuitously uprooted and destroyed their peach orchards.
This violent-laced forced relocation broke the great cultural and spiritual bond between the people and their homelands, which created a deep ache in the heart that no medicine could fix. Moreover, the manner of the removal of the people was itself done in the most inhumane manner conceivable, often at the worst time of year when spring rains and flooding or winter storms and freezing snow made travel near impossible.
This pushed the death toll higher and made it even more tragic. One disaster occurred during the crossing of a river when an old boat, already overcrowded beyond capacity, sank with the loss of many lives:
It was not until October 16, 1837, that the last of the poor Indians arrived in New Orleans from Pass Christian. The fever was raging in town (New Orleans?), and they were hurriedly passed through. Six Hundred and eleven (611) Indians were packed on board the Monmouth and departed up river. Through negligent handling, at night by the Captain, she took a wrong course around Profit Island. This channel was reserved for downward bound vessels only. Unknowing, to the Captain, the Warren had the disabled Trenton in tow. They collided with the Monmouth and cut her in two. One half sunk immediately, and the other drifted some distance before it went down. Three Hundred and eleven (311) Indians died, with many of the survivors badly injured.[i]
In American history books we find the Cherokees “Trail of Tears” although other tribes have similar stories: the Navajo have “The Long Walk”.
Many of the First People died along the trail as those too weak or ill, too old or too young to keep up were left behind to die, or sometimes killed by soldiers or civilians in acts of petty and vengeful murder. There were as many as 4,000 deaths on the Cherokee’s “Trail of Tears” alone, out of an estimated 17,000 Indians forced to endure the march.
Settlers and soldiers killed Indians during battles, certainly, but they also killed them in non-military situations when an opportunity presented itself. In other words, the worst of the new breed of American settler killed individual Indians not involved in any fighting for purposes of revenge, for sport, or for genocidal mania.
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In American history, companies of soldiers, sometimes accompanied by armed civilians, killed bands of peaceful Indians “not engaged in hostilities”: friendly Indians, so nicknamed. Several such massacres of native peoples occurred in the West, including those at Sand Creek, Colorado in 1864 and Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1890.
These were cruel, barbarous, and unnecessary killings of the worst kind involving the murder of women, children, and old men—an excess of murderous rage (and hostile racist killings) the U.S. soldiers and settlers became all too comfortable with perpetrating.
Rarely was any soldier or civilian punished during these times when the U.S. Army were bent on conquering one tribe after another as fast as they could go. The pace slowed down only when they met determined and skillful resistance led by some particularly gifted Indian leader such as Tecumseh (Shawnee), Red Cloud and Sitting Bull (Sioux), Quanah Parker (Comanche) Cochise and Geronimo (Apache) or Chief Joseph (Nez Perce).
Eventually, superiority in numbers, war materiel, weaponry and the use of brutal tactics (along with the usual false promises and treachery) gave the American soldiers the upper hand. They drove the native peoples from their homes, burning their villages, crops and storehouses of winter food. Americans devised other methods to drive the Indians into starvation submission.
Armed with powerful rifles, people traveled by train to take part in the slaughter of millions of buffalo who once roamed the Plains freely. The buffalo were the main food source force for many tribes. Their slaughter forced the Plains Indians into starvation and submission.
Greed, racism, and militarism all combined to make the killing of Indians, including women and children, “acceptable”. In California money was offered and a job was created with the simple title “Indian killer”. Murders and massacres followed in the mountains of California, continuing a bloody tradition introduced and refined all across the land.
Such massacres and murders actions were seldom investigated, let alone condemned–if indeed a true account of such atrocities ever reached the ears of the general population at all. Even today, most Americans remain blissfully unaware of how cruel and gratuitous much of this violence truly was. As a U.S. general once stated: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”.
The attitude that predominated at the time was racist to the core: many Americans (of European descent) believed that Indians were racially inferior and would vanish entirely in time. It was “open season” on the Indians, to use a term usually reserved for the hunting of animals. All kinds of brutal attacks—beatings, rapes, murders—occurred repeatedly because soldiers and civilian settlers felt confident they would not be punished, as generally proved to be the case.
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Like Black slaves in the South, the Indian people would suffer every kind of brutal mistreatment with little or nothing ever being done to improve their lot or to punish those committing the most horrible acts imaginable!
The theft of Indian lands, the battles, the murders, the wanton and merciless attacks aimed at driving a whole race of people to the edge of extinction, became genocide: their only crime being a desire to live where they had always lived and to defend their homes and families from the onslaught of greedy Americans who were gobbling up everything in sight.
Unfortunately, the early telling of American history turned these facts upside down, labeling the Indians as “savages” and the Europeans as “civilized”. In truth, most Indians had developed a culture that protected the environment through wise use and recognized the independence and creativity of the individual.
They had a strong sense of conscience, integrity, and moral values; they developed a spiritual and philosophical outlook equal to that of any other people or nation, and lived in a society which placed the highest premium on life and peace.
The indigenous Native Americans were better at practicing the greatest virtues of humanity—honesty, loyalty, courage, kindness, compassion—than the invading arms-wielding land-grabbing Americans.
The Indians consciously understood the importance of each individual having a strong moral character; they strove to develop these virtues in themselves.
They did so successfully and without the frequent examples of human depravity that plagued the so-called “civilized” aggressors: the insatiable greed and thievery, the hypocrisy and deception, the willingness to commit unspeakable acts of brutality, the incessant wars and dishonest dealings, the irrational lies and virulent racism, and all the rest.
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For years the politicians and preachers, the teachers and journalists, have turned American history upside down by trying to justify the unjustifiable: they have resorted to every kind of foolish and impossible argument to make palatable this part of American history: the long, brutal, and murderous subjugation of the First Peoples of this continent—and it is time to support the educational movement to put a stop to such bald-faced lies once and for all.
We must condemn all such actions of conquest and oppression for what they are: crimes! These actions should have been condemned at the time but on one was willing to do so. As we cannot travel back in time, we must today, at the very least, take the lead in condemning them now under every legal and moral standard known to man.
The unlawful taking of a human life is heinous unjustifiable murder, especially when it abets the commission of still other crimes, such as the theft of Indian land or the cover-up of rape. This is not a new idea; such immoral criminal actions have been described this way in the justice system of America and Europe for many centuries, going back to the legal codes of Hammurabi (a Babylonian king who lived nearly 4,000 years ago) and everywhere else in the world where concepts of justice prevail.
Only when it comes to the history of Americans conquering Indian Nations do we find people going blind, deaf, and dumb. Suddenly their historical memories are erased as though they never heard of such legal codes or moral principles; suddenly we find, despite the great and noble words of the Declaration of Independence, anything goes when it came to the conquest, subjugation, and near-genocidal extinction of Native American peoples.
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America has many of the deepest blood-stained splotches of guilt on her conscience imaginable. As a nation, she will never be able to free herself from this god-awful past, toward a far more just and democratic future, until these lies are recognized for what they are.
America will not move forward morally if we, as a nation, continue to refuse to come to terms with the real facts of American history–however sad, tragic, and miserable those truths may be. What really happened must be told honestly, without attempting to excuse or rationalize by promoting racist stereotypes of Indians.
We must stop whitewashing the crimes of Americans who took part in the brutal slayings of Indian men, women, and children: our American Indian brothers and sisters.
We cannot change things overnight or turn American history right side up instantly but we can refuse to continue to take part in the centuries-long effort to subdue, oppress, and obliterate the history and culture of Native peoples.
We can refuse to participate in perpetuating the distorted and sanitized history of lies and crimes committed against Native Americans.
We can add our voices to the ever-expanding movement to tell the truth and seek a redress of grievances—to seek justice—for the First Peoples of this land.
Let us add our voices to this movement for justice so that future generations will not have to be ashamed of us, as we are ashamed of earlier generations of Americans who kept quiet while a whole people, a whole way of life, was destroyed due to the racism and greed of the first waves of colonists and settlers.
Let us speak and write only the truth. Let future generations know we have seen through the lies and will not tolerate them any longer.
Let a future generation of Americans acknowledge our desire to be honest and virtuous human beings insofar as our consciences—our pledge to be ever truthful–will allow us!
[i] http://indians.passchristian.net/monmouth_sinking.htm. Retrieved on July 23, 2017.
