FYI, Eagle, full text on http://www.voy.com/185381/ -- Taquan Tribune

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, [4] ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: Friday, November 13, 06:24:37am
Author: Anonymous
Subject: FYI, Eagle, full text on http://www.voy.com/185381/

Whither the American Indian?
by ALDEN STEVENS

A Century and a Half of Dishonor
1. SINCE THE BEGINNING OF WHITE OCCUPATION OF THE North American continent the Indian has been trampled upon and exploited. Treaties have been made and violated; tribes deprived of their land, their living, their customs and religion. In 1838 the Cherokees were mercilessly driven westward from their homes in North Carolina and Georgia clear across the Mississippi. A few hid out in the mountains, but only a few. It was winter, and the soldiers who drove them cared little whether they lived or died. The best thing was to get rid of them anyway. One third of the tribe was buried or left to rot along the way.
2. At about the same time. on the western plain, the fur trading posts systematically debauched the Indians with cheap liquor, cheated them of their furs and sometimes of their land. Did a tribe rebel? Soldiers came quickly and taught them their place. Usually their place was underground.
3. Every effort was made, over a long period of time, to get rid of the Indian; to kill him off, starve him and discourage him into race suicide, in an effort to solve the Indian problem by eliminating the Indian. It didn't work, and today the Indian is actually gaining in numbers at a rate faster than that of the white population of the United States.
4. When Helen Hunt Jackson wrote "A Century of Dishonor" in 1881, the fashion of making treaties with tribes, and then conveniently breaking them by writing new ones, had just been abandoned. The book tells a long story of broken promises, systematic destruction and de. moralization, exploitation by traders, railroad companies and politicians. How much the book had to do with it is hard to say, but shortly after it was published a new Indian policy came into effect, based on the land needs of the tribes. This was urged by Carl Schurz and approved by Helen Hunt Jackson and other good friends of the Indian. It was recognized that ruthless destruction must stop. Instead, the Indian should be assimilated, gradually losing his identity until he became indistinguishable from a white man. This done successfully, the Indian problem would disappear, for certainly the Indian was dying out at that time�or being killed off; and Indian culture could not possibly last more than a few years, anyway. As a matter of fact little was said about Indian culture, the general feeling being that there wasn't any.
5. The General Allotment Act was passed in 1887, and many people regarded it as the final solution of the Indian problem. Each Indian was to be given 40 to 160 acres of land, with the stipulation that it must not be sold for twenty-five years except with the consent of the government. Agents were supposed to give instruction in farming methods and help along a little during the first few years.
6. It is doubtful whether anyone suspected that this act would work out even one tenth as badly as it did. In the first place the Indians were expected to adapt themselves almost immediately to a completely new way of life. The very concept of land ownership by individuals was foreign. Few of the tribes had done any farming or were interested in doing any. The facilities for educating them to the new ways were pitifully inadequate.
7. When all the Indians on a reservation had received their allotments, the remainder of the land was thrown open for white settlement. Nobody thought this mattered very much, since the Indians were a dying race, anyway, and would never need the land, especially now that each had a nice farm of his own. The tribes lost 20 percent of all their land within two years. By 1933 they had lost 90 million of the 138 million acres they had when the act was passed�nearly two thirds. "Checkerboarding" of reservations, leaving blocks of Indian land completely surrounded by white holdings, led to the gradual break-up of tribal life without the substitution of any other kind of community life. Whites more often than not regarded the Indians as inferior, and almost never would the two cultures mix.
8. But probably the worst feature of the allotment act was its inheritance provision. On the death of the original allottee, the land was to be divided among his heirs. Why no one thought of the way this would work out is hard to say; maybe some legislators did think of it, but they didn't do anything. Indians sometimes live a long time, and when Charley Yellowtail dies at the age of ninety-nine, the number of heirs may be something little less than astronomical. Forty acres of land divided among, say, 120 heirs, gives each just about enough to pitch a teepee.
9. The Indian Bureau attempted to solve difficulty by renting and in some cases selling the entire parcel, and dividing the proceeds among the heirs. More often than not a white man was on the other end of the deal. The Indians were left landless, and the rental checks sometimes amounted to as little as two or three cents a year. Some Indians might have these microscopic shares in a dozen or more estates. The bookkeeping was about all the Indian Bureau had time to handle.
It was an impossible situation, of course, and quite insoluble under the allotment act. Fortunately for them, the act was never applied to some groups, such as the Pueblos in New Mexico, who retained their land as tribes and lost nothing through allotment.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]