LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

particularly among older residents. They’ve seen it all before, and they don’t expect anything to get better. Small, who owns some land and a few head of cattle, recently tried to buy land from a neighbor of his on the Crow reservation. The two had agreed on the price. But the Bureau of Indian Affairs blocked the deal. The BIA had recently had land on the reservation appraised as part of a buyback program – the federal government was going to trade one plot of land to the tribe for another – and the appraiser had put a higher value on the land than the price that Small and his neighbor had agreed upon. In fact, as Small tells it, the BIA told the appraiser to overvalue the land so as not to “screw the Indians.”

      Small is past the point of anger, though, and he laughs. He’s no economist, but he’s well aware, as he tells me, “Land is worth what someone will pay for it,” not what some outside appraiser decides.

      Similar stories could be told about jobs, health care, and land management on reservations. We’d like to think that stricter regulation or larger grants or other forms of government intervention or support would solve the many problems on reservations. But there are too many policies standing in the way of real improvements. It’s not only that the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education are perhaps the most inefficient of all federal bureaucracies. It’s not only that Washington officials are far removed from the people they serve – though 90 percent of the staff of these bureaucracies are Indians themselves.³ It’s that the BIA’s purpose is unclear.

      How did we arrive at this sad state of affairs? Between 1777 and 1871, the federal government signed over 400 treaties with American Indians. In the 1850s, the reservation system was devised as a way of ending the Indian wars and moving Indians off of land that white settlers wanted for farming, ranching, or mining. Tribes agreed to give up the land they occupied and move to reservations in exchange for payments and other benefits. Often, of course, these promises weren’t kept.

      Tribes often ended up far from their homelands. Not only were their new lands less desirable because they had fewer natural resources, American Indians had no idea how to live on them. But, in small ways, they began to adapt. This evolution in fact was already underway. In his book Sovereign Nations or Reservations? Terry Anderson notes, “Even before interaction with Europeans, Indian institutions were evolving as a result of changing resource values and technology. Perhaps as much as any other factor, the horse changed the lives of Indians. With the horse, transportation costs declined significantly as did the costs of harvesting buffalo. The result was that many otherwise sedentary tribes took to a more nomadic life.”⁴ In principle, there’s no reason that tribes couldn’t have adapted themselves again to a more sedentary life on the reservation, however unjust the reason they’d wound up there in the first place.

      But tribal autonomy had been compromised. American Indian communities’ ability to subsist often depended on the federal administrators assigned to each tribe, who treated them like children assigned to their care. For example, Indians weren’t permitted to leave reservations in search of food; thus, many tribes needed outside shipments of food and other resources in order to survive. This meant that any small delay of appropriations from the federal government could lead to mass starvation or armed conflict.

      Agents were supposed to supervise the relationship between Indians and white settlers – including any commercial activity – but by the late 19th century, their roles had shifted to include the forced assimilation of Indians into American culture. Agents oversaw the education (in English) of Indians, enforced a prohibition on alcohol, and ensured that “no Indian should be idle for want of an opportunity to labor or of instructions as to how to go to work, and, if farm work is not extensive enough to employ all idle hands, some other occupation should be introduced.”⁵

      Of course, this relationship was understood mostly in racial terms. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a popular as well as an academic fascination with racial classification. New waves of immigration from Europe, the post–Civil War period of reconstruction, and the Indian wars out west made white Americans hugely interested in and receptive to all sorts of theories of racial differences. The application of Mendel’s genetic theories about dominant and recessive traits in plants to human beings launched a wrongheaded and dangerous foray into eugenics.

      From the early 19th century, self-styled scientists had developed all sorts of theories about the inferiority of the Indian race. Samuel George Morton, a Philadelphia patrician who had two medical degrees, hypothesized that skull size was correlated with mental capacity. As a result of his phrenological studies, he concluded: “It must be borne in mind that the Indian is incapable of servitude, and that his spirit sunk at once in captivity, and with it his physical energy [whereas] the more pliant Negro, yielding to his fate and accommodating himself to his condition, bore his heavy burden with comparative ease.”⁶ One of Morton’s successors, Josiah Nott, wrote, “It is vain to talk of civilizing [Indians]. You might as well attempt to change the nature of the buffalo.”⁷

      Those who didn’t see race as destiny, though, had plenty of theories of their own. Many Christian missionaries saw it as their duty to “civilize” American Indians, almost as soon as settlers made contact with Indians – in the 18th century, the founder of Dartmouth College told his sponsors he’d “cure the Natives of their Savage Temper” and “purge all the Indian out” of his Indian students.⁸ As Fergus Bordewich says in his book Killing the White Man’s Indian, “Education was seen by well-intentioned Americans both as a moral imperative and as a practical gateway to modern civilization. However their optimism was often rooted in the naïve conviction that Indians were but blank slates waiting to be inscribed with the vigorous script of American civilization.”⁹

      Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts (who served from 1875 to 1893) wasn’t quite so insensitive, though, as Bordewich tells the story. In fact, Dawes considered the history of U.S.-Indian relations to be one “of spoliation, of wars, and of humiliation.”¹⁰ More importantly, he believed that Indians had the same capacity for education, independence, and economic success as their white brothers – if only the right policies were put in place.

      Dawes proposed to take all the reservation land that was held in common, divide it up among Indians individually, and put the rest up for sale to white settlers. He told a group assembled at Lake Mohonk in upstate New York, “If you will prepare the Indian to take care of himself upon this land that is allotted, you will find the solution to the whole question. . . . He shall have a home and be a citizen of the United States; shall be one of us, contributing his share to all that goes to make up the strength and glory of citizenship in the United States.”¹¹ After he proposed this allotment, one of his colleagues told the assembly, “I have more than once spoken of Senator Dawes’s severalty bill as the act of emancipation for the Indian. I believe when it is passed it will enroll his name with that of Lincoln as an Emancipator of those in bonds.”¹²

      In 1887, Congress passed the General Allotment Act, known as the Dawes Act, which surveyed Indian lands and divided them into parcels, allowing individual Indians to apply for ownership of plots of land (though many of these parcels weren’t actually given over completely). The head of a family could receive 160 acres. People under the age of 18 would receive 40 acres. Indians had four years to select the plot they wanted. After that, the secretary of the interior would select it for them. The federal government would hold the land “in trust” for the Indians, but after 25 years had elapsed, the Indians would own the land outright. Well, almost. According to the language of the Dawes Act, “At the expiration of said period the United States will convey the same by patent to said Indian, or his heirs as aforesaid, in fee, discharged of said trust and free of all charge or incumbrance whatsoever: Provided, That the President of the United States may in any case in his discretion extend the period.”¹³

      There are interesting similarities to the “40 acres and a mule” policy implemented after the Civil War to give freed slaves rights to abandoned land previously owned by slaveholders. Of course, in that case, the land was rarely allotted, and there was no federal money to purchase it for former slaves either. But the connection between owning land and having full citizenship was a strong one. Dawes and his colleagues in Washington clearly believed that if Indians got

Скачать книгу