The Wild Frontier (4 page)
Authors: William M. Osborn
I
N THE
1870s Selden N. Clark of the Bureau of Indian Affairs published a pamphlet that concluded that the theory that the Indian was destined to decline and finally disappear “should probably be abandoned.” This created a “minor sensation.”
78
Many were beginning to take this view. On the other hand, Indians were sometimes receiving respectful treatment in the courts. Two Poncas and some Sioux were visiting the Yankton Reservation in 1875. The Sioux attacked the Poncas outside the reservation’s agency, killing one and seriously wounding the other. Charges were brought, but the case was dismissed on the grounds that the court had no jurisdiction over crimes committed by one Indian against another in Indian country.
79
Four years later, a group of Poncas were taking the son of Chief Standing Bear to his boyhood home for burial. Due to government bungling, they were detained by the military. Indians had been generally excluded from the judicial system until federal judge Elmer Dundy held
that the Poncas were “persons” under the Constitution and could apply for a writ of habeas corpus. He released them from detention. The realization that Indians were now afforded some protection by the judicial system “jolted” the country.
80
After that decision, Robert G. Hays concluded, the Poncas (and the settlers) understood that “the Indian is just as good as a white man, as long as he behaves himself,” at least in a court of law.
81
Still, Indians were seen as a menace by some. The
New York Herald
called for their extermination in 1879. “The continent is getting too crowded.” But William Brandon in
Indians
correctly observed that “no one really took that seriously anymore.”
82
In spite of this progress, in 1881, the
Times
reported that the Colorado legislature considered a bill “for the destruction of Indians and skunks.” A committee recommended that it pass. “To class Indians and skunks together is the habit of the free and boundless West. Only the sickly sentimentalists of the East demur at such a classification.”
83
The bill did not pass. That same year, “several hundred thousand people addressed a memorial to Congress asking that body to keep faith with the Indians.” A significant number of people thus supported the Indian cause.
84
The perceived success of the Carlisle and Hampton Indian schools, where young Indians were sent to be “civilized,” convinced the country that Indians were capable of receiving a Christian education. President Grover Cleveland told Congress in 1888 that the “capacity of the Indian no longer needs demonstration.”
85
T
HE
Times
editorialized after the Battle of Wounded Knee that it was “proof of a high degree either of desperation or of fanaticism that the captives should have preferred to trust the chance of resisting an irresistibly superior force of whites. They must have known when they emptied the rifles they were required to surrender into the ranks of armed soldiers that surrounded them that they were sealing their own doom.”
86
James Wilson in
The Earth Shall Weep
asserted that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (who died in 1894) described Indians as “this sketch in red crayons of a rudimental manhood[,] to keep the continent from being a blank until the true lord of creation should come to claim it.”
87
Near the end of the century, the
Times
decided that culture even among the civilized tribes was seldom deemed noteworthy and that the Indian “was not a particularly creditable specimen of humanity.”
88
——
T
HEODORE ROOSEVELT
was the last president to undergo a change in attitude toward Indians. Shortly before he became president in 1901, he said, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely in the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.”
89
His position was that the Indian was a savage, the Anglo-Saxon a civilized man, and civilization always had priority over savagery.
90
However, Roosevelt’s views soon altered. After he took office, his policy was to prepare Indians for freedom from the reservation system while protecting them from their inexperience in the hard world.
91
He later said that each Indian should be given a piece of land and “thrown loose to shift for himself, as a citizen amongst other citizens, as soon as he can be prepared for the ordeal.”
92
In his diary, moreover, he wrote that he “regretted he didn’t have a strain of Indian blood” in his veins.
93
I
N THE
decades from the 1920s to the 1940s, Indians began agitating in a way that did not sit very well with most whites and perhaps with most Indians. Cayuga chief Deskaheh went to the League of Nations in 1922 unsuccessfully seeking recognition of his tribe’s sovereignty. The Sénecas issued a declaration of independence to the state of New York in 1939. In World War II, although many Indians fought and died heroically for the United States, the Iroquois League independently declared war on Germany; others, including Iroquois, Ute, Papagos, Hopi, and Seminole, ignored Selective Service and were put in jail.
94
Many whites found renewed Indian activism in the 1960s unacceptable. Those activities seem to have divided Indians as well and even retarded Indian progress. Peter Matthiessen’s
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse
reported that they were directed by the radical American Indian Movement, or AIM. Its predecessor was founded in 1962 by 2 Ojibway inmates of Minnesota’s Stillwater State Prison, Clyde Bellecourt and Eddie Benton Banai. In 1968 Bellecourt, Banai, George Mitchell, and Chippewa Dennis Banks formed AIM.
95
AIM people were connected with a number of events ostensibly meant to further the Indian cause. They occupied the former federal prison on Alcatraz Island in 1969. They occupied federal buildings in Littleton, Colorado; Fort Lawton, Washington; Mount Rushmore; Stanley Island; Ellis Island; Plymouth Rock; a replica of the
Mayflower;
and
a Coast Guard station in Michigan. According to Wilson, in 1971 AIM established the International Treaty Council, which tried to win recognition of Indian sovereignty from the United Nations and other countries.
96
There was a march on Washington called the Trail of Broken Treaties Caravan in 1972 and a subsequent 6-day demonstration during which AIM occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices and destroyed public files.
97
The National Tribal Chairmen’s Association, headed by Webster Two Hawk, chairman of the Rosebud Sioux, denounced the occupiers. AIM carted off dozens of documents and looted and defaced the building.
98
In 1973 AIM and its supporters occupied the Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation, where the Wounded Knee Massacre had occurred. AIM wanted to throw allegedly corrupt tribal leaders out of office. They held out for 71 days, and during that time 2 Indians were killed and a United States marshal wounded. Two years later, there was another shoot-out at Pine Ridge, and 2 FBI agents were murdered.
99
William T. Hagan, author of
American Indians
, reported that these and other AIM activities caused whites to “become alarmed at the violence and property destruction associated with” the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Pine Ridge Reservation. There was a “shift in public opinion—a white backlash” suggesting that “such confrontations had become counter-productive, particularly for a people increasingly dependent upon the good will of Congress.”
100
Edward Lazarus, who had a chapter in his book about AIM and related movements, concluded that some of these events further deepened divisions among Indians.
101
Middle-of-the-road tribal people were sometimes affronted by the fundamentalist fervor of “born-again Indians.” One Sioux said, “I don’t need some urban activist to come and tell me how to be an Indian. I’ve always been an Indian. I don’t have to put on feathers to prove it.”
102
And Washburn observed this about AIM:
AIM does not represent a majority viewpoint among Indians…. The dominant white majority, upon whose goodwill any major change in Indian policy is ultimately dependent, does not stand behind the radical outlook presented by AIM…. AIM leaders at Wounded Knee proved unable to relate their demands to the context of American political realities, thereby letting slip an opportunity to promote Indian advancement. In their assault on elected tribal leaders like Richard Wilson of the Oglala Sioux, and by their demands that such leaders be summarily removed and the elective system abolished, AIM leaders
threatened one of the major props of Indian autonomy and self-government…. Even AIM’s cavalier asssumption that its members could not be hurt by the white man, no matter how violently they acted in destroying the symbols of his authority, smacks of the belief of the Ghost Dancer followers … that their Ghost Shirts were invulnerable to the white man’s bullets.
103
In the last few decades, the view of the western migration and of Indian history has changed dramatically for some, from the belief that the migration was heroic to the belief that it was a deep tragedy. This radical transformation came about in part because of the 1970 Dee Brown book,
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
, which “stunned the nation”
104
and exerted a great influence on white attitudes about Indians. Wilson said that book, “perhaps more than anything else, helped to promote the more sympathetic view of Indians.”
105
The revised view also came about because of the political correctness movement. Almost everyone remembers the turbulent sixties and seventies and the Vietnam War protestors, many of whom are now college professors and leaders in the political correctness movement, which admittedly has contempt for American history. Indians hold a special place in politically correct hearts. Columnist John Leo described the movement as an attempt “to portray American Indian cultures as unremittingly noble, mystical, gender-fair, peace-loving, and living in great harmony with nature.”
106
One’s attitudes toward Indians today will as likely as not be governed by one’s political views. Liberals argue that the present dismal state of the Indian results from the failure of government to remedy mistreatment. Conservatives argue that their state results from Indian failure to adapt to American society. Something can be said in support of both positions.
CHAPTER 2
Some Indian Cultural Characteristics
S
ome view Indians as angels, while others view them as devils. (The former view is advanced by numerous recent motion pictures and television programs.)
1
The truth of course lies somewhere between heaven and hell.
The hundreds of Indian tribes that existed in 1622 were diverse in many ways, yet they also had many common characteristics. Edward H. Spicer said in
The American Indians
that
in the early 1600s at least 75,000 American Indians lived along the coast from Maine to North Carolina. Divided into approximately 40 groups, they differed from one another in language, customs, and sense of collective identity. However, all of their languages belonged to one linguistic family—Algonkian—and they shared many basic cultural traits, such as the small-scale cultivation of corn, beans, and squash; a religious belief centered on the acquisition of supernatural power through shamans; and a strong tradition of absolutist and hereditary political authority with tribute payments to a principal headman.
2
Angie Debo noted that these characteristics have influenced their history and persist to the present day in many of their descendants.
3
Clark Wissler came to the conclusion more than 50 years ago that “the white man defeated the Indian, traded with him, sometimes married his women, usually held his opinions and ways in contempt,
but never understood him”
(emphasis added).
4
George Catlin, the famous Indian portrait painter, gave up his law practice, painted portraits in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and then spent from 1831 to 1839 visiting Indians from 48 tribes. He was armed with letters of recommendation from President Jackson and his secretary of war. By the time he returned, he had additional recommendations—he had been made a medicine man in 3 tribes because of his magnificent Indian portraits. He wrote a book about his experiences called
Letters and Notes.
Catlin called himself a “professed philanthropist”
5
and an Indian advocate. He respected and admired them: “The North American Indian in his native state, is an honest, hospitable, faithful, brave, warlike, cruel, revengeful, relentless—yet honourable, contemplative and religious being.”
6
If the reader could only read one book about the character of Indians during this period, Catlin’s book is the one to read.
A
PRINCIPAL
common characteristic of Indians, love of warfare, understandably related directly to atrocities. Several writers and historians, however, have reached the stunning conclusion that the Indian tribes were peaceful. Tebbel and Jennison said as much in
The American Indian Wars:
Before the white man came, the vast, magnificent, and comparatively empty region that is now the United States was inhabited by one million Indians, organized into six hundred distinct societies and scattered from the desolate wastes of the Far North to the hot swamps of the South; from the great forests of the East to the plains, deserts, and mountains of the West. These Indian societies existed in balance with themselves…. The tribes of eastern North America were relatively free of warfare.
7
