Everybody whines about the treatment of the American Indian. What would a better solution have been than to put them on reservations far removed from any existing population areas? I know the reservations could have been administered better and the forced march could have been avoided. But the appointing of “indian lands” was just a temporary fix to appease everyone until the expansion needed the land. Was it just bad luck that the blackhills were found to have gold and OK was found to have Oil? Is there any examples in world history where a people with a completely different culture invaded a society and coexisted peacefully?
Invasion and peaceful coexistence? No.
Well, there were solutions other than the reservation system suggested (I’m assuming we’re talking about the tribes of the Great Plains). A number of people, among them, Isaac Parker, the “Hanging Judge”, suggested making what was at that time “Indian territory” (Now Oklahoma) a state, and extending citizenship to all Indians living in the territory of the US.
Alternatively, the U.S. could have recognized the tribes as independent nations, and actively enforced the protection of their borders, keeping out white settlers.
As each tribe was conquered, the US could have forced them to give up their own culture and adopt the US (European) culture. Such a policy would have been brutal. However, their descendents today might be better off than reservation dwellers.
First of all JustinH what do you mean when you said this:
This to me sounds like a quasi-brutal thing to say…These peoples the Native Americans were slaughtered for wanting to stay in the areas they knew, and to keep a way of life familiar and perfectly suited for them. I certainly hope you are not suggesting that whining about the treatment of American Indians is a bad thing.
Families, entire clans, women, children, were all slaughtered so white Europeans could come in and have a nice house on a lake or stream. How would you like it if people you had never seen before came into your home and killed your mother and father and little brothers and sisters and eveyone in your family for that matter? I beg your pardon JustinH no one is whining here. We are stating fact.
Incidently I am not a Native American.
Captain Amazing Says:
This is interesting, but not sure if it would had worked. I am not all that convinced that plains tribes who had vast territories could have recognized borders. Well I am sure they would have understood them but recognized them…not sure. It would have been very interesting seeing Gov’t soldiers protecting the Indians on reservations against white settlers…Wow think of the ramifications…
Phlosphr,
It was a terrible thing that was done to the Indians. my point is “what choice was there?”. and whining about it doesnt help. Soldiers rode into camps and shot everyone they could. Marauding bands of indians raided family farms and killed everyone the found. It was brutal but that was the situation. but was it preventable? should the behavoir of the govt at that time influence our decisions in todays world. was it akind to the genocides thoughout history? or is the natural way: stronger people move in and the weaker people move out or are destroyed.
You’re suggesting that this did not happen? That the schools established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs were centers of “Indian” culture?
As for adopting "US (European) culture, perhaps we should ask the Cherokee – from the
Encyclopedia Britannica
"After 1800 the Cherokee were remarkable for their assimilation
of white culture. <snip>. They adopted white methods of
farming, weaving, and home building. <snip>
A written constitution was adopted, and religious
literature flourished, including translations from the Christian
scriptures. An Indian newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, the
first of its kind, began publication in February 1828.
But the Cherokee’s rapid acquisition of white culture did not
protect them against the land hunger of the settlers. When gold
was discovered on Cherokee land in Georgia, agitation for the
removal of the Indians increased. <snip>. The [Supreme] court
rendered a decision favourable to the Indians, declaring that
Georgia had no jurisdiction over the Cherokees and no claim to their lands.
Georgia officials ignored the court’s decision, and Pres. Andrew
Jackson refused to enforce it. As a result, the Cherokees were
evicted under the Indian Removal Act of 1830 by 7,000 troops
commanded by Gen. Winfield Scott. "
Well, it was more the other way around. The US government would sign a treaty with a tribe, granting the tribe the exclusive right to a specific piece of land, and then, when white settlers violated those borders, there’d be a crisis that would usually end with the government signing another treaty with the tribe, granting them exclusive right to another piece of land, etc.
Um… not killing everyone in sight perhaps?
The “choices” (in descending order of likelihood and ascending order of morality):
- Europeans stay in Europe, establishing trade with the Americas.
- Having invaded, the Europeans avoid settled lands (leaving rather few places to establish colonies–at least until the Old World diseases had done their work).
- Having invaded and taken possession of disputed lands, the Europeans abide by their treaties and stay out of lands that they promised they would leave alone.
(It is possible that number 1 could be modified to indicate that Europeans could settle lands depopulated by disease. Even without the deliberate transmission of smallpox, many indian nations were nearly destroyed by measles and similar diseases.)
Places where the current residents tend to think that there were no indians, originally, are generally misled by the fact that the indians were pushed out ahead of the white invasion. Ohio was pretty well depopulated of Indians by the time the canals began bringing lots of settlers (and a few Ohio historic references talk about the displacement of the Delaware!): the Delaware were only in Ohio because they had been already displaced from their Atlantic coast homes. Aside from a few references to Pontiac’s Rebellion, there is little knowledge of indian occupancy of Michigan: they either assimilated or fled before the whites, leaving the impression among many that they were never even there.
The European settling of North America was an invasion. It was resisted by the overwhelming number of native inhabitants. As long as non-American immigrants were going to come, conflict and tragedy were inevitable. The conflict could have been less terrible, (e.g., Jackson could have submitted to the ruling of the Supreme Court), but it could not have been avoided.
Descending likelihood and descending morality.
So, because we feel some population pressure on the East Coast, we really don’t have any choice than to invade Canada, kill off a large segment of their population, move the rest into camps, and take over their land? After all, our army is stronger than the Canadian army, we are the stronger nation. Is this not preventable?
Justin, I’m not a big fan of after the fact reparations, but your OP is “WAS genocide the only solution,” not how should we address this today. You also seem to be concerned about the amount of “whining.” I consider this “never forget.” Genocide is part of human history. We should not let holocaust deniers win, nor should we let those events be minimized. Likewise, we should never minimize our own treatment of Native Americans.
Primarily Dangerosa I agree with you. We should never minimize our own treatment of the Native Americans.
However, why would you Justinh say:
Your kidding right? How could the behavior of the past Gov’t influence our decisions today – with regard to the American Native Indians??? They annhiliated them… What is there to discuss? They slapped them on reservations and made them sign treaties they did not even know how to sign.
So no Justinhthe actions of the government back then does not dictate our governments actions toward Native Americans today…We pretty much have an open society right now and most of the reservations that are still quite active, do active things in their communities. Such as ceremonial dances, traditional sweat lodges (depending on the tribe) etc…etc…What else do you want, what kind of changes do you think would have taken place, or still could for that matter…
TOM –
Well, the problem with No. 1 is that the primary impetus for expansion, if not for actual colonization, was land, not resources. And of course there’s really no way to acquire land and stay where you are. The problem with No. 2 is that many Native Americans (particularly the Plains Indians) did not have “settled lands” in the way that Europeans considered “settled” or would have recognized as “settled.” They were either migratory (seasonally) or nomadic. Do you get to keep land you only use for, say, four months out of the year? I totally agree with No. 3, though.
Genocide is never a solution!
They Europeans could have stayed the heck home. They didn’t need the land anymore than Hitler needed the Sudetland. Was it natural for the “stronger” Germans to destroy the “weaker” Poles? Just because you would like to have something doesn’t mean you have a right to take it. If the Europeans were running low on resources perhaps they could have tried to slow population growth or something.
I find your logic vile.
If you wish a complete view of the treatment of the native americans, you have to make the effort to look past the deliberate misinformation generated at that time to obscure the intentional invasion and seizure of inhabited lands.
The treatment of the Plains Indians represents but the final chapters in a long and sorry book.
Our government was unwilling to impose any limitations on European Americans’ greed. If a property was of any value, the Indians would have to go. Yeah, it would have been impossible for the Europeans to acknowledge that they couldn’t just take whtever they wanted. No reason to have to bargain in good faith with someone else, or pay market rates for what you can take.
What alternatives were sought other than land seizure and relocation or extermination? What attempts to co-exist were attempted? Many east coast tribes exhibited a willingness to adopt many European customs and lifestyles. But they were pushed west or killed like all the others.
This really is an unbelievably sad aspect of our history.
I wrote an article about one particular case of an indian sachem being forced off his land – Weequehela. It appeared in New Jersey History magazine about five years ago. As I state in that article, the New Jersey Indians (the Lenni Lenape) were officially bought off of all New Jersey land. It’s the only case I know of where the native Americans voluntarily and completely left a state as a tribe. It’s not as if they wanted to, but “European” population pressure was forcing them off. It’s a pattern repeated over and over across the country – Treaties are signed that the Indian land will be sacrosanct, but squatters show up on the land. Speculators “buy” land from the tribes from indians not empowered by the tribe to sell it, or settlers lay claim to portions of tribal land. There’s a war or a conference, and the Indian frontier gets pushed farther back by either the settlement or by being forcibly ejected. The government had been forbidding westward expansion ever since before there was one (the British didn’t want people pushing into Indian land), but the history of the US is one of Westward expansion and land speculation. The “draw” of the country was that it had all that “unused” land – and most people didn’t count the Indian claims as having any value. Manifest Destiny and all that. There were a few bright spots of peaceful transfer, like the NJ deal, or William Penn’s founding of Pennsylvania, but even these were cases of land being obtained from the Indians.
The Indians were forced onto their own land, but if anything desirable was found on those lands, the whites were in there in a hurry to exploit it. Most people wouldn’t, of course, but some would. This is still going on – I’ve read accounts of white fishermen poaching on Northwest Indian fishing streams, where the Indians have a negotiated Indians-only policy, or even challenging this in court. I’ve read of another case where construction workers went onto Indian hills – sacred ground, in this case – to cut timber. There’s a reason “reservations” are often poor, bleak places with few resources, and it’s not a pretty one.
So in some historical, Machiavellian sense, perhaps there was no other solution. But it’s a rotten one, driven by the greed of unethical individuals who will exist in some number even among “decent” folks.
This isn’t unique to the US – look at the treatment of the Aborigines in Australia. The South American nations like to claim that they treated their indigenous people more fairly, but there are plenty of counterexamples there, too.
You’re kidding, right? It was the same government operating under the same Constitution then as the one that we have now; only the names of the guys sitting in the seats have changed. Nor does the fact that the other party didn’t understand the treaties minimize or abrogate in any way our responsibility (moral, legal, and otherwise) to follow the terms outlined in them.
Jodi:
I would imagine so. What about rich people who have summer homes in the Hamptons and only use them from Memorial Day to Labor Day? Are you considering the presence of the house itself “use” of the land?
What happened in the Americas is no diff. than what has happened everywhere else throughout history: Two groups of people want the same thing, so they fight over it. The Europeans won here, thanks to their Guns, Germs, and Steel (a la Jared Diamond).
Genocide is usually averted by practical matters (i.e., it’s too hard to kill your enemy) rather than moral ones. Is there any other way this situation in the Amnericas could have turned out? Probably not. The USA was stronger than the Indians and wanted their land. The closest I can see would be that the USA (I don’t know much about Canada’s history with the Native Americans, so I won’t include it) might have been more sensitive to where the reservations were located, but that’s it.
As an example, I’m reading “The Northwest Coast” by James G. Swan, who lived on Shoalwater Bay in the Washington Territory in the early 1850s. He tells of a treaty meeting he attended between Governor Stevens and the coastal tribes, to negotiate the purchase of tribal lands and the relocation of the tribes to a reservation. The USA wanted to move 5 different tribes onto one reservation (in exchange for money, schools, doctors, sawmills, farm equip., food, a ban on liquor, etc.; the Indians would have still been free to wander wherever they wished, like any white man, but this reservation would remain inviolate, and the other lands would be sold/given to settlers over time); the tribes didn’t want to, b/c (a) they didn’t like each other, and would end up fighting and (b) they, naturally, wanted to live where they always had and remain close to the graves of their ancestors.
The alternative the tribes proposed: Each tribe would dwell on a small reservation on its own land (they tribes had been decimated by smallpox over the last century, and now numbered only a hundred or so persons each, so they didn’t need lots of land) and sell the rest of its territory to the USA.
The USA didn’t go for it. Might have eased some heartache late in the whole colonization game.
Are you proposing manifest destiny? Obviously, since the Europeans did push the Americans out of the way (where possible) or killed them (when that seemed more “practical”), we are simply playing what-if games, here. Nevertheless, it was possible that Europeans could have looked at their own ethics and decided to not invade. (It wasn’t very likely.)
Britain was certainly motivated by a desire for land (much more than Spain and France, at least), but the “relief” that Britain gained in lower population between 1607 and 1775 was negligible. They did not need the land; they simply wanted it.