One solution that once had some acceptance in the United States was intermarriage. I believe that men such as Thomas Jefferson had advocated that frontier whites and Indians could mix to the point that they would become a single “American” people. However, “scientific” racism took hold after the early 1800’s, and seperation and Indian removal became the policy.
This “solution” was essentially what happened in much of Latin America (esp. Mexico and Chile), the interior of Brazil and even in parts of colonial Canada (where mestizo, cobloço, and métis populations formed as a result). But as with mixed white and African American people, the United States never established a viable place in society for mixed white and Indian communities.
Also even in countries that are mostly mestizo, the remaining Indians are often on the margins of society.
MY question is whether the governing society was that evil at that particular point in human history or was it inevitable what happens when 2 groups want an area and 1 is a lot stronger than the other.
I rhetorically asked “Do you get to keep land you only use for, say, four months out of the year?” to which PLDENNISON replies:
My point is that the Native Americans did not “use” the land in any “settled” way that the Europeans would have recognized as being a use of it. They didn’t build houses on it, or make changes to it, or in any way interfere with it in any of the ways that Anglo-Europeans would consider to be consistent with “ownership.” In fact, the Native American idea of land use, being more consistent with what we would now consider “stewardship,” was not a form of permanent land use that Europeans would recognize, much less consider legitimate. To Anglo-Europeans, land use devolved to “ownership,” and all land was (and is) subject to ownership. (This is still the system we function under, BTW; every inch of land in the U.S. has a record owner.) To an Anglo-European, any land not having an owner was up for grabs. (And, as it turned out, even land having owners was likely up for grabs as well, if the owner was Indian.) In other words, TOM’s suggestion that the Anglos could “avoid settled lands” is premised on a concept of “settlement” that the Anglos would not have even recognized, much less respected. That’s why I don’t think it’s a terribly persuasive solution, even hypothetically. I am not minimizing the grievous wrongs done to the Native Americans, but the fact is that large tracts of North American land appeared to white settlers to be free for the taking. Add to that the eurocentric belief that the highest, best use for land was to convert it to farming or civilization, and it’s easy to see why settlers would not contrue the use of land (or resources) for mere months a year to be consistent with ownership. And, of course, any land without an owner was subject to being claimed. In short, the concepts of “ownership” and “stewardship” were not compatible. And just as the Indians did not initially understand the concept of ownership regarding the land, neither did the white settlers see stewardship as what it was – as a legitimate way to hold land for the greater good of the society.
I am very obviously not talking about manifest destiny at all. I am saying that if we recognize that the motivation for colonization and expansion was the thirst for land – which we agree it was – then “they could have stayed home” seems to me to be a hypothetical non-starter. They obviously weren’t going to stay home. This is more true regarding expansion, given the American idea that success for a man was almost synonymous with property ownership – indeed, in some locales a man could not vote if he did not own land. As the country expanded, it’s need for and desire for land expanded as well. Could that expansion, could the invasion, if you will, of Indian lands by settlers be handled by some means other than violence and extermination? That’s the question. And I’m not sure it could have been. Two such different cultures both desiring the same resource (land) – it seems like a collision course.
I am in no way excusing the U.S. government’s treatment of the Native Americans, which in general was deplorable, in some cases reprehensible. But I think that when the question is “how could these cultures have interacted without violence?”, then “one of them could have stayed home” isn’t really a viable answer.
I think it was a mix of things, not many of which I would ascribe to actual “evil.”
It is true that when two groups want the same resource, one can strong arm the other and just take it. And that is basically what happened to the Native Americans in the United States. There really can’t be any question about that. But even then (in the early to mid 19th century), civilized people (which Americans certainly considered themselves to be) did not just take something belonging to someone else, just because they wanted it. So how did they justify doing so to the Indians?
They didn’t consider the Indians to “own” the land, and therefore did not consider themselves to be “taking” the land from the Indians. (And here I’m talking about the plains and far west expansion, not, say, the Trail of Tears.) They could tell themselves, honestly or disingenuously, that the land was free to be taken because it wasn’t owned by anyone, and race out there and take it.
They didn’t consider the Indians to be using the land as it ought to be used – the Indians let the land lay fallow. The Europeans felt the best use for land was to farm it. So the Europeans could tell themselves that the Indians were “misusing” the land, anyway.
They misunderstood how much land the Indian way of life required. A nomadic existence based on hunting the buffalo, for example, requires as much land as the buffalo will roam over. To the Europeans, it was ridiculous for the Indians to claim hundreds of square miles of land for relatively few people. To the Europeans, you could put the Indians on reservations and teach them how to farm and they ought to be perfectly happy. Which, of course, they weren’t.
They believed that Indians were inherently inferior to whites, and that the opinions, desires, and rights of Indians were therefore given little or no respect or credence. It’s hard to reconcile this with the nineteenth century romantic ideal of the Noble Savage, but most white Americans felt that non-Christian, non-civilized (meaning, non-european-civilized) peoples were beneath them. So, yes, maybe you cheat them or treat them badly or even kill them, but it’s not the same as doing that to a white man, right?
Some (many) government officials and other individuals were corrupt and perhaps even evil. Through greed and sadism they arranged for or aquiesced to the subjugation of the Indians. They took advantage of the Indians’ lack of understanding about white ways, white concepts, and white law to defraud them, abuse them, and even kill them.
I think it was a combination of these societal factors that allowed for the shameful treatment of the Native Americans, which I do nothing to excuse. But I do wonder if, by changing one or more of them, the settlers would have treated the Native Americans more honorably.
Good point, PP. It also illustrates my point that assimilation was good for the descendents. My wife is part Cherokee. She, mother and grandmmother all lived comfortable, assimilated American lives. So, at least, they benefited.
DECEMBER, you appear to have missed the PRINCE’s point, which I believe was that the Cherokee did everything they possibly could to assimilate and they still were treated like absolute shit by the U.S. government.
Your wife’s family led happy, comfortable assimilated lives only because their ancestors were lucky enough to survive or avoid the Trail Or Tears. Thousands of assimilated Indians died on it, and the fact that they had tried their best to follow white ways did not save them.
PP’s post does not “illustrate your point” that assimilation is good for the descendants of the Cherokees. It clearly sets forth the fact that assimilation did not save the Cherokees from the Trail of Tears. It has nothing to do with the descendants of those who happened to survive.
Read “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” by Dee Brown for much more.
My favorite (because it hits so close to home) is Henry Sibley (first Governor of Minnesota) and Josiah Snelling offering $25 a scalp for Indian scalps. I no longer own a copy of the book, so can’t look up the cite, but it would have been around 1850 - $25 was a lot of cash to a trapper or farmer.
I don’t mean to downplay the mistreatment and killing of Indians, but I sometimes think these discussions tell only half the story.
Almost from the moment English settlers landed on the shores of North America, a deadly clash of cultures ensued. The first attacks were launched not by the Europeans but by the Indians (in Jamestown):
Ultimately, the Native Americans lost this clash of cultures. It was not, however, the one-sided affair you see in revisionist histories. For every “atrocity” you can cite committed by white settlers or soldiers against Indians, I can probably match you with a tale of atrocities committed by Indians against settlers, including the slaughter and butchery of women and children. (See above.)
In fact, the Indian custom of making war not only upon soldiers but also upon women and children so distressed the colonists that they complained of it in the Declaration of Independence:
Were the Indians right to defend their land? Of course. But I think it would be incorrect to impose upon them some sort of “noble savage” stereotype. They fought dirty, too. And they tried to commit genocide against the Europeans. They just weren’t able to do the job.
Again, I don’t mean any of this to sound like an apologia for the destruction of Indian cultures. The Cherokee in particular were dealt with in an unconscionable way, as noted in earlier posts.
(Aside from their ready adoption of Western culture, by the way, the Cherokee had served as our allies in the Red Sticks War. They fought alongside Andrew Jackson and his men in that conflict. This makes the Trail of Tears an even more egregious betrayal.)
I know all about Godwin’s law, but I still think this is fairly related to the topic at hand.
Anyway, let’s do a thought experiment: If the Germans had won WW2, would we have people a hundred years from now on message boards debating the topic “Europeam Jews - was genocide the only solution?”
That was my point. You had a strong warrior race opposed to a stronger race. The outcome was inevitable. I have heard it compared to the Jewish Genocide attempt by the Nazis and it just doesnt seem to be the same situation.
What could have changed the outcome? possibilities:
Indians prevent the settlers from establishing colonies.
hard to do and requires intertribe cooperation
A sympathetic president establishes a seperate state (Present Kansas, Oklahoma, N and S Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington,oregon) also New Mexico and Arizona.) in 1800
Colorado would of course been part of the agreement but the gold would have pushed them out. Also a need for the a right of way for the transamerica railroad would have caused problems.
at the time these were just wilderness areas that for the most part are sparsely occupied even today. subsequent presidents would have had to had the guts to preserve the areas. these include enough diversity to make all the tribes happy (except the NorthEast tribes who were already wiped out by 1800.
Well, while such was unfortunate, this is the way of the world. perhaps the (former) Europeans in NorthAm were simply too diferent from the Native Indians to peacefully coexist for long. Or rather, we were too alike in needing the same resources but too different in how we saw ourselves and out technologies. I don’t know of one can cast this in terms of mortality, however. While Europeans immigrants and their New American descendants did commit some awful acts, so did the Native Ams. The only diiference as I see was one of scale - gun technologies and better-equipped armies gave the new settlers much more power.
Compare the settlers vs. Indians to the establishment of Israel in the Middle East. The Arabs attacked Israel several times, but Israel won a series of wars and annexed more land in the process. Israel did not attempt genocide. The left certain land for the Palistinians they had defeated and allowed other Palistinians to live in Israel and to become citizens.
Would Israel be better off today if they had been crueler and more selfish? I dunno…
[nitpick] This fails recognize that Hitler actually split up Poland with Stalin. Stalin took much of eastern Poland. The Soviet occupation was every bit as brutal as the German occupation. Aunt Sophia would want me to correct you on this. Oh, and don’t forget that Britan and France, with their mutual protection agreement with Poland, failed to do anything to help Poland.
How does this relate to the OP? Good question. Much 16-18 c. “superpower” politics influenced Indian relations in the early days. The British, French, and Spanish all used the Indians when it was convenient to get at the other powers. Moreover, the “genocide” was piecemeal, not an established policy of the colonial powers. Often the killing was done in the course of wars. Don’t forget, the Indian tribes warred with each other before the Europeans came, this carried over to warring with the Europeans when westward expansion exploded.
Am I saying that the settlers were fair to the Indians? Mostly, no. Did some acts of slaughter, perhaps fairly termed “genocide,” occur? Yes. However, the Indians did some slaughtering also. History is rarely a one way street.
The most serious problem that caused friction between the settlers and the Indians was the medieval (still used today) “estate” system of land ownership. The European system classifies land in tenancies (fee simple and the rest) while the Indians were often nomadic and had no comparable system of land ownership. This led to much confusion when the Europeans negotiated for the rights to land. The Indians did not expect that they would be fenced out and excluded when a land deal was struck, while the Europeans could not imagine a system without ownership and the right to exclude.
Except most of the Indians, especially on the coasts, weren’t nomadic until after white settlement drove them off their farms and out of their villages.
European and Indian ideas of land ownership weren’t really all that different, because even in the European model at the time of European settlement (16th-17th century), the community had rights on private land. Harvested fields were open to public grazing, for example, and paths on private land that led to communal property couldn’t be blocked. Hunting and fishing rights were also seperate from land ownership, and the “right to exclude” wasn’t absolute.
I’m not sure the settlers ever sincerely tried to establish “appropriate” boundaries. My admittedly non-thorough reading of relevant history suggests simply that settlers granted Indians any lands the settlers were not yet able to exploit/inhabit. But as soon as the settlers developed the ability/desire to expand to “Indian” lands, they felt they had an essentially divine right to do so again and again.
“Bury My Heart” is a fine book, but it begins with the SW Indians, following their centuries of struggle with Mexico. And it pays little heed to settler/Indian relations E of the Mississippi, other than the Cherokee.
I would have to review some books at home to intelligently respond to spoke’s representation of Jamestown. Doesn’t seem consistent with my recollection, but I may well be mistaken. Was that the first European/Indian conflict in America? Of course, even if it happened that way, Columbus had already cleared Hispanola what, a century earlier?
To suggest an alternative that I do not believe was ever attempted, what prevented the settlers from expanding as they wished, but reserving a set percentage of each new territory, maybe as little as 5%, for the indigenous peoples? We could claim the entirety, but allow Indians right to govern their 5% and to control it’s resources. Even if the US restricted their trading options, they would get market value for their resources.
And what prevented settlers from allowing indigenous people to stay on their most sacred land? Instead, all too often they were relocated to property where they were unable to support themselves through any lifestyle, not only their traditional one. As a result they were forced into dependance upon the US. Moreover, they were often comingled with other tribes, including their historic enemies.
My quote on the Jamestown massacre came from the award-winning Virtual Jamestown site. I think you will find it tough to quibble with their scholarship.
I did not intend to represent the Jamestown attack as the first European/Indian conflict in America, but as the first between English settlers and Indians. My apologies if I was unclear on that point.
Turns out I was wrong, anyway. The English settlers who founded the first Roanoake colony (North Carolina, 1585) had also been attacked by Indians. (In fairness, the colonists had antagonized the Indians by periodically kidnapping individual natives to get information from them.) The first Roanoake colony failed, and a second Roanoake colony, established in 1587, simply vanished. (This was the famous “lost colony”).
The Jamestown massacre, by the way, was not unique. I can point to other instances of atrocities committed by eastern tribes against European settlers. By which I mean only to point out that atrocities were a two-way street.
With regard to the activities of Columbus in Hispanola, well yeah, Columbus wreaked havoc among the Carib Indians. But then the Caribs had wreaked havoc among the Arawak Indians prior to Columbus’s arrival. Hard to paint the Europeans as being any more cruel to the Caribs than the Caribs had been to the Arawak. Let’s face it, Homo sapiens sapiens can be a remarkably vicious beast regardless of skin color.
PP’s post does not “illustrate your point” that assimilation is good for the descendants of the Cherokees. It clearly sets forth the fact that assimilation did not save the Cherokees from the Trail of Tears. It has nothing to do with the descendants of those who happened to survive.