Volume 16 , Issue 43

What Have We Done To/For Native Americans?

The following information is transcribed from The Indian Advocate, date 1 January 1904, page 3 thru 6, asking it's readers, "What are the Indians today? What have we done for them?"

January, 1904 -- What are the Indians today? What have we done for them? We have broken their proud, independent spirit; we have made war on them, or have given them provocations until we had the desired pretext for war, then hundreds fell before the disciplined, well-drilled lines of the white soldiers, and whole tribes became a memory; we have taken their lands without giving them any recompense, and have kept on shoving them onward with the setting sun, and have silenced their protests with the crack of the rifle and the boom of the cannon; we have killed their buffaloes for mere sport, leaving their carcasses to rot on the plains; have destroyed their forests, slaughtered their game, desecrated the rating places of their ancestors, ruined their hunting grounds, broken up their homes, and have penned them within the fixed limits of a reservation, of which perhaps the greater part is such where, as Mr. Lummis says, "a horned toad my scratch out a living when single, but would inevitably starve if led into matrimony."

What are the Indians of today (1904)? What have we done for them? Thousands and millions of emigrants from all lands and nations have come to our shores; they have been welcomed; have not only become our friends, but our very brethren. And the Indians -- the Native Americans par excellence -- are still set aside, are strangers and foreigners in the land owned and lorded over by their ancestors long before the hyphened Anglo-Saxon was ever dreamed of; they are shunned and spurned by the superior race," are cut off from all intercourse with those whose civilization they are expected to accept; are cried out a lazy because they do not become civilized fast enough; as indolent, because they do not turn into experienced farmers or expert mechanics without being properly taught and shown; as stupid, because they can not learn to read, write and cipher over night; as half-witted because they cannot acquire the heaven-born english tongue -- the only worthy channel of instruction and education -- in a half dozen hours.

What are the Indians of today (1904)? Excepting the Osages and Pueblos, the majority of them are poor people, called in thin, cheap calicos, sometimes grotesquely botanical in aspect and intensely howling in colors, but insufficiently warm of protective. Most of their homes are poor, cheerless, unlovely places: tepees of hide, pickings of branches,or hogans of trunks covered with ground, with nothing in them but a few sheepskins or blankets and a fire.

What has the white man done for the Indian? He has brought him rum, smallpox, tuberculosis and syphilis, has taught him to lie, cheat and defraud, to swear, curse, and get drunk. He has made a rascal, morally and physically, of the savage with whom he has come in contact, and whom he has not sent to the happy hunting grounds. The best Indians, therefore, are this who live far away from he railroads, and who have not come in contact with the whites, or but very little. There one yet finds frank hospitality, natural grace and cheerfulness, happy humor and sociability.

What have we done for the Indians? In Canada men like Frs. Rogues and Brebeuf; in the Northwest men like Frs. Ravel and DeSmet; in the Southwest men like Frs. Jumper Serra and Juan Ramirez, in the East men like Lord Calvert and William Penn have done a world of good for the Indian, but where is their work now (in 1904)? The insatiable Anglo-saxon shark (who is undoubtedly the biggest thing unearth), has swallowed and digested it long since, save a few ruined remnants. Indeed, our race has scarcely done a single thing it should have done. There is hardly a single fact to which we may point with pride, but our ten fingers are not sufficient to point to facts of which we must be ashamed.

It can not be denied that the Indian suffered many wrongs; great and small, at the hands of the early settlers and later. He resented and resisted these wrongs; fought hard and bitterly against what he deemed an unjust, unscrupulous nation of invaders. His warfare partook of the character of his rugged mountains, his wild valleys, his turbulent streams, and his intricate forests. When the Indian, decked out in feathers and war paint, filled his quiver with arrows, grasped tightly the handle of his tomahawk, and went out upon the war trail, his intention was to kill and not be be killed. Who would, therefore, blame him if instead of rushing with foolhardy bravery into an open, exposed position, before the muzzle of his enemy's rifles, he preferred those tactics which have lately been adopted by the Americans in the Philippines, and by the British in South Africa? What these two giant twin-intelligences do ought surely not to be considered skulking treachery or cowardly assassination in the savage.

The ancient Britons defended their home and country against the Romans, against the Angles and the Saxons, the English against the Normans, the Irish, the boers, and the Poles fought valorously against the invaders of their county -- all these we consider brave people fighting for their home and hearth. But did the Indian not fight for the same purpose? Why should we admire and praise the one and brand the other a "red devil?" His religion demanded that a captive should die for every tribesman slain, unless the dead warrior's family, as frequently happened, chose to adopt the prisoner, and then his fate was worse than death: a life of slavery. But we are told they tortured prisoners inhumanly at the stake. In the British Museum is a collection of instruments of torture, used in England a few hundred years ago, which would give an Iroquois chief an epileptic fit, or drive a Mohawk warrior crazy with envy. Then why should the Indian be so continually held up as a treacherous blood-thirsty savage and his descendants held under the ban of that belief for all time?
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