Kindle Notes & Highlights
Now there was just the land. But someday there would be more. Much more. Meanwhile, “the earth seemed waiting, after the primeval fashion, for man to come in and possess it.”
“The rush of Western settlement grows more and more; an enormous army pours continually into our Eastern seaports to spread itself over the West,”
Pancoast reported. Living a Stone Age existence, Indians could never withstand the never-ending onslaught of white settlement. Furthermore, the tide of progress could not be stopped.
Hence, “We must either butcher them or civilize them, and what we do...
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According to prevailing republican theory, only a society built upon the broad foundation of private property could guarantee public morality, political independence, and social stability.
For the founders of a settler nation a major priority was the creation of a mechanism and rationale for divesting Indians of their lands. The matter was especially delicate and problematic because even though the divestiture of Indian land was essential to the extension of American ideals, that divestiture must also be ultimately justified by those same ideals.
Moreover, once transformed into farmers, they would require less land, which would then become available to whites. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson observed that this ongoing process was in fact producing a “coincidence of interests” between the races.
Indians, having land in abundance, needed civilization; whites possessed civilization but needed land.
the central role of personal industry in defining rectitude and merit;
the sanctity and social virtues of property;
The reasons for the Indians’ lowly position on Morgan’s scale becomes clear when considering his requirements for civilized status.
Two evolutionary developments were of particular significance. The first of these was the monogamous nuclear family.
This development was crucial because it contributed to firmly fixed ideas of familial responsibility, reflected a higher sense of moral understanding, and established clearer lines for the inheritance of property.
The second key development—and in many ways the linchpin to the wheel of progress—was the idea of property. Without the conception of private property a society’s social, economic, an...
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In Morgan’s words: “Its dominance as a passion over all other passions marks the comm...
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By this standard (and, for that matter, by all others as well), Indians failed t...
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When William Torey Harris, the US commissioner of education, addressed the Lake Mohonk Conference, he placed the Indian problem in a context wholly familiar to his audience.
After asking whether a member of Indian society was civilized, he answered:
Above that comes the village community, and many who believe in socialism would like to have us go back to that. Above the village community comes feudalism, wherein the individual is ground into subordination, so that division of labor can be established.
No yellow race has passed through it. The black race has not passed through it except as it has come into the house of bondage.
the acceptance of Christian doctrine and morality, including the “Christian ideal of the family”;
the abandonment of loyalty to the tribal community for a higher identification with the state as an “independent citizen”;
Thus, Carl Schurz, a former commissioner of Indian affairs, concluded in 1881 that Indians were confronted with “this stern alternative: extermination or civilization.”
Commissioner of Indian Affairs Henry Price opined: “Savage and civilized life cannot live and prosper on the same ground. One of the two must die.”
“The only alternative left is civilization or annihilation, absorption or extermination.”
The land issue was linked to what reformers regarded as the biggest obstacle to Indian assimilation: the reservation system. The reservation was deplored for three reasons.
First, it perpetuated the Indians’ attachment to the tribal outlook and tribal institutions. Most notable in this regard was the high value placed on communal property-holding and gift-giving, traditions that reformers viewed as anathemas to the emergence of self-reliant individualism.
For these reasons, Lyman Abbott pronounced, the reservation had to be “uprooted root, trunk, branch, and leaf, and a new system put in its place.”
First, the reservation was surveyed and divided up among the Indians: 160 acres to each family head, 80 acres to single persons and orphans over eighteen years, and 40 acres to single persons under eighteen.
Finally, after all tribal members had received an allotment, all surplus land might be sold to white settlers. The proceeds gained from these sales would be held by the government for the tribe’s “education and civilization.”
Reformers viewed the Dawes Act as a major victory: in one bold stroke it held out the possibility of smashing the tribal bond and setting Indians on the road to civilization.
since laws and courts were civilizing influences, they must be extended to reservations.
The creation of the reservation Indian police force in 1878 was a first step. As this system was set up, Indian policemen were selected from the ranks of cooperative tribesmen, given a badge of authority, and pledged to carry out the directives of the reservation agent,
Another step was taken in 1883 when Congress provided for the creation of Indian courts to try cases involving minor crimes such as polygamy, theft, and participation in “heathenish” dances.
One of the strongest arguments was that the older generation of Indians was incapable of being civilized.
As an agent to the Lakota mused: “It is a mere waste of time to attempt to teach the average adult Indian the ways of the white man. He can be tamed, and that is about all.”
The only hope, he concluded, was “in training the youth.”
“but our main hope lies with the youthful generations who are still measurably plastic”
The agent to the Utes observed in 1886:
It is food for thought to note the number of handsome, bright-eyed children here, typical little savages, arrayed in blankets, leggings, and gee-strings, their faces hideously painted, growing up in all the barbarism of their parents.
A few years more, and they will be men and women, perhaps beyond redemption, for, under the most favorable circumstances, but little can be hoped from them after growth and matured, wedded and steeped in the vices of their fathers.
Another argument was that it was less expensive to educate Indians than to kill them. Carl Schurz, for instance, estimated that it cost nearly a million dollars to kill an Indian in warfare, whereas it cost only $1,200 to give an Indian child eight years of schooling.
Similarly, Secretary of the Interior Henry Teller calculated that over a ten-year period the annual cost of both waging war on Indians and providing protection for frontier communities was in excess of $22 million—nearly four times what it would cost to educate 30,000 children for a year.
A wild Indian requires a thousand acres to roam over, while an intelligent man will find a comfortable support for his family on a very small tract. When the rising generation of Indians have become civilized and have learned how to utilize the land they live on, a vast domain now useless can be thrown open to settlement
“I would first teach the Indian how to work,” Oberly began, “then I would teach him our ideas of the rights of property, and give him lands in severalty; then I would abolish the reservation system, and then make the Indian a citizen and enfranchise him.”42
“The kind of education they are in need of is one that will habituate them to the customs and advantages of a civilized life
and at the same time cause them to look with feelings of repugnance on their native state.”
Indian schools should introduce the child to the civilized branches of knowledge—arithmetic, science, history, and the arts—not with the idea that he would master these areas but rather that he might “catch at least a glimpse of the civilized world through books.”
Second, Indians needed to be individualized. In many ways, the issue of individualization went to the very heart of the Indian question.
In the philanthropic mind Indians were savages mainly because tribal life placed a higher value on the tribal community than individual interests.
