The Inconvenient Indian (11 page)

When she read the passage above, Helen was concerned that the word “property” might imply that I was suggesting that Indians were slaves. That’s not accurate. We were more like … furniture.

The three U.S. court cases, along with Canada’s Indian Act, were not random, stand-alone decisions. They were part of a coordinated undertaking to organize Indians. Even though disease and conflict had dramatically reduced the tribes, there were still, in the minds of policy makers, too many Indians. Too many Indians, too many tribes, too many languages. Indians were a great, sprawling mess. What was needed was a plan to give this snarl of cultures a definitive and manageable form. So, out of ignorance, disregard, frustration, and expediency, North America set about creating a single entity, an entity that would stand for the whole.

The Indian.

Or as J.R.R. Tolkien might have said, “One name to rule them all, One name to find them, One name to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.”

No one really believed that there was only one Indian. No one ever said there was only one Indian. But as North America began to experiment with its “Indian programs,” it did so with a “one size fits all” mindset. Rather than see tribes as an arrangement of separate nation states in the style of the Old World, North America imagined that Indians were basically the same. Sure, Mohawk were not Apache, Cherokee were not Cheyenne, but the differences among Native peoples were really just a matter of degree.

All for one. One for all.

Now the only real question was what to do with this Indian. What could North America expect of this Indian? What might be this Indian’s place, if any, in the new order? With the proper guidance, what might this Indian become? These questions and their answers would form the backbone of what we call “Indian Policy.”

Prior to the 1800s, military action had been, by default, Indian policy in North America, but in the nineteenth century, gunboat diplomacy was augmented by treaties, removals, and relocations, all bundled into a package that we will call Plan A. Plan A wasn’t so much a coherent undertaking as it was a series of speculations about how to shuffle Indians out of the way of White settlement and economic development.

Plan A was also a pattern. Someone would start a conflict—it didn’t matter who—and the military would come to the rescue. A treaty would be negotiated in which Native people, if they were fortunate, were forced to give up a portion of their land but allowed to keep the remainder and stay where they were. If they
were unfortunate, tribes and bands were forced to give up all of their land and move elsewhere to a location chosen for them.

During the colonial period, European powers signed over 1,500 such treaties with Native people, while, on their own, the United States and Canada signed well over 500. In the United States, the first treaty was signed with the Delaware in 1778, and the last one with the Nez Perces in 1868. Treaty-making in the United States was eliminated by statute in 1871, which, coincidentally, was the same year that Canada
began
signing treaties, starting with the eleven Numbered Treaties that dealt with First Nations bands in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and the Northwest Territories. The last of the so-called “historical” treaties was signed in 1923 with the Chippewa and Mississauga First Nations, while the last “modern” treaty was signed in 2000 with the Nisga, though, given the number of outstanding Native land claims, there may well be more treaties on Canada’s horizon.

Peace treaties should have been the answer to Indian-White conflict, but as Vine Deloria, Jr., points out, “America has yet to keep one Indian treaty or agreement.” Sweeping generalizations are always suspect, but I’m not sure that Deloria is wrong. I have no idea what Deloria thought of Canada’s record of keeping its promises to Native people, but I doubt he would have been impressed.

More than one scholar has argued that treaties were never meant to be long-standing agreements, that they were simply expediencies of the moment. Indians were dying, so the wisdom of the day argued. In fifty or a hundred years, Native people would be gone, and the gnarly, logistical questions that the terms of the treaties might raise in the long term would be resolved
naturally through attrition. In the meantime, however, the combination of military action, treaties, and the myth of Native extinction was not working fast enough to keep pace with the demand for space. Even though they had ceased to be a military threat, even though they had been forced to give up vast tracts of land, Indians were, through no fault of their own, still in the way.

Still inconvenient.

The official rationale for removal and relocation was Indian welfare. Removing Indians from the path of White settlement would reduce the potential for conflicts. Separating Indians from Whites would limit the occasions for racism. Removal and relocation would limit the availability of White vices such as alcohol. Out of sight of Whites and away from the corrupting influences of White culture, Indians would be able to maintain their own cultures in peace.

Oh, and by the way, Indians had more land than they needed, more land than they knew what to do with, more land than they deserved.

The assault on Aboriginal land was greater in the United States, where the flow of settlement had assumed the proportions of a tidal wave. In 1763, the British tried to control this tsunami with a proclamation that forbade White settlement west of the Appalachians. This line was not intended to be a permanent boundary. Rather it was a stratagem to maintain the peace with the tribes between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, while at the same time allowing for the slow and orderly settlement of the trans-Appalachian west. But by 1763, it was already too late for such lines and such cautions. The boundary had already been breached, with more settlers pouring in all the time. Since no
politician wanted to alienate western voters by trying to evict them, it was decided that the best course of action would be to move Indians to another place.

Just not here.

In the United States, sentiment for forcing Indians out of areas that Whites wanted was as old as the first colonies, but it got its legislative legs in the early 1800s with Thomas Jefferson. In 1802, Georgia was asked to cede the western portion of its lands to the federal government. Georgia agreed to the deal, but only with the stipulation that the federal government secure and turn over title to all lands held by Indian tribes within Georgia’s new boundaries to the state. In 1803, Jefferson drafted a constitutional amendment that authorized Congress to trade land west of the Mississippi, bought from France in the Louisiana Purchase, for land that the tribes held in the east. The amendment was never submitted for ratification, but in 1804, Congress passed legislation that authorized the president to pursue such a policy. And the sooner, the better.

Tribes were not particularly keen on moving anywhere, but there was no mistaking the intent of Whites and their government. In 1804, Henry Harrison, the governor of Indiana, “negotiated” a treaty with a small contingent of Sauk chiefs who had come to discuss the fate of a Sauk warrior accused of killing three settlers. Harrison offered to release the man if the Sauk would compensate the families of the slain settlers, which wasn’t a problem since this was Sauk custom anyway. But Harrison wanted more. He also insisted that the Sauk sign a removal treaty that ceded all of the tribe’s land in Illinois and Wisconsin. Various stories have Harrison intimidating the men or getting them drunk until he had their names on his treaty. The fact that the
Sauks who signed the treaty had no authority to do so didn’t bother Harrison or the politicians in Washington in the least.

In fact, scenarios such as this were commonplace, coercion coming in a variety of forms and flavours. If a tribe or a band refused to sign a removal treaty, government officials would find a few members who could be convinced to sign, and then the treaty would be applied to the entire tribe. Native people opposed to such treaties and tactics were frequently threatened with military action. Annuity payments from a previous treaty would be withheld to force compliance. A food source such as the buffalo would be driven off or destroyed in order to bring Indians to heel. These were some of the methods used to bully the Choctaw into the Treaty of Doak’s Stand in 1820 and to force Big Bear’s Cree to sign Treaty Six in 1876.

Removal, as national policy, began in the United States when the Removal Act was signed into law by Andrew Jackson in 1830. That same year, in his second annual address to Congress, Jackson justified the policy, saying, “Toward the aborigines of the country, no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself, or would go further to reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people.”

And then he asked the rhetorical question to which all of White North America knew the answer.

“What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?”

Well, since you put it that way.

The U.S. government may have been slow to react to Hurricane Katrina when it hit the Gulf coast in 2005, or to British Petroleum’s massive oil spill in 2010, but in 1830 they wasted no time implementing Indian removal legislation. Almost as soon as the bill had left the building, the Choctaw were hustled out of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana and packed off to Indian Territory. That same year, 1831, the Shawnee were dragged out of Ohio. The following year, the Ottawa and the Wyandot followed, leaving Ohio free of Native people. In short order, the Creek, the Chickasaw, the Cherokee, and portions of the Seminole were shipped west. By 1840, the majority of the tribes east of the Mississippi had been moved west of the river into what would eventually become Oklahoma.

The Cherokee call the removal from Georgia
nunna daul isunyi
or “the trail where they cried.” Out of some 17,000 Cherokee, over 4,000 died on the trail. Some historians claim the numbers were higher. Some claim they were lower. Whatever the actual number was, the Trail of Tears was, arguably, the largest massacre of Native people in North American history.

A Twin Towers moment.

Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole, Cherokee, Shawnee, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Sauk and Fox, Osage, Kickapoo, Wyandot, Ho-Chunks, Kaskaskia, Peoria, Miami, Delaware, Illinois, Modoc, Oto, Ponca, Seneca, Cayuga, Tuskegee, Quapaw. These are the names of a few of the tribes that were removed from their homelands during the middle of the nineteenth century. What you can’t see by reading about these removals is that these were massive upheavals that, in many cases, broke the backs of the communities.
No one has exact figures on how many Native people were relocated during the years that removal was national policy, but for the Choctaw, the Creek, the Chickasaw, the Cherokee, and the Seminole alone, the number was probably between 75,000 and 100,000. How many people were lost in these relocations? No one knows. At the time, no one really kept track. No one much cared. No one really cares now.

Oh, sure, the tribes care. But they’re biased.

Canada didn’t have an Indian removal policy, certainly not in the same way or on the same scale as their cousins to the south. However, the government did tinker with what it liked to call “relocations,” the moving of families, groups, and small bands from one place to another for a variety of reasons. In the States, removals were part of a national strategy to move Native people off prime land and push them out of the way of White settlement. In Canada, relocations were employed ostensibly to further the official goals—protection, civilization, and assimilation—of Canadian Native policy.

The 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples summed up relocation policy nicely.

The majority of relocations in Canada began in the 1940s, almost a century after the mass removals of Native people in the United States. You might have thought that by then the government would have learned something about such programs and policies, but perhaps the old adage is true after all: “Those who do not understand the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.”

After watching what has happened over the past fifty years in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and seeing the money that is to be made from such ventures, I wonder if that adage should have a corollary: “Those who understand the lessons of history are only too happy to repeat them.”

Still, a hundred years
is
a long time. There was no particular reason for the Canadian government to remember what had happened to the Cherokee in the 1840s. After all, most governments can’t remember the promises that got them elected. A hundred years? In political terms, that’s when dinosaurs ruled the planet.

I said that the majority of relocations in Canada began in the 1940s. And that’s true. But practice for what would later become unofficial policy began much earlier. In 1836, the Governor
General of Canada, Francis Bond Head, came up with the paternalistic notion that Indians needed to be protected from White vices. The most effective way to accomplish that, he decided, was to move them far away from White settlement. So, in 1836, at the same time that Georgia was getting ready to evict the Cherokee, Head forced the surrender of some 600,000 hectares of land south of Owen Sound, Ontario, that was held by the Newash and Saugeen bands of the Ojibway. The Ojibway were moved to what is now the Bruce Peninsula with the promise that the area would be protected from White encroachment.