.. "a treaty was good only until the government changed its mind." -- A history of American Indian

Struggle for Rights Continues

'Only Good Indian Dead Indian' --
With Whites It Was All Too True

1973, June 27  The Daily Herald  - by Donald Finley 

          Washington -- "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead" was the way Gen Philip Sheridan put it. The phrase later was honed into "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

          Although Sheridan's attitude in 1868 was not shared by most white Americans, it nevertheless provides insight into the way the natives of both North and South America were regarded and treated by the European immigrants to the Western Hemisphere.

          The Europeans regarded the Indians as inferiors with few rights, as heathens to be evangelized to Christianity and the white man's way of life, as savages whose lands could be taken.

          And they were to be killed if all else failed, or sometimes killed with flimsy excuses or no excuse at all.

          The white man's attitude finally was summed up in the "Manifest Destiny" doctrine in frontier America that said the white man was ordained by destiny to rule the continent.

          Under that doctrine, Indians were slaughtered, robbed of their lands and eventually subdued and relegated to reservations, their culture and their pride all but destroyed.

          The "Indian problem" still is with the nation today. The federal government retains trusteeship over the country's nearly half million reservation Indians and maintains a "special relationship" to them and the more than 300,000 urban Indians living off reservations.

          For the most part, Indians have clung to their tribal life, refusing to melt into white society. But poverty, alcoholism, suicide and other social problems dog Indians as they stumble - through modern America as wards of the white man's government. 

          After nearly a century of dormancy, however, some Indians are beginning to reawaken a sense of pride in their race, and to demand a redress of grievances. 

          This resurgence led to the seizure of the government's Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in Washington last year by the militant American Indian Movement (AIM); and to the 71-day takeover by AIM this year of the South Dakota hamlet of Wounded Knee, site in 1890 of the last big massacre of Indians by Army troops.

          No one knows what lies ahead for Indians, but the Indians themselves are only too aware of their history and their treatment by the Europeans who settled their land.

          After Columbus discovered America, the Spaniards debated how to treat the inhabitants of the New World. The hardliners, calling for subjugation, won out despite please by dissenters to recognize the prior claims by the natives to the land and their right to refuse to adopt the white man's ways.

          With the Crusades to the Holy Land in Medieval times as a precedent, the Catholic Spaniards, armed with a Papal Bull ordering conversion of the Indians by force if necessary, set out not only to colonize but also Christianize the New World. At the same time, they claimed its gold and exploited its other resources.

          Wilcomb E. Washburn, director of American studies at the Smithsonian Institution, concluded that the root of all alleged justification for European settlement and conquest was "the assumption that Christians and Christianity had both a moral right and legal authority to overspread the world."

          With this imperialistic approach, conflicts and wars with the natives were inevitable. But the Indians and their arrows were no match for the Spanish guns.

          The mostly Protestant English, in colonizing North America, to a large extent inherited the Spanish approach, although they were not as aggressive in evangelism. 

          The first English settlers were met by friendly Indians who were helpful hosts. But the white man's naughty manner and his greed for the Indians' land and food soon turned white-Indian relations to conflicts and war.

          Outnumbered by the Indians, the settlers first used the prudent approach of negotiations for land cessions from the natives. But as their numbers grew, the settlers turned to force and coercion.

          The system of assigning Indians to reservations and of government regulation of commerce and land dealings with Indians began in colonial America. That precedent is followed to this day.

          As the years passed many Indian tribes disappeared, either through annihilation, disease or assimilation into white society. Other tribes were pushed westward.

          The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, established the basic policy that, as an ideal, has governed US treatment of Indians since. But this paternalistic policy has not always been followed.

          The ordinance said "the utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their land and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property rights and liberty they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress; but laws founded in justice and humanity shall from time to time be made for preventing wrongs being done to them and for preserving peace and friendship with them."

          Under this "them and us" approach, the fledgling United States regarded the Indian tribes as foreign nations, although living in US territory, and negotiated treaties with them to settled differences and to get cessions of land from the Indians.

          The first of 371 such treaties was signed in 1778 with the Delawares to enlist their aid in the fight against the British in the Revolutionary War, during which most tribes sided with England.

          As the young nation expanded westward and wanted more and more of the Indian territory, its record of honoring treaties deteriorated. 

          The general pattern was this: the United States would sign a treaty with a tribe guaranteeing certain territory to the Indians and other land to the government; white settlers would move into Indian territory in violation of the treaty; the United States, often using coercion, would demand new cessions of Indian land onto which the settlers had moved, leading to new treaties abrogating the old ones.

          Federal Indian law, a book published by the Interior Department, states that "its a well established principle of our constitutional law that a treaty may be abrogated or superseded by a subsequent act of Congress. While good faith may cause Congress to refrain from making any change in a treaty law, if it does so its enactment becomes the law."  

          In other words, a treaty was good only until the government changed its mind.

          "However, an amendment of abrogation of a treaty provision, like a repeal of a law, operates in the future, leaving unaffected executed transactions or vested rights," it said.

          Thus in 1877 Congress voted to ignore an 1868 treaty recognizing the Black Hills of South Dakota as Sioux land. Unable to get the Sioux to cede the land after gold was found in the Hills and Custer and his 7th Cavalry troops were wiped out, Congress passed a law taking the area from the Sioux.

          But Federal Indian law said Congress does not have absolute power to take tribal lands by force without giving the Indian owners adequate compensation. This is similar to condemnation proceedings under which a government may take private land for a highway, but must pay the owners a fair price for the land.

          This "fair compensation" principle has been used by the government to take great chunks of Indian territory over the past 200 years. The fact that the Indian usually wanted the land, not the money, often was ignored.

          Placing of the Indian Affairs Office in the War Department in 1789 showed that the young American nation basically regarded Indians as hostiles. Not until 1849 was Indian Affairs put under the new Interior Department.

          Continued conflicts and wars led Congress in 1830 to pass the Indian Removal Act under which nearly all the 100,000 Indians living East of the Mississippi River were forcibly moved west of the river to territory guaranteed them forever. But as the white man moved ever westward and gold was found in California, new treaties ceded more and more Indian territory to the government.

          In 1830, Chief Justice John Marshall, wrote an opinion establishing Indians as "dependent sovereign nations." But in 871, Congress revoked this by ending all treaty-making with the Indians and relying instead on statutes -- thus substituting edicts for bilateral negotiations.

          The 1887 Allotment Act was aimed at breaking up the Indian reservations by allotting individual tracts to each Indian family and selling the rest of the reservations. Although this process was never completed, 90 million acres of land passed from the Indians before the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, restored recognition of the tribal system and the reservations.

          By then, there were only 48 million acres left, and Washington said, "a way of life had been smashed, a value system destroyed," for the Indians.

          After World War II, government policy again shifted and became "termination" of its "special relationship" to the Indians -- in order words, the Indian would have to make his own way in society. Proponents claimed it would set the Indian free.

          But the Indians opposed ending the trust relationship, and experience under the termination policy showed Indians worse off than before, often the victims of white manipulation and exploitation.

          President Nixon reversed this policy in 1970 by renouncing termination in favor of retaining government trusteeship over Indians and increasing federal spending on Indian programs.

          Despite the BIA and Wounded Knee takeovers by AIM, this remains the government policy today, along with efforts to permit Indians more control of the government programs that affect them.

          The nation has come a long way since Civil War hero Sheridan, commander of Army troops fighting Indians in the West in 1868, made his famous statement in rebuking a surrendering Comanche Indian named Tosawi who said in broken English, "Tosawi, good Indian."

          Although American no longer slaughter Indians as Sheridan's troops did at times, the "Indian problem" has not gone away or been solved.

          Though treatment is more tender in most respected, Indians remain alienated.

          Descendants of the once proud tribes are groping to find their identity and their niche in the modern world.

1973, June 27  The Daily Herald