"It is not worthwhile to talk of the past"
August 2006 revision: because of this post, a reader found me and I found in her a friend in July 2006. More at the end of this post]
That is one of the statements made by General Smith, representative of the United States, in an 1871 meeting with Red Cloud, Chief of the Oglala Sioux Nation. The report, filed by U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Felix R. Brunot, can be seen in its entirety here.
The gist of the report was this: good-hearted white men travel to Indian territory to settle with the Sioux once and for all, moving them for the second time to "safer" territory beyond the grasp of bad white men. The good white men urge the Indians to "select [a] place for your agency [i.e., reservation] in your own country, where bad white men can be kept away from you." In other words, the present reservation wasn't working because the whites wanted in.
Solution? Move the offended party.
Failing that, U.S. rations then being given to the Sioux would be stopped. And if many Sioux starved that winter, said General Smith, it would be the stubborn Sioux's fault.
We get a different story from the Third Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners in the same year. The Board was a Christian-minded organization put in place in 1869 to oversee and prevent corruption and mistreatment of Native Americans. It remained in place for more than 60 years. An excerpt from that report entitled "Partially Civilized Tribes" reads this way:
The condition of the partially civilized tribes on established reservations has materially improved. The covetous desire of white people, generally living near these reservations, to obtain possession of the lands, either for occupation or speculation, led to the introduction at the last session of Congress of several bills providing for the removal of the Indians, and the sales of the lands, without due regard to the rights of the Indians or the sacred obligations of treaties. When the attention of Congress was called to these several acts, however, and their manifest injustice pointed out, they [the acts] were promptly abandoned.
Emphasis mine.Wait a minute. Didn't we just have some good white men from Washington threatening an established Indian nation with starvation if its people didn't move that very same winter? Doesn't sound like any U.S. relocation policies were abandoned in 1871. Nor in 1872, 1873, 1877 and on into the next century. Including, if I am reading right, a relocation as recently as 1954.
We had some dams and stuff to build that year.
Nice how just a single report in 1871 can take care of 80-some years worth of graft ahead of us.
They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one: they promised to take our land, and they did.
-Mahpiua Luta (Red Cloud), Oglala Lakota
Born 1822 in Nebraska Territory.
Died in Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1878, after two government relocations.
[photo of Sioux Camp at Pine Ridge, 1891, via Neo' Kis' Tomi]
categories: life thought time words
August 2006: On July 20 I got an email from writer/researcher Colette Keith of Black Hills State University in South Dakota. A member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe. Ms. Keith was Googling the phrase "Neo'Kis'Tomi" when she came across my site.
But that's not what's so odd about this story.
What's odd is that Colette and I felt we'd known one another all our lives after a few brief exchanges. Almost precisely the same age, we have compared life stories and found amazing coincidences of experience and interest, as well as wildly divergent paths.
What's odd is that, as with many of my best bliends, Colette is someone I never, ever would have met. But having now encountered her, I find I can't imagine life without her.
The bait was a post I created out of cynicism and depression. The "catch" was a living friend.
posted by lisa schamess @ 15:37
3 Comments:
It's like Bush is still doing - remove "terrorists" (aka every Iraqi, Afghani or anyone else whose opinions differ from his) and "put them in a safer place". Guantanamo may possibly be even worse than the old times' reservations.
I did my high school dissertation on North American Indians. I was so embarrassed to be white, until someone gave me a T-shirt saying "judge my mind, not my colour" - himself wearing "I was born this colour!"
It's what you do that counts.
So next time, I hope the other half of America will be voting in the presidential election as well...
An excellent commentary to read prior to a Thanksgiving meal. It reminded me a bit of the time when your brother-in-law Andrew, at the age of 12, discovered the "real" history of the Native Americans, as opposed to the Thanksgiving legend of savages-turned-benefactors that he'd learned in school up to then. He spent the whole Thanksgiving meal that year lecturing us on what "we" had done to the Native Americans. I tried to convince him that "we" -- or at least our ancestors -- were being pursued by Russian Cossacks at the time and were too busy saving ourselves to be oppressing Native Americans. But all joking aside, I was proud of him for having taken his new-found knowledge seriously. He hasn't changed a bit, as you may have noticed. And I am grateful to you for expanding further my knowledge of a part of our history that no amount of turkey, stuffing and family togetherness can erase. Good for you, Lisa!
I'll correct this post soon to reflect the fact that Red Cloud was the chosen chief of the Oglala Lakota, not by lineage but by his brave conduct. He was the primary negotiator with the whites during the mid-19th century, a gifted orator and mediator who strove to balance the opinions of many Sioux chiefs. Perhaps he gave the Sioux a few extra decades of relative autonomy before the inevitable relocation.
Incidentally, my reading of all of this is that obviously the railroad drove the development, just as highways and to some extent rail transit do now (though rail is not usually built on raw land in farflung outposts; roads are). The "greedy, bad" whites were greedy and bad because government infrastructure gave them a leg up. That has not changed. Is it a strictly American phenom?
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