A Very Brief Summary of Wrongs Done to Native Americans

In the 1830s, US President Andrew Jackson, in defiance of a decision by the Supreme Court, ordered the Cherokee Indians, Choctaws, and several other tribes in the American Southwest, to leave their homes and march westward to a new land that was promised them, Oklahoma (which was then named Indian Territory). The story of this forced march (The "Trail of Tears"), is an extremely sad one. According to Wikipedia, "Many Native Americans suffered from exposure, disease and starvation en route to their destinations. Many died, including 4,000 of the 15,000 relocated Cherokee."*

Maybe even sadder, the promise of this land for the exclusive and perpetual ownership and use by the Indians was broken a few decades later, when white settlers started moving in.

In 1868, the Treaty of Ft. Laramie promised 41,000 square miles of land (in four states, centered around Montana) to the Lakota (Sioux) Indians. Again the treaty with its promises was broken a few decades later when gold and silver were discovered on those lands and white settlers began dispossessing the Indians of what had been promised to them.

The Indian cultures had no concept of land ownership, and when they did agree to sell their land to the White Man they often did not really understand what they were doing. Or, when they agreed to sell, they had been backed into a position of having no choice. Their lands--hunting and burial grounds, sacred mountains, and so forth—were enormously important to the Indians and yet they had to leave them, again and again.

Time and again, promises made to the Indians and treaties were simply forgotten and ignored by the US government. That is only one aspect of all the wrongs and mistreatment perpetrated against the Native Americans. The buffalo (bison), on which the Plains Indians depended for food, were deliberately, systematically, and efficiently wiped out as a matter of US government policy. This virtually destroyed Indian culture and turned a proud people into dependents. The Indians, deprived of their food source, were forced into dependence on the government's Indian agencies for handouts of food, and these handouts were not always adequate or dependable; and there was much corruption, fraud, and abuse in the system of Indian agencies, all to the detriment of the Indians whom they were supposed to benefit.

The catalog of wrongs done to the Indians is endless and shameful. They often were simply massacred, shot and their homes burned. They were given blankets infected with smallpox, perhaps deliberately (my impression is that the evidence on that is not completely clear).

As I have written elsewhere, in my view it is extremely cruel to deprive a people of its culture and its language. In addition to the utter destruction of the buffalo-centered hunting lifestyle of the Plains Indians, Indian cultures were vitiated in other ways, too. Indian children were removed from their families and sent to "Indian schools" where they were forbidden to speak their native languages and punished if they did so. This was all part of a policy to force the Indians to assimilate to the White Man's culture, but obviously done out of a lack of any respect for their own culture. Racial attitudes meant that the Indians were regarded as "savages"--even by Andrew Jackson, who professed to love the Cherokee. Clearly, Jackson held conflicting and irreconcilable attitudes toward the Cherokee. (Notions of the superiority of any European and Christian culture to any indigenous New World culture also worked to cause the Spanish conquerors to destroy the great empires of the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca.)
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*Wikipedia, s.v. Trail of Tears.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein