Who Spoke for the Indians?

In the 1850s, the 1830s—in fact for decades before the Civil War—there were well-organized, powerful, and certainly very vocal individuals and groups calling for an end to slavery—at least in the North.

On the other hand, the Indians (Native Americans) were being treated very badly and even exterminated; and I have never heard that there was even one individual who raised his voice in protest against this.

The treatment of the Indians is a sad, disgusting, tragic, criminal, and extremely long story. The saga could just go on and on.

Just a very few examples: During the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the Cherokees and several other tribes living in the Southeast of the United States were forcibly removed. With no more than the possessions they could carry on their backs they were forced to walk all the way to Oklahoma, even through bad winter weather. Many, especially the oldest and the youngest, died of disease or starvation. (Once they got there, they were told, Oklahoma, or "Indian Territory," would be theirs forever; and that turned out to be just one of innumerable, countless promises to the Indians that turned out to be totally meaningless.)

Similarly, in 1864, the Navajo were also "removed," and made to walk several hundred miles, and for a while were impounded in basically a concentration camp where nearly half of them died. (There is a lasting legacy of this in that all Navajo now alive are descendents of some 2,000 who survived this so-called Long Walk and so are inbred and suffering from diseases that result from the build-up of recessive genes.)

When the Indians were not being made to go on long forced marches like these, they were otherwise being killed by being given smallpox-infected blankets; being shot; having their villages burned and their crops destroyed; or having the buffalo, their source of food and nearly everything else in the case of the Plains Indians, exterminated. Or once on reservations and removed from their hunting grounds and thus no longer able to provide for themselves, they were not receiving food destined for them because of corrupt Indian agents.

Indians who somehow survived all the genocide by shooting and starvation had to undergo having their culture destroyed. Indian children, once in the power of whites—missionaries or teachers in special Indian schools—were forbidden to speak their language. Along with their native religious beliefs, which of course were also suppressed by the missionaries, language is virtually synonymous with culture, so that to deprive a people of their language is to virtually destroy their culture.

Of course I am viewing all this from the perspective of a  relatively enlightened person of the 21st century. But where was the person who was a bit ahead of his time, or was more humane, and who said, "These are people, they deserve to live, it's wrong to kill them, to try to wipe them out"?

Copyright © 2013.