by David Treuer
Despite his affection for Parker or his apparent concern for Indians and Indian interests, Grant arrived at a disastrous solution to the problem the board had described. If the Indian service was rife with opportunists and ne’er-do-wells and warmongers, he would find a new source of administrators. In his second annual message to Congress, in December 1870, Grant unveiled his plan. Indian affairs would come under the control of a handful of religious orders. The effect of Parker’s own Baptist upbringing can be felt in this decision, which would have dire ramifications for every aspect of Indians’ daily life, especially, after Wounded Knee, in perhaps the most destructive aspect of Indian policy to come: Indian boarding schools.
In 1871, Ely Parker resigned, calling it a “thankless position.” The end of his service was the end of an era: on March 3, 1871, Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act, a bookend act closing down the “treaty period” opened twenty years before with the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851. This was a small piece of legislation meant to appropriate around $1,500 for the relief of the Lakota, who were experiencing serious hardship at the time. However, a rider was attached that radically changed the government’s policy toward Indians by ending the treaty period. It read, in part: “No Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty; but no obligation of any treaty lawfully made and ratified with any such Indian nation or tribe prior to March 3, 1871, shall be hereby invalidated or impaired.” In plain language this meant that the treaty process—the means by which the federal government and the Indian tribes had interacted and defined their relationships with one another—was officially terminated. In its place (as provided by the act), the government would administer Indians not as foreign nations (as they had been) or as citizens (which, by and large, they had yet to become) but as wards of the state, for whom the government assumed the roles of guardian, banker, and protector. In principle this might have been a good thing, but it flew in the face of obvious realities, namely that, where Indians were concerned, the government itself often acted as the aggressor and treated with tribes unfairly and in bad faith. How, then, should Indians, when seeking redress, rely on American courts and American politicians and American people to see to their interests? Juries and governmental committees seldom included any Indians, let alone a majority. No elected officials were Indians. And yet the bureau would assume radical new importance as the sole conduit for all claims and adjudications and assessments.
With the end of the Plains Indian Wars in the 1880s and the closing of the frontier in 1890, the Office of Indian Affairs became even more important. By that time the Indians of the Southwest—including the vast number of Diné, Californian Indians, and all the other Indians in territories not yet states—lived under the American umbrella. The Office of Indian Affairs’ payroll grew from 108 employees in 1852 to almost 2,000 by 1888. These employees, organized into agencies, each run by an Indian agent, were clumped into larger regions administered by superintendents, who in turn reported up to the board of commissioners, and from there to the commissioner himself. Each agent was expected to administer to the Indians within his agency, to see that they received treaty rations, to dispense annuities, to hire and train police (often drawn from Indians of the tribes within the reach of the agency), to redress wrongs, to keep the peace, to supervise the missions and religious orders empowered by the government to “civilize” the Indians, to make sure traders and store owners both served Indians and were paid by them, and to file quarterly reports to their superintendent, who would file reports on his region with the office in Washington, D.C. On the ground, the agent was most Indians’ point of contact with the government. By 1900, indeed, “the Indian agent had, in effect, become the tribal government.” So what did that government look like?
A civilian visiting the agency in Anadarko, in Indian Territory, observed, “There are bluffs and bunches of timber around Anadarko, but the prairie stretches towards the west, and on it is the pen from which cattle are issued. The tepees and camp-fires sprang up over night, and . . . more Indians were driving in every minute, with the family in the wagon and the dogs under it. . . . The men galloped off to the cattle-pen, and the women gathered in a long line in front of the agent’s store to wait their turn for their rations. It was a curious line, with very young girls in it, very proud of the babies in beaded knapsacks on their backs—dirty, bright-eyed babies . . . and wrinkled, bent old squaws . . . with coarse white hair, and hands worn [almost] out of shape with work. Each of these had a tag . . . on which was printed the number in each family, and the amount of grain, flour, baking-powder, and soap to which the family was entitled.” An Indian agent assigned to the Blackfeet in northwestern Montana reported that the Indians there were in terrible condition: “Their supplies had been limited and many of them were gradually dying of starvation. I visited a large number of their tents and cabins the second day after they had received their weekly rations. . . . All bore marks of suffering from lack of food but the little children seemed to have suffered most. . . . It did not seem possible for them to live long . . . so great was their destitution that the Indians stripped bark from the saplings that grow along the creeks and ate the inner portions to appease their gnawing hunger.” Whereas the Blackfeet had, fifty years earlier, the millions-strong bison herd to feed them, now they had the bark of trees. And even in order to hunt they needed the permission of the Indian agent.
Washburn ruefully summed it up this way: “Back in the tail end of the nineteenth century, Indians lived in organized communities, but many of them were living, literally, against the walls of federal forts. It was a real low point for tribes. There was a BIA superintendent for each agency”—the new term for what before 1909 had been referred to as an “Indian agent”—“who was viewed as a god. They were in charge of everything. The superintendent had an amazing amount of authority. Consequently, when people talk about the BIA today there is still a lot of resentment. Back then ‘BIA’ really did stand for ‘Bossing Indians Around.’”
A whole new bureaucracy grew up to support the work of the Indian agent: clerks, stenographers, millers, farmers, carpenters, mechanics, sawyers, stockmen, laborers, freighters, and cops. The mission was, according to Henry L. Dawes, the chief architect of this new phase in federal Indian policy, to turn Indians into Americans through private ownership, religion, and education. Thomas Morgan, the commissioner of Indian affairs in 1890, was clear: “It has become the settled policy of the Government to break up reservations, destroy tribal relations, settle Indians upon their own homesteads, incorporate them into the national life, and deal with them not as nations or tribes or bands, but as individual citizens.” Or as Dawes put it more colloquially: What America wanted, at a time when it was drunk on its own power and sense of the rightness of its ways, was for Indians to “wear civilized clothes . . . cultivate the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink whiskey [and] own property.” The Indian agent, together with the bureau he represented, was the administrative tool to achieve this end. His two greatest weapons were schools and land. The attempted control of tribal lives (and the attempt to turn tribes into individuals) through the theft of land and children was guided by greed, ideology, religion, and, of course, good intentions.
The rider to the 1871 Indian Appropriations Act that had brought the treaty period to an end—though barely recognized by most people—was one such instance of good intentions with profound, largely unintended consequences. Grant and Ely Parker hoped to end the patronage system by moving the Office of Indian Affairs from the Interior back to the War Department and by putting religious orders in positions of power. But by legislating the end of the treaty process, the act took all the power of the executive branch to negotiate with the tribes and gave it to Congress. It also prevented Grant from moving the Indian service back to the War Departm
ent, as he’d hoped. Now, both houses of Congress (rather than just the Senate and the executive branch) would legislate Indian policy, ensuring that Indian affairs would forever be wrapped up in partisan politics and subject to the local whims of states’ rights. This new phase of federal Indian policy was known as assimilation, and as bad as the years of warfare and treaty making had been, assimilation would be immeasurably worse. How Indian policy evolved, and how it was experienced on the ground, is a story that includes the resistance and eventual capitulation of the Nez Perce, the protest of a band of Ponca, the educational reforms of Richard Henry Pratt, Helen Hunt Jackson, the Friends of the Indian, and the resulting Lake Mohonk Conference.
Chief Joseph and Chief Standing Bear
In January 1870, U.S. troops killed 173 Blackfeet Indians (mostly women and children) after being directed to the wrong camp by a soldier who wanted to protect his Indian wife and children. In 1871, four settlers killed thirty Yahi Indians in the Ishi Wilderness near Wild Horse Corral; the entire remnant of the tribe numbered fifteen or so. On December 28, 1872, U.S. troops killed seventy-six Yavapai Indians in the Skeleton Cave Massacre in Arizona. U.S. troops attacked a Nez Perce village in 1877 in Big Hole, Montana, killing as many as ninety before they were driven away by the survivors. After escaping confinement at Nebraska’s Fort Robinson in 1879, Northern Cheyenne chief Dull Knife and his band were hunted down and slaughtered, though the chief didn’t die until 1883. As many as seventy perished. Regional coverage of these atrocities by papers like the Portland Standard and The Lewiston Teller was quickly picked up out east.
The struggles of the Nez Perce under Chief Joseph received especially widespread coverage. The tribe had been promised by treaty a reservation in their ancestral lands in Oregon’s Wallowa Valley. In 1877, however, they were forcibly removed to a poorer, smaller, and unfamiliar reservation near Lapwai, Idaho. Chief Joseph and his band decided they could not live in this new land, far from the bones of their ancestors, and so they fled, embarking on a twelve-hundred-mile fighting retreat across Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, on their way to join Sitting Bull’s Lakota across the border in Canada. Starving and exhausted, Joseph and his band surrendered to General Nelson A. Miles on October 5, 1877, just forty miles from the Canadian border. John Andrew Rea covered the entire battle over the spring and into the winter for the Chicago Tribune and The New York Herald. Two years after his surrender, Chief Joseph gave a speech in Washington, D.C., to the government and the public. It is worth reading in full. Few other documents capture both the anguish and the hopes of Indians at that time or provide such a concise account of a tribe’s relationship with the United States from the moment of first contact:
My friends, I have been asked to show you my heart. I am glad to have a chance to do so. I want the white people to understand my people. Some of you think an Indian is like a wild animal. This is a great mistake. I will tell you all about our people, and then you can judge whether an Indian is a man or not. I believe much trouble and blood would be saved if we opened our hearts more. I will tell you in my way how the Indian sees things. The white man has more words to tell you how they look to him, but it does not require many words to speak the truth. What I have to say will come from my heart, and I will speak with a straight tongue. Ah-cum-kin-i-ma-me-hut (the Great Spirit) is looking at me, and will hear me.
My name is In-mut-too-yah-lat-lat (Thunder traveling over the Mountains). I am chief of the Wal-lam-wat-kin band of Chute-pa-lu, or Nez Perces (nose-pierced Indians). I was born in eastern Oregon, thirty-eight winters ago. My father was chief before me. When a young man, he was called Joseph by Mr. Spaulding, a missionary. He died a few years ago. There was no stain on his hands of the blood of a white man. He left a good name on the earth. He advised me well for my people.
Our fathers gave us many laws, which they had learned from their fathers. These laws were good. They told us to treat all men as they treated us; that we should never be the first to break a bargain; that it was a disgrace to tell a lie; that we should speak only the truth; that it was a shame for one man to take from another his wife, or his property without paying for it. We were taught to believe that the Great Spirit sees and hears everything, and that he never forgets; that hereafter he will give every man a spirit-home according to his deserts: if he has been a good man, he will have a good home; if he has been a bad man, he will have a bad home. This I believe, and all my people believe the same.
We did not know there were other people besides the Indian until about one hundred winters ago, when some men with white faces came to our country. They brought many things with them to trade for furs and skins. They brought tobacco, which was new to us. They brought guns with flint stones on them, which frightened our women and children. Our people could not talk with these white-faced men, but they used signs which all people understand. These men were Frenchmen, and they called our people “Nez Perces,” because they wore rings in their noses for ornaments. Although very few of our people wear them now, we are still called by the same name. These French trappers said a great many things to our fathers, which have been planted in our hearts. Some were good for us, but some were bad. Our people were divided in opinion about these men. Some thought they taught more bad than good. An Indian respects a brave man, but he despises a coward. He loves a straight tongue, but he hates a forked tongue. The French trappers told us some truths and some lies.
The first white men of your people who came to our country were named Lewis and Clark. They also brought many things that our people had never seen. They talked straight, and our people gave them a great feast, as a proof that their hearts were friendly. These men were very kind. They made presents to our chiefs and our people made presents to them. We had a great many horses, of which we gave them what they needed, and they gave us guns and tobacco in return. All the Nez Perces made friends with Lewis and Clark, and agreed to let them pass through their country, and never to make war on white men. This promise the Nez Perces have never broken. No white man can accuse them of bad faith, and speak with a straight tongue. It has always been the pride of the Nez Perces that they were the friends of the white men. When my father was a young man there came to our country a white man (Rev. Mr. Spaulding) who talked spirit law. He won the affections of our people because he spoke good things to them. At first he did not say anything about white men wanting to settle on our lands. Nothing was said about that until about twenty winters ago, when a number of white people came into our country and built houses and made farms. At first our people made no complaint. They thought there was room enough for all to live in peace, and they were learning many things from the white men that seemed to be good. But we soon found that the white men were growing rich very fast, and were greedy to possess everything the Indian had. My father was the first to see through the schemes of the white men, and he warned his tribe to be careful about trading with them. He had suspicion of men who seemed so anxious to make money. I was a boy then, but I remember well my father’s caution. He had sharper eyes than the rest of our people.
Next there came a white officer (Governor Stevens), who invited all the Nez Perces to a treaty council. After the council was opened he made known his heart. He said there were a great many white people in the country, and many more would come; that he wanted the land marked out so that the Indians and white men could be separated. If they were to live in peace it was necessary, he said, that the Indians should have a country set apart for them, and in that country they must stay. My father, who represented his band, refused to have anything to do with the council, because he wished to be a free man. He claimed that no man owned any part of the earth, and a man could not sell what he did not own.
Mr. Spaulding took hold of my father’s arm and said, “Come and sign the treaty.” My father pushed him away, and said: “Why do you ask me to sign away my country? It is your business to talk to us about spirit matters, and not to talk to us about parting with our land.” Governor Stevens
urged my father to sign his treaty, but he refused. “I will not sign your paper,” he said; “you go where you please, so do I; you are not a child, I am no child; I can think for myself. No man can think for me. I have no other home than this. I will not give it up to any man. My people would have no home. Take away your paper. I will not touch it with my hand.”
My father left the council. Some of the chiefs of the other bands of the Nez Perces signed the treaty, and then Governor Stevens gave them presents of blankets. My father cautioned his people to take no presents, for “after a while,” he said, “they will claim that you have accepted pay for your country.” Since that time four bands of the Nez Perces have received annuities from the United States. My father was invited to many councils, and they tried hard to make him sign the treaty, but he was firm as the rock, and would not sign away his home. His refusal caused a difference among the Nez Perces.
Eight years later (1863) was the next treaty council. A chief called Lawyer, because he was a great talker, took the lead in this council, and sold nearly all the Nez Perces country. My father was not there. He said to me: “When you go into council with the white man, always remember your country. Do not give it away. The white man will cheat you out of your home. I have taken no pay from the United States. I have never sold our land.” In this treaty Lawyer acted without authority from our band. He had no right to sell the Wallowa (winding water) country. That had always belonged to my father’s own people, and the other bands had never disputed our right to it. No other Indians ever claimed Wallowa.