Henry Benjamin Whipple, an Episcopal bishop, argued that corruption and mismanagement of federal Indian policy inevitably led to armed conflict.49 After the Santee Sioux Uprising in Minnesota in 1862, Whipple made a report about the causes of the uprising and reforms in the Indian Department necessary to correct them. He complained to President Lincoln that Indian agents were selected “without any reference to their fitness for the place” but largely as a reward for political party work. They appointed their subordinates on the same basis.
They are often men without any fitness, sometimes a disgrace to a Christian nation; whiskey sellers, barroom loungers, debauchees, selected to guide a heathen people. Then follows all the evils of bad example, of inefficiency, and of dishonesty. The school a sham; the supplies wasted; the improvement fund squandered by negligence, or curtailed by fraudulent contracts. The Indian bewildered, conscious of wrong, but helpless, has no refuge but to sink into depths of brutishness never known to his fathers.50
Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton was incensed by Whipple’s blanket indictment and in 1864 asked General Henry Halleck,
What does Bishop Whipple want? If he has come here to tell us of the corruption of our Indian system, and the dishonesty of Indian agents, tell him that we know it. But the Government never reforms an evil until the people demand it. Tell him that when he reaches the hearts of the American people, the Indians will be saved.51
Lincoln took a different view. He was shaken by Whipple’s report. “If we get through this war,” he said, “and I live, this Indian system shall be reformed.”52 Whipple proposed a complete reform of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, elimination of the appointment of agents through political patronage, and establishment of a cabinet post exclusively for the management of Indian policy. He was a respected voice on Indian issues through many administrations.53
In 1867, Grant’s Peace Commission came down heavily on the bureau:
The records are abundant to show that agents have pocketed the funds appropriated by the government and driven the Indians to starvation. It cannot be doubted that Indian wars have originated from this cause.54
Two years later, the Times charged that “the management of the Indian Bureau has brought about the present [Cheyenne] uprising, and that Bureau clearly is not fit to deal with them in the future.”55 Congressman Lawrence in 1869 joined the chorus of criticism, complaining, “The whole Indian Bureau is rotten and a mere den of thieves.”56 Helen Hunt Jackson wrote in 1885 that “the Indian Bureau represents a system which is a blunder and a crime.”57
The government representatives who were to administer the Dawes Act, Edward Lazarus said,
continued for the most part to be political appointees with little or no experience in Indian affairs. A state governor blithely admitted that for party workers fit for nothing else, he found jobs in the Indian service. One inspector found an “abandoned woman” in charge of one Indian school, a lunatic in charge of another.58
William T. Hagan added to the list of things gone wrong:
Contracting to supply an Indian reservation was a lucrative business. Collusion between contractor and agent provided “steel chopping knives made of cast iron; best brogans with paper soles; blankets made of shoddy and glue, which fell to pieces when wet … forty dozen elastics … when there was not a stocking in the tribe.” … Honest mistakes were as damaging. Sawmills were erected miles from any timber; bakeries were built which the Indians declined to patronize; agency farms were opened where drought was a chronic condition.59
The United States Senate itself made fundamental criticism of our Indian policy in Report No. 91-501, 91st Congress, 1st Session (1972):
A careful review of the historical literature reveals that the dominant policy of the Federal government toward the American Indian has been one of forced assimilation which has vacillated between the two extremes of coercion and persuasion. At the root of the assimilation policy has been a desire to divest the Indian of his land and resources.
More recently, Fergus M. Bordewich said that President Reagan’s Commission on Reservation Economics report in 1984 accused the Bureau of Indian Affairs of “excessive regulation and incompetent management, with the agency consuming more than two-thirds of its budget on itself, and recommends assigning the agency’s programs to other federal agencies.”60
The Bureau of Indian Affairs remains incompetent even today. In 1985, in what was called by Bordewich “one of the most stunningly shortsighted decisions for which it has become famous,” the bureau announced that welfare recipients would no longer be permitted to attend school.61
Bureau financial affairs are equally bad. In a 1991 report, the Department of the Interior found Bureau of Indian Affairs accounting systems were “totally unreliable.” Two specific examples: The Bureau of Indian Affairs Muskogee Area office inventoried 3 chainsaws at a total of $297 million, a television set at $96 million, and 2 typewriters at $114 million. The Albuquerque Area office valued a computer disk drive at $3 million; its actual cost was $495. “The agency could not locate $23 million worth of property in 1991.”62
In 1993, federal inspectors reported that the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ financial system was in such disarray that they could not audit $3.2 billion of $4.4 billion in bureau assets. Until recently, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was 8 years behind in paying its local telephone bills. The $2.1 billion Indian trust fund was never audited until 5 years ago. That fund has not been able to reconcile its accounts for more than 100 years, a fact that Congress has characterized as a national disgrace. Although the Bureau of Indian Affairs budget for 1994 was about $1.8 billion, some bureau officials estimate that less than 20 percent of money received trickled down to the reservations. Accountants at Arthur Andersen & Company have been hired to try to sort out the books, but estimate it could cost $390 million just to reconcile accounts in the $2.1 billion Indian trust fund.63
There is current litigation involving bureau financial affairs. The bureau manages 300,000 individual Indian land accounts worth an estimated $500 million.64 It admits it cannot document $2 billion worth of transactions in tribal accounts over a 20-year period.65 In February 1999, the judge in a class-action suit filed against the government held 3 government officials in contempt of court for failing to turn over bureau records, holding they “must take blame for years of delays and ‘Outright false statements.’“66 He also said, “Justice has not been done to these Indian beneficiaries.”67 The same day, a joint statement from the Treasury and Interior Departments said, “We deeply regret the mistakes that we made in this case.”68
In May 1999, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt charged that the bureau’s critics were “racially motivated.” He added that it was “a deep condescension to the fact that any institution which is primarily managed by Indians is incompetent of managing in the modern world.” The bureau’s workforce is 90 percent Indian. A Cherokee lawyer replied that “if criticizing the BIA is anti-Indian, then most Indians are anti-Indian.”69
Minutes before the trial concerning the bureau’s alleged failures concerning the land accounts started in June 1999, the government admitted that it “does not adequately control the receipts and disbursements of account holders.”70 Also in June, a court-appointed investigator found inappropriate storage of bureau records, which were kept in 108 different offices. Records were kept in wooden sheds; files were spilled loosely around and were stuffed in unmarked boxes strewn among truck tires. Many had been lost or ruined over the years.71 Babbitt announced that the government was installing a new $60 million computer system to try to help the situation, but he added that because of the poor condition of some records, “the new computer system will not be totally accurate.”72
When this current litigation is concluded, we should know more about the bureau and its impact on the Indians.
CHAPTER 11
Where We Are and Where We May Go
The relations between the settlers and the Indians during the war were understandably
hostile in view of the fact that each side was often trying to kill the other. After wars have been over for a period of time, however, there is usually a tendency to let bygones be bygones. One need only recall that after World War II our two major opponents, Germany and Japan, became our friends, and our old Cold War enemy, the former USSR, now has fairly cordial relations with us. This has not been true of settler-Indian relations, even though the war was ended more than a century ago. Some Indians today are frustrated, unhappy, and even bitter toward the descendants of the settlers. What accounts for this?
We know that most of the Indian tribes loved war. They were defeated in this war, and that defeat no doubt led to frustration that less warlike peoples might have more easily tolerated. We also know that after the war was ended, the Indians were victims of settlers who grabbed Indian-occupied lands, of the government’s inconsistent Indian policies, and of misconduct on the part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs that continues to the present time. The low state of Indian health and economic status also continues. Unhappiness and bitterness resulted from all these things.
Bitterness and unrealistic expectations also came about from the doctrine of historical revisionism, or false history. Products of the doctrine mislead instead of inform, thereby impairing resolution of disputes. Arthur M. Schlesinger repeated this concept. He said, “Honest history is the weapon of freedom,” then added that we can’t allow our history to be dictated by pressure groups such as Indian advocates:
Our schools and colleges have a responsibility to teach history for its own sake—as part of the intellectual equipment of civilized persons—and not to degrade history by allowing its contents to be dictated by pressure groups, whether political, economic, religious, or ethnic. The past may sometimes give offense to one or another minority; that is no reason for rewriting history.1
Lincoln said it first and said it better: “History is not history unless it is the truth.”2
Apparently in an attempt to romanticize Indians and make them and their advocates feel better, in 1970 the Dee Brown book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was published. Admittedly, it was a history of the American West from the Indian point of view. The New Statesman said the book was “a deliberately revisionist history.” The New York Review of Books noted that Brown’s reason for writing the book was his belief that settlers “have for long had the exclusive use of history and that it is now time to present, with sympathy rather than critically, the red side of the story.”3 John M. Coward in The Newspaper Indian called Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee “polemical literature.”4
Brown said, “The culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed” between 1860 and 1890.5 Indian culture and civilization are not destroyed as one can see just by looking at the wealth of Indian cultural events available today. Brown also said that one of the most warlike tribes of all, the Iroquois, “strove in vain for peace.”6 Finally, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee praised Little Crow and Cochise as “perhaps the most heroic of all Americans.”7 But among the highlights of Cochise’s career was his vow to exterminate all whites in Arizona and his brutal murder of 14 prisoners. Little Crow led the Santee Sioux Uprising, where some 700 settlers were murdered and 100 soldiers killed. These multiple murderers are surely not heroic to present-day Indians. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is history that often leads us away from the truth so that it is more difficult to solve Indian problems. Terrorists such as Cochise and Little Crow have never been heroes in mainstream American history.
The Earth Shall Weep by James Wilson also relied heavily on revisionist history. Reviewer C. B. Delaney on Amazon.com accurately said that Wilson was “attempting to view the Indian-European encounter through their [Indian] eyes.” Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 1999, noted, “He [Wilson] relies heavily on the work of revisionist historians.” Wilson, an Englishman, seems to have a distorted view of America. He said we are a “racist, immoral society” where (speaking of Indian casinos) the “ultimate accolade of success [is] Mafia involvement.”8 We do have some racist, some immoral, and some Mafia people here, but that does not make America a racist, immoral, or Mafia society.
It has not been demonstrated that rewriting history helps the groups for which it is rewritten. Arthur M. Schlesinger said,
Even if history is sanitized in order to make people feel good, there is no evidence that feel-good history promotes ethnic self-esteem and equips students to grapple with their lives.9
Schlesinger also quoted the Czechoslovakian Vaclav Havel, who pointed out one of the effects of historical revisionism:
He who fears facing his own past must necessarily fear what lies before him…. Lying can never save us from the lie. Falsifiers of history do not safeguard freedom but imperil it.10
Those who falsify Indian history with the best of intentions, hoping to improve the Indian condition, will of course harm the Indians, not help them. To paraphrase Schlesinger, historical revisionism clouds the Indians’ view (and that of all others as well) of where they have been and where they are going, and this is to their detriment. The rich cultural history of the many tribes is well worth preserving and presenting, but falsification of certain aspects of Indian life is not.
PARADOXICALLY, THE invasion of the settlers benefited the Indians in some important ways. The impact of white culture was most notable among eastern tribes. With their metal tools and weapons, the Indians were able to support themselves more easily, leaving more time for religion, war, and recreation. Old crafts declined. Some crafts reached new levels of excellence.11 The acquisition of rifles allowed some tribes to drive out traditional enemies, which has been described as a “prodigious shifting of tribes.” William T. Hagan has observed that
the Iroquois in the East, the Apaches in the Southwest, and the Crees in the Hudson’s Bay area were among those Indians who acquired metal weapons and used them with devastating effect on their neighbors, driving them from choice hunting grounds, seizing their property, enslaving and killing them.12
White culture influenced western tribes as well. “Degeneration did not automatically follow tribal associations with the whites,” observed Hagan. “The acquisition of metal tools and utensils, firearms, horses, and sheep simplified life for the Indian.”13 The horse made the greatest impression. It “facilitated a genuine revolution” and “produced a new culture” for the Plains Indians. With the horse, the Indians became mobile and could follow the buffalo herds. As a result, “an entirely new pattern of life developed, complete with a new religious orientation, new dances, and new games.”14 The horse was so important to the Navajo that they claimed there was never a time the 2 did not exist together. “If there were no horses, there were no Navajos.”15
The horse and the gun allowed the Sioux to achieve a “rich and satisfying life.”16 Indeed, “some Indian groups, such as the Plains warriors, achieved their greatest power and fame as a direct result of such trade [with the settlers].”17 The Creeks grew prosperous in dealing with colonial traders.18 In addition to horses and guns, some tribes (the southern tribes and the Iroquois) began acquiring domestic animals and planting European fruit trees.19
In the long run, the Indian was changed dramatically by the settlers. Fergus M. Bordewich concluded that
in the course of the past five centuries, Indian life has been utterly transformed by the impact of European horses and firearms, by imported diseases and modern medicine, by missionary zeal and Christian morality, by iron cookware, sheepherding, pickup trucks, rodeos and schools, by rum and welfare offices, and by elections, alphabets, and Jeffersonian ideals as well as by MTV, Dallas, and The Simpsons and by the rich mingling of native bloodlines with those of Europe, Africa, and the Hispanic Southwest.20
The invasion of the settlers greatly accelerated Indian material progress. The change was perhaps too rapid for the Indians, but it was arguably a change for the better. The Indian today is able to live more effectively in the modern world in many ways because of the impact of the settler invasion.
In addition to these benefits, starting nearly with the beginning of the United States, Bernard W. Sheehan noted, the Indians have “accepted incontinently a rich assortment of the products of civilized technology. The list seems endless.”21 Federal money for Indian programs designed to alleviate their problems annually totalled $120 million by 1960 and was estimated to exceed $2 billion each year by the late 1970s.22 That sum increased dramatically to about $3 billion each year by the 1990s.23
Whether or not these payments are well spent has been questioned by columnist Mona Charen:
For years, but particularly since the 1960s and ‘70s when the Indian cause became chic, the U.S. government has lavished freebies on Indian reservations. Hendrik Mills, writing in the November/December American Enterprise magazine, described the cornucopia available to reservation Indians: free health care with no co-payments, extra education funds, tribal colleges complete with full scholarships and living expenses, exemptions from many local and state taxes, Head Start, loads of free food, and—of course—welfare.
Mills, who was drawn to the reservation initially by leftist idealism, was appalled to see the unopened packages of food—most with Department of Agriculture stamps—rotting in local dumps.
He was shocked that many Indian parents effectively have made their children orphans by failing to provide the most basic care. And he was disillusioned to discover that many Indians wait for the government check to come each month and then blow it all at the casino.24
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