The State, Removal and Indigenous Peoples in the United States and Mexico, 1620-2000

Claudia Haake

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135903152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

This book investigates the forced migration of the Delawares in the United States and the Yaquis in Mexico, focusing primarily on the impact removal from tribal lands had on the (ethnic) identity of these two indigenous societies. It analyzes Native responses to colonial and state policies to determine the practical options that each group had in dealing with the states in which they lived. Haake convincingly argues that both nation-states aimed at the destruction of the Native American societies within their borders. This exemplary comparative, transnational study clearly demonstrates that the legacy of these attitudes and policies are readily apparent in both countries today. This book should appeal to a wide variety of academic disciplines in which diversity and minority political representation assume significance.

Chapter One

Indian Policy in the United States: Removal of Difference

American Indians were and are very diverse peoples. That is the reason why it makes only limited sense to treat them as a uniform group. American Indian policy is a somewhat different matter because policymakers largely treated Native Americans as monolithic. Still, the same policy could turn out to be a very different experience for different tribes as to a considerable extent it would have been shaped by those actually carrying it out along with those who were forced to receive it, as well as by those who originally made the laws.

Yet even when taking all these dissimilarities into account, removal is one of the—if not indeed the—dominant theme of United States Indian Policy as it was present in a range of policies from treaties of land cession over allotment to termination and relocation. This chapter will show how removal has been a prevalent motif in any aspects of Indian policy as practiced in the United States.

THE COLONIAL LEGACY OF TREATY-MAKING

Upon their ‘discovery’ and under what has come to be called the ‘doctrine of discovery,’ Indians, while held to be inferior to Europeans, were generally recognized by most European nations as political entities capable to deal with Europeans by means of treaty. The reasons for this decision on the part of the Europeans would have been complex. While the European presence in what today is the United States was still comparatively weak, treaty-making was the easiest and probably the most secure way to deal with Native American nations. It also gave an air of legality and propriety to the dealings Europeans had with American Indian nations. Significantly, this would have lent strength to the claims Europeans laid to parts of the New World in particular against possible rival claims by other Europeans. Had this not been the case it may have been easier and more convenient to simply adhere to Native traditions instead of written treaties which would be binding under European law as well and thus potentially inconvenient for the European party.

When the United States of America achieved independence, it adhered to this established pattern within Native-white relations and assumed the treaty-making powers earlier exercised by Great Britain and other European nations. This may partly have been because Native Americans were key actors during the American Revolution and hence needed to be catered to, and partly because the standard had already been established.¹ So in 1778, the newly created United States entered into its first (known) treaty with an Indian nation, the Lenape or Delawares.² While this was a treaty of friendship and thus reflective of the United States’ need for allies, that was not necessarily the normal content of such documents. Among other things, treaties often arranged for a more or less orderly transfer of land-ownership from Indians to the United States. And so with each treaty signed the Indians lost more and more of their land base.

As becomes obvious when looking at treaties of land cession which suggested to the Indians that it would be beneficial for them to surrender their lands, “white America’s policy from the beginning was a curious mixture of the benign and the malevolent.”³ At times it seemed like Europeans could not make up their minds if they wanted to help the Indians or eradicate them. Indeed, some policies seem to have aimed to do both and even the genuinely benevolent help given to Indians quite often turned out to ultimately be to the Natives’ disadvantage. This curious fact has been reflected in many Indian policies, starting with the very earliest ones. For instance, during the first years of the nineteenth century, the United States of America followed a policy of assimilation. “Assimilation, the replacement of one culture by another, was considered the humane solution to the problem of peaceful coexistence of peoples from such different cultures as Indians and whites.”⁴ The underlying idea was that once Native Americans gave up hunting for subsistence they would not need the traditional amount of land, which were vast to European eyes, and thus could probably be induced to give them up to the newcomers. (From George Washington on, American presidents, following John Locke’s ideas about property as the basis for prosperity, ignored the agricultural elements of many Native societies.) And as the white culture was generally considered to be vastly superior to the American Indian one, assimilation—removal of their aboriginal culture and way of life— was also viewed as being ultimately beneficial for the Natives.

REMOVAL ANTECEDENTS

However, most Natives did not share this conviction and would refuse to be assimilated, leaving their European neighbors at a loss for what to do to still achieve their goal of land acquisition. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson bought Louisiana from France, and with this purchase, the idea of physical removal was born. The Indians were to be removed to the newly acquired ‘Great American Desert,’ which was presumed to be unfit for farming, thus freeing up valuable lands elsewhere and at least temporarily solving the problem of Native failure to assimilate. Jefferson, “like so many others of his generation, rejected the idea that Indians and whites could live peacefully together in the same neighborhood and he saw removal as the most humane way to solve this problem.”⁵ He favored what has been termed voluntary removal. But it was far from being truly voluntary; if necessary removal was to be achieved by creating conditions which would induce and compel the Indians to move, like indebtedness.⁶ While especially in the beginning some tribes were able to resist removal, the long-term results of this policy were disastrous, especially when President Andrew Jackson turned it into an official government program in 1830 and thus moved away from treating it as a voluntary step.

The object of the policy was to transfer the Indians to the west of the Mississippi and in that manner to clear the lands east of the river for unhindered white settlement. While for some Americans greed would have been the prevalent motive for supporting this policy, others considered removal and separation to be the best or even the only means to keep the Indians from being annihilated. White influence was viewed as being ultimately destructive, especially since in the eyes of the supporters of this measure Indians only seemed to have adopted white vices instead of virtues, and the need was felt to give the Native nations time to gradually adapt and get ready to finally be assimilated into American society. Government rhetoric in support of removal reflected this reasoning even though doubtlessly less noble incentives also played important roles in the evolution of the policy.

Much of general United States policy revolved around land and its ownership as easily becomes apparent by the broad focus on territorial expansion, which resulted in the Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Florida, the incorporation of what today are parts of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, and the repeated attempts to acquire Texas first from Spain and then from Mexico. The acquisition of land was an essential matter for the United States, externally as well as internally and there necessarily with regard to Native American lands. This led Vine Deloria, Jr. to conclude that “land, its ownership and use, has been a major theme in the federal-Indian relationship.”⁷ This was reflected particularly in various legal cases of the time, starting with Fletcher v. Peck in 1810. And in 1823 this central question in Indian-European relations, the question of Native land-ownership was taken on by the Supreme Court and Chief Justice John Marshall in the case Johnson v. McIntosh. Even though Native Americans were not party to the case the decision passed by the Marshal court was taken to clarify the issue of Native land ownership within the territorial boundaries of the United States. According to the court’s opinion, discovery gave the Europeans title to the entire territory and that Indian title had necessarily been impaired by the Europeans. The United States government, it was held, therefore had the exclusive right to extinguish Indian title which Marshall furthermore took to be one of occupancy only. But the Chief Justice also recognized at least a certain degree of Indian sovereignty. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) he characterized Natives as ‘domestic dependent nations,’ and thus declared Indian nations to be subject to the guardianship of the United States, yet as nations still in possession of some sovereignty.⁸ “Thus, while the tribes did not fall within the category of ‘foreign nations’ that possessed full sovereignty, they did constitute legitimate legal and political entities that could manage their own affairs, govern themselves internally, and engage in legal and political relations with the federal government and its subdivisions,” as Deloria and Lytle have explained.⁹ This unclear and puzzling legal status, probably at least partly the result of political and tactical considerations on the part of John Marshall, remains at the heart of American Indian law even today and has caused many problems in the intervening years.

To deal with the Indians the United States government established the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), often also called Indian Office. It was created in 1824 as part of the War Department and transferred to the Department of the Interior in 1849. The BIA was in charge of the administration of Native American (‘Indian’) affairs, acting on behalf of the United States of America, the trustee of tribal lands and properties. As it was the main instrument to deal with Indian nations the Bureau often came to be regarded as the bearer of bad news and something to be wary of.

REMOVAL

While for some years the United States government and mainly through the BIA had primarily used persuasion to try and make Native Americans vacate their lands, these efforts had met with only very limited success. This changed when Andrew Jackson took office in 1829. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 provided the legislative basis and the funds to remove Native peoples to the west of the Mississippi River. And while the bill’s language still suggested voluntary removal the practice often saw Native tribes removed against their will and under highly questionable circumstances. Yet still the United States found ways to justify such measures. As Ronald Takaki has observed: “As the President of the United States responsible for Indian removal, Jackson developed a philosophical explanation which transformed Indian deaths into moral inevitability.”¹⁰ This ‘inevitability’ became very evident in the Supreme Court decision of Worcester v. Georgia (1832). John Marshall ruled that the state of Georgia had no right to extent its power over the lands of the Cherokee nation but President Jackson did not enforce Marshall’s decision and consequently sealed the fate of the Cherokees even though they managed to resist removal as late as 1839. Their tragic removal acquired a sad fame under the fitting name ‘Trail of Tears’ and at least 4000 of 18000 Cherokees died in the course of the trek to their new lands in Indian Territory.

According to the BIA, at the close of Jackson’s terms in office only about 9,000 Indians were without removal treaties.¹¹ These were mostly tribes from the old Northwest. So by 1840 the area east of the Mississippi was largely cleared of Native Americans living as tribes though some had chosen to stay as individuals and to take up United States citizenship. The removal of such a large number of people was partly achieved by means of treaty, but also through war. In the Seminole Wars of the 1830s the United States had had to re-discover that fighting Indians could be a difficult, drawn-out, and costly task with no guarantee for success. To avoid such expensive and time-consuming affairs as far as possible treaties generally took preference over military means. This does not mean, however, that treaties were always legal or even morally justifiable. Bribes to the chiefs or dealings with unauthorized tribal members were a common thing to happen, as for instance the treaty of New Echota (1835) showed which arranged for the removal of the Cherokees to Indian Territory.¹² President Jackson called these bribes ‘a few presents’ but, far from relying just on such methods, also turned to intimidation and threats, bullying and other not strictly legal methods.¹³

It has been estimated that about eighty to ninety percent of the lands formerly granted to southeastern Indians, roughly 25 million acres, were acquired by speculators once the Natives had been removed from their homes, making it hard to believe in a purely philanthropic nature of removal.¹⁴ As Robert Remini has concluded, “the Indians were invariably cheated, even when the treaties were legitimately obtained.”¹⁵

RESERVATIONS

Between 1845 and 1849 the United States again enlarged their territory, in part through a victorious war with Mexico. In 1848, gold was found in California and soon a gold rush set in, the expansion to the west intensified and a new migratory fever took over. The so-termed ‘Manifest Destiny’ rationalized this move to the Pacific and the conquest of Native American and Mexican lands.¹⁶ These developments also came to have an impact on Indian policy and saw a modification of the existing removal policy. As Vine Deloria and Clifford Lytle have pointed out, “removal and relocation as policy were doomed from the beginning. Expansionist forces beyond the government’s control inevitably destroyed the effort to keep the Indian and white communities apart.”¹⁷ Some of those Natives who had already been removed from their Eastern homes once again found themselves in the path of white expansion. The rapidly developing technology and especially the building of railroads helped to speed up new settlements and hence it became impossible to keep up the policy of separation the United States government had initially been trying to achieve by means of Indian removal. Once again, land- and gold-hungry settlers invaded Indian lands. And even though some of the European intruders were only passing through Indian lands, the supposed sanctuary given to the Natives through removal could not be kept intact. Especially with the lands obtained by the United States as a result of the Spanish-American War (1846–1848), the ‘Indian question’ once again came to be at the center of national attention as settlers wanted to move onto the newly acquired lands immediately and Indians were again considered to be in the way.

As a consequence of these developments this period in United States history saw the birth of what is sometimes called the policy of concentration, which could also be classified as removal, but taken one step further. It was not drastically different from its preceding separation policy since ‘whites’ and ‘reds’ were still to be kept apart, Indians were removed to reservations, were concentrated on a smaller amount of land, and Native landholdings thus were yet again reduced, freeing up even more lands for white settlers.¹⁸ That being so, Native American peoples could be more easily supervised with the establishment of strategically placed military forts. The lands like the Great American Desert, formerly only deemed fit to accommodate the undesired Indians, now were viewed in a different light. Suddenly this area was perceived as the nation’s heartland and therefore could not be left to Native Americans.

Many tribes signed such removal treaties after the Indian Appropriation Act of 1851 by which Congress allowed $100,000 for this purpose. Usually there was only one way for Indians to avoid having to leave their old lands: “In the removal treaties tribal members had been given a choice of moving west or accepting land scripts that entitled them to take allotments within the areas they had ceded and to become state citizens.”¹⁹ For most this was not a real choice as they were unwilling to surrender their tribal ties and thus had only one option, removal, left. Much of this process took place under the direct influence of various railroad companies trying to acquire land to construct their lines and aided in this endeavor by the United States government. By and by, tribes were thus reduced to reservations in Indian Territory.²⁰

This was the situation at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. During the war the fighting was not limited to the European part of the population. In Indian Territory, it mostly took place among pro-Northern and pro-Southern groups of the Five Civilized Tribes and 6,000–10,000 were killed. Old conflicts among the Cherokees, stemming from the time of their removal from Georgia continued during the Civil War. About equal numbers of the members of the Five Civilized Tribes served in the Union as in the Confederate Army but still the federal government later used their allegiances as an opportunity to declare the existing treaties with them to be void and forced the tribes into new negotiations and thus more land losses.²¹ The government then used the lands surrendered by these tribes to resettle even more tribes onto already established reservations in Indian Territory and thus concentrating Indian land holdings and populations even more.

While the United States troops were still occupied elsewhere during the Civil War only very few could be spared to fight Indians an...