Native American Viewpoints -- T

Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, Helen (Fisk) Hunt Jackson (1830-1885) we raised to be a conventional wife and mother. Her father taught Latin and philosophy at Amherst College, and she was the neighbor and life long friend of Emily Dickinson. As a girl, she attended private school in lpswish and New York, and in 1852, she married and army officer, Edward B. Hunt. She dutifully followed him as he was reassigned, and gave birth to two sons, one of whom died in infancy. Eleven years after her marriage, her husband died in an accident; two years later her son died. Bereft, she began writing poems and articles for magazines. In 1875, she married William S. Jackson, and they settled in Colorado Springs. After hearing a lecture, she became interested in the plight of the Indians. In 1881, she published a Century of Dishonor which she sent to every member of Congress; and excerpt appears below.

There is not among three hundred bands of Indians (in the United States) one which has not suffered cruelly at the hands either of the government or of white settlers. The poorer, the more insignificant, the more helpless the band, the more certain the cruelty and outrage to which they have been subjected. This is especially true for the bands on the Pacific- slopes. These Indians found themselves of a sudden surrounded be and caught up in the great influx of gold-seeking settlers, as helpless creatures on a shore caught up in the tidal wave. There was not time for the government to make treaties; not even time communities to make laws. The tale of the wrongs, the oppressions, the murder of the Pacific- slope Indians in the last thirty years would be a volume by itself, and its to monstrous to be believed.

It makes little difference, however, where one opens the record of the history of the Indians; every page and every year has its dark stain. The story of one tribe in the story of all, varied only by differences of time and place; but neither time nor place makes any difference in the main facts. Colorado is as greedy and unjust in 1880 and was Georgia in 1830, and Ohio in 1795; and the united Stated Government breaks promises now as deftly as then, and with added ingenuity from long practice.

One of its strongest supporters in so doing is the widespread sentiment among the people of dislike to the Indian, of impatience with his presence as a “barrier to civilization,” and a distrust of it as a possible danger. The old tales of frontier life, with its horrors of Indian warfare, have gradually, by two or three generations’ telling, produced in the average mind something like an hereditary instinct of unquestioning and unreasoning aversion which it is almost impossible to dislodge or soften.

There are hundreds of pages of unimpeachable testimony on the side of the Indian; but it goes for nothing, is set down as sentimentalism or partisanship, tossed aside and forgotten.

President after president has appointed commission after commission to inquire into and report upon Indian affairs, and to make suggestions as the best methods of managing them. The reports are filled with eloquent statement of wrong done to the Indians, of perfidies on the part of the government; they counsel, as earnestly as words can, a trial of the simple and unperplexing expedients of telling truth, keeping promises, making fair bargains, dealing justly in all ways and all things. These reports are bound up with government’s annual reports, and that is the end of them. It would probably be no exaggeration to say that not one American citizen out of tem thousand ever sees them or knows they exist, and yet any one of them, circulated throughout the country, read by the right-thinking, right-feeling men and woman of this land, would be of itself a “campaign document” that would initiate a revolution which would not subside until the Indians’ wrongs were, so far as is now left possible righted.

In 1869, President Grant appointed a commission of nine men, representing the influence and philanthropy of ix leading States, to visit the different Indian reservations, and to “examine all matters appertaining to Indian affairs.”

In the reports of the commission are such paragraphs as the following: to “To assert that ‘the Indian will not work’ is as true as it would be to say that the white man will not work.

‘Why should the Indian be expected to plant corn, fence lands, build houses, or do anything but get food from day to day, when experience has taught him that the product will be seized by the white mans to-morrow? The most industrious white man would become a drone under similar circumstances. Nevertheless, many of the Indians” (the commissioners might more forcibly have said 130,000 of the Indians) “are already at work, the furnish ample refutation of the assertion the ‘Indian will not work.’ There is no escape from the inexorable logic of fats.

“ The history of the Government connections with the Indians is a shameful record of broken treaties and unfulfilled promises. the history of the border, white man’s connection with the Indian is a sickening record of murder, outrage, robbery, and wrongs committed by the former, as the rule, and the occasional savage outbreaks and unspeakably barbarous deeds of retaliations by the latter, as the exception.

“Taught by the Government that they had rights entitled to respect, when those rights have been assailed by the rapacity of the white man, the arm which should have been raised to protect them has ever been ready to sustain the aggressor.

“The testimony of some of the highest military officers of the United States is on record to the effect that, in our Indian wars, almost with out exception, the first aggressions have been make by the white man, and the assertion is supported by every civilian of reputations who has studied the subject. In addition the class of robbers and outlaws who find impunity in their nefarious pursuits on the frontier, there is a large class of professedly reputable men who used every means in their power to bring on Indian wars for the sake of the profit to be realized from the presence of troops and the expenditures of Government funds in their midst. They proclaim death to the Indians at all times in words and publications, making no distinction between the innocent and the guilty. They irate the low class of men to their perpetration of the darkest deeds against their victims, and as judges and jurymen shield them from the justice due to their crimes. Every crime committed by an Indian against a white man is born on the wings of the post or the telegraph to the remotest corner of the land, clothed with all the horrors which the reality or imagination can throw around it. Against such influences as these the people of the United States need to be warned.”

To assume that it would be easy, or be any one sudden stroke of legislative policy possible, to undo the mischief and hurt of the long past, set the Indian policy of the country right for the future, and make the Indians at once safe and happy, its the blunder of a hasty and uniformed judgment. The notion which seems to be growing more prevalent that simply to make all Indians at once citizens of the United States would be a sovereign and instantaneous panacea for all their ills and all the government’s perplexities, is a very inconsiderate one. To administer complete citizenship of a sudden, all round, to all Indians, barbarous and civilized alike, would be as grotesque a blunder as to dose them all round with any one medicine, irrespective of the symptoms and needs of their diseases. It would kill more than it would cure. Nevertheless, it is true, as was well stated by one of the superintendents of Indian Affairs in the 1857, that, “so long as they are not citizens of the United States, their rights of property must remain insecure against invasion. The doors of the federal tribunals being barred against them while wards and dependents, they can only partially exercise the rights of free government, or give to those who make, execute, and construe the few laws hey are allowed to enact, dignity, sufficient to make them respectable. While they continue individually to gather the crumbs that fall from the table of the United States, idleness, improvidence, and indebtedness will be the rule, and industry, thrift, and freedom from debt the exception. The utter absence of individual title to the particular lands deprives every one among of the chief incentive to labor and exertion—the very mainspring on which the prosperity of a people depends.”

All judicious plans and measures for their safety and salvation must embody provisions for their becoming citizens as fast as they are fit, and must protect them till them in every right and particular in which our laws protect other “persons” who are not citizens.

There is a disposition in a certain class of minds to be impatient with any protestation against wrong which is unaccompanied or unprepared with a quick and exact scheme of remedy. This is illogical. When pioneers in a new country find a tract of poisonous and swampy wilderness to be reclaimed, they do no withhold their hands from fire and axe till they see clearly which way roads should run, where good water will spring, and what crops will best grow on the redeemed land. They first clear the swamp. So with this poisonous and baffling part of the domain of our national affairs-let the firs “clear the swamp.”

However great perplexity and difficulty there may be in the details of any and every plan possible for doing at this late day anything like justice to the Indian, however hard it may b for the good statesmen and good men to agree upon is, or ought to be, no perplexity whatever, no things that ought not be done, and which be taken toward righting the wrongs, curing the ills, and wiping out he disgrace to us of the present condition of our Indians.

Cheating, robbing, breaking promises—these three are clearly things which must cease to be done. One more thing, also, and that is the refusal of the protection of the law to the Indian’s right of property, “of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

When these four things have ceased to be done, time, statesmanship, philanthropy, and Christianity can slowly and surely do the rest. Till these four things have ceased to be done, statesmanship and philanthropy alike must work in vain, and even Christianity can reap but small harvest.

My father's father's father said in 1805
Some white men came into our land, barely alive
We fed them and their horses
Gave them canoes made of bark
To continue on their journey
They called themselves Lewis and Clark
Though we never saw them again
We thought they were our friends

And we would fight no more forever
We would live in peace together
The Nez PercÈ and whites would always give
Each other room to live
And we would fight no more forever

Now I am chief, they call me Joseph
But that's a white man's name
For many moons we lived in peace
But now things aren't the same
They stole our cattle, discovered gold
And want to take our lands
Some braves decided to take revenge
Now there's blood on our hands
The only course that I can see
Is it's time for us to flee

So we can fight no more forever
We can live in peace together
If we can get to Canada, they say
No one will follow us that way
And we will fight no more forever

So I took our tribe across the Bitterroot Mountains
Into the land where the buffalo roam
We fought the Blue Coats at the Big Hole River
By now we knew that we could never go home

We kept on going past the Yellowstone Canyon
Bear Coat Miles and One-Armed Howard behind
But they surrounded us in the Bear Paw Mountains
With only forty miles of mountain to climb

Tell General Howard I know his heart
My own is sick and sad
My chiefs are dead, my children are freezing
We ate up all we had
Some of my people ran off in the hills
You may find them among the dead
Hear me, my chiefs, I am tired
There's just one thing to be said
They have taken away our lands
But from where the sun now stands

I will fight no more forever
We will go in peace together
Though we were once a mighty nation
We will go to the reservation
And we will fight no more forever
We will fight no more forever
We will fight no more...... forever

Native American Viewpoints -- Trials and tribulations

HELEN HUNT JACKSON

A CENTURY OF DISHONOR

The tales of the wrongs, the oppressions, the murders of the Pacific-slope Indians in the last thirty years is to monstrous to be believed.