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Historical Background
With the collapse of the Apaches, all the western
tribes had yielded to the realities of their condition and settled on
reservations. Military action had hastened the process, but the absence
of any acceptable alternative for the Indians, given the loss of their
land and traditional means of livelihood, provided the most powerful
incentive. At first the reservation was simply an expedient. The problem
was to clear the paths of expansion. The solution was to corral the
Indians on a parcel of land thatas yetno one else wanted,
and keep them reasonably content by regular issues of food and clothing.
But during the decade of the 1880's the reservation system assumed a
different shape. Abolition of the treaty system in 1871 had deprived the
tribes of even the small comfort of theoretical sovereignty. Thus when
they came to the reservation, fresh from military conquest and dependent
on Government largess, they were undeniably wards of the Government and
subject to its will.
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Geronimo, Natchez, and followers
en route in 1886 from Fort Bowie, Ariz., to Fort Pickens, Fla., for
imprisonment. Geronimo is third from right, bottom row; Natchez, fourth
from right. (photo by A. J. McDonald, National
Archives) |
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The ultimate humiliation for the
Indians, once a proud people, was the reservation dole. Distribution of
rations about 1892 at San Carlos Agency, Ariz. (National
Archives) |
In the 1880's this will derived largely from the
theories of a growing number of Indian reform organizations that exerted
increasingly awesome influence on national legislators and
administrators. The reformers expressed the widespread conviction that
solution of the Indian problem lay in transforming the Indian, as
rapidly as possible and by compulsion if necessary, into a God-fearing
tiller of the soil enjoying the blessings of Christianity, education,
individual instead of tribal ownership of land, and national
citizenship. Reformers and like-minded officials used the reservation
system as the instrument for attempting this program. Thus, in the end,
the reservation system wrought with terrible swiftness the ethnic
disaster that had been foreshadowed by the collapse of the "Permanent
Indian Frontier."
On the reservation the Indian found himself suddenly
overwhelmed by the civilizing process. It took the form of a concerted
campaign to root out the old and inculcate the new. Indian policemen and
Indian courts, controlled by the agent, ironically provided the
compulsion. When they failed, withholding of rations ordinarily produced
a surface illusion of the desired conformity.
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Western Indian Reservations
(1890) (click on image for an enlargement in a new
window) |
All facets of Indian life came under fire. Because
tribal communalism stood in the way of progress, the attack centered on
basic social, economic, religious, and political institutions. Many of
these, indeed, had already lost much of their pertinence in the
transition from nomadic to sedentary life. "Every man a chief,"
announced the Government, and urged the people to abandon their camps,
throw away their lodges, spread out over the reservation, build cabins,
and ignore the traditional leaders. A list of "Indian Offenses,"
promulgated by the Indian Bureau, outlawed fundamental social and
religious customs. These included the Sun Dance, the foundation upon
which the Plains Indian had built his whole theological edifice, and the
practices of the medicine man.
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Reading the Declaration of
Independence at Rosebud Agency, S. Dak., on the Fourth of July 1897.
Those few Indians who understood the significance of the occasion must
have recognized the terrible irony involved for their people. (photo
by J. A. Anderson, Library of Congress) |
Other whites helped the agent. They were a different
breed than the easy-going fun-loving trappers of earlier times. The
"practical farmer" tried to teach farming to a people who did not want
to farm, on land that for the most part was not suitable for farming
anyway, using techniques that were ill adapted to the soil and climate
and to the background of the trainees. The school teacher tried to teach
unwilling children of unwilling parents the "useful arts of
civilization," but these arts had little real meaning in the reservation
environment. Off-reservation boarding schools, patterned after the
military model of Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, proved much
more effectiveuntil the child returned to the reservation and
found no place for himself either in white or Indian society.
Missionaries tried to substitute a frequently irrelevant Christianity
for religious patterns that had proved rich and satisfying and that were
a functional part of Indian culture. The Indians were often receptive to
Christian teachings but also unwilling to surrender the old beliefs.
They found that the trader was frequently the only entirely agreeable
white man on the reservation. He provided them useful manufactures
without eternally carping about their "barbarous" habits.
Central to the reform program was the severalty
movement. Give the Indian individual title to the soil, reformers held,
and virtually all other problems would automatically solve themselves.
The Indian would become a responsible, self-supporting citizen just like
all other citizens. The severalty movement culminated in the Dawes Act
of 1887, which provided for the allotment of reservation lands, usually
in 160-acre parcels, to individual natives. The Dawes Act gave eastern
reformers and western land "boomers" common ground, for it provided that
all reservation lands not needed for allotment could be thrown open to
white settlement. Because the majority of western Indians at first
resisted allotment, vast tracts of "surplus" reservation land were
released for settlement before many Indians received allotments.
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Educational programs for the
Indians in the 19th century stressed remaking them in the white man's
image. Chiricahua Apache students, 4 months after entering Carlisle
Indian School, Pa., in 1887. (Yale University
Library) |
Loss of reservation land created deep resentment.
Worse, after the Indian finally bowed to the inevitable and accepted
allotment, he found himself imprisoned by a vicious and unfamiliar
system that forced him ever lower on the economic scale. Eastern land
patterns dictated 160-acre allotments. In the arid West these were too
small for economic efficiency, especially when devoted to crop raising.
Even these were severely reduced. Despite legal safeguards, patented
land found its way, through one subterfuge or another, into white
ownership. And the rest was endlessly subdivided through inheritance
into tiny patches, on which the heirs eked out the barest
subsistence.
Yet the policies of the 1880's, founded on the
idealistic dreams of the severalty advocates, prevailed until well
beyond the turn of the century.
Already, however, the "civilization" program and the
beginnings of the severalty movement had produced severe emotional
stresses among the tribes. A decade of exposure to reservation policies
served mainly to blend twisted remnants of the old life with a few
frayed strands of the new. Bleak prospects for the future combined with
nostalgic memory of the past to induce a state of mind particularly
susceptible to the Messianic fervor that swept the western reservations
in 1889 and 1890. A strange mixture of Christian and traditional
beliefs, the Ghost Dance religion promised a return of the previous
order and the disappearance of the white race. The disastrous clash of
arms at Wounded Knee Creek, S. Dak., December 29, 1890, shattered this
dream and marked the final collapse of the Indian barrier.
In little more than a century the white man had
reorganized the culture of the western Indians. But the forces of change
flowed in both directions. Because he won the contest, the white man did
not have to bow to a conqueror's will; thus his way of life under went
no such cataclysmic change as that of the Indian. Yet his experience
with the Indian, an experience not confined to the West and in fact
spanning five centuries and a continent, left him in the 20th century
with a culture decidedly influenced and enriched, in some ways
profoundly, by the very culture he almost destroyed.
Phillips D. Carleton observed that the whites
"conquered the Indian but he was the hammer that beat out a new race on
the anvil of the continent." And D. H. Lawrence added, "Not that the Red
Indian will ever possess the broadlands of America. But his ghost
will."
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/soldier-brave/intro9.htm
Last Updated: 19-Aug-2005
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