Unit III, Lecture 4
Whose Manifest Destiny?  The Federal Government and the American Indian

Below you will find the overheads for this lecture.

Whose Manifest Destiny?  The Federal Government and the American Indian
Lecture Goals:

1. To study the attitudes and actions of European colonists that helped shape the philosophical foundations of American Indian policy.

2. To determine the consequences of such colonial attitudes and actions.

3. To examine relevant federal policies through the end of the nineteenth century.

4. To determine whether the consequences of federal policies during the era of Manifest Destiny culminated in genocide.

5. To debunk three myths:

Colonial Policies for Dealing with American Indians

1. Dispossession.  When white settlers began to barter for Indian lands, claiming they could make it more profitable, the Indians refused.  Thus, the initial recourse was to dispossess Indians of their traditional lands and tribal ties.

2. Removal.  But dispossession did not rid the colonists of the Indian "problem."  American Indians, they argued, needed to be removed from their land and relocated elsewhere.

3. Assimilation.  Wherever Indians lived, it was necessary for them to assimilate into American society by accepting Christianity, as well as European culture and tradition.

4. Elimination.  But what if Indians did not want to willingly give up their land or assimilate?  According to the historical values of Christianity, the colonists had the right to wage a "just war" against those who would not accept Godís law or those who used violence against Godís "elected" governors.   One of the first such "just wars" began on March 22, 1622, when the Algonquin Indians, the indigenous residents of what the English settlers called Jamestown, surprised the residents and killed 347 settlers in retribution for European encroachment upon their lands.

 Thereafter, the colonial governor set the policy for dealing with American Indians with this pronouncement:  "It is infinitely better to have no heathen among us, who were but as thorns in our sides, than to be at peace and league with them."   (As quoted in Utley and Washburn, 1977:17.)  The colonists had tried to convince the Indians to barter for land.  But when the Indians refused, and finally resisted, they violated all natural laws and thereafter, possessed no rights which the English must respect - not even the right to life.  Accordingly the colonists set about eliminating the natives from the entire Tidewater area. By January 1623, the Virginia Council of State proudly reported that more Indians had been killed in the previous year since the beginning of the colony.

Colonial Attitudes That Contributed to Indian Policy

1. Intolerance.  Most colonists were intolerant and fearful of American Indians whom they perceived to be a single, standard, homogeneous, and heathen Indian nation - and as such, a threat to white progress, humanity, and most importantly - Christianity.

2. Belief in the superiority of Christianity and Western civilization over non-Christian, non-Western peoples.

Early U.S. Governmental Policies and Laws Dealing with American Indian Nations
1889 The Northwest Ordinance mapped out the manner in which the United States government would deal with the Indian nations.  The Ordinance proclaimed tha tthe government would observe "the utmost bood faith" in dealing with Indians and promised that their lands would not be invaded or taken except "in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress."

Commerce Clause in Article 1, Section 8, the Constitution declares that "The Congress shall have the power to...regulate Commerce with foreign nations and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes."

1790 - Indian Trade and Intercourse Act. This Congressional Act placed nearly all interaction between Indians and non-Indians under federal - not state - control,  as well as:

The conduct of Indians among themselves while in Indian country was left entirely to the tribes. These Acts were renewed periodically until 1834.

1834 - Indian Intercourse Act.  Congress created Indian Territory in the west that included the land area in all of present-day Kansas, most of Oklahoma, and parts of what later became Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming. The area was set aside for Indians who were to be removed from their ancestral lands which, in turn, would be settled by non-Indians. The area steadily decreased in size until the 1870s when Indian Territory was the size of today's Oklahoma, excluding the panhandle.

 Nineteenth Century Federal Efforts Designed to Eliminate the  "Indian Problem"

1. Signing hundreds of treaties with Indian nations, treaties which were bolstered by several Supreme Court decisions.

2. Passing laws that established policies designed to define relations between the federal government and Indian Nations.

The Trust Responsibility originated when the US government signed its first treaty promising to provide benefits and right to American Indian Peoples in exchange for their land.  The trust responsibility, or relationship, in turn, bound the United States to: As early as 1823, the US Supreme Court produced two competing theories of tribal sovereignty: Over the years, the Court has relied on either one of these theories in tribal sovereignty cases.  The Marshall Trilogy is an excellent example:

 
"Surrounded by our settlements, these Indians have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition.  Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstance and ere long disappear."
...... President Andrew Jackson
  Message to Congress,
  December 1833

 Federal Efforts to Eliminate American Indian Religious Practices


Federal Efforts to Protect American Indian Religions
Today, traditional Indian religious practitioners are still denied access to sacred sites located outside reservations on federal land.  Additionally, sacred Indian religious sites continue to be unprotected from public access and environmentally degraded.

On November 6, 1868, the Fort Laramie Treaty was signed guaranteeing the Sioux:

"...absolute and undisturbed use of the Great Sioux Reservation...No persons...shall ever be permitted to pass over, settle upon, or reside in territory described in this article or without consent of the Indians...No treaty for the cession of any portion or part of the reservation herein described...shall be of any validity or force...unless executed and signed by at least three-fourths of all adult male Indians, occupying or interested in the same."

GENOCIDE

According to the United Nations, genocide involves actions committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, religious, political, or economic group.  Such actions against a group include:

o killing its members;
o causing serious bodily or mental harm to members;
o deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the groupsí physical destruction in whole or in part;
o imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and
o forcibly transferring its children to another group.

Cultural genocide occurs when governments officially sanction the removal and/or repression of a particular group and subsequently eliminates and/or weakens parts of that group.

The White Response to the “Indian Problem” in California

•    Citizens - wanted the Indians removed from Northern California as quickly as possible.

•    The State of California - had three primary interests: 

o    protecting white settlers and miners from Indian attack,
o    protecting white property from Indian loss or attack, and
o    regulating Indians as a labor force.

•    The Federal government - was bound by its trust relationship with Indian Nations throughout the United States to maintain some degree of safety and well-being among the Indian People of California.
DEALING WITH THE “INDIAN PROBLEM” IN CALIFORNIA

1.    California State Policies
•    Legislative Acts that encourage Indian slavery
•    Legislative Acts that deny Indians equal protection under the law.
•    Legislative Acts that encourage white settlers to form volunteer militias to eliminate California Indians.

2.    Federal Government Policies
•    The 18 Treaties
•    California’s response to the 18 Treaties
•    U.S. Congress response to the 18 Treaties
•    Military Model for California Reservations
3.    Local Citizens of No. California React
•    The Massacre at Indian Island
•    Bret Harte run out of town.
 
The Federal government approved five new military reservations in March 1853.  The Congressional resolution that created the reservations made several points quite clear.
Selected Incidents of Indian Genocide in Northern California, 1851-1860

•    Thompkins Ferry Massacre, 1851.  After several white miners were killed outside of Trinidad by local Indians, a group of men formed a committee that hunted down and massacred as many local Indians as they were able to find.

•    Bridge Gulch, April or May 1852.  After Colonel John Anderson was killed by some Wintun Indians, 30 volunteers were deputized. A group of 70 men surrounded and open fired upon a camp of men, women, and children.  Between 80 and 300 Indians were massacred, depending upon the accounts given.

•    Orleans Bar, April 1852. After miners discussed the "Indian problem," they voted to kill on sight any Indians having a gun.

•    Weaverville, May 1852.  In revenge for the killing of five cows belonging to a white man, 153 Wintun Indians were killed.

•    Yontoket, 1853.  200 Tolowa people were murdered by citizens from Crescent City.  A survivor described the massacre:  "The whitemen built a huge fire and threw in our sacred ceremonial dresses, the regalia, and our feathers, and the flames grew higher.  Then they threw in the babies, many of them were still alive."

•    Round Valley, 1856-1860.  Drydon Laycock, a local resident, claimed that during this period, settlers went out "two or three times a week" and killed "on an average, fifty or sixty Indians on a trip.”

•    Eel River, 1859.  After local Indians stole about 600 head of cattle and killed 19 white settlers, a group of ranchers from Laytonville claimed to have killed 283 men and taken 292 prisoners to the Mendocino Reservation.
 
 Chronology – Indian Island Massacre

Pre-Contact.  About 1500-2000 Wiyot people lived in their ancestral territory that included the current tows of McKinleyville, Blue Lake, Arcata, Eureka, Kneeland, Loleta, Fortuna, Ferndale, and Rohnerville.  Indian Island was and remains the center of the Wiyot People’s world.  It is home to the ancient village of Tuluwat and the traditional site of the World Renewal Ceremony held annually to welcome the new year.  The ceremony lasted between 7-10 days and began with the men leaving the island and returning the next day with the needed supplies.  The elders, women, and children remained behind.

The ground beneath Tuluwat village is an enormous clamshell mound (or midden). This mound, measuring over six acres in size and estimated to be over 1,000 years old, is an irreplaceable physical history of the Wiyot way of life. Contained within it are remnants of meals, tools, and ceremonies, as well as many burial sites.

1850.  The town of Eureka was founded by a group of miners who needed a more convenient route to the overland trail from Sacramento the California gold fields.  Shortly thereafter, Humboldt Bay became the busiest port between San Francisco and Portland.  As Eureka’s population and economy grew, its white residents became increasingly uneasy about local Indians whom ranchers blamed for thefts and cattle loss.  Merchants began to see Indian villages that thrived along the Bay as a direct threat to their growing trade.

February 16, 1860.  A group of white settlers armed with hatchets, clubs, and knives paddled to Indian Island where Wiyot men, women, and children were sleeping after a week of ceremonial dancing.  Two other villages were raided on the same night – one on the Eel River and another on the South Spit.  Somewhere between 80-100 people were killed on Indian Island.  A baby, Jerry James, was the only infant that survived the massacre on the Island.  Another 200-600 Wiyot were massacred in the other raids.

Journalist Bret Harte published a front-page editorial in The Northern Californian in which he expressed horror over the massacre.  Subsequently, he was run out of the county and moved to San Francisco.

After 1860.  An estimated 200 Wiyot people still lived in the area.  Federal troops collected the surviving Wiyot people from other villages and confined them to the Klamath River Reservation.  After a disastrous flood on the Klamath, the Wiyot were moved to the Smith River Reservation and later to the Hoopa and Round Valley Reservations.

1870.  A shipyard repair facility was built on part of the Island and operated there until the 1980s.  During that time, it dumped creosote, solvents, and other chemicals that were used to maintain ships.

Late 19th Century.  Non-Indian settlers built dikes and channels on Indian Island that changed tidal action along the shore and caused some erosion of the clamshell-shaped mound.

Early 1900s.  A church group purchased 20 acres in the Eel River estuary for homeless Wiyot people.  This land later became known as the Table Bluff Rancheria of Wiyot Indians. 

Archeologists began to dig at the site of the mound and one amateur is said to  have looted as many as 500 gravesites.

1910.  Under 100 full blood Wiyot people were estimated to be living in Wiyot territory.

February 1992.  The first candlelight vigil was held to remember those who lost their lives in the Massacre and to help the community heal.  About 75 people participated that year and by 1996, over 300 participated.  The Wiyot hope that at some  point, the vigil can be held on Indian Island which remains inaccessible to the Wiyot.

2001.  The Wiyot Tribe purchased 1.5 acres of Indian Island and began cleaning the debris and pollutants left on the village site.

May 18, 2006.  The Eureka City County unanimously approved a resolution to return 60 acres, comprising the northeastern tip, of Indian Island to the Wiyot Tribe.

Some of the remaining Wiyot people live on the 88 acre Table Bluff Reservation.  550 members are enrolled in the Wiyot Nation.

 
Conclusions for the Northern California "Indian Problem".     

1.    The State of California decided to solve the “Indian Problem” through policies of forced labor, slavery, and volunteer militia whose job it was to kill local Indians. 

2.    The policies of the federal government were designed to please a majority of Californians and thus resulted in hiding the 18 treaties and creating military reservations.

3.    Northern Californian citizens responded to Indian raids, Indian killings, and economic competition from Indian communities with acts of vigilante violence – none of which were punished by local, state, or federal agencies.

4.    Each of these three efforts to deal with the “Indian Problem” resulted in policies and/or actions that had three enormous consequences for the Indians Nations of California:
5.    Despite the many attempts to destroy the Indians of Northern California, within several generations, most nations had survived and replenished their populations and maintained many of their tribal cultural, political, economic, and spiritual traditions.

Conclusions
"Whose Manifest Destiny?    The Federal Government and the Native Americans"

1. By the end of the 19th Century:

2. The federal policies discussed in these lectures were directly responsible for the above consequences.  Such policies, taken as a whole, indicate that the loss of 95% of a specific population of people over a 100-year period was not inadvertent, nor was it an inevitable or unintended byproduct of progress.  Rather, these policies were the result of intentional decisions made by federal policymakers to officially remove the so-called "Indian problem."  When considering the definition of cultural genocide - when a government officially sanctions the removal and/or repression of a particular group that subsequently eliminates and/or weakens part of that group - the actions of the federal govern-ment can be considered genocidal in both intent and consequence.

3. Treaties - the legal, government-to-government agreements between the United States and an Indian Nation - formed the original cornerstone of American Indian policy.  In signing a treaty, a trust relationship was created in which the Indian nation agreed to give the federal government some or all of its land as well as some of its sovereign powers and, in return, that relationship bound the United States to represent the best interests of the tribe, protect the safety and well-being of tribal members, and fulfill its treaty obligations and commitments.

4. As early as 1823, the US Supreme Court began to reinterpret the meaning of Indian sovereignty and thereafter, produced two competing theories: tribes have inherent powrs of sovereignty that predate the "discovery" of America; and tribes only have the attributes of sovereignty that Congress gives them.  The Supreme Court cases known as the Marshall Trilogy gave Indians a kind of limited sovereignty that was to be governed by paternalistic trust and subject to the interpretation of the US government.

5. The signing of treaties, the rendering of Supreme Court decisions, and the passing of policies and laws gradually eroded the sovereignty of American Indian nations by seeking to achieve at least two specific goals:

6. The attitudes that fueled such policies were firmly entrenched in colonial America and carried over into the new American government.  The British Crown assumed protectionist policies, arguing that it was the Kingís duty to protect the tribes against colonial excesses and injustice.  Such protectionist, paternalistic policies formed the foundation of the Indian policies created by the US government.  Thus, federal policies were evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

7. The genocide of Indian peoples which occurred at the hands of Anglo-Europeans failed to destroy them as a people, nor did it destroy their cultural and spiritual heritage.  Those who survived the first 200 years of European contact are the ancestors of a large Indian population in the US today.  Currently, over 500 Nations exist in the United States, with an officially recognized population of about 2 million people.

8. Indians are not relics of some idealized past, but rather, are members of contemporary American society.  As such, Native Americans must be seen as participants in an ongoing shared experience of all Americans who are looking for a common discourse about how to coexist.  If seen in this light, the Anglo guilt about genocide can become less of a contemporary reproach, and more a shared knowledge of lost opportunity - we had the chance to create a harmonious coexistence, but gave it up in favor of economic "progress."  Today, however, we have another opportunity to enter into a common dialog with Indian peoples as equals and as members of their own sovereign nations.