Post by Avatar on Oct 25, 2023 15:04:48 GMT
Ported in to give the reader an idea of how TEXAS fits in this timeline. And then there is the general Native American Problem.
===========================================================================
The supply of weapons to the Comanches... was a historical problem.
===========================================================================
That would be as a Texan would say "NOT TOO GOOD".
What do I mean?
Think of them as American "Mongols".
American Cultural Imperialism.
Then there is Carlisle Barracks.
===========================================================================
The supply of weapons to the Comanches... was a historical problem.
===========================================================================
That would be as a Texan would say "NOT TOO GOOD".
What do I mean?
Power in Comancheria: Analysis of Hamalainen's Comanche Empire
Pekka Hamalainen’s The Comanche Empire serves as a well-written account that embodies the trend in Native American history to discard Euro-American biases of past scholarship and to place Indian agency at the center of the historical process. Hamalainen demonstrates how the Comanche accommodated to outside pressures in order to survive as coherent cultural entities, but goes further by showing how they not only adapted to new political and economic realities wrought by various imperial projects but also competed with and bested European and Euro-American powers in controlling the heartland of the North American Continent. In doing so. Hamalainen tells the story of expansion with a reversal of usual historical roles, in which Indians expand, dictate and prosper, and European colonists resist, retreat and struggle to survive. This ambition leads Hamalainen to reveal that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Comanche turned the Southwest into a boundless resistant indigenous empire. This paper is intended to portray how the Comanche’s ecological base, monopoly of trade, ability to adapt to Western technologies and flexible social structure allowed them to invert projected colonial trajectory and bring much of the colonial Southwest under their sway and at the same time explain the failures of Spanish and Mexican colonialism and the nature and course of United States conquest.
The power of the Comanche cannot be understood without first playing on the importance of their ecological system of the horse, grass and bison complex. The abundant grasslands present in the environment they lived in made Comanche monopoly on horses and bison hunting possible. The horses’ ability to convert plant life into muscle power tapped into the seemingly inexhaustible pool of thermodynamic energy stored in the grasses. This in turn, led the Comanche to use horses as hunting tools to harness the enormous biomass stored in the bison herds.[ii] The horse served to both simplify and expand Comanche economy. The effectiveness of mounted hunting allowed the Comanche’s to dismiss their gathering system and switch to specialized bison hunting and horse herding. This resulted in a dual economy of hunting and pastoralism. Using this new economic system, the Comanche reared horses for part of the year, while following the bison herds the rest of the year. The semi-nomadic way they lived made it possible to control and exploit the environment of the Great Plains. The effective hunting of bison also insured both an adequate food supply consisting of protein and materials to make clothing and other essential needs. Through horses serving as both vehicles for travel and as commodities to be traded, the Comanche’s dominated long-distance trade networks and extended their raiding spheres far beyond their core area. This enabled Comanche’s to eliminate Spain’s edge on colonial expansion. By controlling trade, the Comanche’s dictated where resources were allocated, thus in effect brought Spanish colonialism under their control. It is also important to note that frequent raids deep into Spanish territory weakened the Spanish military that were ineffective in protecting Spanish settlements and Indian encroachment. The thinly colonized Hispanic lands had no way of halting Indian raiding parties that extracted their horses, and thus the Spanish submitted to becoming tributary subjects of the Comanche. The Hispanic peoples gave the Comanche gifts in return for leaving their herds alone. This tributary gift giving weakened the treasury of Spain and Mexico and forced them as subjects of the Comanche Empire.
As eluded to earlier, the Comanche ecological system enabled them to effectively form a monopoly on trade in the Southwest, which greatly expanded their power. Their horse economy also supported a thriving exchange economy. This exchange economy gave access to vegetables and grains as well as guns, gunpowder and metals.[iii]. Vegetables and cereals were collected through massive trade networks, which linked tribes of the east within the network of the Comanche empire. By allying with neighboring native groups, the Comanche’s ensured a system of trade and at the same time created a buffer between them and the expansionist Euro-American forces of the East. Comanche power in horse trade also enabled them to become strong trade partners with the expanding United States. In return for horses, the Comanche amassed expansive quantities of both guns and gunpowder. In a sense, it can be understood that United States trade with the Comanche played a major role in weakening Spanish power. Through the guns and firepower supplied by the United States, the Comanche successfully kept the Spanish at their will. Another major component in Comanche trade was their monopoly on the slave trade. While they raided Spanish lands for cattle, they did also for human capital. The Comanche used their slaves as trade collateral and also used them to work in their growing dualist economy. Slaves mainly worked in horse rearing and domestic chores and were sometimes adopted into the family. The taking of slaves both frightened and terrified Spanish settlers. The constant fear and ineffective way in dealing with them prompted many Spanish settlers to give up their lands and return to areas away from Comanche aggression.
Another way the Comanche’s maintained power in the interior of the United States, was the way the adapted to Western technologies, especially weapons, diplomacy and disease. With the use of the horse and adapting to western guns and firepower the Comanche were able to exert control over the Southwest. Western weaponry allowed the Comanche to not only mount a strong military force, but it also allowed for the efficiency of bison hunting. The horse and gun allowed efficient killing, reducing both time and effort.
In regards to diplomacy, the Comanche effectively exploited it to meet their needs. The Comanche were adept at drawing native nations into its sphere of commercialization. The movement west of native tribes because of encroaching American settlement and pressures of Indian groups caused an influx of people upon Comancheria territory. While a clash was inevitable and immediate, the Comanche soon invited the removed Indians to become middlemen who facilitated the movement of goods among the centers of wealth around them. By adapting other native tribes into their commercial realm, the Comanche refigured trade to distant markets but also surrounded Comancheria with important buffer zones against white setllement. These Indian alignments halted the encroachment of United States and Texas settlers who feared a massive joint tribal retaliation. Another aspect of the alliances with native tribes is that it opened Comancheria to open commercial trade with American markets. Thus, in abstract, the thriving trade zone of eastern Comancheria meant the removal of indigenous nations from the east Indian territory to the west could continue. Another way the Comanche used diplomacy in their favor was the fact that they did not recognize national boundary lines and legal obligations. Even though the Spanish and later Americans established boundaries denoting their territory. Comanche’s did not follow them. In their eyes, all land was free and available to whoever had the ability to use it. Thus they raided deep into Spanish territory. Likewise, even though the Comanche’s agreed to formal trade relations with the Spanish, the Comanche did not see the trade partnership in the same way. Comanche’s traded and dealt with whoever they could gain the most from and make the most profit. Trade agreements meant nothing to them and the Comanche a lot of the time doubled dealt with both the Spanish and Americans.
The Comanche also successfully adapted to diseases brought by western settlers. While the humid temperatures of the coast brought the indigenous there terrific population loss from western diseases, the dry air of the Southwest and Great Plains halted the spread of disease to an effect not as dramatic as other parts of North America. Another, more exploitative way the Comanche dealt with diseases was the practice of marrying and fornicating with western women. By fornicating with western women, the Comanche successfully produced offspring who were tolerant to western diseases. And while disease decimated the Comanche at first, over time they became tolerant of western diseases due to the increased numbers of racially mixed offspring.
One more basis of Comanche power can be understood through their flexible and adaptive social structure. Comanche society was very hierarchical. While the men hunted bison, went on raiding missions and controlled the household, the women and children reared horses and did domestic work. However, not just Comanche men enjoyed power. Slave men, also had the ability to rise up in the ranks and become warriors and hunters. Most male slaves taken by the Comanche were young boys, who could be raised and nurtured in Comanche ideals. Older men proved too much of a risk as they would likely never repel western ways which they have learned. As a society, the Comanche were also very mobile. Their hunting and pastoralist economy was unfit to foster large permanent settlements and thus they lived in a semi-nomadic way migrating in different times of the year to follow the bison herds and the fresh grasses to raise their horses. The lack of permanent settlement proved it difficult for another power to launch an attack on the Comanche that would cripple them. Because members of Comanche society were always separated and never cloistered, it was only possible to attack a portion of the empire and never inflict massive losses. The semi-nomadic structure of the Comanche thus made it difficult for the Spanish and United States to amount successful control over the Comanche Empire.
Politically, the Comanche Empire was distant but unified. All Comanche units or households lived distantly from each other. The semi-nomadic ways and need to raise horses allowed the Comanche unit to live fairly independently, with each unit or family containing a male that held power. Usually the most powerful male was the one that had multiple wives and could produce the most goods. While the Comanche were so distant from each other, in times of toil they could easily unite. All the heads of family would join together in a great joint meeting and discuss the problem at hand. All the males had equal power in the assemblies, and thus made decisions as a single polity or unified empire. This ability of the Comanche to unify and amass great forces greatly halted American and Spanish expansion, as they feared conflict with a massive Comanche force.
Lastly, while the systems, which constituted Comanche power made them, a superpower in the Great Plain and Southwest, they also led to the collapse of the Comanche Empire in the 1870’s-1880’s. The center of Comanche power caved in with the sharp declines of bison herds. The Comanche had exploited the land beyond its sef-sustaining ecological stability. There had simply been too many Comanches and their allies raising too many horses and hunting too many bison on too small a land base. The Comanche could not move to other lands because there whole economy relied on the grasslands. The Comanche ability to adapt and incorporate other groups into their empire eventually led to their demise. The incorporation of removed Indian groups, facilitated American expansion and led to increased competition over bison on which they ultimately were being killed faster than they could reproduce. When the bison fell, so did the Comanche Empire. The Comanche trade networks collapsed because they had no bison meat to trade and their whole lifestyle became unglued. Powerless with the collapse of trade, Comanche’s were placed in reservations by the fast encroaching Americans. There, the Comanche were forced to live permanently and could not continue to live the way they had for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Comanche’s rapid decline, tells a great deal about the nature of their power system. They were not a tightly structured, self-sustaining entity but rather a system based on networks of power.[iv] The lack of centrality in Comanche Empire therefore allowed the decline to move rapidly and forcefully.
Pekka Hamalainen’s The Comanche Empire serves as a well-written account that embodies the trend in Native American history to discard Euro-American biases of past scholarship and to place Indian agency at the center of the historical process. Hamalainen demonstrates how the Comanche accommodated to outside pressures in order to survive as coherent cultural entities, but goes further by showing how they not only adapted to new political and economic realities wrought by various imperial projects but also competed with and bested European and Euro-American powers in controlling the heartland of the North American Continent. In doing so. Hamalainen tells the story of expansion with a reversal of usual historical roles, in which Indians expand, dictate and prosper, and European colonists resist, retreat and struggle to survive. This ambition leads Hamalainen to reveal that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Comanche turned the Southwest into a boundless resistant indigenous empire. This paper is intended to portray how the Comanche’s ecological base, monopoly of trade, ability to adapt to Western technologies and flexible social structure allowed them to invert projected colonial trajectory and bring much of the colonial Southwest under their sway and at the same time explain the failures of Spanish and Mexican colonialism and the nature and course of United States conquest.
The power of the Comanche cannot be understood without first playing on the importance of their ecological system of the horse, grass and bison complex. The abundant grasslands present in the environment they lived in made Comanche monopoly on horses and bison hunting possible. The horses’ ability to convert plant life into muscle power tapped into the seemingly inexhaustible pool of thermodynamic energy stored in the grasses. This in turn, led the Comanche to use horses as hunting tools to harness the enormous biomass stored in the bison herds.[ii] The horse served to both simplify and expand Comanche economy. The effectiveness of mounted hunting allowed the Comanche’s to dismiss their gathering system and switch to specialized bison hunting and horse herding. This resulted in a dual economy of hunting and pastoralism. Using this new economic system, the Comanche reared horses for part of the year, while following the bison herds the rest of the year. The semi-nomadic way they lived made it possible to control and exploit the environment of the Great Plains. The effective hunting of bison also insured both an adequate food supply consisting of protein and materials to make clothing and other essential needs. Through horses serving as both vehicles for travel and as commodities to be traded, the Comanche’s dominated long-distance trade networks and extended their raiding spheres far beyond their core area. This enabled Comanche’s to eliminate Spain’s edge on colonial expansion. By controlling trade, the Comanche’s dictated where resources were allocated, thus in effect brought Spanish colonialism under their control. It is also important to note that frequent raids deep into Spanish territory weakened the Spanish military that were ineffective in protecting Spanish settlements and Indian encroachment. The thinly colonized Hispanic lands had no way of halting Indian raiding parties that extracted their horses, and thus the Spanish submitted to becoming tributary subjects of the Comanche. The Hispanic peoples gave the Comanche gifts in return for leaving their herds alone. This tributary gift giving weakened the treasury of Spain and Mexico and forced them as subjects of the Comanche Empire.
As eluded to earlier, the Comanche ecological system enabled them to effectively form a monopoly on trade in the Southwest, which greatly expanded their power. Their horse economy also supported a thriving exchange economy. This exchange economy gave access to vegetables and grains as well as guns, gunpowder and metals.[iii]. Vegetables and cereals were collected through massive trade networks, which linked tribes of the east within the network of the Comanche empire. By allying with neighboring native groups, the Comanche’s ensured a system of trade and at the same time created a buffer between them and the expansionist Euro-American forces of the East. Comanche power in horse trade also enabled them to become strong trade partners with the expanding United States. In return for horses, the Comanche amassed expansive quantities of both guns and gunpowder. In a sense, it can be understood that United States trade with the Comanche played a major role in weakening Spanish power. Through the guns and firepower supplied by the United States, the Comanche successfully kept the Spanish at their will. Another major component in Comanche trade was their monopoly on the slave trade. While they raided Spanish lands for cattle, they did also for human capital. The Comanche used their slaves as trade collateral and also used them to work in their growing dualist economy. Slaves mainly worked in horse rearing and domestic chores and were sometimes adopted into the family. The taking of slaves both frightened and terrified Spanish settlers. The constant fear and ineffective way in dealing with them prompted many Spanish settlers to give up their lands and return to areas away from Comanche aggression.
Another way the Comanche’s maintained power in the interior of the United States, was the way the adapted to Western technologies, especially weapons, diplomacy and disease. With the use of the horse and adapting to western guns and firepower the Comanche were able to exert control over the Southwest. Western weaponry allowed the Comanche to not only mount a strong military force, but it also allowed for the efficiency of bison hunting. The horse and gun allowed efficient killing, reducing both time and effort.
In regards to diplomacy, the Comanche effectively exploited it to meet their needs. The Comanche were adept at drawing native nations into its sphere of commercialization. The movement west of native tribes because of encroaching American settlement and pressures of Indian groups caused an influx of people upon Comancheria territory. While a clash was inevitable and immediate, the Comanche soon invited the removed Indians to become middlemen who facilitated the movement of goods among the centers of wealth around them. By adapting other native tribes into their commercial realm, the Comanche refigured trade to distant markets but also surrounded Comancheria with important buffer zones against white setllement. These Indian alignments halted the encroachment of United States and Texas settlers who feared a massive joint tribal retaliation. Another aspect of the alliances with native tribes is that it opened Comancheria to open commercial trade with American markets. Thus, in abstract, the thriving trade zone of eastern Comancheria meant the removal of indigenous nations from the east Indian territory to the west could continue. Another way the Comanche used diplomacy in their favor was the fact that they did not recognize national boundary lines and legal obligations. Even though the Spanish and later Americans established boundaries denoting their territory. Comanche’s did not follow them. In their eyes, all land was free and available to whoever had the ability to use it. Thus they raided deep into Spanish territory. Likewise, even though the Comanche’s agreed to formal trade relations with the Spanish, the Comanche did not see the trade partnership in the same way. Comanche’s traded and dealt with whoever they could gain the most from and make the most profit. Trade agreements meant nothing to them and the Comanche a lot of the time doubled dealt with both the Spanish and Americans.
The Comanche also successfully adapted to diseases brought by western settlers. While the humid temperatures of the coast brought the indigenous there terrific population loss from western diseases, the dry air of the Southwest and Great Plains halted the spread of disease to an effect not as dramatic as other parts of North America. Another, more exploitative way the Comanche dealt with diseases was the practice of marrying and fornicating with western women. By fornicating with western women, the Comanche successfully produced offspring who were tolerant to western diseases. And while disease decimated the Comanche at first, over time they became tolerant of western diseases due to the increased numbers of racially mixed offspring.
One more basis of Comanche power can be understood through their flexible and adaptive social structure. Comanche society was very hierarchical. While the men hunted bison, went on raiding missions and controlled the household, the women and children reared horses and did domestic work. However, not just Comanche men enjoyed power. Slave men, also had the ability to rise up in the ranks and become warriors and hunters. Most male slaves taken by the Comanche were young boys, who could be raised and nurtured in Comanche ideals. Older men proved too much of a risk as they would likely never repel western ways which they have learned. As a society, the Comanche were also very mobile. Their hunting and pastoralist economy was unfit to foster large permanent settlements and thus they lived in a semi-nomadic way migrating in different times of the year to follow the bison herds and the fresh grasses to raise their horses. The lack of permanent settlement proved it difficult for another power to launch an attack on the Comanche that would cripple them. Because members of Comanche society were always separated and never cloistered, it was only possible to attack a portion of the empire and never inflict massive losses. The semi-nomadic structure of the Comanche thus made it difficult for the Spanish and United States to amount successful control over the Comanche Empire.
Politically, the Comanche Empire was distant but unified. All Comanche units or households lived distantly from each other. The semi-nomadic ways and need to raise horses allowed the Comanche unit to live fairly independently, with each unit or family containing a male that held power. Usually the most powerful male was the one that had multiple wives and could produce the most goods. While the Comanche were so distant from each other, in times of toil they could easily unite. All the heads of family would join together in a great joint meeting and discuss the problem at hand. All the males had equal power in the assemblies, and thus made decisions as a single polity or unified empire. This ability of the Comanche to unify and amass great forces greatly halted American and Spanish expansion, as they feared conflict with a massive Comanche force.
Lastly, while the systems, which constituted Comanche power made them, a superpower in the Great Plain and Southwest, they also led to the collapse of the Comanche Empire in the 1870’s-1880’s. The center of Comanche power caved in with the sharp declines of bison herds. The Comanche had exploited the land beyond its sef-sustaining ecological stability. There had simply been too many Comanches and their allies raising too many horses and hunting too many bison on too small a land base. The Comanche could not move to other lands because there whole economy relied on the grasslands. The Comanche ability to adapt and incorporate other groups into their empire eventually led to their demise. The incorporation of removed Indian groups, facilitated American expansion and led to increased competition over bison on which they ultimately were being killed faster than they could reproduce. When the bison fell, so did the Comanche Empire. The Comanche trade networks collapsed because they had no bison meat to trade and their whole lifestyle became unglued. Powerless with the collapse of trade, Comanche’s were placed in reservations by the fast encroaching Americans. There, the Comanche were forced to live permanently and could not continue to live the way they had for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Comanche’s rapid decline, tells a great deal about the nature of their power system. They were not a tightly structured, self-sustaining entity but rather a system based on networks of power.[iv] The lack of centrality in Comanche Empire therefore allowed the decline to move rapidly and forcefully.
Think of them as American "Mongols".
American Cultural Imperialism.
“Kill the Indian, and Save the Man”: Capt. Richard H. Pratt on the Education of Native Americans
A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.
(Philip Sheridan was that man. Author.).
We are just now making a great pretence of anxiety to civilize the Indians. I use the word “pretence” purposely, and mean it to have all the significance it can possibly carry. Washington believed that commerce freely entered into between us and the Indians would bring about their civilization, and Washington was right. He was followed by Jefferson, who inaugurated the reservation plan. Jefferson’s reservation was to be the country west of the Mississippi; and he issued instructions to those controlling Indian matters to get the Indians there, and let the Great River be the line between them and the whites. Any method of securing removal - persuasion, purchase, or force - was authorized.
Jefferson’s plan became the permanent policy. The removals have generally been accomplished by purchase, and the evils of this are greater than those of all the others combined. . . .
It is a sad day for the Indians when they fall under the assaults of our troops, as in the Piegan massacre, the massacre of Old Black Kettle and his Cheyennes at what is termed “the battle of the Washita,” and hundreds of other like places in the history of our dealings with them; but a far sadder day is it for them when they fall under the baneful influences of a treaty agreement with the United States whereby they are to receive large annuities, and to be protected on reservations, and held apart from all association with the best of our civilization. The destruction is not so speedy, but it is far more general. The history of the Miamis and Osages is only the true picture of all other tribes.
“Put yourself in his place” is as good a guide to a proper conception of the Indian and his cause as it is to help us to right conclusions in our relations with other men. For many years we greatly oppressed the black man, but the germ of human liberty remained among us and grew, until, in spite of our irregularities, there came from the lowest savagery into intelligent manhood and freedom among us more than seven millions of our population, who are to-day an element of industrial value with which we could not well dispense. However great this victory has been for us, we have not yet fully learned our lesson nor completed our work; nor will we have done so until there is throughout all of our communities the most unequivocal and complete acceptance of our own doctrines, both national and religious. Not until there shall be in every locality throughout the nation a supremacy of the Bible principle of the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, and full obedience to the doctrine of our Declaration that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created free and equal, with certain inalienable rights,” and of the clause in our Constitution which forbids that there shall be “any abridgment of the rights of citizens on account of race, color, or previous condition.” I leave off the last two words “of servitude,” because I want to be entirely and consistently American.
Inscrutable are the ways of Providence. Horrible as were the experiences of its introduction, and of slavery itself, there was concealed in them the greatest blessing that ever came to the Negro race—seven millions of blacks from cannibalism in darkest Africa to citizenship in free and enlightened America; not full, not complete citizenship, but possible—probable—citizenship, and on the highway and near to it.
There is a great lesson in this. The schools did not make them citizens, the schools did not teach them the language, nor make them industrious and self-supporting. Denied the right of schools, they became English-speaking and industrious through the influences of association. Scattered here and there, under the care and authority of individuals of the higher race, they learned self-support and something of citizenship, and so reached their present place. No other influence or force would have so speedily accomplished such a result. Left in Africa, surrounded by their fellow-savages, our seven millions of industrious black fellow-citizens would still be savages. Transferred into these new surroundings and experiences, behold the result. They became English-speaking and civilized, because forced into association with English-speaking and civilized people; became healthy and multiplied, because they were property; and industrious, because industry, which brings contentment and health, was a necessary quality to increase their value.
The Indians under our care remained savage, because forced back upon themselves and away from association with English-speaking and civilized people, and because of our savage example and treatment of them. . . .
We have never made any attempt to civilize them with the idea of taking them into the nation, and all of our policies have been against citizenizing and absorbing them. Although some of the policies now prominent are advertised to carry them into citizenship and consequent association and competition with other masses of the nation, they are not, in reality, calculated to do this.
We are after the facts. Let us take the Land in Severalty Bill. Land in severalty, as administered, is in the way of the individualizing and civilization of the Indians, and is a means of holding the tribes together. Land in severalty is given to individuals adjoining each other on their present reservations. And experience shows that in some cases, after the allotments have been made, the Indians have entered into a compact among themselves to continue to hold their lands in common as a reservation. The inducement of the bill is in this direction. The Indians are not only invited to remain separate tribes and communities, but are practically compelled to remain so. The Indian must either cling to his tribe and its locality, or take great chances of losing his rights and property.
The day on which the Land in Severalty Bill was signed was announced to be the emancipation day for the Indians. The fallacy of that idea is so entirely demonstrated that the emancipation assumption is now withdrawn.
We shall have to go elsewhere, and seek for other means besides land in severalty to release these people from their tribal relations and to bring them individually into the capacity and freedom of citizens.
Just now that land in severalty is being retired as the one all-powerful leverage that is going to emancipate and bring about Indian civilization and citizenship, we have another plan thrust upon us which has received great encomium from its authors, and has secured the favor of Congress to the extent of vastly increasing appropriations. This plan is calculated to arrest public attention, and to temporarily gain concurrence from everybody that it is really the panacea for securing citizenship and equality in the nation for the Indians. In its execution this means purely tribal schools among the Indians; that is, Indian youth must continue to grow up under the pressure of home surroundings. Individuals are not to be encouraged to get out and see and learn and join the nation. They are not to measure their strength with the other inhabitants of the land, and find out what they do not know, and thus be led to aspire to gain in education, experience, and skill,—those things that they must know in order to become equal to the rest of us. A public school system especially for the Indians is a tribal system; and this very fact says to them that we believe them to be incompetent, that they must not attempt to cope with us. Such schools build up tribal pride, tribal purposes, and tribal demands upon the government. They formulate the notion that the government owes them a living and vast sums of money; and by improving their education on these lines, but giving no other experience and leading to no aspirations beyond the tribe, leaves them in their chronic condition of helplessness, so far as reaching the ability to compete with the white race is concerned. It is like attempting to make a man well by always telling him he is sick. We have only to look at the tribes who have been subject to this influence to establish this fact, and it makes no difference where they are located. All the tribes in the State of New York have been trained in tribal schools; and they are still tribes and Indians, with no desire among the masses to be anything else but separate tribes.
The five civilized tribes of the Indian Territory—Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles—have had tribal schools until it is asserted that they are civilized; yet they have no notion of joining us and becoming a part of the United States. Their whole disposition is to prey upon and hatch up claims against the government, and have the same lands purchased and repurchased and purchased again, to meet the recurring wants growing out of their neglect and inability to make use of their large and rich estate. . . .
Indian schools are just as well calculated to keep the Indians intact as Indians as Catholic schools are to keep the Catholics intact. Under our principles we have established the public school system, where people of all races may become unified in every way, and loyal to the government; but we do not gather the people of one nation into schools by themselves, and the people of another nation into schools by themselves, but we invite the youth of all peoples into all schools. We shall not succeed in Americanizing the Indian unless we take him in in exactly the same way. I do not care if abundant schools on the plan of Carlisle are established. If the principle we have always had at Carlisle—of sending them out into families and into the public schools—were left out, the result would be the same, even though such schools were established, as Carlisle is, in the centre of an intelligent and industrious population, and though such schools were, as Carlisle always has been, filled with students from many tribes. Purely Indian schools say to the Indians: “You are Indians, and must remain Indians. You are not of the nation, and cannot become of the nation. We do not want you to become of the nation.”
Before I leave this part of my subject I feel impelled to lay before you the facts, as I have come to look at them, of another influence that has claimed credit, and always has been and is now very dictatorial, in Indian matters; and that is the missionary as a citizenizing influence upon the Indians. The missionary goes to the Indian; he learns the language; he associates with him; he makes the Indian feel he is friendly, and has great desire to help him; he even teaches the Indian English. But the fruits of his labor, by all the examples that I know, have been to strengthen and encourage him to remain separate and apart from the rest of us. Of course, the more advanced, those who have a desire to become civilized, and to live like white men, who would with little encouragement go out into our communities, are the first to join the missionary’s forces. They become his lieutenants to gather in others. The missionary must necessarily hold on to every help he can get to push forward his schemes and plans, so that he may make a good report to his Church; and, in order to enlarge his work and make it a success, he must keep his community together. Consequently, any who care to get out into the nation, and learn from actual experience what it is to be civilized, what is the full length and breadth and height and depth of our civilization, must stay and help the missionary. The operation of this has been disastrous to any individual escape from the tribe, has vastly and unnecessarily prolonged the solution of the question, and has needlessly cost the charitable people of this country large sums of money, to say nothing of the added cost to the government, the delay in accomplishing their civilization, and their destruction caused by such delay.
If, as sometimes happens, the missionary kindly consents to let or helps one go out and get these experiences, it is only for the purpose of making him a preacher or a teacher or help of some kind; and such a one must, as soon as he is fitted, and much sooner in most cases, return to the tribe and help the missionary to save his people. The Indian who goes out has public charitable aid through his school course, forfeits his liberty, and is owned by the missionary. In all my experience of twenty-five years I have known scarcely a single missionary to heartily aid or advocate the disintegration of the tribes and the giving of individual Indians rights and opportunities among civilized people. There is this in addition: that the missionaries have largely assumed to dictate to the government its policy with tribes, and their dictations have always been along the lines of their colonies and church interests, and the government must gauge its actions to suit the purposes of the missionary, or else the missionary influences are at once exerted to defeat the purposes of the government. The government, by paying large sums of money to churches to carry on schools among Indians, only builds for itself opposition to its own interests. . . .
We make our greatest mistake in feeding our civilization to the Indians instead of feeding the Indians to our civilization. America has different customs and civilizations from Germany. What would be the result of an attempt to plant American customs and civilization among the Germans in Germany, demanding that they shall become thoroughly American before we admit them to the country? Now, what we have all along attempted to do for and with the Indians is just exactly that, and nothing else. We invite the Germans to come into our country and communities, and share our customs, our civilization, to be of it; and the result is immediate success. Why not try it on the Indians? Why not invite them into experiences in our communities? Why always invite and compel them to remain a people unto themselves?
It is a great mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage. He is born a blank, like all the rest of us. Left in the surroundings of savagery, he grows to possess a savage language, superstition, and life. We, left in the surroundings of civilization, grow to possess a civilized language, life, and purpose. Transfer the infant white to the savage surroundings, he will grow to possess a savage language, superstition, and habit. Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit. These results have been established over and over again beyond all question; and it is also well established that those advanced in life, even to maturity, of either class, lose already acquired qualities belonging to the side of their birth, and gradually take on those of the side to which they have been transferred.
As we have taken into our national family seven millions of Negroes, and as we receive foreigners at the rate of more than five hundred thousand a year, and assimilate them, it would seem that the time may have arrived when we can very properly make at least the attempt to assimilate our two hundred and fifty thousand Indians, using this proven potent line, and see if that will not end this vexed question and remove them from public attention, where they occupy so much more space than they are entitled to either by numbers or worth.
The school at Carlisle is an attempt on the part of the government to do this. Carlisle has always planted treason to the tribe and loyalty to the nation at large. It has preached against colonizing Indians, and in favor of individualizing them. It has demanded for them the same multiplicity of chances which all others in the country enjoy. Carlisle fills young Indians with the spirit of loyalty to the stars and stripes, and then moves them out into our communities to show by their conduct and ability that the Indian is no different from the white or the colored, that he has the inalienable right to liberty and opportunity that the white and the negro have. Carlisle does not dictate to him what line of life he should fill, so it is an honest one. It says to him that, if he gets his living by the sweat of his brow, and demonstrates to the nation that he is a man, he does more good for his race than hundreds of his fellows who cling to their tribal communistic surroundings. . . .
No evidence is wanting to show that, in our industries, the Indian can become a capable and willing factor if he has the chance. What we need is an Administration which will give him the chance. The Land in Severalty Bill can be made far more useful than it is, but it can be made so only by assigning the land so as to intersperse good, civilized people among them. If, in the distribution, it is so arranged that two or three white families come between two Indian families, then there would necessarily grow up a community of fellowship along all the lines of our American civilization that would help the Indian at once to his feet. Indian schools must, of necessity, be for a time, because the Indian cannot speak the language, and he knows nothing of the habits and forces he has to contend with; but the highest purpose of all Indian schools ought to be only to prepare the young Indian to enter the public and other schools of the country. And immediately he is so prepared, for his own good and the good of the country, he should be forwarded into these other schools, there to temper, test, and stimulate his brain and muscle into the capacity he needs for his struggle for life, in competition with us. The missionary can, if he will, do far greater service in helping the Indians than he has done; but it will only be by practising the doctrine he preaches. As his work is to lift into higher life the people whom he serves, he must not, under any pretence whatsoever, give the lie to what he preaches by discountenancing the right of any individual Indian to go into higher and better surroundings, but, on the contrary, he should help the Indian to do that. If he fails in thus helping and encouraging the Indian, he is false to his own teaching. An examination shows that no Indians within the limits of the United States have acquired any sort of capacity to meet and cope with the whites in civilized pursuits who did not gain that ability by going among the whites and out from the reservations, and that many have gained this ability by so going out.
Theorizing citizenship into people is a slow operation. What a farce it would be to attempt teaching American citizenship to the negroes in Africa. They could not understand it; and, if they did, in the midst of such contrary influences, they could never use it. Neither can the Indians understand or use American citizenship theoretically taught to them on Indian reservations. They must get into the swim of American citizenship. They must feel the touch of it day after day, until they become saturated with the spirit of it, and thus become equal to it.
When we cease to teach the Indian that he is less than a man; when we recognize fully that he is capable in all respects as we are, and that he only needs the opportunities and privileges which we possess to enable him to assert his humanity and manhood; when we act consistently towards him in accordance with that recognition; when we cease to fetter him to conditions which keep him in bondage, surrounded by retrogressive influences; when we allow him the freedom of association and the developing influences of social contact—then the Indian will quickly demonstrate that he can be truly civilized, and he himself will solve the question of what to do with the Indian.
Source:
Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction (1892), 46–59. Reprinted in Richard H. Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian” 1880–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 260–271.
Beginning in 1887, the federal government attempted to “Americanize” Native Americans, largely through the education of Native youth. By 1900 thousands of Native Americans were studying at almost 150 boarding schools around the United States. The U.S. Training and Industrial School founded in 1879 at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, was the model for most of these schools. Boarding schools like Carlisle provided vocational and manual training and sought to systematically strip away tribal culture. They insisted that students drop their Indian names, forbade the speaking of native languages, and cut off their long hair. Not surprisingly, such schools often met fierce resistance from Native American parents and youth. But the schools also fostered a sense of shared Indian identity that transcended tribal boundaries. The following excerpt (from a paper read by Carlisle founder Capt. Richard H. Pratt at an 1892 convention) spotlights Pratt’s pragmatic and frequently brutal methods for “civilizing” the “savages,” including his analogies to the education and “civilizing” of African Americans.
A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.
(Philip Sheridan was that man. Author.).
We are just now making a great pretence of anxiety to civilize the Indians. I use the word “pretence” purposely, and mean it to have all the significance it can possibly carry. Washington believed that commerce freely entered into between us and the Indians would bring about their civilization, and Washington was right. He was followed by Jefferson, who inaugurated the reservation plan. Jefferson’s reservation was to be the country west of the Mississippi; and he issued instructions to those controlling Indian matters to get the Indians there, and let the Great River be the line between them and the whites. Any method of securing removal - persuasion, purchase, or force - was authorized.
Jefferson’s plan became the permanent policy. The removals have generally been accomplished by purchase, and the evils of this are greater than those of all the others combined. . . .
It is a sad day for the Indians when they fall under the assaults of our troops, as in the Piegan massacre, the massacre of Old Black Kettle and his Cheyennes at what is termed “the battle of the Washita,” and hundreds of other like places in the history of our dealings with them; but a far sadder day is it for them when they fall under the baneful influences of a treaty agreement with the United States whereby they are to receive large annuities, and to be protected on reservations, and held apart from all association with the best of our civilization. The destruction is not so speedy, but it is far more general. The history of the Miamis and Osages is only the true picture of all other tribes.
“Put yourself in his place” is as good a guide to a proper conception of the Indian and his cause as it is to help us to right conclusions in our relations with other men. For many years we greatly oppressed the black man, but the germ of human liberty remained among us and grew, until, in spite of our irregularities, there came from the lowest savagery into intelligent manhood and freedom among us more than seven millions of our population, who are to-day an element of industrial value with which we could not well dispense. However great this victory has been for us, we have not yet fully learned our lesson nor completed our work; nor will we have done so until there is throughout all of our communities the most unequivocal and complete acceptance of our own doctrines, both national and religious. Not until there shall be in every locality throughout the nation a supremacy of the Bible principle of the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, and full obedience to the doctrine of our Declaration that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created free and equal, with certain inalienable rights,” and of the clause in our Constitution which forbids that there shall be “any abridgment of the rights of citizens on account of race, color, or previous condition.” I leave off the last two words “of servitude,” because I want to be entirely and consistently American.
Inscrutable are the ways of Providence. Horrible as were the experiences of its introduction, and of slavery itself, there was concealed in them the greatest blessing that ever came to the Negro race—seven millions of blacks from cannibalism in darkest Africa to citizenship in free and enlightened America; not full, not complete citizenship, but possible—probable—citizenship, and on the highway and near to it.
There is a great lesson in this. The schools did not make them citizens, the schools did not teach them the language, nor make them industrious and self-supporting. Denied the right of schools, they became English-speaking and industrious through the influences of association. Scattered here and there, under the care and authority of individuals of the higher race, they learned self-support and something of citizenship, and so reached their present place. No other influence or force would have so speedily accomplished such a result. Left in Africa, surrounded by their fellow-savages, our seven millions of industrious black fellow-citizens would still be savages. Transferred into these new surroundings and experiences, behold the result. They became English-speaking and civilized, because forced into association with English-speaking and civilized people; became healthy and multiplied, because they were property; and industrious, because industry, which brings contentment and health, was a necessary quality to increase their value.
The Indians under our care remained savage, because forced back upon themselves and away from association with English-speaking and civilized people, and because of our savage example and treatment of them. . . .
We have never made any attempt to civilize them with the idea of taking them into the nation, and all of our policies have been against citizenizing and absorbing them. Although some of the policies now prominent are advertised to carry them into citizenship and consequent association and competition with other masses of the nation, they are not, in reality, calculated to do this.
We are after the facts. Let us take the Land in Severalty Bill. Land in severalty, as administered, is in the way of the individualizing and civilization of the Indians, and is a means of holding the tribes together. Land in severalty is given to individuals adjoining each other on their present reservations. And experience shows that in some cases, after the allotments have been made, the Indians have entered into a compact among themselves to continue to hold their lands in common as a reservation. The inducement of the bill is in this direction. The Indians are not only invited to remain separate tribes and communities, but are practically compelled to remain so. The Indian must either cling to his tribe and its locality, or take great chances of losing his rights and property.
The day on which the Land in Severalty Bill was signed was announced to be the emancipation day for the Indians. The fallacy of that idea is so entirely demonstrated that the emancipation assumption is now withdrawn.
We shall have to go elsewhere, and seek for other means besides land in severalty to release these people from their tribal relations and to bring them individually into the capacity and freedom of citizens.
Just now that land in severalty is being retired as the one all-powerful leverage that is going to emancipate and bring about Indian civilization and citizenship, we have another plan thrust upon us which has received great encomium from its authors, and has secured the favor of Congress to the extent of vastly increasing appropriations. This plan is calculated to arrest public attention, and to temporarily gain concurrence from everybody that it is really the panacea for securing citizenship and equality in the nation for the Indians. In its execution this means purely tribal schools among the Indians; that is, Indian youth must continue to grow up under the pressure of home surroundings. Individuals are not to be encouraged to get out and see and learn and join the nation. They are not to measure their strength with the other inhabitants of the land, and find out what they do not know, and thus be led to aspire to gain in education, experience, and skill,—those things that they must know in order to become equal to the rest of us. A public school system especially for the Indians is a tribal system; and this very fact says to them that we believe them to be incompetent, that they must not attempt to cope with us. Such schools build up tribal pride, tribal purposes, and tribal demands upon the government. They formulate the notion that the government owes them a living and vast sums of money; and by improving their education on these lines, but giving no other experience and leading to no aspirations beyond the tribe, leaves them in their chronic condition of helplessness, so far as reaching the ability to compete with the white race is concerned. It is like attempting to make a man well by always telling him he is sick. We have only to look at the tribes who have been subject to this influence to establish this fact, and it makes no difference where they are located. All the tribes in the State of New York have been trained in tribal schools; and they are still tribes and Indians, with no desire among the masses to be anything else but separate tribes.
The five civilized tribes of the Indian Territory—Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles—have had tribal schools until it is asserted that they are civilized; yet they have no notion of joining us and becoming a part of the United States. Their whole disposition is to prey upon and hatch up claims against the government, and have the same lands purchased and repurchased and purchased again, to meet the recurring wants growing out of their neglect and inability to make use of their large and rich estate. . . .
Indian schools are just as well calculated to keep the Indians intact as Indians as Catholic schools are to keep the Catholics intact. Under our principles we have established the public school system, where people of all races may become unified in every way, and loyal to the government; but we do not gather the people of one nation into schools by themselves, and the people of another nation into schools by themselves, but we invite the youth of all peoples into all schools. We shall not succeed in Americanizing the Indian unless we take him in in exactly the same way. I do not care if abundant schools on the plan of Carlisle are established. If the principle we have always had at Carlisle—of sending them out into families and into the public schools—were left out, the result would be the same, even though such schools were established, as Carlisle is, in the centre of an intelligent and industrious population, and though such schools were, as Carlisle always has been, filled with students from many tribes. Purely Indian schools say to the Indians: “You are Indians, and must remain Indians. You are not of the nation, and cannot become of the nation. We do not want you to become of the nation.”
Before I leave this part of my subject I feel impelled to lay before you the facts, as I have come to look at them, of another influence that has claimed credit, and always has been and is now very dictatorial, in Indian matters; and that is the missionary as a citizenizing influence upon the Indians. The missionary goes to the Indian; he learns the language; he associates with him; he makes the Indian feel he is friendly, and has great desire to help him; he even teaches the Indian English. But the fruits of his labor, by all the examples that I know, have been to strengthen and encourage him to remain separate and apart from the rest of us. Of course, the more advanced, those who have a desire to become civilized, and to live like white men, who would with little encouragement go out into our communities, are the first to join the missionary’s forces. They become his lieutenants to gather in others. The missionary must necessarily hold on to every help he can get to push forward his schemes and plans, so that he may make a good report to his Church; and, in order to enlarge his work and make it a success, he must keep his community together. Consequently, any who care to get out into the nation, and learn from actual experience what it is to be civilized, what is the full length and breadth and height and depth of our civilization, must stay and help the missionary. The operation of this has been disastrous to any individual escape from the tribe, has vastly and unnecessarily prolonged the solution of the question, and has needlessly cost the charitable people of this country large sums of money, to say nothing of the added cost to the government, the delay in accomplishing their civilization, and their destruction caused by such delay.
If, as sometimes happens, the missionary kindly consents to let or helps one go out and get these experiences, it is only for the purpose of making him a preacher or a teacher or help of some kind; and such a one must, as soon as he is fitted, and much sooner in most cases, return to the tribe and help the missionary to save his people. The Indian who goes out has public charitable aid through his school course, forfeits his liberty, and is owned by the missionary. In all my experience of twenty-five years I have known scarcely a single missionary to heartily aid or advocate the disintegration of the tribes and the giving of individual Indians rights and opportunities among civilized people. There is this in addition: that the missionaries have largely assumed to dictate to the government its policy with tribes, and their dictations have always been along the lines of their colonies and church interests, and the government must gauge its actions to suit the purposes of the missionary, or else the missionary influences are at once exerted to defeat the purposes of the government. The government, by paying large sums of money to churches to carry on schools among Indians, only builds for itself opposition to its own interests. . . .
We make our greatest mistake in feeding our civilization to the Indians instead of feeding the Indians to our civilization. America has different customs and civilizations from Germany. What would be the result of an attempt to plant American customs and civilization among the Germans in Germany, demanding that they shall become thoroughly American before we admit them to the country? Now, what we have all along attempted to do for and with the Indians is just exactly that, and nothing else. We invite the Germans to come into our country and communities, and share our customs, our civilization, to be of it; and the result is immediate success. Why not try it on the Indians? Why not invite them into experiences in our communities? Why always invite and compel them to remain a people unto themselves?
It is a great mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage. He is born a blank, like all the rest of us. Left in the surroundings of savagery, he grows to possess a savage language, superstition, and life. We, left in the surroundings of civilization, grow to possess a civilized language, life, and purpose. Transfer the infant white to the savage surroundings, he will grow to possess a savage language, superstition, and habit. Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit. These results have been established over and over again beyond all question; and it is also well established that those advanced in life, even to maturity, of either class, lose already acquired qualities belonging to the side of their birth, and gradually take on those of the side to which they have been transferred.
As we have taken into our national family seven millions of Negroes, and as we receive foreigners at the rate of more than five hundred thousand a year, and assimilate them, it would seem that the time may have arrived when we can very properly make at least the attempt to assimilate our two hundred and fifty thousand Indians, using this proven potent line, and see if that will not end this vexed question and remove them from public attention, where they occupy so much more space than they are entitled to either by numbers or worth.
The school at Carlisle is an attempt on the part of the government to do this. Carlisle has always planted treason to the tribe and loyalty to the nation at large. It has preached against colonizing Indians, and in favor of individualizing them. It has demanded for them the same multiplicity of chances which all others in the country enjoy. Carlisle fills young Indians with the spirit of loyalty to the stars and stripes, and then moves them out into our communities to show by their conduct and ability that the Indian is no different from the white or the colored, that he has the inalienable right to liberty and opportunity that the white and the negro have. Carlisle does not dictate to him what line of life he should fill, so it is an honest one. It says to him that, if he gets his living by the sweat of his brow, and demonstrates to the nation that he is a man, he does more good for his race than hundreds of his fellows who cling to their tribal communistic surroundings. . . .
No evidence is wanting to show that, in our industries, the Indian can become a capable and willing factor if he has the chance. What we need is an Administration which will give him the chance. The Land in Severalty Bill can be made far more useful than it is, but it can be made so only by assigning the land so as to intersperse good, civilized people among them. If, in the distribution, it is so arranged that two or three white families come between two Indian families, then there would necessarily grow up a community of fellowship along all the lines of our American civilization that would help the Indian at once to his feet. Indian schools must, of necessity, be for a time, because the Indian cannot speak the language, and he knows nothing of the habits and forces he has to contend with; but the highest purpose of all Indian schools ought to be only to prepare the young Indian to enter the public and other schools of the country. And immediately he is so prepared, for his own good and the good of the country, he should be forwarded into these other schools, there to temper, test, and stimulate his brain and muscle into the capacity he needs for his struggle for life, in competition with us. The missionary can, if he will, do far greater service in helping the Indians than he has done; but it will only be by practising the doctrine he preaches. As his work is to lift into higher life the people whom he serves, he must not, under any pretence whatsoever, give the lie to what he preaches by discountenancing the right of any individual Indian to go into higher and better surroundings, but, on the contrary, he should help the Indian to do that. If he fails in thus helping and encouraging the Indian, he is false to his own teaching. An examination shows that no Indians within the limits of the United States have acquired any sort of capacity to meet and cope with the whites in civilized pursuits who did not gain that ability by going among the whites and out from the reservations, and that many have gained this ability by so going out.
Theorizing citizenship into people is a slow operation. What a farce it would be to attempt teaching American citizenship to the negroes in Africa. They could not understand it; and, if they did, in the midst of such contrary influences, they could never use it. Neither can the Indians understand or use American citizenship theoretically taught to them on Indian reservations. They must get into the swim of American citizenship. They must feel the touch of it day after day, until they become saturated with the spirit of it, and thus become equal to it.
When we cease to teach the Indian that he is less than a man; when we recognize fully that he is capable in all respects as we are, and that he only needs the opportunities and privileges which we possess to enable him to assert his humanity and manhood; when we act consistently towards him in accordance with that recognition; when we cease to fetter him to conditions which keep him in bondage, surrounded by retrogressive influences; when we allow him the freedom of association and the developing influences of social contact—then the Indian will quickly demonstrate that he can be truly civilized, and he himself will solve the question of what to do with the Indian.
Source:
Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction (1892), 46–59. Reprinted in Richard H. Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian” 1880–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 260–271.
Then there is Carlisle Barracks.