How Their World Was Lost

American Indians—What Does Their Future Hold?

Courtesy of The Awake Magazine 

Courtesy of Awake Magazine

For many years the story of the United States was summed up with the expression, "How the West was won." Hollywood's films showed white settlers moving across the American plains and mountains, with John Wayne-type soldiers, cowboys, and settlers battling the fierce, savage, tomahawk-wielding Indians. While the white man was looking for land and gold, some of Christendom's priests and preachers were supposedly saving souls.
How does that history look from the standpoint of the original inhabitants, the native people of America? With the arrival of Europeans, Indians "were forced to cope with the introduction into their environment of the most rapacious predator they had ever faced: white European invaders," states the book The Native Americans-An Illustrated History.

Harmony That Led to Strife

Initially, many of the Europeans who first arrived in the American Northeast were met with kindness and cooperation from the natives. One account says: "Without the aid of the Powhatans, the British settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English colony in the New World, would not have lasted through its first terrible winter of 1607-08. Similarly, the Pilgrim colony at Plymouth, Massachusetts, might have failed except for help from the Wampanoags." Some natives showed the immigrants how to fertilize the soil and grow crops. And how successful would the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-06-to find a practical transportation link between the Louisiana Territory and what was called the Oregon Country-have been without the help and intervention of the Shoshone woman Sacagawea? She was their "token of peace" when they came face-to-face with Indians.
However, because of the European way of using land and the limited food resources, the massive immigration into North America caused tension between the invaders and the natives. Canadian historian Ian K. Steele explains that in the 17th century, there were 30,000 Narragansett in Massachusetts. Their chief Miantonomo, "sensing danger, . . . sought to build on his Mohawk alliance to create a general Amerindian resistance movement." He is reported to have said to the Montauk in 1642: "We [must] be one as they [the English] are, otherwise we shall all be gone shortly, for you know our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and of [turkeys], and our coves full of fish and fowl. But these English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved."-Warpaths-Invasions of North America.

Artistic Navajo weaving and jewlery

Miantonomo's efforts to form a united Native American front came to naught. In 1643, in a tribal war, he was captured by Chief Uncas of the Mohegan tribe, who turned him over to the English as a rebel. The English could not legally convict Miantonomo and execute him. They figured out a convenient solution. Steele continues: "Unable to execute [Miantonomo], who was outside the jurisdiction of any of the colonies, the commissioners had Uncas execute him, with English witnesses to prove it had been done."
This illustrates not only the constant conflicts between the invading colonists and the native population but also the internecine rivalry and treachery among the tribes, which had existed even before the white man ever reached North America. The British, in their wars against the French for colonial domination of North America, had some tribes on their side, while others supported the French. No matter which side lost, all the tribes involved paid a loser's price.

A Tough Life for the Women While the menfolk were the hunters and the warriors in most tribes, the women had endless tasks, including raising the children, planting and harvesting the grain, and pounding it into flour. Colin Taylor explains: "The major role of Plains women . . . was one of maintaining the established household, bearing children and preparing the food. In the horticultural societies they also tended the fields, . . . while, in the case of the nomadic buffalo-hunting western tribes, they helped butcher the animal, brought the meat into camp and subsequently prepared the meat and hides for future use."-The Plains Indians. Another source says regarding the Apache people: "Farm work was women's work and there was nothing degrading or menial about it. Men helped out, but women took a more serious view of farming than men. . . . Women always knew how to keep up with the agricultural rituals. . . . Most women prayed while irrigating the land."-The Native Americans-An Illustrated History. Women also made the temporary dwellings called tepees, which usually lasted about two years. They raised them and dismantled them when the tribe had to move. Without a doubt, the women led hard lives. But so did their menfolk as guardians of the tribe. The women were respected and had many rights. In some tribes, such as the Hopi, even today property is held by the women.

"A Chasm of Misunderstandings"

This is one view of the European invasion: "What leaders of Indian nations did not understand, often until it was too late, was the way the Europeans viewed Indians. They were not white or Christian. They were savages-wild and brutish-in the minds of many, a dangerous and unfeeling commodity for the slave markets." This attitude of superiority resulted in devastating effects on the tribes.
The European viewpoint was incomprehensible to Native Americans. There was, as Navajo counselor Philmer Bluehouse called it in a recent interview with Awake!, "a chasm of misunderstandings." The natives did not view their civilization as inferior but, rather, as different, with entirely different values. As an example, selling land was totally foreign to the Indians. Could you own and sell the air, the wind, the water? Then why the land? It was there for all to use. Thus, Indians were not known to fence off land.
With the arrival of the British, the Spanish, and the French, there came about what has been described as a "cataclysmic meeting of two alien cultures." The indigenous population were people who for hundreds of years had come to terms with the land and with nature and who knew how to survive without upsetting the environmental balance. Yet, the white man soon came to view the native inhabitants as lower, ferocious creatures-conveniently forgetting his own savagery in subduing them! In 1831, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville summed up the prevailing white opinion of Indians: "Heaven has not made them to become civilized; it is necessary that they die."

The Most Deadly Killer

As the new settlers poured west across North America, violence begot violence. So whether the Indians or the European invaders attacked first, atrocities were committed by both sides. The Indians were feared because of their reputation for scalping, a practice that some believe they learned from Europeans who offered bounties for scalps. However, the Indians were fighting a losing battle against superior odds-in numbers and in arms. In most cases the tribes ended up having to leave their ancestral lands or die. Often it was both-they left their lands and then were killed or died of disease and starvation.
Yet, death in battle was not the most decimating factor for the native tribes. Writes Ian K. Steele: "The most potent weapon in the invasion of North America was not the gun, the horse, the Bible, or European 'civilization.' It was pestilence." Concerning the effect of Old World diseases on the Americas, Patrica Nelson Limerick, a professor of history, wrote: "When carried to the New World, these same diseases [to which Europeans had had centuries to develop immunity]-chicken pox, measles, influenza, malaria, yellow fever, typhus, tuberculosis, and, above all, smallpox-met little resistance. Mortality rates in village after village ran as high as 80 or 90 percent."
Russell Freedman describes an epidemic of smallpox that struck in 1837. "The Mandans were the first to be stricken, followed in swift succession by the Hidatsas, the Assiniboins, the Arikaras, the Sioux, and the Blackfeet." The Mandans were almost completely liquidated. From a population of some 1,600 in 1834, they dwindled to 130 in 1837.

An Animal That Changed Their World The Europeans introduced one animal into North America that changed the life-style of many tribes-the horse. In the 17th century, the Spanish became the first to bring horses to the continent. Native Americans became brilliant bareback riders, as the invading Europeans soon discovered. With horses, the natives were able to hunt the bison much more easily. And the nomadic tribes were better able to raid their neighbor tribes living in fixed villages and thus pick up plunder, women, and slaves.

What Happened to the Treaties?

To this day tribal elders can reel off the dates of the treaties that the U.S. government signed with their forefathers in the 19th century. But what did those treaties actually provide? Usually an unfavorable exchange of good land for a barren reservation and government subsistence.
An example of the disdain with which the native tribes were treated is the case of the Iroquois nations (from east to west, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca) after the British were defeated by the American colonists in the war of independence, which ended in 1783. The Iroquois had sided with the British, and all they got in repayment, according to Alvin Josephy, Jr., was abandonment and insults. The British, "ignoring [the Iroquois], had ceded sovereignty over their lands to the United States." He adds that even the Iroquois who had favored the colonists against the British "were set upon by rapacious land companies and speculators and by the American government itself."

Canyon de Chelly, where the "Long Walk" began

When a treaty meeting was called in 1784, James Duane, a former representative of the Continental Congress' Committee on Indian Affairs, exhorted the government agents "to undermine whatever self-confidence remained among the Iroquois by deliberately treating them as inferiors."
His arrogant suggestions were carried out. Some Iroquois were seized as hostages, and "negotiations" were conducted at gunpoint. Although considering themselves unconquered in war, the Iroquois had to give up all their land west of New York and Pennsylvania and accept a reservation of reduced dimensions in New York State.
Similar tactics were used against most of the native tribes. Josephy also states that American agents used "bribery, threats, alcohol, and manipulations of unauthorized representatives to attempt to wrench land away from Delawares, Wyandots, Ottawas, Chippewas [or Ojibwa], Shawnees, and other Ohio nations." Little wonder that the Indians soon came to mistrust the white man and his empty promises!

The "Long Walk" and the Trail of Tears

When the American Civil War (1861-65) broke out, it drew soldiers away from Navajo country in the Southwest. The Navajo took advantage of this respite to attack American and Mexican settlements in the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico territory. The government sent in Colonel Kit Carson and his New Mexico Volunteers to suppress the Navajo and to move them to a reservation on a barren strip of land called Bosque Redondo. Carson pursued a scorched-earth policy to starve and drive the Navajo out of the awesome Canyon de Chelly, in northeastern Arizona. He even destroyed more than 5,000 peach trees.
Carson gathered together some 8,000 people and forced them to take the "Long Walk" of about 300 miles to the Bosque Redondo detention camp at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. A report says: "The weather was bitterly cold, and many of the ill-clad, underfed exiles died along the way." The conditions at the reservation were terrible. The Navajo had to gouge out holes in the ground in an effort to find refuge. In 1868, after realizing its crass blunder, the government granted the Navajo 3.5 million acres of their ancestral homeland in Arizona and New Mexico. They went back, but what a price they had been forced to pay!
Between 1820 and 1845, tens of thousands of Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creeks, and Seminoles were driven from their lands in the Southeast and forced to march westward, beyond the Mississippi River, to what is now Oklahoma, hundreds of miles away. In cruel winter conditions, many died. The forced march westward became infamous as the Trail of Tears.
The injustices committed against Native Americans are further confirmed by the words of the American general George Crook, who had hunted down the Sioux and the Cheyenne in the north. He said: "The Indians' side of the case is rarely ever heard. . . . Then when the [Indian] outbreak does come public attention is turned to the Indians, their crimes and atrocities are alone condemned, while the persons whose injustice has driven them to this course escape scot-free . . . No one knows this fact better than the Indian, therefore he is excusable in seeing no justice in a government which only punishes him, while it allows the white man to plunder him as he pleases."-Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
How are Native Americans faring today after more than a hundred years of domination by Europeans? Are they in danger of disappearing as a result of assimilation? What hope do they have for the future? The next article will consider these and other questions.

Appeared in Awake!  September 8, 1996

Picture Credit: Indian: Artwork based on photograph by Edward S. Curtis
Copyright © 2006 Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania. All rights reserved.