Native American treaties

[This Guy]

This thread is inspired, and split off from - http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=78477

The primary purpose of this thread is to discuss and share/gain knowledge about the US Government's record with treaties between itself and the Native Americans.

My understanding is that the US has broken most of the treaties it signed with Native Americans. In some cases where the US didn't directly break the treaty, it either encouraged, or looked the other way while US citizens violated the terms of treaties. From my scattered knowledge of the subject, I believe that while the Native Americans are not without fault, the US Government and it's citizens were guilty much more than the Natives, when it came to atrocities.

This is not an attempt to "Bash" the Government. Just a stab at discovering the truth, whatever it is. My feeling on the over all treatment of the Native Americans is that over all the displacement of the Native Americans was probably a good thing, for the future of our country. I just wish we could have achieved the same ends, by different means. But that's is a moot point.

I'm starting the thread as I suggested in the "other" thread, then I'm gonna start searching for information on individual treaties, and what happened with them. The main issues at question are -

1) Did the Native Americans understand the treaties they agreed to?

2) Were the Native American signers of the treaties in a position to obligate their people to the treaty's terms?

3) Was the treaty broken. and if so, by whom, and on what grounds, if any?

My hope is that the thread will be a pleasant sharing of knowledge, and not a shooting match

The topic is, for many, a very emotional one. I hope we can leave out the emotions, and primarily discuss the facts. I suspect we will have to deal with some of the emotional aspects of the parties to the treaties at least though. Also, I believe there were hundreds of treaties between the various groups/tribes of Native Americans, and I doubt we can cover them all with much detail, so perhaps we should try to discuss those that dealt with major issues, such as land/reservation rights? I believe that is the major area where contention developed, and problems arose. But I could be wrong, and I welcome all to bring out other issues related to the topic, that they feel should be addressed.

It will likely be late tonight, at the earliest, before I make a contributing post here. I just wanted to get the thread started so others could either get the ball rolling, or at least start gathering facts to share on the topic.

 

[BPSCG]

(What follows was hacked out of a post I put in a thread in the Politics forum, an area many here shun like a cholera ward. This Guy observed that my post was a derail, but rather than issue a fatwa calling for his death, I agreed; he started this thread, which is why we're here now.

This Guy points out that much of what I wrote was with regard to the Comanches, and wonders if it applied to the Amerindians in general. Much of it does. The lack of the concept of private land ownership certainly does, as does the wartime routine mutilation of slain enemies, torture of captives, rape of women, and abduction of children to be raised in the new tribe; as I explained, the Amerinds waged war long before the arrival of the whites, and they had their own forms of brutality and viciousness, albeit different from the white forms.)

Treaty enforcement between the US government and the Amerinds was a doomed effort, a fact which nobody on either side could possibly have comprehended, due to the abyss that lay between them in terms of cultures. We routinely, even instinctively recognize the idea of hierarchical government: a national government, state/provincial governments underneath, county/city/town governments underneath that. It's not a rigid hierarchy, but it's one whose structure we comprehend and understand intuitively how to live with; we take it in with our mothers' milk.

The Amerinds' concept of government was far less structured. The chief of the Comanche nation was no such thing, because there was no such thing as a Comanche nation (or any other Amerind nation); he was chief of a Comanche tribe. Comancheria, at its height in the 18th and 19th centuries, spread over parts of what is now five states, from Kansas and Colorado, south through New Mexico and Oklahoma, into central Texas. There were five or six distinct Comanche bands, and they, as well as most of the other tribes of the southwest, were largely nomadic, and in a more or less constant state of uneasy truce or hostilities (not necessarily outright war - more on that later) with the other tribes in the area. A chief was the chief of his band, not the chief of the Comanches. The same held true for the other Amerind tribes.

Movement between bands was common; a warrior unhappy with his own band could move to another one. Decisions regarding going to war were made by the men in councils (women were allowed in once they had reached menopause), but ultimate authority did not rest so much with the chief as with a warrior who had had a war vision and was able to persuade the other council members of the strength of his vision, or "medicine." If the others agreed his medicine was strong, their band would go to war.

War did not consist of the European-style formalities of public declaration followed by the assembly of armies in the field and open battle, with great armies grappling heroically and tragically; it consisted generally of a party leaving an encampment at night and attempting to catch its adversaries by surprise. If it all went well, the attack would result in a general slaughter of the attackees, with male warriors being killed and mutilated, women raped and killed and children carried off as prisoners, often to be adopted and raised in the new band as equals with any other member of the band. Males who were captured could count on being brought back to camp and tortured to death, often by the women.

But if the battle did not go well - if the surprise attack was discovered too soon, for example - the Amerinds would conclude that the medicine of that warrior who had had the vision was somehow defective, and the attack - and the war - would end there. There were no Pickett's Charges, no Charges of the Light Brigade among the Amerinds. War had its own viciousness among the Amerinds, just as among the Europeans, but of a different sort.

The idea of "medicine" can not be overstated. Where Europeans saw the world as mechanistic, subject to predictable laws and patterns of cause and effect, the Amerinds saw the world as capricious, subject to the whims of the spirits that lived in the forests and the stones and the rivers and the skies. Good medicine meant that the spirits were with you, and that nothing could harm you. Bad medicine meant that the spirits were against you, or, worse, that they had betrayed you for some infraction you might not have known you'd committed. The Amerind lived in a constant state of anxiety over not causing offense to the spirits.

What you had was two different cultures separated not simply by technology or even culture, but by their total world view. They completely misunderstood each other, when they even tried. The Europeans took it for granted that there was some "head chief" out there somewhere; there wasn't. The Amerinds were puzzled about who the Great White Father was supposed to be. The Europeans believed giving the Amerinds shiny medals with George Washington's portrait on them, and food and other gifts, would bring peace with the Amerinds; the Amerinds - particularly the Comanches - saw these as signs of weakness. The Europeans were horrified and disgusted by the Amerind wartime practice of rape, torture, and mutilation of one's enemies, especially the rape, torture, and mutilation of whites, while the Amerinds considered them perfectly normal, acceptable, even honorable behavior. And the Amerinds would call off an attack against whites at the first indication that their medicine had gone bad; this meant if something inexplicable and unexpected happened, such as a soldier standing in his place and not fleeing (yes, it happened, at least once), or the death early in the battle of the warrior who had had the supposed good medicine. Whites concluded this meant the Amerinds were cowardly, while to the Amerind mind, it made perfect sense.

The point of all this is that the idea of a treaty between the US and the Comanches - or any other tribe - was a fantasy, born perhaps of good intentions, or perhaps not, but ultimately unenforceable. Imagine the US at war with Canadians and trying to make peace with Canada by signing a treaty with the mayor of Quebec. Imagine the Quebecois unhappy with said treaty moving to Montreal, who had no such treaty, and decided he was going to go hunting moose with a few hundred of his buddies in northern Vermont and kill a few Green Mountaineers while he was at it. Imagine you couldn't tell the difference between a Quebecker and a Montrealite by looking at them, but that you could tell from their dress and appearance that they were Canadians. Imagine you called the local army - stretched thin along a thousand-mile long frontier - and showed them the burned ruins of your house and your husband's mutilated corpse. What do you suppose would happen?

No, I'm not some Amerind scholar. But I urge anyone who would like to read an unsparing, unblinking, ultimately tragic book about how and why the Amerinds were destroyed, to bypass the romanticized Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and pick up T.R. Fehrenbach's Comanches - The Destruction of a People (I believe more recent editions have retitled it Comanches - The History of a People). You will find no heroes here, and few villains. You will find some knaves, some fools, and a great many people trying to deal with cultures about which they understand nothing.

But you will come away with an understanding of how two peoples who both ultimately wanted nothing more than for the other to leave them alone quite logically ended up in a war of extermination. It's heartbreaking, but it's ultimately far more enlightening than the popular, sound-bite explanation of white devil guilt.

 

[This Guy]

Thanks for getting things going BPSCG!

I'm still searching for decent information to answer the questions I posed in the OP. Finding actual treaties is not that hard. Finding information surrounding the treaties is another matter.

Thought I'd post a few interesting/informative links I've found. This is mainly to let it be known that I haven't ducked out already. Right now, I'm looking at a couple of major (IMO) treaties, and what happened with them, in regards to the questions I posed in the OP.

Yale has something called the Avalon Project. "The Avalon Project at Yale Law School Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy".

Their listing of Native American Treaties - http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/ntreaty/ntreaty.htm

A site called Americanforignrelations.com has some good, though somewhat brief discussions on various aspects of Native American dealings with early Europeans and the US, with further details provided in links at the bottom of the page. An interesting site to browse about IMHO.

http://www.americanforeignrelations.com/Al-Am/American-Indian-Relations-1763-1815.html

Native Americans is a site that claims "This website will try to present as a true and accurate picture as possible of the past, but not dwell on it." Haven't dug too deep there yet, but did find some interesting reading. If you go to the picture gallery, some pages have audio that runs when the pages load. Native American songs/chants and such. Nothing obnoxious IMO, but one or two pages had rather loud volume, so be warned

http://www.nativeamericans.com/

 

[sackett]

The history of White-Indian relations in North America, or even just in what’s now the United States, is long and various. Generalizing is about the most dangerous thing you can do. (Generalizing from the Comanches is a case in point, although I don’t disparage BPSCG’s effort for a moment.)

The range of societies present in North America when Europeans arrived was enormous. The Eastern Woodland cultures were agricultural, semi-sedentary, and possessed of some degree of social organization at the level of tribe or “nation.” You could negotiate with the Six Nations and others; treaties had some meaning in their case. At the same time, they were “a horrible, destructive society,” in the words of the late Dr. Charles F. Hockett of Cornell. It was difficult for a civilized man to view them without horror. (I’m going to generalize: No white atrocity, not even Sand Creek, ever rose to the level of Eastern Woodland cruelty.)

At the other end of scale (and of the continent) were people like some of the Californian Indians, who had no social organization; they were accumulations of families who happened to speak the same language, nothing more. Treaties with them were at best a futile attempt at establishing some kind of relationship. As it happens, the Comanches fall fairly close to this end of the scale. (The historical Comanches may have been the result of a folk upheaval, with the resulting destruction of important customs, including social cohesiveness; the picture isn’t clear.) The Comanches’ predatory way of life may not have been a “social norm” at all. It may be simply an unhappy aspect of human nature.

In between the ends of the scale -- or off to one side of it – or maybe the idea of a scale is useless -- you can identify cultures of the most diverse kinds: town-dwelling Hopis, Sheepeaters with a pure-quill Paleolithic technology, bilocal Tlingits with a trading economy covering hundreds of miles, Cheyennes with herds of dogs (they adopted horses with ease and delight), Menominees who either had or quicly learned the concepts of land ownership, money, and interest -- the tribes and customs are endless. No wonder the Atlas of North American Indians is something like fifteen volumes. Thick ones, too, with fine print.

Also, since we’re dealing with the historical period, we have to account for rapidly changing cultures, i.e., contact cultures. The Sioux are an example: a Woodland people who moved into a quite different habitat, the Plains, and adoped a horse-borne hunting life like nothing ever seen anywhere before.

Remember that “Indian” and “Native American” are Euopean ideas. With the exception of Tecumseh and his brother The Prophet, I can’t think of a pan-Indian leader, that is, an Indian who thought in terms of red and white, rather than in terms of tribes. Even with good will (and after the French and Indian Wars, English America didn’t possess a lot of good will toward Indians), whites would have found it impossible to deal equally with all those different groups.

Man alive, we’ll never be done with this topic.

 

[wunky]

The lawsuit against the Department of the Interior may contain some interesting documents and references- but since it is ongoing and will be til the end of time- it may be hard to find those references.
Also, several versions of various treaties exist?
Are you including Native Alaskans and Native Hawaiians in this discussion?

 

[This Guy]

The history of White-Indian relations in North America, or even just in what’s now the United States, is long and various. Generalizing is about the most dangerous thing you can do. (Generalizing from the Comanches is a case in point, although I don’t disparage BPSCG’s effort for a moment.)

The range of societies present in North America when Europeans arrived was enormous. The Eastern Woodland cultures were agricultural, semi-sedentary, and possessed of some degree of social organization at the level of tribe or “nation.” You could negotiate with the Six Nations and others; treaties had some meaning in their case. At the same time, they were “a horrible, destructive society,” in the words of the late Dr. Charles F. Hockett of Cornell. It was difficult for a civilized man to view them without horror. (I’m going to generalize: No white atrocity, not even Sand Creek, ever rose to the level of Eastern Woodland cruelty.)

At the other end of scale (and of the continent) were people like some of the Californian Indians, who had no social organization; they were accumulations of families who happened to speak the same language, nothing more. Treaties with them were at best a futile attempt at establishing some kind of relationship. As it happens, the Comanches fall fairly close to this end of the scale. (The historical Comanches may have been the result of a folk upheaval, with the resulting destruction of important customs, including social cohesiveness; the picture isn’t clear.) The Comanches’ predatory way of life may not have been a “social norm” at all. It may be simply an unhappy aspect of human nature.

In between the ends of the scale -- or off to one side of it – or maybe the idea of a scale is useless -- you can identify cultures of the most diverse kinds: town-dwelling Hopis, Sheepeaters with a pure-quill Paleolithic technology, bilocal Tlingits with a trading economy covering hundreds of miles, Cheyennes with herds of dogs (they adopted horses with ease and delight), Menominees who either had or quicly learned the concepts of land ownership, money, and interest -- the tribes and customs are endless. No wonder the Atlas of North American Indians is something like fifteen volumes. Thick ones, too, with fine print.

Also, since we’re dealing with the historical period, we have to account for rapidly changing cultures, i.e., contact cultures. The Sioux are an example: a Woodland people who moved into a quite different habitat, the Plains, and adoped a horse-borne hunting life like nothing ever seen anywhere before.

Remember that “Indian” and “Native American” are Euopean ideas. With the exception of Tecumseh and his brother The Prophet, I can’t think of a pan-Indian leader, that is, an Indian who thought in terms of red and white, rather than in terms of tribes. Even with good will (and after the French and Indian Wars, English America didn’t possess a lot of good will toward Indians), whites would have found it impossible to deal equally with all those different groups.

Man alive, we’ll never be done with this topic.

Yea, I'm thinking I bit off more than I can chew here

Thanks for the informative post!

 

[This Guy]

The lawsuit against the Department of the Interior may contain some interesting documents and references- but since it is ongoing and will be til the end of time- it may be hard to find those references.
Also, several versions of various treaties exist?
Are you including Native Alaskans and Native Hawaiians in this discussion?

I'm not sure about your question. Are there multiple versions of some treaties? Other than translations, I can't imagine why there would be.

My main interest was "Mainland". But I would be interested in Alaskans, and Hawaiians also. I don't recall reading anything about our initial interactions with those peoples.

 

[BPSCG]

The history of White-Indian relations in North America, or even just in what’s now the United States, is long and various. Generalizing is about the most dangerous thing you can do. (Generalizing from the Comanches is a case in point, although I don’t disparage BPSCG’s effort for a moment.)

Agreed; the Comanches and the Apaches were completely different types of cultures (and they hated each other), and a number of the southwestern tribes took up agriculture long before the whites showed up, while the Comanches never did.

One thing Fehrenbach observes early on in his book is how Amerind languages never spread widely. Whereas in Europe, there are similarities between French, Spanish, and Italian, and German and Dutch, the Amerind languages had very little overlap between them. He blames the vast size of the North American continent for this, a theory I'm not all that comfortable with - after all, Europe is about the size of the U.S. - but the language disparity would certainly explain the difficulty of spreading a tribal culture across the continent. (Sign language was an adaptation to overcome the spoken language barrier).

At the same time, they were “a horrible, destructive society,” in the words of the late Dr. Charles F. Hockett of Cornell. It was difficult for a civilized man to view them without horror. (I’m going to generalize: No white atrocity, not even Sand Creek, ever rose to the level of Eastern Woodland cruelty.)

But, again, Amerind atrocities were not for the purpose of horrifying and subduing an enemy, but rather for the purpose of proving one's strength, bravery, and character to the rest of one's tribe. While the Amerinds made regular use of torture, rape, and mutilation, which horrified whites, they, OTOH, engaged in no huge battles involving tens of thousands of massed troops, with thousands of dead or wounded in the aftermath; there were no Amerind Gettysburgs. If an attack wasn't going off well, it would be called off, and if a defense was not going well, there was no desperate battle to hold the line; retreat made perfect sense because your medicine wasn't working that day and the spirits were against you.

The Comanches’ predatory way of life may not have been a “social norm” at all. It may be simply an unhappy aspect of human nature.

This is a view Fehrenbach supports; he says that until they discovered the horse and firearms, the Comanches were a despised, weak tribe, struggling to survive.

Man alive, we’ll never be done with this topic.

True. I feel like it's something I've just scratched the surface of - and I've now moved on to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America - so I wonder if I'll ever understand it better. But when I tell people what I've learned about the Comanches in particular, and the Amerinds in general, in particular how the loose organization made treaty-making a utile exercise, they are almost always surprised, and enlightened.

 

[sackett]

...Thanks for the informative post!

You're welcome, although the amount of information I can contribute on the American Indians is about 0.000000001% of the total -- which is still growing, of course, with all the controversy and rancor you'd expect from academia.

For just a hint of the complexity of the subject, try A. L. Kroeber's book on the Indians of California. It contains a whopping amount of info on cultures that are now vanished.

How do I feel about white-Indian treaties and relations in general? Mixed. Few tribes can ever restrain their "wild young men," and of course the white-eye tribe found it nearly as difficult as any other. I mentioned Sand Creek, where "Colonel" Chivington and his pals massacered a band of Cheyennes. An ugly business -- but carried out in retaliation for Cheyenne scalp-raids in the region. The Sand Creek Cheyennes said that they hadn't been doing any of that horrid raiding, and they just couldn't understand why they were attacked.

You can explain, and condemn, and excuse, and rationalize, and, yes, generalize until the last sun sets, and not get anywhere. I suppose we'll still be arguing in Shadow Country.

 

[Smart_Cookie]

I thought that I had a book on Native treaties here in Manitoba, but I can't find it. Maybe it's buried in a box of books in the basement somewhere.

But I did find a link to a site regarding the treaties, here.

Following is a quote (it's biased, naturally, because the website is from the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs):

In addition, First Nations entered into Treaty negotiations with the Crown in the hopes of securing a better life not only for themselves but, more importantly, for their future generations. In exchange for surrendering "all their right and title" to their lands, the First Nations were to receive annuities in perpetuity and "reserves"; for their own use.

I guess there's one of the important points of contention. The treaties were supposed to ensure perpetual care for the people, in exchange for vast tracts of land.

I thought I had read on that site the other night some details regarding the fact that the Canadian government had not actually followed through on the amounts of land that the First Nations were supposed to be given. Certain bands/treaties weren't given the amount of land they were promised. I'll keep looking to find it.

It's interesting that these Manitoba treaties were quite specific on the actual items that the First Nations received, like "each Band to receive 1 bull, 1 yoke of oxen, 4 cows, 1 auger, 1 handsaw, 1 cross cut saw, 1 pit saw, the necessary files and 1 grindstone". And: "each Chief and each headman to receive a suitable suit of clothing every three years".

Gee, I wonder what the modern equivalents would be?

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

The Native Americans were dead for thousands of years before Europeans ever showed up on this continent. I beleive the people you are referring to are Indians, or American Indians, if you prefer.

 

[Mephisto]

For those of you who have HBO, there is going to be an upcoming production of Dee Brown's book that will (hopefully) outline the making and breaking of treaties between Native Americans and the American government. I've seen some previews and it looks worthwhile.

http://www.hbo.com/films/burymyheart/index.html

 

[geni]

One thing Fehrenbach observes early on in his book is how Amerind languages never spread widely. Whereas in Europe, there are similarities between French, Spanish, and Italian, and German and Dutch, the Amerind languages had very little overlap between them. He blames the vast size of the North American continent for this, a theory I'm not all that comfortable with - after all, Europe is about the size of the U.S. - but the language disparity would certainly explain the difficulty of spreading a tribal culture across the continent. (Sign language was an adaptation to overcome the spoken language barrier).

European langaue is probably more varried than you think. The extream example is Basque which doesn't resemble any living european language in any way shape or form. French, Spanish, and Italian all have a latin background in common and the roman empire was large. German and Dutch well the countries are next to each other so that both are germanic languages is hardly a suprise. However it should be noted that a lot of the convergence in europe is pretty recent. For example in the last 200 years or so Lowland Scots has gone from being pretty much a seperate language from english to being a fairly mild dialect of english.