The American Indian as Victim
Sheehan, Bernard W.
"The American Indian as Victim" To HEAR MANY historians tell it, the American story has been one long parade of unrelieved suffering. Victims abound: indentured servants, convicts, antinomian dissenters, Quakers, black slaves,...
...During the New Deal, John Collier of the Bureau of Indian Affairs attempted to promote a plan for the reconsolidation of the tribal order, though ironically the impulse for this quite sensible plan stemmed from a naive celebration of a primitive communal order that the white man could interpret as the opposite of civilized life...
...Messianism among the Indians revealed the extent to which native society had been undermined by the white man's influence...
...It did not work...
...In the late eighteenth century, Jefferson and many Americans defended the American Indian against the accusation by certain European philosophers that he was deficient in natural energy...
...The tribe gradually became center of native public into it...
...Observation of a one-dimensional phenomenon did not supply the method for describing an existing society possessing a distinctive culture...
...But it quickly developed...
...From the beginning the idea preceded observation, and thus the Indian was accorded a form of existence that drew its character from the white man's perception of himself...
...But it quickly developed...
...But the white man's ideas about himself required that any separate people be conceived of in a mirror image...
...The more he became conscious of the challenge of European society, the more he saw the need to consolidate with other Indians...
...During the New Deal, John Collier of the Bureau of Indian Affairs attempted to promote a plan for the reconsolidation of the tribal order, though ironically the impulse for this quite sensible plan stemmed from a naive celebration of a primitive communal order that the white man could interpret as the opposite of civilized life...
...But it was also partly a projection of the white man's image of the Indian...
...Although, beginning with Henry School-craft and Lewis Henry Morgan, the nineteenth century inaugurated serious anthropological study of native society, there is little in public policy toward the tribes that would indicate any basic change in the way that white men viewed them...
...Usually, Indians were viewed as noble savages who lived in paradise and had not suffered the fall from grace that afflicted civilized men...
...Less often observers interpreted them as vicious savages, the inhabitants of a howling wilderness who represented the obverse of civilized life...
...It must be drawn from the actual experience of native-white contact...
...The search for the origin of the tribes ended successfully in the eighteenth century with the conclusion that they had migrated from Asia...
...They knew well enough that there were different kinds of native peoples, with different physical appearances and different social habits...
...The result of this application of altruism to the problem of the Indian was the further disintegration of native society and the final decision to remove the southern tribes from their eastern lands to the country beyond the Mississippi where the effort at conversion might be continued...
...But there were always more Europeans eager to take their chances...
...Yet warfare was only one of the ways in which whites and natives dealt with each other and there are good reasons to believe that it was not as destructive as has frequently been claimed...
...Of an aboriginal population of about 2,500,000 only some 250,000 remained in 1890...
...The Indians were eager to accept a long list of tools, guns and clothing from traders in return for furs andpelts with little thought on either side that this exchange would be to the detriment of white or Indian...
...And even the kind of daily regimen that the Prophet actually imposed seemed more reminiscent of the life of a sober American farmer than of aboriginal customs...
...And it was also part of the native's acceptance of the white man's view of his way of life...
...it must take into account the aspects of that relationship that were subject to human determination, but it must also include a consideration of those mechanisms that affected the Indian's life despite any particular plans for his destruction hatched by white men...
...The evidence of this social pathology can be seen in two symptoms: a decline in the birth rate and the appearance of messianic movements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries...
...The first aggressive act is the white man's...
...When the American Indians first intruded on the perception of Europeans in the sixteenth century, there already existed the requisite formulas for explaining their appearance...
...In many ways the concept of the tribe defined this middling stage...
...They proved remarkably resilient, capable of absorbing critical segments of the white man's technology, and of retreating with a core of their own social order intact...
...And seemingly he never does learn, as, generation after generation, whites alternate between killing Indians and stealing their lands...
...But the white man's ideas about himself required that any separate people be conceived of in a mirror image...
...Despite the grievous injury that white settlements caused the native population, Indians continued to exist as a people...
...In 1887 Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act which intended the dismemberment of the tribes, the imposition of individual land ownership, and the final transformation of the Indian into a copy of the individualistic white man...
...Suspended between two worlds the Indians no doubt drew some interim consolation from their prophets, but ultimately messianism constituted significant evidence of the decline of native society...
...It was, in fact, part of the gradual breakdown of native society and acculturation into a median state between civilization and the aboriginal past...
...But it was also partly a projection of the white man's image of the Indian...
...The Indian's status in nature was affirmed when he was quickly granted a position between white and yellow in the Great Chain of Being...
...Perhaps the most striking evidence that the white man would have his way with the native Americans was the growing acceptance of the idea of Indianness...
...This gave him a potential superior to the African and the Oriental but not quite the equal of the European...
...After the massacre of 1622, the Virginia colonists struck a terrible blow at the peninsula tribes...
...Civilized observers expected to find a political order in America, and they reported back that they had found one organized as expected...
...Removal was scarcely complete before the frontier pushed close to the Indian territory...
...They turned to the white man and adopted many of his manners when their own became useless, and they also began to believe in the white man's conception of Indian unity...
...white Americans showed little inclination to welcome them into it...
...They inevitably fought in small bands...
...Yet for all civilized man's determination to put an end to savage life, the reverse intention would not have saved the Indian...
...Neither before nor after their arrival could they have been considered one society possessing one culture...
...The more the native American doubted himself, the more he became an Indian...
...Even before the Europeans moved into the continent in force,their diseases preceded them...
...Civilized observers expected to find a political order in America, and they reported back that they had found one organized as expected...
...White men always viewed the aboriginal population of America through the prism of their own world—and this has been as much a failing of those who loved the Indians as it has been of those who hated them...
...From the beginning few white men held any brief for the survival of Indian culture...
...Moreover, the process continueswith the return of the native American as a symbol of the supposed viciousness of civilization and the identification of the Indian as the first ecologist whose supposedly judicious treatment of the continent should stand as an indictment of civilization's prodigal waste of its natural resources...
...Finally, the science of natural history, which became the principal method for examining Indian society in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, tended to blend the native into the landscape...
...Consistently, then, in the first three centuries of Indian-white contact the Indian was made the subject of the white man's perception of himself or of his continent...
...For many scholarly treatments and for the popular imagination war would seem to be the common meeting ground between whites and Indians...
...And surely if any character in American history deserved compassion it was the Indian...
...Both of these tendencies were symptomatic of disintegration...
...the list encompasses virtually every social category that can be plausibly distinguished from the centers of social and political power...
...Even the exotic possibilities that had supposed the natives tobe lost Welshmen or Jews or survivors of the destruction of Atlantis had as their purpose an explanation of the Indian past consistent with the white man's understanding of his own past...
...Of these, none made a greater impact on native life than liquor...
...The native's position as a victim affords him status but only in the civilized world, not in his own...
...The Indian could not be distinguished easily from fish, animals, plants, and other natural resources that made up the riches of the continent...
...The point is that this version of the relationship between whites and Indians is itself the profoundest victimization of the Indian because from it the native emerges as merely a pale reflection of the white man...
...Because the native brand of war made no distinction between noncombatants and warriors, whites looked upon it as especially brutal...
...the white man's artifacts were incorporated into Indian culture and it might even be maintained that life in the forest became more efficient...
...The great questions that informed the literary treatment of the Indian until well into the nineteenth century were similarly abstract...
...The search for the origin of the tribes ended successfully in the eighteenth century with the conclusion that they had migrated from Asia...
...White men did kill Indians...
...The Indian survived but his life in the New World would never more than faintly resemble the aboriginal existence of pre-Columbian times...
...No one would deny the superiority of the gun to the bow in hunting...
...This version of the decline of native society has the advantages of accounting for the facts of Indian-white contact, of granting to the Indian a separate existence that is affected from the outside by the white man's activities, and of draining the story of much of its excessive moral content...
...Significant also were the many commodities that Europeans brought to America...
...The Indian's status in nature was affirmed when he was quickly granted a position between white and yellow in the Great Chain of Being...
...In war white killed Indian, though the Indian gave as well as he received...
...Jefferson took the argument seriously because he sympathized with the Indian but also because it cast doubts on the potential of the whole continent, including its European inhabitants...
...Handsome Lake led the Seneca in a religious consolidation which could not be easily distinguished from the evangelical revivals that became common occurrences in the early nineteenth century among whites in the "burned-over district" of New York...
...But a good deal more information can be found about messianic movements...
...From the beginning whites treated with the native leadership just as they would deal with any foreign potentate...
...But none of these groups has been as profoundly and as consistently the recipient of the historian's compassion as the American Indian...
...A measure of the white man's success in victimizing the American Indian is that the tribe is now the basis of native social order and that the concept of Indianness is more and more accepted among the native populace...
...When the white man came upon them, the native peoples were without an inkling of pan-Indianness...
...From the beginning whites treated with the native leadership just as they would deal with any foreign potentate...
...The Pilgrims found the New England coast conveniently stripped of Indians by a still unidentified malady when they arrived in 1620...
...Observation of a one-dimensional phenomenon did not supply the method for describing an existing society possessing a distinctive culture...
...And sometimes the native managed a place in "the middling landscape" of the pastoral garden which allowed him the simple virtues Spenser had described in The Faerie Queene...
...This solution to the problem assured the white man that the Indian fitted into an accepted scheme of historical development...
...The process by which the Indian fell in with the white man's misconceptions began early...
...The Great Chain judged the native's capacity by the white man's standard and in the deficiency dispute the Indian emerged unscathed because of the white man's interest in the issue...
...Hence the existence of an Indian who could carry the full reflection of the white man's character was essential...
...Both of these tendencies were symptomatic of disintegration...
...And finally, this history of violence, avarice, and lying is capped by the great betrayal of the 1830s when the federal government forcibly removed the southern tribes in direct contravention of many agreements that assured the Indians of perpetual possession of their lands and required them to set out on the "trail of tears," the trek to the west on which great numbers perished...
...and the government did betray its word in removing the tribes to the trans-Mississippi region...
...Yet for all civilized man's determination to put an end to savage life, the reverse intention would not have saved the Indian...
...Fighting had certain ritual and totemic implications that often could be satisfied by touching or defying the enemy instead of killing him...
...The subsequent story of Indian-white relations only repeats this original scenario...
...It was, in fact, part of the gradual breakdown of native society and acculturation into a median state between civilization and the aboriginal past...
...The tribe served the white man's purposes...
...Native culture could not simply cease to be...
...In contrast with the eminently successful white man, the Indian seemed always on the losing side...
...The pre-Columbian inhabitants had migrated to the American continent over an extended period of time in waves of disparate peoples...
...The erection of the tribe into an institution resembling an Indian state took place as a result of the native's response to white encroachment...
...He was as much the victim of the poor prospects for survival in a primitive society forced to live in close contact with a vigorous and aggressive culture...
...Indians were very parsimonious in expending manpower in war...
...Victims abound: indentured servants, convicts, antinomian dissenters, Quakers, black slaves, workers, immigrants, women, children...
...In truth, of course, the process was never complete...
...Of course, white and Indian exchanged diseases...
...Violence and war, the possession and use of land, truthfulness and loyalty, are presumed to mean the same thing to both white and Indian...
...they possessed none of the social mechanisms required for organizing and disciplining large numbers of warriors...
...the relationship among the five Iroquois tribes could be likened to the great confederations of ancient times...
...In his aboriginal existence, the native American clung to the familial band...
...Columbus' original mistake became compounded by the explorers' and settlers' refusal to distinguish groups of Indians...
...Soon after, Handsome Lake's rise among the Iroquois brought this early movement to a culmination...
...This version of the decline of native society has the advantages of accounting for the facts of Indian-white contact, of granting to the Indian a separate existence that is affected from the outside by the white man's activities, and of draining the story of much of its excessive moral content...
...The more the native American doubted himself, the more he became an Indian...
...They demanded the impossible...
...Neither before nor after their arrival could they have been considered one society possessing one culture...
...And sometimes the native managed a place in "the middling landscape" of the pastoral garden which allowed him the simple virtues Spenser had described in The Faerie Queene...
...It made little difference that neither the origins of native society nor the ways in which the native population actually lived would support such a contention...
...The literature of the first three centuries of Indian-white contact records much accurate and interesting information about the manner of life among the American tribes, but in no instance does it formulate a general conception of those societies that can claim anthropological validity...
...Sullivan's expedition sent to punish the Iroquois during the American Revolution fought only one pitched battle and had to be satisfied with burning fields and crops...
...Perhaps the most powerful destructive forces brought to the New World by explorers, traders, and settlers were the diseases that the American Indians had never before experienced...
...In the pre-Columbian period no tribe north of the Gila River produced a fermented or distilled beverage...
...In the Swamp Fight in 1637 during the Pequot War, the New England militia slaughtered great numbers of helpless natives...
...In the late eighteenth century, Jefferson and many Americans defended the American Indian against the accusation by certain European philosophers that he was deficient in natural energy...
...It is true that white men took the Indian's land and often refrained from telling him the truth...
...The Great Chain judged the native's capacity by the white man's standard and in the deficiency dispute the Indian emerged unscathed because of the white man's interest in the issue...
...Government agents went to those they supposed to be the tribal leaders when they wanted land...
...Powhatan supposedly ruled an empire...
...The population of Mexico dropped from a conservative estimate of 20,000,000 in 1520 to approximately 7,500,000 in 1650...
...Powhatan supposedly ruled an empire...
...all played a part in the failure of native society to sustain itself...
...they did lust after the natives' land...
...Over the centuries civilized men had learned to live with most of these afflictions, but they could not communicate their relative immunity to the Indians...
...Prisoners were also of considerable importance—some, it is true, were captured for torture in the home village, but others were taken for adoption...
...Every relationship between white and Indian—war, diplomacy, trade, education, proselytization—leads ultimately to a land cession...
...In its most current manifestation, the conceptual victimization of the Indian has culminated in his appearance among the suffering minorities of the American social order, a position made all the more poignant by the Indian's apparentacceptance of it and by the tendency among whites to use a supposed Indian mode of life as an instrument of revolutionary attack against their own social order...
...the native American never completely became an Indian...
...In truth the Indian has been made a victim of the sympathetic historian's incapacity to judge the world by any criteria other than his own universalist ideology—a crime far more portentous than the particular offenses of frontiersmen and government officials...
...Lewis and Clark discovered signs of civilization's diseases among the Rocky Mountain natives who may have never before seen a white man...
...Columbus' original mistake became compounded by the explorers' and settlers' refusal to distinguish groups of Indians...
...Hence the existence of an Indian who could carry the full reflection of the white man's character was essential...
...In the wake of the Spanish conquest native society suffered an incredible demographic disaster...
...Ironically this very acquiescence in the white man's identification of the tribe with the native polity was used by whites to force evacuation of the southern tribes in the 1830s...
...they seldom felt any deep compunction to tell Indians the truth...
...In war white killed Indian, though the Indian gave as well as he received...
...With scarcely a perception of the significance of this invasion for their own future, the Indians receive the white men hospitably only to have their good will answered with violence...
...In many ways native life proved quite resilient...
...This gave him a potential superior to the African and the Oriental but not quite the equal of the European...
...But most Indian-white conflict was less decisive...
...Even the exotic possibilities that had supposed the natives tobe lost Welshmen or Jews or survivors of the destruction of Atlantis had as their purpose an explanation of the Indian past consistent with the white man's understanding of his own past...
...But the overall consequences of the wholesale adoption of civilized goods by the Indians was the spread of a slow and wasting malaise among the native bands...
...The major factors turn out to have been beyond the white man's control (disease), or much too difficult to control (liquor), or so slow in working its effects as to be imperceptible (trade), or the result of a philanthropic effort to do good for the Indians (missionaries...
...All of the original settlements had been made with the intention of converting the native population to Christianity and of obliterating what were considered the vestiges of savagery...
...The Indians could not return to a pre-Columbian existence if only because they had forgotten how...
...The major instruments for accomplishing this monumental transfer of real estate are dissimulation and betrayal...
...They first appeared in the later years of the French and Indian War and fueled Pontiac's uprising in 1764...
...the Indians could not so easily replenish their numbers...
...Subsequently, messianic prophets influenced Tecumseh in his effort to drive the whites back in the early nineteenth century...
...Tribes were uprooted, population declined, the traditional ways of life fell into disuse...
...Peaceful native societies are disrupted by the movement of a powerful and aggressive people into their territory...
...It permits the depiction of the direct destruction of the Indians and the portrayal of the white man as hostile and aggressive...
...The white man's pressure continued...
...The significance of this description of Indian-white relations is not in the truth or falseness of it...
...In fact, allowing for exaggeration and one-sidedness, the indictment is largely true...
...In his aboriginal existence, the native American clung to the familial band...
...He is not depicted as a member of a distinct society possessing a different culture with different values...
...The literature of the first three centuries of Indian-white contact records much accurate and interesting information about the manner of life among the American tribes, but in no instance does it formulate a general conception of those societies that can claim anthropological validity...
...The pre-Columbian inhabitants had migrated to the American continent over an extended period of time in waves of disparate peoples...
...his daughter should be respected as a princess...
...At each step along the way, the native is assured that this will be the last cession demanded of him...
...Whatever the reasons—a tendency to imitate the white man, the tensions induced by a failing culture, the absence of social controls in the use of liquor—alcohol became one of the major forces leading to the decline of the Indian...
...In 1826 smallpox cut a swath through the Mandans from which the tribe never recovered...
...Whole villages disappeared...
...It made little difference that neither the origins of native society nor the ways in which the native population actually lived would support such a contention...
...By fighting from ambush and never risking frontal assault on a fortified place, the tribes kept their losses to a minimum...
...Traditional life never utterly disappeared...
...They knew well enough that there were different kinds of native peoples, with different physical appearances and different social habits...
...The more he became conscious of the challenge of European society, the more he saw the need to consolidate with other Indians...
...The seasoning process was an accepted burden of settlement and it exacted its price in all of the early colonies, especially Virginia...
...After World War II, in an outpouring of guilt the government began the process of paying claims to tribes which could show that they had been unjustly dispossessed of their lands...
...More to the point, the Indian was ultimately the victim of the inability of European men to perceive the native on his own terms...
...If he refuses despite these assurances rival factions amenable to the transfer are sought out and agreements are made that ars then construed as agreements with the whole tribe...
...It did not work...
...Later the Ghost Dance and the Native American religion repeated the process among the plains and southwestern Indians...
...In the region that was to become the United States the numbers are smaller but the decline was nevertheless catastrophic...
...The Indian is generally portrayed as a passive object that is inexorably destroyed by the white man...
...The white man's pressure continued...
...Later in the century the more primitive plains Indians were gathered onto reservations...
...None of these conceptions of the Indian drew upon an actual perception of native life, though they were held by men who had seen and sometimes lived with real Indians...
...And, of course, much fighting took place between two groups of people with different interests...
...Yet the recurrent theme of the Indian as victim and loser in the contest for survival must be tempered by recognition of the persistence of native society...
...Jefferson took the argument seriously because he sympathized with the Indian but also because it cast doubts on the potential of the whole continent, including its European inhabitants...
...Conflict between white and Indian was endemic (as it was between Indian and Indian), but it was not the major reason for the decline of the native society...
...many natives became disoriented by the threat of disease...
...The history of Indian-white relations describes the Indian's steady recession and the white man's constant advance...
...The result of this application of altruism to the problem of the Indian was the further disintegration of native society and the final decision to remove the southern tribes from their eastern lands to the country beyond the Mississippi where the effort at conversion might be continued...
...If the native has any virtues, they are the white man's because they are defined as the reverse of the white man's vices...
...Although, beginning with Henry School-craft and Lewis Henry Morgan, the nineteenth century inaugurated serious anthropological study of native society, there is little in public policy toward the tribes that would indicate any basic change in the way that white men viewed them...
...None of these conceptions of the Indian drew upon an actual perception of native life, though they were held by men who had seen and sometimes lived with real Indians...
...Finally, the science of natural history, which became the principal method for examining Indian society in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, tended to blend the native into the landscape...
...his daughter should be respected as a princess...
...The great questions that informed the literary treatment of the Indian until well into the nineteenth century were similarly abstract...
...Smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, venereal diseases, and varieties of plague were some of the afflictions that took this terrible toll among the native peoples...
...the Indian only responds as befits a primitive man who has not yet learned the wiles of civilization...
...In so far as the native possessed a public order it was not consonant with the tribe but was more closely associated with less general social groupings...
...The tribe gradually became center of native public life, and, of course, it was critical for any dealings with the white man's government...
...In truth, of course, the process was never complete...
...In many ways the concept of the tribe defined this middling stage...
...Removal was scarcely complete before the frontier pushed close to the Indian territory...
...As other victims have faded from memory or moved into the ranks of the unoppressed, the Indian has remained the quintessential victim...
...The factionalism that had always been a significant part of native life became more extreme under the stress of social breakdown, and the whites found it convenient to cultivate these factional divisions in order to obtain what they wanted —sometimes land but also roads through Indian territory and the right to establishschools and mission stations...
...The missionaries intended the total transformation of native life and the eventual incorporation of the Indians into American society...
...missionaries, supported by the government, established themselves to carry on their programs of education and conversion,with the same indirect social consequences for the Indians...
...Land and furs are the two Indian possessions that the white man cannot get enough of, and when the furs run out there is no remaining reason to let the native keep the land...
...In so far as the native possessed a public order it was not consonant with the tribe but was more closely associated with less general social groupings...
...In its most current manifestation, the conceptual victimization of the Indian has culminated in his appearance among the suffering minorities of the American social order, a position made all the more poignant by the Indian's apparentacceptance of it and by the tendency among whites to use a supposed Indian mode of life as an instrument of revolutionary attack against their own social order...
...From the beginning the idea preceded observation, and thus the Indian was accorded a form of existence that drew its character from the white man's perception of himself...
...Rather he and the white man with whom he contests the continent are assumed to share the same conceptions of reality...
...The establishment on the new continent of permanent settlements of large numbers of Europeans worked radical changes in the character of native society...
...When rum from the English and Dutch and brandy from the French became the staples of the fur and pelt trades, the Indians faced a serious problem of personal and often communal alcoholism...
...When the white man came upon them, the native peoples were without an inkling of pan-Indianness...
...Moreover, Indian warfare (the spectacular Iroquois attack on the Hurons in the seventeenth century excepted) did not necessarily require the physical destruction of the enemy...
...Alcohol may have been the most devastating item of trade between white and Indian, but many other artifacts affected the native culture...
...Traditional life never utterly disappeared...
...Native Americans became Indians in direct proportion to the measure of decline in their traditional way of life...
...The first object of the white man's aggressive instincts, he has proved himself a victim of extraordinary historiographical vitality...
...They did not in fact have the population base to allow for the prodigal use of men...
...After World War II, in an outpouring of guilt the government began the process of paying claims to tribes which could show that they had been unjustly dispossessed of their lands...
...He was as much the victim of the poor prospects for survival in a primitive society forced to live in close contact with a vigorous and aggressive culture...
...Consistently, then, in the first three centuries of Indian-white contact the Indian was made the subject of the white man's perception of himself or of his continent...
...Native Americans became Indians in direct proportion to the measure of decline in their traditional way of life...
...Moreover, aside from the white man's perverse determination to see the Indian out of the way, a substantially different list of reasons for native decline can be assembled...
...Later in the century the more primitive plains Indians were gathered onto reservations...
...Most observers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries noted the apparent decline in the numbers of Indians...
...Little was accomplished until the late eighteenth century when the new national government and a number of missionary agencies began a concerted attempt to introduce civilization among the tribes...
...Similar declines took place in the Caribbean and Peru...
...the relationship among the five Iroquois tribes could be likened to the great confederations of ancient times...
...When the American Indians first intruded on the perception of Europeans in the sixteenth century, there already existed the requisite formulas for explaining their appearance...
...There are some signs that the Indians might discover the significance of the white man's tendency to use them for purposes of collective expiation of guilt, though it must be said that the discovery is only likely to increase their anger and to add one more way in which they have been victimized by the white man...
...Earlrdeaths in drunken fighting, a decline in personal responsibility, the breakdown of familial restraint and order...
...It is true that white men took the Indian's land and often refrained from telling him the truth...
...They turned to the white man and adopted many of his manners when their own became useless, and they also began to believe in the white man's conception of Indian unity...
...Usually, Indians were viewed as noble savages who lived in paradise and had not suffered the fall from grace that afflicted civilized men...
...missionaries, supported by the government, established themselves to carry on their programs of education and conversion,with the same indirect social consequences for the Indians...
...The erection of the tribe into an institution resembling an Indian state took place as a result of the native's response to white encroachment...
...And it was also part of the native's acceptance of the white man's view of his way of life...
...Less often observers interpreted them as vicious savages, the inhabitants of a howling wilderness who represented the obverse of civilized life...
...The attractions of such an approach are evident...
...This solution to the problem assured the white man that the Indian fitted into an accepted scheme of historical development...
...In 1887 Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act which intended the dismemberment of the tribes, the imposition of individual land ownership, and the final transformation of the Indian into a copy of the individualistic white man...
...But they often found that there was more than one group of leaders...
...The Indian could not be distinguished easily from fish, animals, plants, and other natural resources that made up the riches of the continent...
...the Indians made no massive move to enter the white man's world...
...The classic account of Indian-white relations as an epic of suffering is Helen Hunt Jackson's A Century of Dishonor, published in 1881, and most modern treatments tell a similar story...
...He suffered as much from the white man's good will as he did from the many positive efforts to destroy him...
...In the early nineteenth century, the Shawnee Prophet may have planned the restoration of primitive ways, but Tecumseh knew well enough that the whites could not be opposed without guns...
...White men always viewed the aboriginal population of America through the prism of their own world—and this has been as much a failing of those who loved the Indians as it has been of those who hated them...
...The consequences for the Iroquois were serious enough, but they did not fit the stereotype of the native population decimated in war with the white man...
...The prophets' imprecations against civilized life and their call for a return to the old ways only heightened the tension...
...Perhaps the most striking evidence that the white man would have his way with the native Americans was the growing acceptance of the idea of Indianness...
...the native American never completely became an Indian...
...The process by which the Indian fell in with the white man's misconceptions began early...
...The natives' acceptance of the white man's conception culminated in the formal establishment of an Indian state by the Cherokees in 1827...
...The major factors turn out to have been beyond the white man's control (disease), or much too difficult to control (liquor), or so slow in working its effects as to be imperceptible (trade), or the result of a philanthropic effort to do good for the Indians (missionaries...
...More to the point, the Indian was ultimately the victim of the inability of European men to perceive the native on his own terms...
Vol. 8 • January 1975 • No. 4
