Explanation: The US has a horrible record with regards to actually upholding its treaty obligations with Native American polities. Especially in the second half of the 19th century, in which treaties rarely lasted a decade before the US broke them or forced the issue with a new war.
I’m Indigenous up in Canada and that was the big difference between the frontier periods between both countries.
In the US, the people were basically let loose on the frontier to interact with Native people and it never worked because it was immediate conflict all around. So when you have lawlessness mixed in with a free for all and a world where the ‘biggest gun’ wins … everything just goes from bad to worse fast. Once the problems were started, then the law came and began to take some form of control but then that representation was lopsided and the Indians got the short end of the stick. Then once again when things got worse … they just sent in the army with bigger and more numerous guns.
In Canada, they sent out the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) ahead of the pioneers and they were sent out earlier to maintain control and order. It didn’t make anything magically better but it was a lot more ordered and controlled than what happened south of the border. Treaties were more elaborate and due to the fact that law and order was in place, there was more opportunity to negotiate rather than start another war because things were out of control to start with.
So in the US it was a wild west and guns blazing … and in Canada we had the RCMP … both resulted in us Natives getting used and abused, but less so in Canada.
Yeah, what sticks in my mind is always General Sherman’s career after the Civil War.
General Sherman, despite doing good work in whipping the slaver scum, was not humanely inclined towards the Native Americans. He was one of the architects, even, of the buffalo exterminations which sought to starve out any Native polity which refused sedentary agriculture on what little reservation land they were left with - so not exactly a paragon of humane behavior.
But even he regularly expressed disgust and disdain for the violence and lawlessness of white settlers towards the Native Americans. Mr. “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it” was disgusted - because those white settlers had no notion of respecting any law or treaty that was made, whether made by them or by the Federal government. Certainly not out of a surfeit of sympathy towards Native Americans, but because even by the standards of an unjust time, the behavior of white settlers on the frontier was deeply fucking unjust and arbitrary.
The history of all this in Canada and the US infuriates me because its not a history of forgotten about ancient civilizations that don’t matter any more … it’s history that still has survivors living today or who were children that heard the stories from their parents or grandparents.
The sad evolution of all this for me is in seeing white settlers basically co-opt Native injustices and loss of right as basically their own. Look at what happened to the midwestern tribes that settled on prime oil field country. Colonizers were more than willing to fulfill treaties on those lands, so long as they married into the tribes, then eventually get rid of the original members and take over the identities of the people they wanted to rule over. It’s a point in history now where many of the original Native people who fought for rights and a place to live are being supplanted by their oppressors and the ones who created the injustices are now also reaping the rewards of reconciliation. It’s crazy … they caused the hardships, they apologize, they reward themselves, they accept the apology on behalf of the dead and forgotten.
It’s the whole debate that’s raging in Native country here and in the US about cultural appropriation - where people who have either little or not ancestry are identifying as Indigenous because they see it as some sort of benefit either in the arts, with government, with business, real estate, taxes, land laws, hunting rights or just grabbing some free money. It’s frustrating because on the other end of that scale are actual full blooded or majority blooded Natives who receive little to no benefits for being who they are.
I always thought this was the reason for the expression “Indian giver” but I’ve never looked it up. I thought it was talking about the whities not the Indians.
That would be more appropriate, but unfortunately for the term, it’s not so.
