 | "Remaining Causes of Indian Discontent" |  |
REMAINING CAUSES OF INDIAN DISCONTENT.
BY JOHN M. OSKISON.
WHEN the White River Utes left their reservation in Utah recently in angry protest against the Government's allotment of their land, they attracted attention to a vanishing type of discontented Indian.
Only one big distinctively Indian problem—the distribution of Indian Trust and Treaty Funds—remains to be settled by Congress. Others, such as irrigation for arid and semi-arid lands occupied by the tribes, the menace of tuberculosis, the supplying of good day-schools, the blight of the liquor traffic, and the over-reaching arm of the speculator in oil, mineral and grazing lands, are in some measure the problems of all the West. Continued urging by the Indian Office and the friends of Indian progress is resulting in a merger of the tribesman with his white neighbors and a sinking of the reservation problem in the community problem. Nine out of ten "reservation" Indians are self-supporting. Five of these nine are working in competition with white laborers, mechanics, farmers and stock-raisers of the West. The other four are doing work, more or less well, provided by the Government in place of pauperizing rations. Except for the children in Government schools, and the old, sick and infirm, few Indians now live on the direct bounty of Congress.
The Indian as a landholder is familiar, but as a capitalist he is not so well known. Yet there is in the United States Treasury to the credit of some 53,000 Indians of sixty tribes more than $35,000,000. Nearly all of this is in the form of Trust Funds, held, in varying amounts, for these tribes, only the interest being paid from year to year. The money has come from the sale of land from time to time.
When the land allotment law was passed, in 1887, it was bitterly opposed by the tribes. Later, it became a popular measure with the progressive Indians who were ambitious to distinguish themselves as individuals. This ambitious Indian wants the Trust Funds segregated so that they may be paid, in proportionate share, to every individual who is qualified to use his share. Next to the Dawes allotment law of 1887, this legislation will do most to break up the old communal life that has been nursed by the Government's reservation policy. Holding vast areas of land "in common," with no opportunity to secure private ownership, made the Indians feel as if they were heirs to an estate in chancery. There was no incentive to develop a community-holding; reservations were leased to cattlemen and farmers who had no interest in their ultimate improvement. Upon the allotment of tribal lands, this prop is knocked from under the Indian: the problem of getting a living becomes a personal problem.
That other prop, the tribal fund, should be removed. To illustrate: So long as a member of the Osage tribe knows that he is one of 2,000 heirs to a fund of $8,360,000, and that his proportionate share of interest at five per cent. on this tribal fund will be paid to him regularly, he feels no spur to become a producing member of his community. If it were permitted, however, to set aside Frank Corndropper's share of the $8,360,000 and pay it over when he could convince the Government that he is qualified to use it, Frank Corndropper would bestir himself. His example would be followed by Fred Labadie, and by Black Eagle, and by others, until every separate account between the United States Treasury and the Osage Indians would be closed out. Until that is done, no Osage can be made to realize that he is a competitor of the white man in any vital sense.
Legislation designed to segregate Indian funds has been urged upon Congress for years. At Washington, however, the fear of opening a way for exploiters of the Indians has blocked this needed measure. The conscience of their guardian is as tender towards these wards now as it once was lethargic. Last year Representative Lacey of the House Committee on Indian Affairs introduced a bill into Congress authorizing the President in his discretion to allot tribal funds and open separate accounts with individuals. The bill was amended in the Senate to allow the President to designate individuals of a tribe who had shown
Certain "Treaty" funds, derived usually from "agreements to be good," the income from which is available, but the principal of which has never been appropriated by Congress, should also be capitalized and segregated. Periodical payments of interest on these funds, usually in trifling sums, serve to remind the Indian that he is still a dependent. For example, the Oneidas of Wisconsin, more than two thousand in number, are entitled to the annual payment of $1,000. The majority of them are farmers. They live well, in neat houses, and their children are at school. In no way do they require the material help of the Government. Yet once a year the whole tribe is called away from home to draw forty-eight cents apiece!
Whether the yearly dole be forty-eight cents, interest on a Treaty Fund, or $350, earned by the large Osage Trust Fund, the objection to it holds. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs has clearly indicated that as long as tribal funds remain undivided "the Government has no way of setting free and closing the door behind any Indian who is able fully to care for his own." That the way back to idleness and dependence should be left open is a legitimate cause for complaint among the modern Indians.
Of the fifty-one and a half millions of acres of land occupied by the "reservation" Indians, nearly thirty-two millions lie within the States and Territories of Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. Ten and a half millions more are included in the Dakotas. In all these eleven States and Territories irrigation is a vital subject, and in most it is counted upon to make whatever future lies before them. Nearly seventeen millions of acres of Arizona's huge area are owned by Indians; not one acre in a thousand is arable without water. The same is true of the million seven hundred thousand acres of Indian land in New Mexico. Most of the seven and a half millions of acres held by the Montana tribes will not be productive without irrigation. Idaho's nine hundred and fifty thousand acres, and Wyoming's million seven hundred and fifty thousand acres of tribal holdings are mainly arid
The white man with whom the Indian must expect to compete in the West is having his irrigation needs attended to by the Government; the Reclamation Service is working at top speed, hampered only by the difficulty of getting workmen, and its plans are enlarging marvellously. But the Reclamation Service has nothing to do with putting water on Indian lands except in a half-dozen instances where a part of a reservation happens to fall within a big project. To the Indian Office is left the task of making arid Indian lands productive, and the Indian Office is severely handicapped for the task. Until two years ago only Indian funds could be used to construct irrigation works; last year and the year before Congress appropriated $185,000 "for construction of ditches and reservoirs, purchase and use of irrigation tools and appliances, and purchase of water rights on reservations." The sum is a paltry one. It will be needed to outfit surveyors and to "begin to get ready to dig."
Thus far the Government's work in supplying water to the reservations has been of a haphazard character. It has been undertaken, not primarily to make the cactus desert and the sagebrush plain blossom, but to provide work for able-bodied Indians in lieu of rations. Whole systems built under this policy have been swept away by floods. In the cases of the Mission Indians of California and the Pimas of Arizona, the Indian Office has not been able even to protect the tribesmen in their use of water that had been theirs for years. White settlers above the reservations calmly appropriated the flow that had made the Mission Indians and the Pimas prosperous and self-supporting, and the Indian Office saw these people beggared. With the best intentions in the world, the Indian Office can make only the weakest showing with its own Reclamation Service. In the last report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, eleven separate projects for putting water on reservations are described; in but a single instance was it possible to record more than the merest beginning.
Seven years ago the agent for the Pine Ridge Sioux in South Dakota reported that the annual average death-rate on the reservation was fifty-two per thousand. Last year, Dr. J. R. Walker,
The change from tepee to cabin has cost scores of lives, and is likely to cost thousands more. The old Indian camp was frequently changed; the wind blowing through the tents counteracted the effects of lax sanitation. When the cabin was built and the permanent home on the allotment established, the Indian did not realize the necessity for changing his habits of life. Filthy, overcrowded, overhot shanties breed tuberculosis. Ignorance of "civilized" clothes, leading to the wearing of thick garments in summer and thin garments in winter as often as the other way about, makes pneumonia a serious menace. Ignorance of the meaning of quarantine leads to epidemics that carry off a much larger percentage of victims than among the whites.
It has been impossible for the government's physicians to teach the newly-housed Indian how to live. Their time is fully occupied with the urgent cases. On the Pine Ridge reservation, for example, which is approximately the size of Connecticut, there are two doctors to look after the health of 7,000 Sioux. Neither of these has been supplied with surgical instruments; indeed, surgery, so far as the Bureau of Indian affairs is concerned, might never have been practised. Still, the modern Indian does not complain that doctors are scarce, for in all of the thinly settled West the doctor is a rare visitor. His just cause for discontent is that he has been urged to build a house and wear "store clothes" without being told how to live under a roof and save woollen underclothes for cold weather. Agents, agency physicians, school superintendents and field matrons continue to send in alarming reports, showing the spread of the "white plague" among the tribes. They emphasize the importance of a campaign of instruction, and they point out the immediate need of a sanitarium and school in the Southwest where all consumptive Indians, adults and children, may be sent.
It is important, if the "white man's West" and the Indian's
The Westerner's aversion to the reservation pupil is unfortunate. It discourages the newer type of Indian, for no one sees clearer than he the need for beginning the process of merger at the earliest possible moment. He has accepted in good faith the doctrine that his tribal life must be changed, that he must become in every sense a competitor of the white man. The logical result of such a recognition of superior wisdom would be to secure that wisdom, along with the white man, at a common source. In theory, the public-school authorities of the West agree; in many cases Indian children are included in the State scholastic census, and funds are apportioned as though the doors of the schools were not shut to the little shy people. A small cloud now, this prejudice will assume a very real importance as the tribesmen come to closer grips with their white neighbors.
In the bill of complaint filed against their white neighbors and the Government by the modern "reservation" Indians, the usurer and the trickster, familiar pests in the white man's West, are cited as defendants. These have succeeded the conscienceless old traders. Their methods are different, but their aim is the same— to strip the ignorant Indian of everything that can be obtained. In his report to the Indian Office in 1905, Colonel Randlett, one of the best Indian agents in the service, in charge of the Kiowa agency in Oklahoma, cites an interesting case. An Oklahoma bank official was arrested for trespassing on the reservation. His business there, he explained, was to collect interest on loans
The case was not an isolated one, wrote Colonel Randlett. "This practice of extorting usurious rates of interest (from the Indians) is not confined to the despised professional gamblers, but is generally found to be a habit of senior officials of National as well as State banks." Wherever periodical payments are made to tribes, or where personal property can be secured as pledges, loan sharks thrive, and it is not an unreasonable demand the Indians make who want to be protected from them.
Trickery of another kind is reported by the agent in charge of the Shawnee, Pottawottomi and Kickapoo reservation in Oklahoma. In an Act of Congress approved March 3, 1905, restrictions were removed from the allotments of seven Kickapoo Indians. Six of these lay adjacent to the growing town of Shawnee, and are of exceptional value as town-site additions. The agent declares that "unless some legal steps are taken to prevent the passing of title from the Indians interested, they will soon have lost property worth no less than $100,000. This matter certainly represents a gigantic fraudulent scheme." It is accepted by the intelligent Indians as well as their well-wishers among the whites that the only way to teach the tribesman the value of land and money is to let him use it. But this does not mean connivance with sharpers. It does not mean, as in the case of the Colville Indians in Washington, allowing white men to go upon a reservation and "locate" a farm under pretence of working the claim as a placer mine. Captain Webster, in charge of the Colville agency, hints that "here is a fine field for an expert to trap a conscienceless lot of individuals and corporations who regard Government holdings as legitimate prey."
Between the liquor-seller and the Government the old quarrel over the right of an Indian to buy whiskey has reached a threatening stage. The Supreme Court held, in a recent decision, that it is not against the law to sell liquor to an Indian who has taken his allotment, and, by that act, become a citizen of the United States. An Act of Congress, long relied upon by the Indian Office to keep the Indian and whiskey apart, was by this decision declared unconstitutional. It was declared to be an infringement upon the rights of citizens. In spite of the decision, the Indian Office has declared that an allotted Indian must go out-
When the trust periods begin to expire on allotments already taken by the Indians, as they will in five years, there will be confusion. Questions of heirship that should have been settled long ago will involve Indians in costly litigation. A majority perhaps of the allottees will have died in the trust periods. Who is to inherit? Registers of marriages and records of family relationships are wofully incomplete, and there looms ahead endless costly suits among claimants, with only the lawyers to profit thereby. Left to themselves, the Indians had no incentive to record their family histories. It is a necessity imposed upon them by the adoption of our laws, and it is a just cause for complaint that the making of these records has been neglected.
The bill of complaint contains many minor counts, such as the new greed of the monopolists who are allowed to trade with the Indians, the costly restrictions on the sale of inherited Indian lands, and the demoralizing "work system." Certain of these counts are directed against a Government that is striving with honesty and vigor to satisfy its wards, and some against the white civilization that surrounds the Indian. In its body, the bill is in striking contrast to those so often drawn in the last half-century. To an extraordinary degree, it embodies the complaints heard by the alert traveller in any part of the sparsely settled West, whether Indian reservation or white settlement. It is significant as indicating the practical disappearance of the old "Indian question," and more significant as a sign that the tribesman is becoming a factor in his community.
JOHN M. OSKISON.
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