Essays written in preparation for my Comprehensive exams, nearly 20 years ago.
Anthropology and Government Policy
Part of the government’s role regarding Indian people was to figure out what to do with them. Historically, the European nations and formed contracts and relationships with Indian tribes. Most of these contracts were based on trade. The United States also adopted a trade based relationship with tribes. As tribes moved or were removed westward, the United States had to increasingly pass Indian legislation to appropriate lands, manage the Tribal trade and protect Indian rights. In the 19th century some of the key legislation sought to control trade between tribes in the Indian Intercourse Act. In this manner, tribes were removed to reservations that were becoming islands surrounded by European-Americans. Any trade that took place across United States territory had therefore to be managed, controlled, and taxed by the government.
This relationship became expensive for the United States because in forming treaties with the tribes for their lands the government had stated that they would care for the needs of the Indians. They had counted on Indians maintaining something of a traditional lifestyle and when hunting and fishing became impractical for the tribes, because settlers had decimated the natural wildlife, the government had to pay for all of their food (Fritz). As the bill mounted and the Indians failed to willingly convert to Christianity or the American lifestyle, the government began to plan for their assimilation.
In the 1860’s the government began to actively work on efforts to assimilate American Indians. This effort began with the building of schools and the handing over of control of these schools to different Christian denominations. In Oregon, the primary denominations working on reservations were the Catholics and Methodists. Interestingly enough, in the Oregon Territory, the Catholics and Methodists had been assimilating and converting Indians for over 30 years before the U.S. Government made this the policy. In the Willamette Valley at what is now Salem, Jason Lee a Methodist minister-settler in the 1830s and 1840s, gathered up apparent “wandering” Kalapuya Indians and brought them to his settlement on the banks of the Willamette River. There, Lee began to educate them and forced them into working for him on his nascent farm. Lee eventually established the Indian Agricultural Training School in the Willamette Valley, on the site of what is now Willamette University and the State Capitol.
Similarly, the Catholics were active in the Oregon territory, many having established churches on reservations and in Indian communities before even Jason Lee’s settlement. Catholics at that time were nationally associated with Canada, and so there was a nationalist sense of competition between the Catholics and Methodists for converts up to the settlement of the present day border between Canada and the United States. The Catholics, as part of their missionary policies had begun assimilating and converting the American Indians with the establishment of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. From there they branched off to Indian and settler centers like The Dalles, Oregon City, Champoeg, and eventually Grand Ronde Reservation, Umatilla Reservation, and Warm Springs Reservation.
The Catholic Church’s interest in native peoples was a marked phenomenon in the 19th century. A great number of Catholic missionaries embedded themselves within native societies in Canada, Western North America, in Pacific Island cultures and in many other places throughout the world where colonization was taking place. Many of these missionaries were interested in studying the native languages and produced vocabulary lists and dictionaries of native languages. On the Northwest Coast, many of the hymns and even parts of the Bible were translated into native languages. In the Oregon Territory Rev. Myron Ells became proficient in Chinook Jargon. Ells also became a renowned early linguist and ethnologist who participated in the early anthropology associations. (section about Shaker Church?)
Catholic Missionary History and Oregon relations
Coincidentally, many of the early Catholic missionaries came from Belgium and were educated at the University of Louvain. The University of Louvain is the largest Catholic university in the world and there, in the mid-19th century was established the American College. This college was established with funding from several diocese in the United States, one of them Oregon City. The intent of this college was to train American Catholic missionaries, those from the United States, to return to America to convert the Indian peoples. The college and university already had a heavy missionary emphasis and many of the missionaries from Belgium originated from European countries also.
As well, there is a genealogical connection with the University of Louvain, Belgium and the Grand Ronde Reservation. Reverend Adrian Croquet came to the Grand Ronde Reservation in the 1850s and worked there until the 1890s. In the 1870s Rev. Croquet asked for help from his family in Belgium and they sent Joseph Mercier, a nephew, to Grand Ronde. Mercier married an Indian woman, Hattie Sands, and thus the surname Mercier entered the tribe. Rev. Croquet was educated at the University of Louvain, before the American College was established.
An additional family member of record was Cardinal Adrian Mercier. In an odd twist of history, Cardinal Mercier became an important philosopher in the University of Luvain in the early 20th century. He was the presiding Cardinal of Belgium during World War I. He became a hero to the Belgium people by speaking out against the German occupation of Belgium, and their lack of humanitarianism in their efforts to “colonize” Belgium. There is an incredible irony in this history as Rev. Croquet and Joseph Mercier in Oregon were part of the American effort to colonize American Indians, while Cardinal Mercier in Belgium was against the colonization of his country and became the originator of many philosophies of humanitarianism.
In the 1860’s beginning with President Grant the United States began enforcing an assimilation policy on American Indians. The primary enforcers of government policy was the military. Some military leaders thought extermination was the best solution. However, many other military leader, among them General James H. Carleton, were well educated in current scientific theory. Darwinian theory had begun to influence government policy and in 1866 General Carleton wrote:
“The causes which the Almighty originates, when in their appointed time he wills that one race of men- as in races of lower animals- shall disappear off the face of the earth and give place to another race, and so on, in the great cycle traced by Himself, which may be seen, but has reasons too deep to be fathomed by us. The races of the mammoths and mastodons, and the great sloths, came and passed away: the red man of America is passing away!”[1]
There is also a clear relationship to Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) in statements by General William T. Sherman and Colonel Nelson A. Miles in their individual reports that emphasized,
“ to convert the Indians into a pastoral race is the first step in their upward progress toward civilization; that of the agriculturalist must be the next stage, …in this direction is the sole hope of rescuing any part of the nomade Indians from utter annihilation.”[2]
The policies as emphasized by the previous citations indicate that this is the foundational position of the government towards Indian management. As the military eventually got out of the Indian business, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs within the Interior Department took over management of Indians. The successive Commissioners emphasized the same policies as had the generals above. (expand with quotes)
The closest relationship to anthropology theory is that of Spencerism. (see Harris 1968, 135). Spencerism is in reality what we know as Social Darwinism. Spencer, more than Darwin worked sociologically and applied his theory of survival of the fittest to society. Marvin Harris presents how Spencerism helped justify the use of evolutionary racism and 19th century imperialism on “inferior” races. (expand further)
Relationship of Indian policy with the Traditional Indian
There is another strain of philosophical and scientific theory that influences government policy, that originating with Rousseau. Rousseau wrote about peoples of the new World who he had never met, and like many from his era romanticized heavily about the Indian peoples in his philosophical writings. Rousseau believed in the unspoiled savages of the new world. A simpler people “childlike” and “unspoiled” by associations with the civilized world. This becomes a very large belief among scientists of the following centuries, even to today. This become romanticism. Romanticized images of Indians entered into scientific theory, influencing all of the 19th century scientists, whereby they believe that Indians are of a simpler level, somehow more fundamentally human.
The Boasians, those scientists trained by Franz Boas, even practiced a form of romanticism by studying only Indians that were more traditional, and less assimilated and affected by European-American society. Mainly Boas and his pupils studied memory-culture, or the memories Indians had of their childhood, before their partial assimilation. The critique here is that the Boasians did not study the actual culture of the time, but that of the past because the assumption was that “traditional” culture was somehow more fundamental and therefore more valued.
Government policy appears to follow the Boasians practices by setting boundaries of who is really Indian. The Dawes Act established policies that only Indians of one half percent Indian blood or more could be allotted lands. At that time, it was not difficult to find most Indians had one half percent or more, but in the ensuing 20 years, the bloodlines became much more diluted. The generation of Indians following the original allottees were not allowed to inherit federal trust allotments because of their lesser blood quantum. By the 1930s, millions of acres of Indian lands had passed out of Indian ownership. When Indians stopped being able to own lands on their reservation, they would most likely leave and stop being Indians. In this manner thousands of Indians left their tribes and became assimilated, likely the original purpose of the Dawes Act.
One of the problems here is that Indian Tribes were forced to accept the policies of an outside sovereign entity in setting their membership requirements. This is especially problematic when that outside entity has plans to appropriate and use all of the resources of the Indian lands to benefit their own nation and people. By this manner the United States controls the memberships of the Indian Nations by controlling who can own land, and created plans to slowing degrade their populations. This would allow the United States to eventually take complete ownership of all Indian lands, disenfranchising those Indians that had diluted blood because dilution of the blood quantum somehow meant that those people were less Indian and therefore not eligible to inherit the rights of their ancestors. The fallacy with this argument is that the same policy is not in effect for people that are citizens of the United States, and it would seem that Tribal Nations should set their own membership policies regardless of what the United States thought.
This problem appears again in the termination era as the United States Congress makes assumptions about “how assimilated” Indians are. Without the benefit of any scientific studies of really any opinions by Indian people, the Congress and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, especially William Zimmerman, created and followed a set of assimilation lists, created by Zimmerman in the 1940’s. These lists, 3 of them, created out of Zimmerman’s head, established which tribes were fully assimilated, partially assimilated, and not assimilated. Zimmerman never intended for the lists to be used and said so before Congress, but in the 1950’s they became the de-facto termination lists for Congress. (references)
The Assimilation argument is the reverse of the traditional argument, outlined previously. Here, the government is establishing which tribes are so well acculturated with American society that the whole tribe does not qualify as Indian, and therefore should not continue being supported by government funds.
The arguments by Congress go deeper than this because, their own Congressional independent investigations of the conditions of the tribes in the late 1940s revealed that the BIA had impoverished the tribes so badly that they were actually thought to be literally imprisoning the Indians on the reservations, sort of similar to incarceration conditions. Therefore the Congress spun their termination policy by saying that they were actually freeing the Indians from government supervision, so that they would be able to benefit from all of the freedoms enjoyed by all Americans.
Collier- “In those years, I still took for granted our modern fatalism: that the Indian’s spirit, and all aboriginal and ancient spirit, had to die… The ensuing twenty-five years seem to have proved that the fatalism was wrong, not only as applied to the American tribal Indian but as applied to groups in many parts of the world.” (On the Gleaning Way, John Collier, 1962)
[1] Fritz (1963), 123-124; original in: Rpt of Jt. Spec. Com. Of Cong. On Condition of Ind. Tribes. Senate Rpt. No. 156, 39th Cong. 2nd Sess., 4.
[2] Fritz (1963), 124; original in Annual Rpt. of Gen. of the Army, House Exec. Doc. No. 1, 45th Cong., 3rd Sess., Vol. 2, 406; and, Nelson A. Miles “The Indian Problem,” North American Review CXXVIII (1879), 309.
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