So long and thanks for all the fish.
Indians
were
mentioned in the Treaty of Ghent, which tidied up the War of 1812. Article Nine specified that the United States cease
all hostilities towards the “Nations of Indians” and restore to the tribes all the “possessions, rights, and privileges which they may have enjoyed or been entitled to in one thousand eight hundred and eleven previous to such hostilities.” The Americans more or less forgot about this particular article as soon as they signed the treaty, but anyone watching the film shouldn’t have been surprised.
Throughout the history of Indian-White relations in North America, there have always been two impulses afoot. Extermination and assimilation. Extermination of Native peoples, especially in the early years, was not considered “genocide”—a term coined in 1944 by the legal scholar Raphael Lemkin—so much as it was deemed a by-product of “manifest destiny”—a term struck in the 1840s when U.S. Democrats used it to justify the war with Mexico. Extermination was also seen as an expression of “natural law,” a concept conceived by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C. and used by the Spanish humanist Juan de Sepulveda in the sixteenth as a legal justification for the enslavement of Native people in the Caribbean and Mexico.
The means of extermination didn’t much matter. Bullets were okay. Disease was fine. Starvation was acceptable. In the minds of many, these were not so much cruelties as they were variations on the principles underlying the concept “survival of the fittest,” a phrase that Herbert Spencer had fashioned in 1864 and that would become synonymous with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
The second impulse, assimilation, argued for salvation and improvement. One of the questions that the Spanish worried over was whether or not Indians were human beings. This was the subject of the great debate organized by the Vatican in Valladolid, Spain, in 1550 and 1551 where the cleric Bartolome de las Casas maintained
that Indians had souls and should be treated as other free men, while the aforementioned Juan de Sepulveda made the case on behalf of land owners, arguing that Indians did not have souls and were therefore natural slaves. De las Casas’s position carried the day, but the “Indians have souls” argument provided no more than a philosophical victory and had no effect on the day-to-day actions of Spanish colonists in the New World, who continued to use Indians as slaves to run their plantations.
Neither the English nor the French spent any time with this question. For these two groups, Indians were simply humans at an early point in the evolution of the species. They were savages with no understanding of orthodox theology, devoid of complex language, and lacking civilized manners. Barbarians certainly, and quite possibly minions of the devil. But human beings, nonetheless. And as such, many colonists believed that Native people could be civilized and educated, believed that there was, within the Indian, the possibility for enlightenment.
Extermination dominated the early contact period, assimilation the latter, until finally, in the nineteenth century, they came together in an amalgam of militarism and social theory that allowed North America to mount a series of benevolent assaults on Native people, assaults facilitated by force of arms, deception, and coercion, assaults that sought to dismantle Native culture with missionary zeal and humanitarian paternalism, and to replace it with something that Whites could recognize.
These assaults came singly, in partnerships, and from various angles. In general, settlers and missionaries of one flavour or another led the way, taking turns leapfrogging each other into the “wilderness.” In Canada, it was the French and the Jesuits,
followed by the English and Anglicans, Methodists, and Presbyterians. In the American northeast and along the Atlantic coast, it was the English and the Puritans, Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians, with a smattering of Quakers and other nonconformists working out of Rhode Island. In the southeast, it was the Spanish and the Jesuits and the Franciscans. In the far west, along the Pacific coast, it was the Spanish and the Franciscans, while, much later and farther north in California and up the Pacific coast, it was the Russians and the Orthodox Church.
Francis Jennings, in his book
The Invasion of America
, called Christianity a “conquest religion.” I suspect this description is true of most religions. I can’t think of one that could be termed a “seduction religion,” where converts are lured in by the beauty of the doctrine
and
the generosity of the practice.
Maybe Buddhism. Certainly not Christianity.
Missionary work in the New World was war. Christianity, in all its varieties, has always been a stakeholder in the business of assimilation, and, in the sixteenth century, it was the initial wound in the side of Native culture. Or, if you want the positive but somewhat callous view, you might wish to describe Christianity as the gateway drug to supply-side capitalism.
George Washington and Henry Knox believed in the potential of Indians to become Whites, and they developed a six-point “civilizing” plan to accomplish this. Among other things, the plan called for impartial justice towards Indians, for the development of “educational” experiments to civilize Indian society, and for the prosecution and punishment of anyone who violated Native rights.
Impartial justice? Prosecute anyone who violated Native rights? I’m tempted to say something cranky and sarcastic, but I’m sure
Washington and Knox were serious. For his part, Knox argued for Native rights and for treating Indian nations as sovereign, foreign nations. Knox wrote Washington to say, “How different would be the sensation of a philosophic mind to reflect that instead of exterminating a part of the human race by our modes of population that we had persevered through all difficulties and at last had imparted our Knowledge of cultivation and the arts, to the Aboriginals of the Country.” Knox goes on to say that “it has been conceived to be impractical to civilize the Indians of North America” but that “this opinion is probably more convenient than just.”
While “impartial justice” and “protection of Native rights” proved to be empty rhetoric, the desire to find ways to civilize Indians had been an impulse from the beginning of European settlement. And while many of the civilizing programs in Canada and the United States were marked by education of one sort or another—farming for the men, domestic service for the women, along with a little reading, writing, and arithmetic—almost all of them were anchored in Christianity.
Teach Indians to fish, but teach them to be Christian fishers. And then you can sell them fishing gear.
The hope for Native peoples was that, with a little training and a push in the right direction, they would become contributing members of White North America. This was not to be a compromise between cultures. It was to be a unilateral surrender. Indians were to give up what they had and what they believed, in exchange for what Whites had and believed. The implication could not have been clearer. European culture, religion, and art were superior to Native culture, religion, and art, and the proof of that superiority could be found in the military might of Canada and America.
Whenever I think about this, I’m reminded of the television series
Star Trek
and, in particular, the Borg, whose battle cry, “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated,” could well have been spoken by John A. Macdonald and Andrew Jackson. Or Stephen Harper and George W. Bush.
While there are a great many places to start a discussion of assimilation, two excellent beginnings are in seventeenth-century Quebec and seventeenth-century New England.
Around 1637, the Jesuit Father Le Jeune set about building a Catholic Indian village along the St. Lawrence near Saguenay. He was aided in this effort by Noël Brûlart de Sillery, a Knight of Malta and a member of the Company of the Hundred Associates. The idea was to create a community of Native people who wished to be converted to Catholicism and who would be willing to give up their “nomadic” ways and take up farming. The village was named Sillery after its chief benefactor, and by 1647, there were around 167 Indians living there. However, European religion and farming were not as enticing as the Jesuits had hoped, and, by the winter of 1649, the population of Sillery was reduced to two men, both of them White. The Jesuits would continue to construct such villages in the hopes that Indians would come in out of the woods for the gifts of Christianity. And they did. But it’s reasonably clear, from the historical record, that when Native people made use of these settlements, they did so primarily for food, for temporary shelter, and for protection from other tribes.
The Puritan cleric John Eliot, who was known as the “Indian Apostle,” arrived in Boston in 1631. His mission was to convert Indians to his particular brand of Christianity, and, between 1645 and 1675, he was the leading force in the creation of what
were called “praying towns.” These towns, around fourteen in number, were situated on the outskirts of the Puritan settlements and functioned as halfway houses for Indians who were interested in converting. In these outposts between savagery and civilization, Native people were to be schooled in English, Christianity, and the norms of civilized society.
Praying towns weren’t a bad idea, but because they sat between the forest and the Puritan towns, in what could be seen as an early American demilitarized zone, they became the target for tribes bent on pushing the colonists into the sea, as well as targets for colonists who didn’t make a distinction between friendly Indians and their more hostile relatives. During the 1675 King Philip War, these towns were attacked by both sides, and, in October of that year, the praying Indians, who had pledged their loyalty to the Puritans, but who were still seen as a threat, were shipped off to Deer Island in Boston Harbor. It was essentially a concentration camp, the first in North America, though sadly not the last. The war ended in 1676, but the “praying” Indians were kept on the island for another year.
By the way, Deer Island today is no longer an island. The Shirley Gut channel was filled in by a hurricane in 1938, and the island is now the site of the Deer Island Waste Water Treatment Plant, which treats the sewage from forty-three cities and towns in the area. Park lands surround the treatment plant, and there are walking trails, jogging trails, and picnic areas. So far as I know, there is no plaque or monument to commemorate the Christian Indians who were imprisoned there.
As an assimilation experiment, neither the Jesuit villages in Lower Canada nor the praying towns in New England worked
out well. Still, they were a beginning in the business of assimilation and the precursors to later solutions.
By the late nineteenth century, the Indian Problem was still a problem. Yes, Indians had been defeated militarily. Yes, most of the tribes had been safely locked up on reservations and reserves. Yes, Indians were dying off in satisfying numbers from disease and starvation. Yes, all of this was encouraging. But, at the same time, Indians were still being Indians. How could this happen? How could Native cultures hold their own against the potency of western civilization? Or to put this question in the vernacular, why would anyone prefer a horse when they could have a 1957 Chevrolet two-door convertible with a 283 horsepower Super Turbo V8?
Unless, of course, you’re a Ford person.
Sure, White culture might have seemed a bit on the stingy side, a little mean-spirited from time to time. Greedy. Pompous. But that was the practice of the thing, not what was preached. The Bible, it should be noted, has entire verses devoted to peace, goodwill, and sharing. Assimilation wasn’t a bad thing in itself. It had just been poorly handled.
Speaking in 1892, at the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction, Richard Pratt, a fifty-two-year-old army captain, stood and told the audience how assimilation might be accomplished in a more humane and effective manner.
Education.
Pratt’s plan was a simple one. North America would have to kill the Indian in order to save the man. “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” was the exact quotation, and while it sounds harsh, it was an improvement on Phildelphia lawyer Henry
Pancoast’s 1882 suggestion that, “We must either butcher them [Indians] or civilize them, and what we do we must do quickly.”
For Pratt, the problem of educating and civilizing the Indian was not race or some defect in the blood. It was environmental determinism. “It is a great mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage,” said Pratt. “He is born a blank, like the rest of us. We make our greatest mistake in feeding our civilization to the Indians instead of feeding the Indians to our civilization.”
Now, there’s a pleasant thought.
In 1879 Pratt opened one of the first modern residential schools for Indians at the old Carlisle Army Barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Kill the Indian, save the man. Here, at last, was the answer to the “Indian Problem.” Here, at last, was an effective blueprint for assimilation. Kill the Indian, save the man. A little late in being codified perhaps, but concise and elegant in its simplicity. If I had been Pratt, I would have been tempted to hang the slogan over the entrance to every residential school in Canada and the United States. “Kill the Indian, save the man.” But I’d do it in Latin. To give it more import.
Intermino Indian, Servo Vir
.
Although perhaps Dante’s famous caution,
Lasciate Ogne Speranza, Voi Ch’intrate
, might have been more appropriate. And no less honest. Except it’s Italian, rather than Latin. Not that any of the Native children who passed through the doors of residential schools would have noticed the difference. Or cared.
That was the trick, of course. When North America talked about the education and assimilation of Natives, it wasn’t talking about adult Indians. Or as the Reverend E. F. Wilson, founder of the Shingwauk residential school in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, called
them, “the old unimprovable people.” North America had long ago given up on them. If education was going to make any inroads in Native communities, it would make them through the children.