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From
Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (New York, 1881)
 "There
are within the limits of the United States between two hundred
and fifty and three hundred thousand Indians, exclusive of those
in Alaska. The names of the different tribes and bands, as
entered in the statistical table so the Indian Office Reports,
number nearly three hundred. One of the most careful estimates
which have been made of their numbers and localities gives them
as follows:
"In Minnesota and States east of the Mississippi, about 32,500;
in Nebraska, Kansas, and the Indian Territory, 70,650; in the
Territories of Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, 65,000; in
Nevada and the Territories of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and
Arizona, 84,000; and on the Pacific slope, 48,000."
Of these, 130,000 are self-supporting on their own reservations,
"receiving nothing from the Government except interest on their
own moneys, or annuities granted them in consideration of the
cession of their lands to the United States."
. . . Of the remainder, 84,000 are partially supported by the
Government-the interest money due them and their annuities, as
provided by treaty, being inadequate to their subsistence on the
reservations where they are confined. . . .
There are about 55,000 who never visit an agency, over whom the
Government does not pretend to have either control or care.
These 55,000 "subsist by hunting, fishing, on roots, nuts,
berries, etc.,and by begging and stealing"; and this also seems
to dispose of the accusation that the Indian will not "work for
a living." There remains a small portion, about 31,000, that are
entirely subsisted by the Government.
There is not among these three hundred bands of Indians one
which has not suffered cruelly at the hands either of the
Government or of white settlers. The poorer, the more
insignificant, the more helpless the band, the more certain the
cruelty and outrage to which they have been subjected. This is
especially true of the bands on the Pacific slope. These Indians
found themselves of a sudden surrounded by and caught up in the
great influx of gold-seeking settlers, as helpless creatures on
a shore are caught up in a tidal wave. There was not time for
the Government to make treaties; not even time for communities
to make laws. The tale of the wrongs, the oppressions, the
murders of the Pacific-slope Indians in the last thirty years
would be a volume by itself, and is too monstrous to be
believed.
It makes little difference, however, where one opens the record
of the history of the Indians; every page and every year has its
dark stain. The story of one tribe is the story of all, varied
only differences of time and place; but neither time nor place
makes any difference in the main facts. Colorado is as greedy
and unjust in 1880 as was Georgia in 1830, and Ohio in 1795; and
the United States Government breaks promises now as deftly as
then, and with an added ingenuity from long practice.
One of its strongest supports in so doing is the wide-spread
sentiment among the people of dislike to the Indian, of
impatience with his presence as a "barrier to civilization" and
distrust of it as a possible danger. The old tales of the
frontier life, with its horrors of Indian warfare, have
gradually, by two or three generations' telling, produced in the
average mind something like an hereditary instinct of
questioning and unreasoning aversion which it is almost
impossible to dislodge or soften. . . .
President after president has appointed commission after
commission to inquire into and report upon Indian affairs, and
to make suggestions as to the best methods of managing them. The
reports are filled with eloquent statements of wrongs done to
the Indians, of perfidies on the part of the Government; they
counsel, as earnestly as words can, a trial of the simple and
unperplexing expedients of telling truth, keeping promises,
making fair bargains, dealing justly in all ways and all things.
These reports are bound up with the Government's Annual Reports,
and that is the end of them. . . .
The history of the Government connections with the Indians is a
shameful record of broken treaties and unfulfilled promises. The
history of the border white man's connection with the Indians is
a sickening record of murder, outrage, robbery, and wrongs
committed by the former, as the rule, and occasional savage
outbreaks and unspeakably barbarous deeds of retaliation by the
latter, as the exception.
Taught by the Government that they had rights entitled to
respect, when those rights have been assailed by the rapacity of
the white man, the arm which should have been raised to protect
them has ever been ready to sustain the aggressor.
The testimony of some of the highest military officers of the
United States is on record to the effect that, in our Indian
wars, almost without exception, the first aggressions have been
made by the white man. . . . Every crime committed by a white
man against an Indian is concealed and palliated. Every offense
committed by an Indian against a white man is borne on the wings
of the post or the telegraph to the remotest corner of the land,
clothed with all the horrors which the reality or imagination
can throw around it. Against such influences as these are the
people of the United States need to be warned.
To assume that it would be easy, or by any one sudden stroke of
legislative policy possible, to undo the mischief and hurt of
the long past, set the Indian policy of the country right for
the future, and make the Indians at once safe and happy, is the
blunder of a hasty and uninformed judgment. The notion which
seems to be growing more prevalent, that simply to make all
Indians at once citizens of the United States would be a
sovereign and instantaneous panacea for all their ills and all
the Government's perplexities, is a very inconsiderate one. To
administer complete citizenship of a sudden, all round, to all
Indians, barbarous and civilized alike, would be as grotesque a
blunder as to dose them all round with any one medicine,
irrespective of the symptoms and needs of their diseases. It
would kill more than it would cure. Nevertheless, it is true, as
was well stated by one of the superintendents of Indian Affairs
in 1857, that, "so long as they are not citizens of the United
States, their rights of property must remain insecure against
invasion. The doors of the federal tribunals being barred
against them while wards and dependents, they can only partially
exercise the rights of free government, or give to those who
make, execute, and construe the few laws they are allowed to
enact, dignity sufficient to make them respectable. While they
continue individually to gather the crumbs that fall from the
table of the United States, idleness, improvidence, and
indebtedness will be the rule, and industry, thrift, and freedom
from debt the exception. The utter absence of individual title
to particular lands deprives every one among them of the chief
incentive to labor and exertion-the very mainspring on which the
prosperity of a people depends."
All judicious plans and measures for their safety and salvation
must embody provisions for their becoming citizens as fast as
they are fit, and must protect them till then in every right and
particular in which our laws protect other "persons" who are not
citizens. . . .
However great perplexity and difficulty there may be in the
details of any and every plan possible for doing at this late
day anything like justice to the Indian, however, hard it may be
for good statesmen and good men to agree upon the things that
ought to be done, there certainly is, or ought to be, no
perplexity whatever, on difficulty whatever, in agreeing upon
certain things that ought not to be done, and which must cease
to be done before the first steps can be taken toward righting
the wrongs, curing the ills, and wiping out the disgrace to us
of the present conditions of our Indians.
Cheating, robbing, breaking promises-these three are clearly
things which must cease to be done. One more thing, also, and
that is the refusal of the protection of the law to the Indian's
rights of property, "of life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness."
When these four things have ceased to be done, time,
statesmanship, philanthropy, and Christianity can slowly and
surely do the rest. Till these four things have ceased to be
done, statesmanship and philanthropy alike must work in vain,
and even Christianity can reap but small harvest."
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Helen
Hunt Jackson was a woman ahead of her time. Born Helen Fiske in
1830 in Massachusetts, Hunt-Jackson was a novelist who
questioned the actions of the American government in regards to
the Native Americans.