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Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners, 1885

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Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners, 1885 University of Oklahoma College of Law University of Oklahoma College of Law Digital Commons American Indian and Alaskan Native Documents in the Congressional Serial Set: 1817-1899 2-15-1886 Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners, 1885 Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/indianserialset Part of the Indian and Aboriginal Law Commons Recommended Citation H.R. Exec. Doc. No. 1, 49th Cong., 1st Sess. (1885) This House Executive Document is brought to you for free and open access by University of Oklahoma College of Law Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in American Indian and Alaskan Native Documents in the Congressional Serial Set: 1817-1899 by an authorized administrator of University of Oklahoma College of Law Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. LAND ANDLAW AS AGENTS IN EDUCATING INDIANS. BY MERRILL EDWARDS GA.TES, LL. D., President of Rutgers College, Membe1· U. S. Boa'rd of Indian Commissioners. WH.A.T IS .A.N INDI.A.N1 Land and Jaw aud education are terms which convey a sufficiently definite meaniug to us all. But with reference to the land of the United States, before the law of the United States, and regarded as the subj~ct of an uninterrupted process of education, good or bad, at the hands of the people of the United States, what is an Indian 1 What is his legal status 0? Can be be defined in terms satisfactorv to Americans who lo-ve justice and believe in fair play1 His copper color, his prominent cheek bones, bis straight black hair are physical marks easily connoted for placing him among the ethnographic groups into which we divide the inhabitants of our Jaud. If we look for the marks by which his legal status i~ to be recognized, they will be found to be quite as -striking. But we hesitate in attempting to name the anomalous position we have_ given him before the law. Be is not a citizen by local.birth. He i8 not a foreigner. He is uot an alien. He cannot by naturalization become a citizen. General Cushing called him a "domestic subject." Daniel Webster applies to the Iridians an old legal definition, which would de­ light the heart of many a greedy frontiersman who co-vets their property. He calls them '' perpetual inhabitants wlth diminutive rights." On the whole, the term which bas found most farnr with those who consider the matter is '' wards of the Government." WARDS OF THE GOVERNMENT. To the designingly selfish, this term loosely used seems to indicate power on our part to do a.s we will at present with their land and with the Indians themselves. Who shall call on us for a final accounting before these" wards" attain their majority, And do not statistics and" analogies give ground to bope that before that time shall arrive they will die out? With the fair-minded, on the other hand, this term is a favorite one from precisely opposite motives. It seems to jndjcate that certain duties toward them resit as obligations . upon us. President Cleveland voices this feeling when he says _in bis inaugural address : The conscience of the people dem;wds that the Indians within onr boundaries shall be fairly and honestly treated, as wards of the Government, and their education and civilization promoted, with a view to their ultimate citizenship. The relation of a man to his wards tests his integrity and his sense of honer. If his wards are not in all respects interestirrg, attractive, or 763 764 REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR. lovable, and have no powerful friends to watch over their interests, the relation becomes a nicer test of the guardian. · It will be the aim of my address to-night to examine with you, in the light of tbis truth, some of our duties to. the nation's Indian wards; and especially to look at the agency of such land and law as we gtve them or deny them in educating these "wards of the nation." LAND AND LAW ARE ACTIVJ:iJ AGEN'l'S 0-N 'l'HE FRONTIER. Land and law I have purposely called a.gents in this process of edu­ cating the Indian. They are not mere passive conditions_. They are living forces, now at work in the solution of the question "What is the future of the Indian,,, Here in the East we forget how questions of land and law lay hold upon the frontiersman. Land is conservative, a permanent property, a measure of values, here. Not so in the West. There the chief object of every man is to get land, either to hold or as a basis for speculation. The value of land :fluctuates there at the ca­ price of the railroad magnates, who, by giving or withholding a station or a grain elevator, make or destroy a market, and multiply or divide by ten the value of all the land for miles arouud. There is a fever of activity along the frontier, and its most clearly-marked symptom is the feverish thirst for land. No man who bas not seen it and felt it can understand the intense power of this wish for lauds in the restless life that fringes our unclaimed public domain. To get land,, by hook or by crook, seems ·the one aim of every mau you see. The Indian problem, ever since it began to be a problem, bas been working itself out on an area e,Ter shifting westward, with the march of white settlements. Those who have studieiJ. it have always found themselves in the din of the border life, of land seizures, new settlements, and the eager strife of the frontier.· Land has been and is a powerful agent in tbe education of the Indian, then, whether we will it or not, and never a more powerful agent than now. · Unless we wisely provide ]and in severalty for the Indians witllin the next five years, the awful pressure of immigration and the logic of. selfishness unchecked by wise legislation will have left no land whatever. SOME LA. W MUST BE HAD 'l'O SECURE ANY LA.ND TO THE INDIAN. / Law, too, works its most striking effects at those formative periods when custom and prescription and long occupancy have not settled men's rights and titles. Of course the power of law is best discerned by the tho1:1gbtfnl in ~he silent steady reign of law that characterizes and condi­ tions the society in wbicb we live here at the East. But the unthinking are most deeply impressed by the processes of the law as it begins to make its power felt in communities where all rights of occupancy are comparatively recent, where are found large numbers of adventurers and criminals who shun the law, and where appeals to brute force have been frequent. The power of law is keenly felt because men have so often felt it ab ence. In 'UCb society as this, law is to begin its edu­ cating influence upon the Indian . And one of the first offices of law for the Indian mu 't be to S€Cure a fair amount of land to the Indian, and gradually, but firmly and surely, to teach him that he mu t u e that land wi · ly and tllereby pro per, or that if be persistently refu es to u · it, he mu, t lack, and if be will do no work when he has been aught how to work, then be must starve. BOARD OF INDIAN COMMISSIONERS. 76{) It is but recently that the land question 'bas bt.>gun to press upon us, in America. The overflow of people has moved westward and had the best lands simply for the taking so freely that they have known nothing of the consideration of the rights of former occupants. We have had an almost unoccupied continent to take under cultivation. History has never before recorded the march of a fully civilized race in 1 o and ~:>Ver a continent that was not post-.essed by another race. The "'ast migra­ tions westward of Asiatic and Europen history involved quPstious of joint occupancy, of the right of conquest, and of the local go-,,ermnent of th'< conquered. But for purposes of settled cultivatiou, our contiuent north of Mexico was practically uuoccupied. Roaming over tlwusan<ls of square miles to hunt and foih had not given to tbe Indian tribes any such rights in the soil, auy such tenure of the land in equity, as comes from the cultivation of the soil, or everi from the loug occupancy of fixed tracts for pasturing flocks and herds. When the first period. of Indian wars that threatened tbe extermination of the whites had passed, the flood of mig-rat.ion flowed westw·ird onr a whole continent, checked only for a little at the limits of the reservation which had been solemnly gq.aranteed to the Indi~ns from time to time-then, after chafing a little at the delay, swallowing them up iu its on ward sweep, and tossi?-g the Indians westward again like driftwood ou its foremost waves. This superabundauce of laud no longer exists. Men who have seen millions of acres given to a railroad and have felt'' there's land enough,'' as we begin to approach the limit of the nation's landed largess, grow impatient of the possession of any land by the Indian. We h~ve all seen tLe animus of the Oklahoma' '' boomers/' who pass by thousands of acres of land to be had at merely nominal rates-lan_d far better than that which they seek to wreRt from the Indian, and encamping on the borders of the forbidden land, ddy law and military force, and will do nothing but sigh with passionate covetous longing for Naboth's viue­ yard, though it does not adjoin their own.
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