The Native American Solution

I was watching the History channel between ball games the other day. They covered the American revolution and the actions of the Continental Congress in detail. It was interesting, I learned some things I hadn’t known before. My wife even stopped and watched for a while. Then, history moved on a few years to Andrew Jackson’s decision to remove the Indians from the southeast to reservations in Oklahoma. The natives were forced to leave their homes and march a thousand miles to unfamiliar lands. Several died along the way. The death rate was especially severe for babies and the elderly. The narrator reported the stories of soldiers who reluctantly took part and the human suffering they witnessed. It was the original trail of tears.

Admittedly this is not one of the shinning spots in American history. It ranks right up there with the incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II. What, however, was the alternative? Not too long before Jackson became president, the southeastern tribes, especially the Creeks sided with the British during the War of 1812. The native army, called “Redsticks”, attacked American villages and military outposts with as many as 4000 warriors. Andrew Jackson’s forces consisting mostly of militia defeated the Creeks at the decisive battle of Horseshoe Bend. The combined tribes of Creeks, Choctaw, and Cherokee along with Tecumseh’s Shawnee posed a threat all along the frontier. Tecumseh is famous for uniting the tribes with the objective of driving out the American settlers. One alternative to the trail of tears was a hostile nation on our western border.

The pre-Columbian culture of the American natives was based on the clan. It was common for clans to raid against their neighbors to protect or expand their territories. The name of every native clan I know of translates to “the people” or “human beings.” Every clan believed all other clans were something less than human. Enemies captured in battle were frequently kept as slaves. Sacagawea, who traveled with Lewis and Clark, was captured as a girl and sold to the French trapper Charbonneau. Different clans all had their own norms to control social interaction withing the tribe. There was no rule of law that could be applied across clan boundaries. There was no way the tribes and settlers could have co-existed as neighbors and maintained their respective cultural norms.

The Native Americans’ concept of land ownership was markedly different from that of the European settlers. The tribes had a territory in which they could hunt, gather foodstuffs, and in some cases, grow crops. The land was controlled by the tribe, but only if they could defend it from their neighbors. Thus, tribal lands were fluid. As they obtained modern weapons, tribes would expand their territory and displace others. When the Sioux and Crow obtained horses, they left their lands in the Midwest and carved out new territories and became the buffalo culture of the central plains. The concept of private ownership of land, essential to sedentary farming, was non-existent. Can you imagine neighbors with their own set of laws free to roam through your wheat fields? It just wouldn’t have worked.

Every new world nation had their own solution to the question of the indigenous people. In Canada they made them subjects of the crown and were forced to obey the laws of the King. In Argentina they simply sent in the army and killed them all. In America, we moved them onto reservations. There was no “good” solution. The only alternative that would have been painless for the native tribes would have been for all white settlers to abandon their new homes and return to Europe.

Frank Watson is a retired Air Force Colonel and long-time resident of Eastern Washington. He has been a free-lance columnist for over 20 years.