Scan barcode
scrimjm's review against another edition
4.0
Despite the strong undertones of Christian superiority and paternalism (I suggest skipping the preface and introduction- they don’t really add anything that isn’t in the main text), this is an unrelenting and important compilation and narrative of primary sources on the atrocities committed against Indigenous people in the US. Just when you think you might understand the nature and scope of the horrors, it continues to prove you wrong and go deeper, even with the repetition of broken treaties, lies, and coercion. And this is only a narrow window into the history of seven tribes during this period. And this was published in 1881. I will definitely pair this with more current accounts, especially from Indigenous authors and perspectives.
“What an inconceivable spectacle to us to-day: the governments of Pennsylvania and New York so fully recognizing an Indian to be a “person,” and his murder to be anxiously and swiftly atoned for if possible! … Verily, Policy has kept a large assortment of spectacles for Justice to look through in a surprisingly short space of time.” (302)
“It makes little difference 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 by 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 the added ingenuity from long practice… There are hundreds of pages of unimpeachable testimony on the side of the Indian; but it goes for nothing, is set down as sentimentalism or partisanship, tossed aside and forgotten. President after president has appointed commission after commission… It would probably be no exaggeration to say that not one American citizen out of ten thousand ever sees them or know they exist, and yet any one of them, circulated throughout the country, read by the right-thinking, right-feeling men and women of this land, would be of itself a ‘campaign document’ that would initiate a revolution which would not subside until the Indians’ wrongs were, so far as is now left possible, righted…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… 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, no difficulty whatever, in agreeing upon certain things…” (340)
“What an inconceivable spectacle to us to-day: the governments of Pennsylvania and New York so fully recognizing an Indian to be a “person,” and his murder to be anxiously and swiftly atoned for if possible! … Verily, Policy has kept a large assortment of spectacles for Justice to look through in a surprisingly short space of time.” (302)
“It makes little difference 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 by 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 the added ingenuity from long practice… There are hundreds of pages of unimpeachable testimony on the side of the Indian; but it goes for nothing, is set down as sentimentalism or partisanship, tossed aside and forgotten. President after president has appointed commission after commission… It would probably be no exaggeration to say that not one American citizen out of ten thousand ever sees them or know they exist, and yet any one of them, circulated throughout the country, read by the right-thinking, right-feeling men and women of this land, would be of itself a ‘campaign document’ that would initiate a revolution which would not subside until the Indians’ wrongs were, so far as is now left possible, righted…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… 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, no difficulty whatever, in agreeing upon certain things…” (340)
More...