The Inconvenient Indian

King suggests that the bigoted, anti-Indian slurs he’s heard at protests and marches are indicative of North America’s broader hatred of Live Indians. He isolates one example of this hatred, the question “Why didn’t we kill you off when we had the chance?” as a launch point for a deeper exploration of North American Indian policy during the early colonial years.

King begins by addressing the North American misconception that Native people and their culture “are trapped in a state of stasis,” unable to progress alongside the rest of civilization. He compares this presumed stasis to Vladimir and Estragon of Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, suggesting that White Americans see Native people as “waiting for Europeans to lead [them] to civilization” and considers it an extension of the “savagism versus civilization dichotomy” that has defined North America’s attitude toward Native people for centuries. Such a dichotomy regards anything that contradicts Christianity and capitalism as immoral savagery.

After America fought and won the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812, William Bradford claimed that “a hideous and desolate wilderness” had been transformed into two nation states, Canada, and the U.S.

Indian-White relations were initially centered around commerce, such as the fur trade, and military alliances. Indians saw themselves as independent nations separate from the U.S. and Canada, and, initially, federal governments treated them as such. However, this attitude shifted as European militaries grew more powerful than Indian forces. The Articles of Confederation gave the U.S. federal government the right to supervise all Indian affairs. This right was expanded in the 1790 Trade and Intercourse Act, which gave the federal government the power to buy and sell Indian land.

King cites three Supreme Court decisions in the 19th century as instrumental in shaping Indian-White relations in North America by redefining tribes as dependent rather than sovereign nations. In 1823’s Johnson v. McIntosh, the court ruled that private citizens couldn’t buy land from Indians directly—if Indians wanted to sell, they had to go through the federal government, since the land belonged to the government “by right of discovery.” In 1831’s Cherokee v. Georgia, the court ruled against the Cherokee nation, maintaining that the Cherokee nation was not sovereign and, therefore, still subject to the laws of the state of Georgia. Finally, 1832’s Worcester v. Georgia held that it was the federal government’s responsibility to uphold and regulate relations with the Cherokee nation. Canada would fashion laws of their own in 1876 with the Indian Act.

King describes how these rulings transformed Indians into North America’s “property,” proposing that Indians became “furniture” under such laws, which were designed to control and “organize” them, grouping together disparate tribes, cultures, and languages under the general term “Indian.” This generalization transformed the way North America regarded Indians, grouping them together in a “‘one size fits all’ mindset.” From there, explains King, North America began to form its official “Indian Policy.”

Before the 1800s, explains King, military action had been synonymous with Indian policy in North America. However, by the 19th century, military action was supplemented with “treaties, removals, and relocations,” the combined efforts of which King refers to as “Plan A.” According to King, the point of Plan A was to steer Indians away from White settlement and economic growth. Plan A also outlined a plan of attack for whenever a conflict between Whites and Indians arose. Under Plan A, the military would intervene, and the government would follow up by devising a new treaty that forced Native people to give up either a portion or the totality of their land. 

Throughout the colonial period, the U.S. and Canada signed over 500 such treaties. The first was signed with the Delaware in 1778, and the last, with the Nez Perces, in 1868. Treaty-making ended in the U.S. in 1871, which was, coincidentally, the same year treaty-making began in Canada, with 11 Numbered Treaties negotiated with multiple First Nations bands across Canada. While treaties might have ended Indian-White conflicts, North American governments repeatedly failed to honor the stipulations outlined in these treaties.

King agrees with numerous scholars who have claimed that these treaties were intended to be mere “experiences of the moment” rather than “long-standing agreements.” When these treaties were signed, North America believed it was only a matter of time before Indians died out entirely, therefore agreements outlined in the treaties wouldn’t need to be upheld permanently. The “inconvenien[ce]” of surviving Indian populations prompted their removal and relocation. The federal government’s official justification for such moves was “Indian welfare,” claiming that segregating Indian and White populations would minimize racism and allow Indians to maintain their culture.

The U.S.’s first legal sanctions to force Indians from their land happened in 1802, when the federal government asked Georgia to give its western lands to the federal government. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson drafted an amendment that gave Congress the right to trade land west of the Mississippi River (that was bought from France via the Louisiana Purchase). Although the amendment was never ratified, Congress passed legislation in 1804 that provided an avenue for Jefferson to pursue similar policies.

A series of relocation treaties between the U.S. government and tribes followed. In 1804, Henry Harrison, the governor of Indiana, enacted a treaty between the state and Sauk chiefs in response to a Sauk warrior being accused of killing three settlers. Harrison offered the warrior’s release in exchange for compensation for the murdered settlers and the cessation of the tribe’s land in Illinois and Wisconsin. Moreover, some rumors claim that Harrison got the Sauk chiefs drunk before signing the treaty. Harrison’s trickery was commonplace in treaty “negotiations.” If a tribe refused to sign a removal treaty, for instance, the U.S. government would simply find a few outlying members of the tribe willing to sign the document, even if these members weren’t authorized to speak on behalf of their tribe. When Native peoples threatened to combat these tactics with military action, the U.S. withheld annuity payments to disincentivize military action.

Removal became national policy when Andrew Jackson signed the Removal Act into law in 1830, symbolically framing removal as a triumph of civilization over savagery. From there, relocation happened quickly. The Choctaw were removed from their land in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana in 1831. By 1840, most tribes east of the Mississippi River were relocated west. The Cherokee use the phrase nunna daul isunyi or “the trail where they cried” to refer to their forced removal, which saw the deaths of 4,000 of the 17,000 forced to flee their native land. King sees the Trail of Tears as “the largest massacre of Native people in North American history.” Although no records exist to attest to the exact number of Native peoples removed from their land in the 19th century, the number of displaced Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Seminole peoples alone is between 75,000 and 100,000.

While Canada didn’t have an official removal policy on par with the U.S.’s, it, too, enforced “relocations” for Native peoples. According to a 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the Canadian government saw Aboriginal people as “unsophisticated, poor, [and] outside modern society” and used Natives’ supposed incompetence to justify relocation, arguing that it would help impoverished Native peoples move to locations with more hunting opportunities and better access to healthcare and educational resources.

Most of Canada’s official relocations happened in the 1940s. However, unofficial relocations began as early as 1836, when the Governor General of Canada, Francis Bond Head, suggested that Native peoples needed to be shielded from “White vices,” such as alcohol. To do so, Head proposed relocating Native peoples away from White settlements. In 1836, Head forced the Newash and Saugeen bands of the Ojibway to give up 600,000 hectares of their land south of Owen Sound, Ontario. The bands were then relocated to present-day Bruce Peninsula. Just 20 years later, the Newash band had to relinquish 4,000 hectares of their reserve to make room for additional White expansion. Subsequent relocation measures followed, with the Ojibway being allotted smaller land parcels with each restructuring.

In 1935, the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act, which gave the Canadian government the power to turn farmland into pasture to prevent erosion, allowed for the forced relocation of the Métis of Ste. Madeline in Manitoba. The Act guaranteed displaced White farmers compensation for their removal, but the same protections weren’t extended to the Métis, nor were they given new land to replace the land from which they were removed.

In 1942, the Mi’kmaq were relocated from disparate locations throughout Nova Scotia to Eskasoni and Shubenacadie, the two largest existing Mi’kmaq settlements. Because the Mi’kmaq were Catholic, the Canadian government used the Church to advocate for relocation. Ultimately, the relocation went through, despite the protests of the Mi’kmaq already living in the settlements as well as the relocated Mi’kmaq. Relocation of the Mi’kmaq began in 1942, though by 1944, only 10 new houses had been built at the settlements. Two years later, relocated families were still living in tents. By 1948, unemployment at the Eskasoni and Shubenacadie settlements reached record-breaking heights, and the entire population was on welfare. Ottawa refused to acknowledge that its relocation program had been a failure, and the Canadian government continued with its relocation efforts into the 1950s and 1960s, displacing the Inuit, Nutak, and numerous Yukon bands.

After World War II, North America’s Indians were relocated en masse once more, this time to make room for industrial activity, namely hydroelectric projects. Dams were built across the continent, many on Indian land. These projects depleted hunting resources, destroyed sacred sites, and necessitated yet more forced relocation. King cites as an example the Flood Control Act of 1944, which allowed for the passage of the Pick-Sloan Plan, which, in turn, authorized the creation of dams and reservoirs along the Missouri River. Despite the fact that many of these dams would be built on tribal lands, the Army Corps of Engineers failed to consult with affected tribes. While the Pick-Sloan Plan flooded thousands of acres of Indian land and displaced 1,000 Indian families, curiously, it had no such negative impact on non-Indian towns in the same area.

Ultimately, though, relocating Indians wasn’t enough for North America’s Whites. Indians continued to practice their culture, rendering them “in the way” even after they were relocated and strategically assimilated into Western society. According to King, it was now time for North America to begin “Plan B.”