Posts
Were you aware that a substantial amount of time and effort was expended by the US Government in keeping settlers and prospectors out of the Indian treaty territories?
Even going so far as to seize and destroy all of their possessions summarily at the point of apprehension?
Army commanders routinely expressed despair at the task because of a lack of resources to stem the rising ride of white people heading west.
The later Army campaigns to pacify and contain the American Indian are a textbook case in "the law and moral highground are on your side; here's what you do to make that not matter even the slightest," on the part of the tribes.
All they needed to do was to sit back and let the Army handle it, as agreed in the treaties.
Read that again.
They had agreed to let the Army handle the white settler problem.
Taking matters into their own hands when the Army, admittedly, failed to handle the white settler problem was a treaty violation and the original violation in nearly all cases.
And, as many don't seem to know, once one side violates then all bets are off for the other side.
The Indians escalated when the punitive clauses of the treaty were activated against them for taking the white settler problem on their own.
The deeper I get into this the worse everyone looks, but the Indians are not completely innocent and the whites completely at fault.
Where the whites are at fault is individuals not respecting the borders of the treaty territories and grossly underfunding the Army tasked with enforcing those borders.
While, we might add, the absolute corruption of The Bureau of Indian Affairs who took their lavish funding and lined nests which never got closer to an Indian than a wooden cigar display in Philadelphia.
Bizarrely, the failings of the US Government to prevent the settlers from violating the Indian's reserved territory don't constitute a treaty violation.
That sounds like it makes us White people more at fault, but the Indians signed the damn thing and agreed to be bound by the terms.
Signed at the end of losing a war they started, I might add.
Everyone forgets that part.
My father grew up in the area of Minnesota that had been hit by the great Sioux rebellion of the 1860s, and knew people as a boy who remembered it. His take was that the conflict was utterly inevitable, and that a big part of the problem was that "neither side could control their young men." You're right about the Army trying to protect the Indians---I've seen a picture of a bunch of would-be settlers dancing in rage as the Army burned their wagons and goods when they were caught in Indian territory.
ReplyDelete