José Martí Reader. Jose Marti
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civil pleasures of white people, they will view with indifference the public school system available to them as not proceeding from the tribe’s savage existence, or seeming to be necessary to it. The convention knows this. But it also knows that the Indian is not like that by nature; he has been conditioned to it by the system of vilification and easy living imposed upon him for the last hundred years.
Where the Indian has been able to defend himself more successfully and stay as he was, it can be seen that he is by race strong-minded and strong-willed, courageous, hospitable and worthy. Even fierce, like any man or any people close to Nature. Those same noble conditions of personal pride and attachment to territory make him spring around like a wild animal when he is despoiled of his age-old grain fields, when his sacred trees are felled, when the hot winds from his burning homes scorch the manes of his fleeing horses. The one who is burned, burns; the one who is hunted, gives chase; the one who is despoiled of property, despoils in turn. And the one who is exterminated, exterminates.
Thus reduced to a poor nation of 300,000 scattered savages tirelessly fighting a nation of 50 million, the Indian does not enter the cities of his conquerors, does not sit in their schools, is not taught by their industries, is not recognized as a human soul. By means of onerous treaties he is obliged to give up his land. He is taken away from his birthplace, which is like robbing a tree of its roots, and so loses the greatest objective in life. On the pretext of farming, he is forced to buy animals to work the land he does not own. On the pretext of schooling, he is compelled to learn in a strange language, the hated language of his masters, out of textbooks that teach him vague notions of a literature and science whose utility is never explained and whose application he never sees. He is imprisoned in a small space where he moves back and forth among his intimidated companions, his entire horizon filled with the traders who sell him glittering junk and guns and liquor in exchange for the money which, because of the treaties, the government distributes among the reservations every year. Even if he should be possessed by a desire to see the world, he cannot leave that human cattle ranch. He has no land of his own to till, and no incentive to cultivate it carefully so that he may honorably leave it to his children. Nor does he have to in many of the tribes, because the government, by means of a degrading system of protection that began a century ago, gives him a communal place of land for his livelihood, and furnishes him with food, clothes, medicines, schools, with whatever is a man’s natural objective when he works for a wage. If he has no property to improve or trip to take or material needs to satisfy, he spends this money on colored trinkets that cater to his rudimentary artistic taste, or on liquor and gambling that excite and further the brutal pleasures to which he is condemned. With this vile system that snuffs out his personality, the Indian is dead. Man grows by exercising his selfhood, just as a wheel gains velocity as it rolls along. And like the wheel, when a man does not work, he rusts and decays. A sense of disheartened ferocity never entirely extinguished in the enslaved races, the memory of lost homes, the council of old men who have seen freer times in their native forests, the presence of themselves imprisoned, vilified and idle — all these things burst forth in periodic waves each time the harshness or greed of the government agents is close fisted in supplying the Indians with the benefits stipulated in the treaties. And since by virtue of these treaties, and by them alone, a man is robbed of whatever nobility he has, and is permitted only his bestial qualities, it is only natural that what predominates in these revolts, disfiguring the justice producing them, is the beast developed by the system.
All enslaved peoples respond in like manner, not the Indians alone. That is why revolutions following long periods of tyranny are so cruel. What white man in his right mind fails to understand that he cannot throw in the Indian’s face a being such as the white man has made of him? “He is graceful and handsome,” said the venerable Erastus Brooks at the convention. “His speech is loving and meaningful. We have in American history tens, hundreds of examples to show that the Indian, under the same conditions as the white man, is as mentally, morally and physically capable as he.” But we have turned him into a vagabond, a tavern post, a professional beggar. We do not give him work for himself, work that gladdens and uplifts; at best we force him to earn, with work affording him no direct profit, the cost of the rations and medicines we promise him in exchange for his land, and this in violation of the treaties. We accustom him not to depend upon himself; we habituate him to a life of indolence with only the needs and pleasures of a primitive, naked being. We deprive him of the means of obtaining his necessities through his own efforts, and with hat in hand and bowed head he is obliged to ask the government agent for everything: bread, quinine, clothes for his wife and child. The white men he knows are the tavern keeper who corrupts him, the peddler who cheats him, the distributor of rations who finds a way of withholding a part of them, the unqualified teacher who drills him in a language of which he can speak but a few words, unwillingly and without meaning, and the agent who laughs and shouts at him and bids him be off when he appeals to him for justice. Without work or property or hope, deprived of his native land and with no family pleasures other than the purely physical, what can be expected of these reservation Indians but grim, lazy and sensual men born of parents who saw their own parents crouched in circles on the ground, both pipe and soul snuffed out, weeping for their lost nation in the shade of the great tree that had witnessed their marriages, their pleas for justice, their councils and their rejoicing for a century? A slave is very sad to see, but sadder still is the son of a slave. Even their color is the reflection of mud! Great hotbeds of men are these Indian reservations. Pulling these Indians up by the roots would have been better than vilifying them.
The first treaty was in 1783, and in it the United States government reserved the right to administer the tribes and regulate their trade. And now the 300,000 Indians, subdued after a war in which theirs was not the greatest cruelty, are divided among 50 reservations whose only law is the presidential will, and another 69 known as treaty reservations because of an agreement between the tribes and the government. Thirty-nine of these have treaties stipulating the division of reservation lands into individual properties, an ennobling measure that has scarcely been attempted with 12 of the tribes. “The Indians are given the food that Congress orders for them,” said Alice Fletcher, “and because this passes through many hands, there remains in each pair of them some part of it. But the allotment for schools is not distributed, because the employees can obtain from it the paltry teacher’s salary, which is then passed along to their wives or daughters for augmenting household supplies. Thus, out of the $2 million that must have been spent from the years 1871 to 1881, including the obligations of all the agreements, only $200,000 has been spent on schools.” Many of the tribes have been offered even more than the private property which they are denied, and the schools which have not been established for them: they have been offered citizenship.
All this was heard without contradiction; on the contrary, the Deputy Inspector of Indian Schools, the authors of the House and Senate reservation reform plans, and the members of the Indian Council supported and corroborated it. High government officials supported and corroborated it, too, and applauded the inspired defense of the Indian’s character delivered by that fine man, Erastus Brooks. “There is not one of their vices for which we are not responsible! There is no Indian brutality that is not our fault! The agents interested in keeping the Indian brutalized under their control are lying!”
The government defiles the Indian with its system of treaties that condemn him to vice and inertia. And the government agent’s greed keeps the government under a false concept of the Indian, or hides the causes of his corruption and rebellions in order to continue whittling away to his heart’s content at the funds Congress sets aside for the Indian’s maintenance.
Let the governor keep a wary eye on those rapacious employees!
Give President Cleveland high praise; with neither fanatical vanity nor prudery he has made efforts to investigate the Indians’ sufferings, and instead of throwing in their faces the ignominy in which they are kept, Cleveland decided to shoulder the blame himself, and raise them by means of a just government to the status of men. This president wants no drunken insects; he wants human beings. “They are drunkards and thieves because we have made them so; therefore we must beg their pardon for having made them drunkards and thieves, and instead of exploiting them and disowning them, let us give them work on their lands and encourage them in a desire to live, for they are good people in spite of our having given them the right not to be.”