Mark Trahant
ICT
It’s President’s Day. So much to … well, not celebrate.
It’s a complicated holiday for Native Americans because of the complex, troubled history between tribes and the U.S. government.
Take Teddy Roosevelt. There he is. Smiling on the side of a building in Phoenix. It’s a statement about popular culture: Teddy the teddy bear, Teddy the iconoclast and Teddy the cowboy.
Cowboys and Indians. That stark story, that dark story, is Roosevelt’s story. In an 1858 speech he said:
“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principles than the average Indian. Take three hundred low families of New York and New Jersey, support them, for fifty years, in vicious idleness, and you will have some idea of what the Indians are. Reckless, revengeful, fiendishly cruel.”
Cruel is the ironic word. That same year Roosevelt praised the Sand Creek Massacre as “on the whole as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.”
Cruel as in the murder of more than 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho people on the plains of Colorado.
About 20 years ago I had my own encounter with a president.
I was given the opportunity to ask President George W. Bush a question at a convention that included the Native American Journalists Association. I wanted to ask a question that the president could answer, something just for him.
This is what I came up with:
“Most school kids learn about government in the context of city, county, state, and federal. And of course, tribal governments are not part of that at all. Mr. President, you’ve been a governor and a president, so you have a unique experience looking at it from two directions. What do you think tribal sovereignty means in the 21st century? And how do we resolve conflicts between tribes and the federal and state governments?”
He was clearly flustered. “Tribal sovereignty means that it’s sovereign. You, you’re a, you’re a, you’ve been given sovereignty, and you’re viewed as a sovereign entity.”
The president did recover. And, as Suzan Harjo has pointed out, when you think about it, Bush’s answer was right … sovereignty is sovereignty. End of sentence.
But there is also something to the idea that at a meeting that included the Native American Journalists Association, the president was not prepared. So what does it mean when the president doesn’t understand the policy that is charged with implementing?
President Bush is not the only executive to face this question. President Ronald Reagan was in Moscow when he was asked why he was refusing to meet with a delegation of American Indians.
He replied:
“Let me tell you just a little something about the American Indian in our land. We have provided millions of acres of land for what are called preservations—or reservations, I should say. They, from the beginning, announced that they wanted to maintain their way of life, as they had always lived there in the desert and the plains and so forth. And we set up these reservations so they could, and have a Bureau of Indian Affairs to help take care of them. At the same time, we provide education for them—schools on the reservations. And they’re free also to leave the reservations and be American citizens among the rest of us, and many do. Some still prefer, however, that way—that early way of life. And we’ve done everything we can to meet their demands as to how they want to live. Maybe we made a mistake. Maybe we should not have humored them in wanting to stay in that kind of primitive lifestyle. Maybe we should have said, no, come join us; be citizens along with the rest of us. As I say, many have; many have been very successful.
“And I’m very pleased to meet with them, talk with them at any time and see what their grievances are or what they feel they might be. And you’d be surprised: Some of them became very wealthy because some of those reservations were overlaying great pools of oil, and you can get very rich pumping oil. And so, I don’t know what their complaint might be.”
The roots of President’s Day
President’s Day has its roots in the celebration of two presidents: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Two complicated histories.
Washington recognized the treaty process itself. In a message to Congress Washington wrote: “The general Government only has the power, to treat with the Indian Nations, and any treaty formed and held without its authority will not be binding.”
Washington even directly negotiated treaties, including the 1790 Treaty of New York between the U.S. and Muscogee Nations. Dinner was a technique for Washington. The first president often invited tribal delegations to his home both in Philadelphia (then the capital city) and at Mount Vernon, according to historian Collin Calloway, author of The Indian World of George Washington.
“In his first term in office, Washington dined, often more than once, with Mohawks, Senecas, Oneidas, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Creeks,” Calloway wrote. “And he continued to dine with Indian delegates to the very end of his presidency: in the last week of November 1796, he dined with four groups of Indians on four different days.”
When the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian opened up its treaty exhibit it included a treaty actually signed by George Washington.
Suzan Harjo, Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee, who curated the exhibit, explained on a panel the significance of Washington and his direct involvement with the 1790 Muscogee Treaty. John Trumbull had just finished his famous painting. “ And George Washington wanted to play a joke on the Muscogee delegates. So he had Trumble set up the painting, and then Washington opened a door, and here he was standing next to himself.”
Harjo said you don’t think of Washington as having a sense of humor and it adds a whole new dimension. “I just think that’s pretty wonderful. They loved it. The Muscogee delegates loved it so much that they made a ceremony for it and changed the name of a tribal town, a Muscogee town to Nuyaka. “It’s the sound that they heard when they heard New York.”
John Quincy Adams, like Washington, had a keen interest in working with Indigenous people.
Adams tried to stop Georgia from harassing the Muscogee people who were being pressured by the state’s governor to give up their lands. Some Muscogee agreed to concessions, but Adams did not agree. He declared the treaty “null and void.” In a second treaty, the 1826 Treaty of Washington, Adams and the tribal leaders reached a less one-sided pact.
But Adam’s victory did not last long. He gave into the Georgians because he was afraid of a civil war. Nonetheless Adams remained a critic of the U.S. policy – he was not opposed to Indian removal from lands in the Southeastern United States – but argued that the treaty had to be upheld and lands could not be taken without consent.
The second president originally honored for President’s Day was Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps he was the most complicated of the American presidents.
Lincoln did not execute any generals or other top civil war leaders for treason or insurrection against the United States. Yet on Dec., 26, 1862, he ordered the death of 38 Dakotas by hanging in Mankato, Minnesota, after a short war where Dakota warriors attacked white villages trying to get food for their families.
The army gave Lincoln a list of 304 people that had been sentenced to execution. The president went through that list, striking off many names, leaving 38 to be hanged.
There was not a fair trial or any other judicial proceeding. Most of those arrested and charged did not speak English, let alone have legal counsel. The Dakotas who were executed represent the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
Lincoln was also a champion of Western expansion, promoting the transcontinental railroad as a way to consolidate “civilization.” Tribal people and nations were in the way.
There is another Lincoln story.
Spain’s King had sent symbolic canes to the pueblos as a recognition of sovereignty. At the urging of the U.S. government’s agent to the pueblos, Michael Steck, 19 ebony canes with silver tips with “A. Lincoln” were presented to pueblo governors.
The symbolism of the pueblo canes was not lost on Richard Nixon.
Nixon put the weight of the presidency behind the return of Taos Pueblo land taken by the U.S. Forest Service in 1906. And President Nixon sent a cane, like Lincoln’s, to the Taos leadership.
Nixon’s accomplishments include the return of Blue Lake and his presidential message rejecting termination and instead recognizing tribal self-determination. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act was a legal redefinition of that policy. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act – which some call the last major treaty – was completed in the Nixon years.
It was during the administration of Gerald Ford, however, that the Indian Health Care Improvement Act was signed into law. The new White House staff even suggested Ford break from Nixon and veto the message. A physician in the White House, Dr. Ted Marrs, pleaded with the president to do the right thing.
“I am signing S. 522, the Indian Health Care Improvement Act,” President Gerald R. Ford wrote on Oct. 1, 1976. “This bill is not without its faults, but after personal review, I have decided that the well-documented needs for improvement in Indian health manpower, services and facilities outweigh the defects in the bill. I am signing this bill because of my own conviction that our first Americans should not be last in opportunity.”
President Barack Obama would pretty much own any presidential list of moments because his presence was more significant than any president since Washington’s dinners.
The story starts with candidate Obama when he made a promise at Crow Agency in 2008 to initiate a government-to-government meeting at the White House.
President Obama made more visits to Indigenous communities than any other president. He visited Crow Agency before his election in May 2008.
Then a visit to Standing Rock in June 2014.
“I know that throughout history, the United States often didn’t give the nation-to-nation relationship the respect that it deserved. So I promised when I ran to be a president who changed that. A president who honors our sacred trust and who respects your sovereignty and who upholds treaty obligations and who works with you in a spirit of true partnership in mutual respect to give our children the future that they deserve,” Obama said. “And today, I’m proud that the government-to-government relationship between Washington and tribal nations is stronger than ever. You see, my administration is determined to partner with tribes. And it’s not something that just happens once in a while. It takes place every day on just about every issue that touches your lives. And that’s what real nation-to-nation partnerships look like.”
In September 2015 Obama made a trip to Alaska and is the first president to travel above the Arctic Circle. He talked about climate change and visited with Alaska Native leaders, elders and young people.
Most presidents failed badly when it came to fair dealings with Indigenous people.
Thomas Jefferson was a contradiction. His vision was a country that was a “garden of boundless fertility” and a Republic that was free. In his rough draft of the Declaration of Independence he wrote: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident: that all Men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inherent and* [certain] inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness …”
Then a few paragraphs later, Jefferson complained about British rule because the king “has [excited domestic insurrection among us, & has] endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, & conditions of existence.”
This was the Jefferson who would dig up Indigenous human remains in the name of science. The Jefferson who owned and raped human beings. Jefferson had a contempt for a world he did not understand.
Jefferson should also get credit as the architect for one of the most brutal stories in American history, Indian removal. Long before Andrew Jackson, Jefferson wrote in 1776 that the only resolution between settlers and the Cherokee Nation was genocide. “Nothing will reduce those wretches so soon as pushing war into the heart of the country. But I would not stop there,” he wrote. “I would never cease pursuing them while one of them remained on this side of the Mississippi.”
Indeed, as president, his official policy was the “preservation of peace” and “obtaining lands.”
After all: Jefferson did grow up in a real estate family.
And if Jefferson was a contradiction, that idea was expanded by the presidency of Andrew Jackson.
A few years ago I was at the Hermitage – Jackson’s home in Nashville – with John Seigenthaler who introduced me to the historian Robert Remeni, the author of several books about Jackson.
Remini saw Andrew Jackson as the first American president (he was also the first president to be photographed) saying that those who had come before were essentially still European in thought and dress. But Jackson was from the frontier.
The historian also saw Jackson’s Indian policy as necessary; the idea that Indians had to be separated from the white population in order to survive.
We got into a heated debate. (Seigenthaler, the former editor of the Nashville Tennessean, loved the back and forth. He teased me about the exchange for years afterward.)
In 2004, Remini published “Jackson and his Indian Wars,” a history of the complicated relationship that defined his life and presidency.
What struck me as odd was how personal the connections were then. Tribal leaders visited Jackson at his home. I suppose they debated policy there, much like my encounter with Remini.
And Jackson’s personal history is so interesting. His life was saved by Cherokee warriors during the battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814.
Yet Jackson ignored a Supreme Court decision and ordered the removal of Cherokee. (One side note: Remini says Jackson never said: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” The historian said Jackson did not have to do anything. The state of Georgia was essentially carrying out the policy. The first citation for Jackson’s response came in Horace Greeley’s “The American Conflict, A History of the Great Rebellion” published in 1864. Greeley said the source was Governor George N. Briggs, of Massachusetts, “who was in Washington as a member of Congress when the decision was rendered.”
The quote, however, works because it did capture Jackson’s hostility to the court and its reasoning. Jackson was for state’s rights, period.
In the 1828 State of the Union (then more of a statement than a live production), Jackson made it clear he was taking Georgia’s side over the Cherokee Nation.
“These States, claiming to be the only sovereigns within their territories, extended their laws over the Indians, which induced the latter to call upon the United States for protection,” he wrote. “Georgia became a member of the Confederacy which eventuated in our Federal Union as a sovereign State, always asserting her claim to certain limits, which, having been originally defined in her colonial charter and subsequently recognized in the treaty of peace, she has ever since continued to enjoy, except as they have been circumscribed by her own voluntary transfer of a portion of her territory to the United States in the articles of cession of 1802.”
And just to make certain that his message was clear. Jackson ticked off other states where he thought the tribal interest should be subservient.
The president wrote: “Would the people of Maine permit the Penobscot tribe to erect an independent government within their State? And unless they did would it not be the duty of the General Government to support them in resisting such a measure? Would the people of New York permit each remnant of the six Nations within her borders to declare itself an independent people under the protection of the United States? Could the Indians establish a separate republic on each of their reservations in Ohio? And if they were so disposed would it be the duty of this Government to protect them in the attempt? If the principle involved in the obvious answer to these questions be abandoned, it will follow that the objects of this Government are reversed, and that it has become a part of its duty to aid in destroying the States which it was established to protect.”
He then told Congress that he “informed the Indians” that tribal self-government would not be permitted “and advised them to emigrate beyond the Mississippi.” That would be to the Indian Territory. Later the Twin Territories. And now Oklahoma.
Thousands of people died on that tragic highway, the trail of tears.
Other presidents have visited tribal communities.
President Chester Arthur was likely the first president to formally visit a tribal nation. He traveled to Wind River, Wyoming, 1883, during a two-month fishing trip. This trip could have gone really badly. The president and his delegation met with Chief Washakie, Eastern Shoshone, Chief Black Coal, Northern Arapaho, to talk about a proposal in the Senate for an early version of termination and dividing up the reservation into “tenure in common” or private ownership. The response from Wind River was an unequivocal “no.”
Warren Harding was the first to visit Alaska in 1923, stopping at Metlakatla.
Calvin Coolidge signed the Citizenship Act in 1924, making American Indians citizens. Really. But this law was enacted in the name of assimilation, not Indian rights.
Franklin Roosevelt visited at least three reservations, only once speaking on Indian Affairs. He traveled to Quinault in Washington state, Blackfeet, Montana, and Cherokee, North Carolina. (He was also photographed with a tribal leader in North Dakota.)
Harry S. Truman was president when he stopped on the Fort Peck reservation in 1952 as part of his whistle stop train campaign. He was met by Assiniboine leaders. He was given a pipe to smoke. Montana Rep. Mike Mansfield, who was also on the platform, told the Native representatives, “The President doesn’t smoke. What he did here was for the first time.”
President Bill Clinton was the first president to invite lots of tribal leaders to the White House on April 29, 1994. He said: “My administration has worked in partnership with tribal leaders … to protect American Indian religious freedom, promote tribal self-determination, preserve tribal natural resources and provide economic opportunities for Native Americans. I look forward to continuing this government-to-government relationship in order to build on the progress we have made in Indian Country.”
Clinton also made two presidential trips, one to Pine Ridge and another to Shiprock.
Ronald Reagan went to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to meet tribal leaders in 1985. One extraordinary meeting was in the presidential suite at the Hilton where Reagan, Ivan Sidney and Peterson Zah talked about the Navajo-Hopi dispute.
Presidential trivia: President Herbert Hoover lived as a child in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Hoover wrote in a letter: “I attended school with the Indians appropriate to my size. They were of course being taught English. I and my cousins were mostly interested in learning Osage.”
At least two presidents can claim adoption. Calvin Coolidge in 1927 by Chauncy Yellow Robe, Sicangu, in Deadwood, South Dakota. And Obama by Hartford “Sonny” Black Eagle Jr, Crow Nation.
There is often a narrative about commemoration holidays. Don’t just enjoy the day. Take time to reflect on sacrifice, etc. I suppose that’s true for President’s Day too. It’s just more complicated.
Mark Trahant, Shoshone-Bannock, is editor-at-large for Indian Country Today. On Twitter: @TrahantReports Trahant is based in Phoenix. The Indigenous Economics Project is funded with a major grant from the Bay and Paul Foundations.