The Indian Problem (1887)

BY REVEREND JONATHAN BAXTER HARRISON

EVERY particular reservation and tribe or company of Indians will have to be examined, studied, and dealt with by itself, at least at first. The Indians cannot be understood, nor successfully managed and controlled in detail from a distance. That is the fatal defect of the present system and methods. . . .

Meanwhile . . . the powers of Indian agents should be enlarged, their office made more important, with better pay, so as to make it practicable for men of high character and ability to enter the service on the reservations, and to continue in it while they are successful. I do not think the agency and reservation system should be at once abolished. On the contrary, I think it will be necessary to the very end of our work with the Indians as a separate and special class. The reservation system can be so administered as to prepare the way for its own extinction, by guiding the Indians into conditions in which reservations and agents will no longer be necessary. It is so administered, in many cases, at present, as to provide for and require its own permanent perpetuation. The methods of administration maintain and reproduce the conditions and forces which hold the Indians in an undeveloped and parasitic state of life. . . .

What is the Indian problem? Set forth plainly, without confusing rhetoric or sentimentality, it is the question how the Indians shall be brought to a condition of self-support, and of equal rights before the taw, in which they will no longer require the special protection and control of the Government.

The problem has its alternative. If the Indians are not so instructed, educated and guided that they shall become self-sustaining, industrious and law-abiding citizens, they must inevitably sink to a condition of permanent pauperism, and re-enforce, almost in a body, whatever vicious and disintegrating tendencies already exist in our great Western communities. We have more than 250,000 Indians in our country. They are not scattered or distributed in all parts of it. There are enough of them in various restricted regions and districts to become an intolerable curse to the white communities for all time to come, and a burden which will always cripple and depress their vitality. So far as I can now judge, this appears to be the most probable destiny for most of the Indians, unless the people of the country interpose to prevent it.

It will probably be said by and by that nothing better could be done with the Indians or for them. But nobody can know that this is true; for no reasonable or practical system of management adapted to their guidance through their transition to the conditions of civilized life, has ever been tried. The Indians generally have never had, have not now, and, as I think, are not likely ever to have, what would be half a fair chance or just opportunity for any class of people.

The popular creed on the subject, which clothes itself with the solemn sanctions and imperial authority of science is, that the Indian is doomed and fated to fade away, by reason of his inherent inferiority to the white man. Well, let him fade. Nobody need mourn if any race, justly treated, and with reasonable opportunity for self-perpetuation, comes to an end because its vitality is exhausted and its puny and vanishing representatives no longer reproduce their kind. When a race perishes thus it is time for it to go. But when people numbering hundreds of thousands are destroyed on their own soil by the richest and strongest nation under the sun, crushed and exterminated by means of falsehood and theft, of mountainous fraud and ferocious murder, I do not call that fading out. It is altogether a different matter.

My controversy with a very large proportion of the American people regarding this subject is exactly this: They appear to believe that because we are strong enough to trample upon and destroy the Indians, and there is nobody to call us to account, we may safely do so. I doubt that. I do not believe it. I do not pretend to understand the laws which govern the social world and the course of forces and events in the life of men. But it seems to me that it is by no means plain that we can safely do such deliberate and outrageous wrong. How do people know that it will be safe and profitable, and that there will be no retribution to weary and haunt us by and by? I do not believe they know at all. They are so greedy for the Indian land, poor as most of it is, that they are willing to leave to their children the added burden of a pauper population of a quarter of a million Indians, idle, vicious and criminal, rather than take the trouble to consider the subject, and to institute a policy which would be best and safest for the white people of the country.

The Indian problem will never be decided rightly until the business men of the country take it up, and apply business principles and methods to its investigation and solution. There is no need of rhetoric or sentimentality in treating the subject sensibly and practically. It would be just as well to vary the terms of the problem so that it would stand thus: What policy, system and methods of management in the conduct of Indian affairs would be best for the white people of the country? The conclusion would be equally favorable to the Indians, though we should make no distinct claim on their behalf. Of all our people, those of our great and growing Western communities have most at stake in this matter. But we are all one nation, and our business men everywhere should give attention to this pressing and rapidly developing state of things, and should take the matter into their own hands, it will take time and money, but it will save more.

J. B. Harrison, (Philadelphia, 1887), 166–173 passim.