Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/556

536 The course of our Government, for the full hundred years, in its dealings with the Indians, has been mischievously tentative, experimental, inconsistent, and wavering, — adopting now one theory and course of action, and following one or another method to secure it; then substituting a different idea or aim; next abandoning them, and reverting to its former view, or devising a third; and, finally, confessing itself baffled, as if it knew not what might wisely and rightly be aimed for, or had undertaken a task for which it was incompetent.

It is no longer than twelve years since, in 1871, that our Government recognized the fact that a radical and fatal error, fundamental and comprehensive in all its elements of mistake and harm, had up to that date vitiated all its policy towards the Indians. It is yet to be tested whether the terms in which the recognition of that error was made, and the perpetuity which was assured by those terms to some of the troublesome contracts under that policy, will avail to set the matter in the right way for the future. An Act of Congress in 1871 forbade the recognition any longer of Indian tribes or nations as independent powers in the sense of being capable of forming treaty relations with us; while the same Act did not invalidate, but confirmed, the lawfulness and force of all existing treaties. Now, is this recent legislation to be taken as an admission of a radical error in the action of our Government up to that year in having regarded the Indians as independent powers with whom, as with European and other nations, we might make treaties; or as simply a recognition of a change in the status of the Indians which had been brought about by time and circumstances? Probably we may refer the enactment for its grounds and reasons to both of these explanations.

The Hon. E. S. Parker, before referred to, himself an Indian of marked abilities, in his report as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, in 1869, addressed to the Hon. J. D.