Indigenous Peoples and the American Presidency

 

Since the founding of the United States, Native people have found themselves in the separate but unequal position of “domestic dependent nations [Cherokee Nation v. Georgia].” More often than not, that curious status has left the President of the United States to adjudicate congressional actions in respect to Indian affairs. That is because the Constitution, in Article II, Section 2, decrees that the President “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.” Native communities are nations separate from the U.S.; therefore, since the country’s founding, they have treated with the U.S. in much the same way that France and Mexico do, and because their citizens were not U.S. citizens until 1924, an individual native person’s place in American politics has been, at best, ambiguous.*

No wonder Presidential elections are viewed with great interest in Indian Country.

A survey of presidential actions towards Native peoples in the U.S. presents a volatile history at best. George Washington, who fought against and alongside Haudenosaunee warriors in the American Revolution, entertained a profoundly ambivalent attitude toward federal Indian policy.

On the one hand, Washington needed Indian allies during the fledgling days of the republic. They were his main buffer against French and English interests in the Old Northwest and Great Lakes regions. On the other, Washington had palpable property interests in Native lands, especially those in upstate New York, and often sided with land companies against Native people in disputes over rights of way and development.

It was Thomas Jefferson, however, who really laid the groundwork for a century of presidential assaults on Indian sovereignty. Because he was a profoundly conflicted man when it came to race and American “genius,” Jefferson was simultaneous fascinated with Native Americans and pragmatically opposed to their survival. In the only book he ever published, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), he went out of his way to praise the oratory of the Lenni Lenapi (Delaware) leader Logan, who delivered a famous speech decrying the wholesale slaughter of his family by whites. At the same time, he carefully crafted an imaginary American type, the Anglo-Saxon “yeoman farmer,” who would absorb all the good stuff in the Indian’s world—woodcraft, naturalness, democratic nobility—and then went about planning to rid the whole eastern U.S. of real Indians so that these imaginary ones could take their place.

The history of presidential stewardship of Indian Affairs within the U.S. largely follows Jefferson’s vision. Indian fighters became the staple of presidential campaigns, and slogans like “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” (celebrating the defeat of the Shawnee leader, Tenskwatawa) rang out as political endorsements rooted in racial hatred and genocide.

The worst of them all, Andrew Jackson, pushed The Indian Removal Act through Congress in 1830. It declared

it shall and may be lawful for the President of the United States to cause so much of any territory belonging to the United States, west of the river Mississippi, not included in any state or organized territory, and to which the Indian title has been extinguished, as he may judge necessary, to be divided into a suitable number of districts, for the reception of such tribes or nations of Indians as may choose to exchange the lands where they now reside, and remove there; and to cause each of said districts to be so described by natural or artificial marks, as to be easily distinguished from every other.

On the face of it, this sounds downright gentlemanly—“exchange” of lands, which Indians “may choose.” The reality on the ground was altogether different. 

In 1838, a young non-Native private in the U.S. Army witnessed first-hand what the “exchange” looked like. Late in his life, John Burnett penned this short memoir for his family:

Being acquainted with many of the Indians and able to fluently speak their language, I was sent as interpreter into the Smoky Mountain Country in May, 1838, and witnessed the execution of the most brutal order in the History of American Warfare. I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point into the stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and forty-five wagons and started toward the west . . . Many of these helpless people did not have blankets and many of them had been driven from home barefooted. On the morning of November the 17th we encountered a terrific sleet and snow storm with freezing temperatures and from that day until we reached the end of the fateful journey on March the 26th, 1839, the sufferings of the Cherokees were awful. The trail of the exiles was a trail of death. They had to sleep in the wagons and on the ground without fire. And I have known as many as twenty-two of them to die in one night of pneumonia due to ill treatment, cold, and exposure.

Here’s a bullet point list of some significant Presidential actions in Indian County

• James Monroe–1823 framed a model of U.S. hegemony over the whole of the Western Hemisphere.
• Called the Monroe Doctrine, it would have a disastrous impact on the lives of indigenous peoples in Central and South America.

• Abraham Lincoln–1862 The President who would sign the Emancipation Proclamation, also signed the execution orders for 38 Dakota men who allegedly perpetrated atrocities during the Dakota War in Minnesota. This was the largest mass hanging in U.S. history.

• Ulysses S. Grant tried to take the lead in stabilizing the “Indian Problem” after the Civil War by having his administration draft a nation-wide Peace Policy towards Native Americans. In it, he parceled out the various tribes to the several Christian missionary societies for help in their assimilation.

• In 1871, Congress passed legislation that completely ended the practice of the United States entering into treaties with Indian tribes.

Between 1871 and 1890, the federal government tacked between the forces of Indian hating and assimilationism, passing laws that mandated schooling for Indian children (often by shipping them to far-off academies), the individual partition of formerly corporately held tribal lands, and the outlawing traditional religious ceremonies.

By 1890, the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre, Native American population figures were at their lowest since having been collected.

Teddy Roosevelt—In his 1903 book, The Winning of the West, wrote: “The truth is, the Indians never had any real title to the soil.” As President in 1909,” issued eight proclamations which transferred 15 million acres of Indian timber on reservations created by Executive Order to adjacent national forests. The reservations included Fort Apache, Mescalero, Jicarilla, San Carlos, Zuni, Hoopa Valley, Tule River, and Navajo.”*

The 1920s, however, witnessed a rebounding of indigenous populations and their political power.

• Calvin Coolidge—In 1924 signed The Indian Citizen Act, spurred in part by the very active role Native men played in the U.S. military during WWI, and the efforts of the Society of American Indians, a national organization of Native activists.
  

  Coolidge with Osage leaders in 1924.

• Franklin D Roosevelt—The New Deal sponsored the Indian Reorganization Act in 1933, designed to return tribal governance to the tribes.

• Dwight Eisenhower—1958, affirmed U.S. “Termination” policy, commenting, “I HAVE TODAY signed H.R. 2828 which provides for the method of terminating Federal supervision over the property and affairs of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin on December 31, 1958. This bil, . . . is the first to be enacted into law as an outgrowth of the Congressional policy on Indian affairs which was embodied in House Concurrent Resolution No. 108 adopted last summer. That policy calls for termination of Federal supervision over the affairs of each Indian tribe as soon as it is ready for independent management of its own affairs.”

• Lyndon Johnson—The 1965 Voting Rights Ac reaffirmed the enfranchisement of thousands of Native voters who had been turned away from the polls since 1924.
• 

  Diné (Navajo) voters registering in 1948. Native voting was barred in several states until the Voting Rights Act.

• Richard Nixon—In 1970 issued a public renunciation of the termination policy. He also established the Environmental Protection Agency, which would be an ally in many tribes’ fight for toxic waste cleanup and environmental justice. In South America, however, the Monroe Doctrine would bolster the Nixon administration’s efforts to check communist expansion in the region, leading to the death and dislocation of many indigenous people.

• Jimmy Carter—In 1978 signed The American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which stated the federal government would “protect and preserve for American Indians their inherent rights of freedom to believe, express, and exercise” their traditional religions. He also signed the Indian Child Welfare Act in The act, which came in response to a disproportionately high rate of Indian children being removed from their traditional homes and placed with non-Indian families, established jurisdiction for the placement of Indian children in foster or adoptive care.

• Ronald Reagan— Signed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988. Like Nixon, Reagan’s anticommunist covert activities in Central America led to the deaths of thousands of indigenous peoples in the region.

• George H.W. Bush—Signed NAGPRA into law in 1990.

• Barack Obama—Initiated a yearly Tribal Nations Summit at the White House, and President signed the Executive order 13592: Improving American Indian and Alaska Native Educational Opportunities and Strengthening Tribal Colleges and Universities.
  

  President Obama receives the “Rhythm of the Land Blanket” and Cedar Hat from Brian Cladoosby, the leader of the National Congress of American Indians.

• President-elect Donald Trump—With no record as either an elected official or a member of the military, there’s little information about how the President-elect will approach Indian affairs. In 1993, however, when testifying before a House subcommittee about corruption in Indian gaming, he made these comments:

Further Reading

• see also, The Commerce Clause refers to Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.” [https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/commerce_clause]
• on TR, see Net Roots (nativeamerican roots.net)
• “Birthday Story of Private John G. Burnett, Captain Abraham McClellan’s Company, 2nd Regiment, 2nd Brigade, Mounted Infantry, Cherokee Indian Removal, 1838–39.” http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newnation/4532
• The Monroe Doctrine [https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=23]
• On Carter: Read more athttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/09/27/jimmy-carter-signed-icwa-law-165879