Since you probably think that a blog post written by an American Indian complaining about President’s Day may be a little biased. I will let the facts speak for themselves about some of Presidents honored by this holiday.
George Washington
According to American historian David E. Stannard, the father of our country did not seem to like American Indians very much. In 1783, he compared American Indians to wolves when he proclaimed, “Both being beast of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.”
It appears that the “scorched earth policy” so brilliantly implemented by General William Sherman during a Civil War between mostly white people, was first implemented in American warfare by generals under Washington’s command. While attacking the Iroquois people, the tribe whose constitution was copied by the Founding Fathers, Washington ordered Major General John Sullivan in 1779 to “lay waste to all the settlements around...that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed.” Washington also instructed Sullivan to not “listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected.”
Stannard reminds us that Washington was a huge advocate of exterminating American Indians as evidenced by his troop’s practice of skinning the bodies of dead Iroquois. I bet you thought American Indians were the first ones to initiate scalping and dismemberment. The skin removed from the hips down was often used as boot straps or leggings and as a commecial practice at the time, these body parts were known as Redskins.
The memory of this human mutilation is now memorialized in the team name of the professional football team in Washington, DC-Redskins. The most offensive racial slur you could ever utter against an American Indian.
American Indians who were lucky enough to endure the military exploits of Washington gave our country’s first president the nickname “Town Destroyer.” Stannard noted that 28 to 30 Seneca tribal settlements were also destroyed by Washington and his combatants.
Thomas Jefferson
Stannard also included Jefferson in the prestigious group of Presidents who felt American Indians should be vanquished from the country they discovered. Jefferson’s War Department in 1807 had explicit instructions from this slave owner that any Indian resistance should be met with “the hatchet.” Jefferson further opined, “And...if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or is driven beyond the Mississippi, we shall destroy all of them.”
Jefferson was also in total agreement with Washington on the animalistic nature of American Indians when he described them as “nothing human except the shape” as well as” merciless savages.”
Abraham Lincoln
Even the President who freed the slaves could not see fit to view American Indians in the category of people who are created equal.
Dee Brown in his book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, talks about how Lincoln was responsible for the largest mass execution in US History. In 1862, Lincoln commissioned the hanging of 38 Dakota Sioux prisoners in Makato, MN. Charged with crimes with little proof, many of these captives were non-violent cultural or religious leaders of their Tribe.
Lincoln also had the audacity in 1863 to say to a group of American Indian Chiefs who were visiting him in Washington, DC, “We are not as a race so much disposed to fight and kill one another as our Red Brethren.” These American Indians must have been puzzled by such a statement since by that time, 300,000 had died during the Civil War that happened on Lincoln’s watch.
Lincoln signed the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 which guaranteed the loss of land, natural resources, culture and language for American Indians.
Lincoln’s Indian Office to be later called the Bureau of Indian Affairs never took their government to government relationship seriously with Tribes which led to corruption among Indian agents who often stole provisions and other resources earmarked for American Indians.
The 1863 Lincoln administration was responsible for the removal of Navajos and Mescalero Apaches from the New Mexico Territory. By the time a treaty had been signed, nearly 2,000 Navajos died as a result of this relocation. Some folks call this Lincoln’s “Trail of Tears.”
W. Dale Mason describes Lincoln’s policy toward American Indians as one of “wards of the government.” He never viewed the civil rights of American Indians in the same way he viewed civil rights for African Americans. For American Indians, there was no Emancipation Proclamation under Lincoln.
Theodore Roosevelt
Lest we forget the fourth face on Mount Rushmore, the “Rough Rider” Teddy Roosevelt.
Even white historians agree that Roosevelt held the following biases against Native people:
- The US was generous to the Indians, paying them many times what their land was worth.
- Indians broke just as many treaties as white men did.
- That just and honorable nations like the US can break treaties whenever they choose.
- That international law and morality don’t apply to indigenous people.
- It was US policy to kill and conquer Indians and take their land.
Here are just some of the nasty things Roosevelt had to say about my ancestors:
- All the men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of wild beasts with which they held joint ownership.
- It is as idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality which obtain between stable and cultured communities.
- The most righteous of all wars is a war with savages.
- In their paint and their cheap, dirty finery, these savages did not look very important.
- The ravages committed by these skulking parties of murderous braves were monotonous in their horror.
- Indians are reckless, revengeful, fiendishly cruel, they rob and murder.
- We need not waste our time in dealing with any sentimentalist who believes that, on account of any abstract principle, it would have been right to leave this continent to the domain, the hunting ground of squalid savages. It had to be taken by the white race.
- The General Allotment Act is a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.
- The truth is the Indians never had any real title to the soil.
How will I celebrate President’s Day-as a good day to be alive? Thankful to have survived the legacies of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt. That is something worth celebrating.
