Part 16

But in 1911 two things had not been finished, and one important thing was only vaguely planned. There was no fixed policy for the development of the reserve, and no one had succeeded in breaking the power of Youkeoma, that hostile witch-doctor who had made trouble since 1887. One could not hope to succeed without the first, and the success of the first depended largely on the second. The health work had been sporadic, and was ineffective without a hospital. My predecessor had procured an allotment of eight thousand dollars with which to construct one, whereas thirty thousand—considering Service methods—would not have been too large a sum.

I felt that a consistent policy of control was vitally necessary; that the country and the people in it, both whites and Indians, must be brought under strict regulation; that Youkeoma’s influence must be broken; and I proposed to use the eight thousand dollars, plus whatever additional sum I could talk out of Washington, plus the resources of the reserve in cheap labor, stone, sand, and equipment, mixed with something approximating brains, to have a hospital that would be a benefit to the Indians and a credit to the Service, which too often has constructed buildings that were neither.

Regulation and control required only horse-sense and a little vision. Resolution and earnestness, accompanied by justice and fair-dealing, make a combination that few Indians can resist. The man who fails in the Southwest Indian country is the one who ignores his people’s conception of fair play, and who forgets to keep his word. There have been white men among the Hopi-Navajo who, unmindful of their own two thousand years of background, proposed to correct everything in an afternoon. Discovered in 1540, brought under supervision in the recent eighties, it was and is too big a job for an afternoon.

And why not view with sympathetic consideration the problems of the Indian who, having little education and no vote, being practically as inarticulate as a deaf-mute, childish and incompetent, must trust someone, and is inclined to trust the only official he knows?

Why not be a decent Indian Agent, out of respect for one’s self?

There are relatively few people who know that the United States Indian Service has a history, a tradition as it were, to be honored and lived up to. Few men in the service have the lively curiosity and interest in their charges that is necessary for success among primitive peoples, few who rise above personal prejudice, who can resist feeble enmity. There have been the early-day McLaughlins, Sheltons, and Carrolls, each of whom built himself a Service name by one efficient means or another; but those men have been in the minority.

Now the Army officer has a tradition, and the Naval officer has one. Why ought not other Government officials to view their commissions on as high a plane? Should a reader interpose to mention “scandals”—why, to be sure; there have been many; but they have not destroyed the Indian, and they have not ruined the Service. All Departments of the Government have had scandals of greater or less degree. There was a certain Arnold, an army officer of very high rank; but we need not go back so far. There was enough doing in the year of grace, nineteen hundred and twenty-four, and enough is sometimes too much. There have been timber scandals, and land scandals, and oil scandals, as the wealth of the Indian country has been exploited. And there is the scandal—or should be—of manipulation of individual Indian moneys. And the scandal of keeping inefficients in office. And some Indian Agents have gone to jail, and some should be there, accompanied by those who have protected them. All true, and granted. Nevertheless, the body of them have an honorable tradition as old as the United States itself.

In 1786, in the Articles of Confederation, consideration was given to Indian affairs. Two superintendents were provided for, who had the “comprehension” of all nations of Indians south of the Ohio River and all west of the Hudson. Their exact “comprehension” was no doubt much smaller than their outlined territories.

The Federal Constitution of 1788 deemed it important that the Central Government should have exclusive power over intercourse with Indian tribes. The Supreme Court of the United States later amplified this to include everything that may arise out of our relations with the Indians.

Congress in 1789 appropriated the first moneys to defray expenses of negotiating and treating with the Indians. While the Commissioners were referred to as “agents,” their authorities did not extend beyond treating with the native.

George Washington, in a letter dated August 29, 1789, instructed Messrs. Benjamin Lincoln, Cyrus Griffin, and David Humphrey as “commissioners plenipotentiary for negotiating and concluding treaties of peace with the independent tribes or nations of Indians within the limits of the United States south of the Ohio River.” This commission made a report to the Secretary of War, and from its suggestions grew the licensed-trader system, although the first traders acted as factors, and to some extent as agents, for the tribes with which they were affiliated.

Congress in 1790 provided a method for trading with the Indian tribes under license, but no Indian Agents would appear to have been authorized, as such, by law prior to 1796, when were established the trading-houses on the western and southern frontiers, or in the Indian country, and the appointment of men to manage them under the direction of the President.

The factors were the first real Agents for routine Indian business. This was the first experiment. The law limited it to two years, but its life was extended from time to time until 1822, when the system of Government trading-houses was abolished.

Acts of 1800, 1802, and 1806 provided for other experiments; and after 1806 there were actually four types of Indian officials:

1. Governors of the various Territories, who were ex-officio superintendents of Indian Affairs within their jurisdictions.

2. Certain Agents who were primarily under the direction of these Governors.

3. A Superintendent of Indian Trade.

4. The Factors under his direction.

When in 1819 and 1820 Congress provided for the employment of persons to educate the Indians, the appointment of Agents to specific tribes began.

When the trading-house system expired in 1822, the factors disappeared. Indian trade is conducted to-day by licensed traders, who are under bond, and expected to live within Indian country.

In 1824 the Secretary of War, without authority, organized a Bureau of Indian Affairs, probably to ease his main office of details; and eight years later the President was authorized by Congress to appoint a Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

The Act of 1834 conferred upon the officers of Indian country the authorities they invoke to-day with respect to control of the native and those who may seek to oppress him. This Act did not apply to the Territories of Oregon, Utah, and New Mexico. The Agents for the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico were handicapped in their work until 1913, when the Supreme Court of the United States clarified that situation by the Sandoval decision.

In the early days, army officers were designated to perform the duties of Indian Agents, and the Indians were brought under strict military rule; and this, taken in connection with the imperative language of the laws enacted, tended further to increase the powers of the Agent.

By an Act of 1847, directing distribution of annuities and treaty goods, most Indians were brought to a condition of complete dependence on the central Government. If prior thereto they had enjoyed any civil liberty, the fragment was taken from them. Many looked to the guardian even for food, and when the guardian was aware of him—most Southwest groups were outside this soup-kitchen zone—it was provided. And then came opportunity to those who made a scandal of the “ration” days, and presented Robert Louis Stevenson and other brilliant sentimentalists with a slur from which the honest Indian Agent has suffered. Wherever the Government had cognizance of an Indian, he was a child without rights other than those his Agent permitted him to enjoy. As late as 1922, acting as a Sioux Agent, and being overwhelmed a thousand times daily by the emasculated title of Major, I signed many permits allowing old warriors to leave the so-called Reservation—it was really a sanctuary for whites—for trading- and visiting-trips, a long-obsolete bit of red tape that the vanquished one still recognized. I could not very well have prevented his going without a permit, but as he saw fit to believe in the old system, I signed the papers cheerfully. At least those older majors of the army had instilled into the elder Sioux a respect and obedience, without destroying their pride or confidence.

In 1849 the Department of the Interior was organized, and it was authorized to have supervisory and appellate powers in Indian Affairs theretofore exercised by the Secretary of War. The Secretary of the Interior became head of the Indian Department, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs acting under him.

The local control of reservations remained quite the same. Native police were authorized in 1878, but the Agent continued to be sole judge of the guilt or innocence of Indians charged with offenses. In 1883 the Courts of Indian Offenses were devised, an idealistic experiment, no doubt originating in the far East. It was hoped to encourage the Indian somehow to discipline himself. But it has proved farcical, and when used at all is a mere instrument in the hands of the Agent. During the past fourteen years I have had charge of four Indian reserves: the “Moqui,”—now correctly named Hopi,—where are many Navajo; the Pueblo; the Crow Creek Sioux; and the Colorado River Mohave; these extended into five states, comprising a total population of 14,000 Indians of six different tribes and many local divisions; and among all these natives I have found but one Indian having the requisite intelligence and unprejudiced standpoint to warrant his presiding as a Judge of the Indian Court. It would be unfair not to name this man. He is Pablo Abeita, of the Isleta tribe of Tihua—Pueblo—Indians in New Mexico. And after years of loyalty to his honored Agents (not all of them were honored) he has reaped as his reward tribal enemies, and political and civil ones. The one man who proved the value of the experiment was made the goat. Such are the fruits of idealism, preserved by new leaders who come staggering under many inventions for the benefit of Poor Lo.

These historical facts have been briefed from an article entitled “The Evolution of the Indian Agent,” written by the late Kenneth F. Murchison, one-time Chief Law Clerk for the Office of Indian Affairs, and printed in the Commissioner’s Annual Report for 1892. The writer closed with this significant statement:

The Indian Agent now has almost absolute power in the Indian country, and so far as the people over whom he rules are concerned, he has none to contest his power. Appointed at first in the capacity of a commercial agent or consul of the United States in the country of an alien people, the Indian Agent, under laws enacted and regulations promulgated, has developed into an officer with power to direct the affairs of the Indians and to transact their business in all details and in all relations.

This is a very curious chapter in our history. There is a striking contrast between “ministers plenipotentiary” appointed by the United States to treat with powerful Indian nations, and an army officer, with troops at his command, installed over a tribe of Indians to maintain among them an absolute military despotism. Yet our policy of dealing with Indians has swung from one of these extremes to the other in a strangely vacillating way. Indeed at present (1892) the Agent among the Five Civilized Tribes performs rather the functions of a consul in a foreign nation than those of an agent.... On the other hand, the absolute military rule finds its illustration in the present condition of things at San Carlos (Arizona) and in a modified way at Pine Ridge (South Dakota).

Now the superficially informed person will arise to declaim that this is ancient history. It is true this was written concerning conditions of and prior to 1892. But only recently were the troops removed from Fort Apache in the country adjacent to San Carlos; and very recently we have had cause to regret that the authorities of the Agent for the Five Civilized Tribes were ever revoked. The Indian Agent for the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, considering their recognized forms of tribal government that the United States Courts have sustained, should perform the functions of a consul, plus all the duties of an Agent. It is difficult for the average appointee to perceive this subtle distinction.

And should the superficially informed person visit the Southwest and a closed Indian reservation, to witness the Snake Dance of the Hopi, for instance; to view one of the pageants of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico; or to hunt on Apache grounds,—and always providing that such Indians have an Agent not afraid of his political shadow, he will find that the supervision and control of the Indians, and of the superficially informed person, is based on the authorities related, which have not been revoked, and which any Indian Agent may invoke at any time he thinks necessary. In Arizona the State Legislature has granted additional powers to Indian Agents, as the residents of this colossal State have no false ideas with respect to its Indian inhabitants, and wish them managed in the most efficacious way consistent with justice.

As instances, Arizona has these laws:

CIVIL CODE.

Section 3837: “All marriages of persons of Caucasian blood, or their descendants, with negroes, Mongolians or Indians, and their descendants, shall be null and void.”

Section 3839: “All marriages valid by the laws of the place where contracted, shall be valid in this state; PROVIDED, that all marriages solemnized in any other state or country by parties intending at the time to reside in this state shall have the same legal consequences and effect as if solemnized in this state; parties residing in this state cannot evade any of the provisions of its laws as to marriage by going into another state or country for the solemnization of the marriage ceremony.”

Arizona and its people have no desire for a population of half-breeds; and it is a pity that not all the sovereign States of the Union have been filled with an equal pride. There is one State where it has been found to be necessary to proscribe by law the usage of the term “squaw man.”

While the Agents of to-day have not the military with which to coerce obedience, they have, as Stevenson once wrote of dogs, a strong sense of their rightness and superior position in action. The moral authority is theirs, and the legal means has not been emasculated.

The Regulations for the Indian Service, dated 1904, and unamended in so far as control of closed reservations is concerned, were based very largely on the Act of 1834. Since these regulations were issued, the Indian Agents have been engulfed by 2000 additional rules, advices, warnings, sermons, and remonstrances; but no modification of law-and-order guides has been encountered; and these original regulations have been consistently sustained by the United States District Courts.

An Indian of the Enchanted Empire may be dealt with by his Agent as surely as were the Sioux of the ’80’s. I had occasion to revive the permit system for both whites and Indians, to supervise the conduct of whites within Indian country, to protect native ceremonies, ruins, and graves, to deport those visitors and Bolsheviks considered of no immediate benefit to the quiet Indian population, to arrest and arraign both Indians and whites for offenses, to sentence them, and to see that the sentence was respected.

Now mark you! This does not mean that every Indian Agent is a functioning Agent. It may as well be said, frankly, so long as this is getting out of the family circle, that few Indian Agents perform their fully authorized duty when it is possible to intimidate them: a process often recognized by quavering superiors at Washington who hope to outlast a dying Administration.

But before coming to the field in 1910, I saw three Secretaries of the Interior steadfastly uphold these Regulations; and as an Indian Agent in the field I have been strongly supported by three other Secretaries of the Interior, to the end that my Indian charges, until 1922, were the best-protected people on earth.

XVIII

BUTTONS AND BONDS

And he sat down over against the treasury, and beheld how the multitude cast money into the treasury; and many that were rich cast in much. And there came a poor widow, and she cast in two mites, which make a farthing.—Mark, xii. 41, 42

I have heard it said by old-timers, and they could very nearly prove their suspicions through comparison of customs and the dragging in of the Bible, that the Navajo are the Jews of the Desert, a lost tribe of Israel. And suffice it to say that the true son of David has never been able to prosper in their country. The closest approach of these wanderers to the Navajo has been an invasion by marriage of a certain part of the Pueblo Indian country in New Mexico. Those who once made the effort to penetrate the Hopi-Navajo area of the Enchanted Empire have withdrawn, defeated and outwitted.

But if this is the advantage that the Navajo as a trader has over his white brother, in what relation does the Hopi stand to the Navajo? I cast about me for a simile, and find none.

The desert post-trader welcomes the Navajo when he comes on a purchasing expedition, because the Navajo is a spender and makes for quick sales and large profits. It is when the Navajo is trading wool and blankets and silver junk for hard dollars that the post-trader peels his eye to the nerve, and then hopes he will not get skinned. But the Hopi is maddening as a buyer. It will take a Hopi longer to spend two bits than for a Navajo to squander a month’s freight-earnings. An astute trader once described the Hopi method to me.

“You know,” he said, as if in pain, “an Oraibi will come into my place, hungry. You can tell he is hungry by the look of him. Hasn’t had his breakfast. And he will have come to buy something to eat. And then he will stand before the canned-goods shelves, if I am not watching, and get a full meal by just looking at the labels. Yes sir! Seen it many a time—look at a can of pears and lick his lips until satisfied, then go out without changing a dime. Give me a Navajo every time.”

This same trader at Oraibi—Charlie was murdered by the Navajo, for all his love of them as customers,—would praise the Hopi as bankers. He was located ninety miles from his headquarters and several hundred of miles from his bank. A trader must pay in cash or negotiable checks to Indians, according to the regulations, and on that reservation they had to do it. There was no “tin money,” no trade tokens were used. Charlie would run short of cash.

“I can go to the door, and whistle,” he declared, “and get a thousand dollars silver from the mesa.”

The Hopi liked him, and trusted him, and once tried to protect him.

The bank the Hopi patronizes is his sand bank, or its equivalent—a hole in the wall of his stone house, cleverly concealed, a place under the hearth, or a sack in his corn-cellar.

It is seldom that the Hopi make presents. Curios have a potential value with the trading public, and the Hopi believes that the laborer is worthy of his hire. When they think well of one, likely they will wait until he is leaving the country and then bear what is comparatively a priceless gift, something different in basketry or pottery from those hackneyed forms duplicated so often for the touring invaders. Where the Sioux will impoverish himself in feasting and gifting his friends, the Hopi regards brotherhood on a different basis. But I have in mind to show when the flood of his generosity was loosened.

The Great War opened, and later “Washington” was involved. War is a lost art in the Desert, but old warriors like to think of battles. The far-removed Indians were interested in more ways than one. The registration of them, a silly proceeding, caused not a little panic among the unknowing. While Agents who knew law advised that the non-competent and non-English-speaking ward would not and could not be drafted, this made no difference to those who drew up the schedule. It caused more than annoyance; it caused some little apprehension in the Desert. Said Navajo chiefs to me:—

“You want soldiers for this war of Washington’s? Very well, we will select them, and then married men will not be taken from their families, nor young men from helpless parents. How many do you want?”

Was not their thought a trifle wise?

But it was not to be done that way. Little blue cards had been printed, and the Indian Agent was nominated registrar for all persons of his jurisdiction, whites and Indians, including himself. The Navajo simply evaded; but the Hopi lists were prepared, and so much time and paper and little blue cards were wasted.

Some of the Hopi took an equally fantastic view of the crisis. At Oraibi were located the Mennonite missionaries, an earnest people, but many of them of German extraction. A Hopi delegation waited on them, saying: “In a few days there will be war. Washington will be at war with Germany. You are Germans. You will be our enemies then, for we are supporting Washington. What will you do when Washington sends the order to kill you?”

This was no doubt a very discouraging vision to have before one.

The Hopi interest in war-time methods and inventions could always be aroused through the illustrations in the great dailies. My pictorial sections of the New York Times were in great demand. They would pore over them, remarking the vast number of soldiers, and would ask for many explanations. Men were flying as birds through the air, and carrying the war beneath the waters. They had seen locomotives and automobiles; and they could believe in the aeroplane and the submarine, because of white man’s magic. But at wireless they balked.

“No!” said one old Indian, emphatically. “That is too much. The telephone—yes, I understand, for there is a wire, and the man’s words go through that wire, inside—I see that. But now you tell me of a man talking from here to the mesa, twenty miles, without a wire? No—excuse me, but that is too much.”

Then came the food regulations; and food in the Desert is a limited fare at best. The Indian menu is slim enough, and much of it in flour. He had no use for substitutes that the trader was compelled to have him purchase, and when his horses disdained cornmeal as fodder, the Navajo began to be aggrieved. He had offered to help Washington with his prowess, no mean gift, and he could not see how an empty stomach helped campaigns.