Human Trafficking in Indian Country

“Human trafficking, the exploitation of a person typically through force, fraud, or coercion for such purposes as forced labor, involuntary servitude, or commercial sex,” Gretta L. Goodwin of the Government Accountability Office told the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs yesterday, is “occurring in the United States.”  Drawing upon evidence from the Office of the Attorney General,  traffickers seek out vulnerable individuals.  This vulnerability, Goodwin said, “comes in many forms, including age (minors), poverty, homelessness, chemical dependency, prior experiences of abuse, involvement in foster care programs, and lack of resources or support systems.”

Native Americans, she argued, are indeed such a vulnerable population.  Goodwin cited statistics familiar to those of us who study Indian Country.  28 percent of native peoples live in poverty nationwide, compared to 15% of the general population.  According to “the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 27 percent of Native American women have been raped in their lifetime compared to 18 percent of American women overall.”  Native American children are twice as likely as other children to enter the foster care system.

These figures, and their significance, were underscored by Nicole Matthews, the executive director of the Minnesota Indian Woman’s Sexual Assault Coalition.  The Native American women she and her associates interviewed demonstrated that historical trauma and childhood sexual abuse “were a precursor or antecedent for the women who were used in trafficking.” Indeed, Matthews testified, “79% of the women we interviewed were sexually abused as children, by an average of four perpetrators; and 67% of victims reported that they had family members who were sent to boarding schools, and most were abused in those boarding schools.”  Matthews’ research is available here.  It is a stunning document.

Cindy McCain, who participates on the Arizona Governor’s Council on Human Trafficking, spoke last at the Committee hearing. She told the senators that she would soon participate in an anti-trafficking roundtable in North Dakota. She wanted the senators to know that the remoteness of the Bakken area in that state, and

“the high unemployment rate of nearby Indian reservations, combined with the oil and gas boom, have created a hotbed for trafficking.  Victims are mostly Native American women and girls transported to the region specifically for sex trafficking. Many of these victims are under the age of 18. Children being sold for sex. Outward and organized child abuse and rape.”

McCain pointed out that human trafficking had enslaved more than 41 million people worldwide.  It is, she said, an organized crime.  But it is also a crime of opportunity for, she argued, “Native American girls and women are all too often trafficked by their own relatives.” McCain had seen herself six small girls “lined up against a wall in an Indian casino outside of Phoenix on display for customers.”

McCain did not provide evidence for the involvement of Native American families in the trafficking of their young relatives, and her claim that Native American girls fetched a high price because of their “exotic beauty” is painful to read.  Still, she and the other witnesses raised some important issues.

There is a dearth of evidence.  Of the 132 tribal law enforcement agencies (LEA) that responded to the GAO’s request for information, 27 reported that they had conducted investigations between 2014 and 2016 that involved human trafficking.  And, according to Goodwin,

“Nearly half of tribal LEA respondents (60 of 132) reported that they believe human trafficking is occurring on tribal land in their jurisdictions beyond what had been brought to their attention. Officials from two tribal LEAs told us during in-person meetings that in their experience some victims do not come forward to report their victimization because they are embarrassed or feel ashamed. Several survey respondents also indicated that they suspect there is more human trafficking than what has been reported to them because of the presence of casinos on their land (14 of 60). For example, officials from one LEA explained that the tribal casino hotel may be used as a venue for sex trafficking. Some respondents (13 of 60) suspect that sex trafficking may be occurring as part of some of the drug crimes that they investigate. Officials from one county LEA we visited near a tribal community told us that officers may not recognize that human trafficking is taking place, particularly when it occurs alongside another crime like drug trafficking.”

The Justice Department, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Homeland Security–all of them provide grants to help combat human trafficking, but the problem remains ill-defined, one of great magnitude but hazy borders.  More resources are needed still.  Jurisdiction is a critical issue, as well. Much of the trafficking is supported by non-Indians who are in all but a few instances beyond prosecution by tribal authorities.  More information is needed. Tracy Tolou, the director of the Office of Tribal Justice in DOJ said that data limitations are significant.  It is hard to know the scope of the problem when it remains so difficult to investigate and prosecute.  According to Jason Thompson, the acting director of the Office of Justice Services in the BIA, only twelve investigations by his office have been conducted over the past four years, with only 23 defendants prosecuted.

This is crime on the margins. When I discuss problems related to the issues the Senate Committee confronted in my Indian law class, there is a sense among some of my students that this sort of exploitation and violence is inevitable.  Native communities are poor.  They are isolated.  The Supreme Court has made the prosecution of non-Indians by tribal law enforcement officers difficult where it is not impossible. I ask the students what might be done.  They struggle to think of answers.  I understand the difficulties.  I appreciate their efforts to think of solutions.

Native American history is a story of tragedy, of violence, of crime, of theft and plunder. It is, at other times, a story of blundering goodwill.  Even those who want to do right often do damage.  I have made my career teaching students this history and writing about it.  I once got involved in an argument with a conservative friend who said that if these problems went away, I would be out of a job. That I want to find things to bitch about.  It is a stupid argument, and I told my friend this.  I am a historian. I would love for these problems to be part of the past.  And that might be my insight on this story, as a historian.  We, as a nation and as individuals, have choices.  We are not doomed to repeat the past, and we do not have to continue walking that ragged path that we have walked for so long. There are choices here. Write your representatives and senators.  Write the Attorney General and the President. Given the people currently occupying many of those offices, it is difficult to be optimistic, but these are problems that can be ameliorated.  It is a choice.  We can do more.

We Are Not Canada, But We Could Learn A Thing or Two

In a speech delivered last week before the United Nations, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke about his country’s history of relations with its indigenous population.  He wanted to show the world that Canada could take responsibility for the “terrible mistakes” of its past.

Whether or not Canada has succeeded in doing, so, Trudeau spoke of the enduring legacies of colonialism.  “Early colonial relationships,” he said, for Canada’s First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples, “were not about strength through diversity, or a celebration of differences,” but rather an experience that “was mostly one of humiliation, neglect, and abuse.”

And the damage has been long-lasting indeed.  Trudeau spoke of Canadian indigenous communities with unsafe drinking water, of large numbers of missing or murdered indigenous women.  He spoke of “Indigenous parents in Canada who say goodnight to their children, and have to cross their fingers in the hopes that their kids won’t run away or take their own lives in the night.” The problems of which Trudeau spoke have been well-documented.

Trudeau has faced significant criticism at home from indigenous spokespeople who feel that his words have not been matched by action.  Many have criticized the Canadian movement towards reconciliation, which I have written about on this blog, as a feel-good movement for white people that does nothing about structural inequalities and injustices deeply rooted in Canadian society. These are significant critiques, and it is well-worthwhile for students of America’s native peoples to watch how Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission continues its work. (You can access its reports here.)

But despite the criticism of Trudeau and the limitations of his approach, for an American president to even consider saying something close to what Prime Minister said before the UN is utterly inconceivable.  If you saw the excellent “Wind River,” you will recognize that the problem of missing and murdered indigenous women is not exclusive to Canada.  Corporate profit-seeking in Indian Country has led to the devastation of water supplies on American reservations.  I have written much on this blog about DAPL (the documentary “Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock” is strong on sentiment but weaker in terms of substance) but that is hardly the only example.  More than a third of all Superfund sites are located in Indian Country, and others, like Onondaga Lake in Syracuse, are nearby. Police violence against native peoples, disproportionate rates of incarceration, and higher rates of deficiency on every measure of social well-being: the problems are enormous, the challenges daunting, and the resources available limited.  In both Canada and the United States, these are the legacies of an enduring colonialism.

Now, if I were to ask my students if they should expect President Trump to deliver a speech similar to that given by Prime Minister Trudeau, they would emphatically say “no.”  If I were to ask them why, their answers would be a bit more complex.  For to assert that Trump is a racist or white supremacist uninterested in hearing about complaints from or the conditions experienced by peoples of color, while true, only gets us so far. No American president, whatever his party, has spoken as frankly as Trudeau about his country’s mistakes and misdeeds. No, there is much more to it than the current American president’s long list of shortcomings, inadequacies, and character flaws.

The United States, regardless of its leader, has shown little interest in confronting its long history of colonialism.  The growth of the United States could not have occurred without the wholesale and systematic dispossession of native peoples.  Sure, many of the thousands of transactions where Indian land came into the hands of white people were “legal” in the sense that they were recorded in deeds or ratified in treaties, but these transactions have histories of their own.  They occurred because of the relentless pressure exerted by European farmers and their livestock on native lands, or because native peoples decided to sell lands that they knew from hard experience “settlers” would take from them anyways, or after epidemic diseases reduced an indigenous community’s population and this made their lands seem “vacant” or as “surplus” land. Some of these cessions were the price of peace after a military invasion of conquest and desolation.  Dispossession and violence often walked hand-in-hand.

The loss of land was immense. But it cannot be understood apart from the assault on native peoples’ cultures and ways of living.  Just as Canada had its residential schools, the United States had boarding schools. Still, there was so much more to the assault on Indian identity, and it was so much more thorough than a focus on these sadistic institutions might lead one to believe.  I tell the story of this cultural assault in Chapter 8 of Native America.

We, as a country, are not very good at talking about our misdeeds.  We insulate our children from these stories, for instance, for a variety of reasons: because the stories of the suffering that his country has caused native peoples are so massive that kids could not handle them, or because somehow hiding the country’s crimes from them is the best way to produce loyal and patriotic citizens. So we design curricula that talk about tiny parts of the Native American past, but not in a way that would cause children to question their country’s conduct.  It happened a long time ago. We are free and clear, we tell them.  We’ll blame it on Andrew Jackson, and call it a day.

Meanwhile we cast Indians as part of the past, a point I have raised on this blog many times, because it makes it easier to deny their just grievances today.  We will pat ourselves on the back for renaming a football team, or changing Columbus Day to “Indigenous Peoples Day,” or persuading this or that religious denomination to renounce its approval for the Doctrine of Discovery, valuable though these acts may be.  But let’s be clear. These actions cost white people little, and the structural burdens imposed by colonialism and white supremacy survive them and remain intact.  We like to tinker around the edges of significant problems. Too many of us view manifestations of Indian identity as inauthentic, and the expressions of long-held grievances as belly-aching about things that happened long ago.  We do not believe, as a rule, that inter-generational trauma is a thing, or that the burdens of history weigh more heavily upon some people than upon others.

We are unrepentant, unwilling to apologize, and to many of us too ill-informed or too uninterested to learn and understand how Native America’s loss has been white America’s gain.

As I wrote the first draft of this post earlier this morning, the hourly NPR newsbreak came over the radio.  The first story was Donald Trump’s denunciation of those NFL players who, with respect and civility, took a knee to protest police brutality and the continuing slaughter of people of color by the nation’s law enforcement officers.  The second story involved the shooting of a deaf person of color by police officers in Oklahoma. The victim did not hear the officers’ demand that he set down the metal pipe he was holding.

This country, it’s something else sometimes.  As native peoples long have told us, white people in America are comfortable dictating to people of color how they should conduct themselves, the forms of grievance and redress-seeking that are legitimate, not to mention how to conduct themselves religiously, spiritually, emotionally, sexually, domestically, and aesthetically. When kneeling for the National Anthem is viewed as more disrespectful than flying the Confederate flag, and when this proposition can be debated, defended, and taken seriously by millions of almost exclusively white Americans who support the President, it is pretty evident that the sickness is rooted deep.

Justin Trudeau clearly has not come close to doing what his very sincere and committed critics want him to do, but he has done more than any American president, and he is light years ahead of our Brass Creon. Talking cannot do everything, and acknowledging past crimes is not a remedy by itself. But it’s a start. It is a vital precondition to things getting better. The act of acknowledging that I am at least partially responsible for your pain,  and that I have benefited from the historical suffering of your people: it can be a powerful thing.  I am fully aware that I am speaking favorably of Prime Minister Trudeau for doing, at the end of the day, what any informed and honest person would do.  Yet our current leadership, in politics and in public education, in the Democratic and in the Republican parties, are not even close to being able to clear so low a bar.

One Ring to Rule Them All: Roanoke and that Signet Ring

Recently Smithsonian Magazine published a piece by Andrew Lawler on the signet ring found on Hatteras Island by archaeologist David Sutton Phelps. Phelps, who taught at East Carolina University, died in 2009.

As Lawler correctly points out,

The 1998 discovery electrified archaeologists and historians. The artifact seemed a rare remnant of the first English attempt to settle the New World that might also shed light on what happened to 115 men, women, and children who settled the coast, only to vanish in what became known as the Lost Colony of Roanoke.

One Ring to Rule Them All

Now it turns out that researchers had it wrong from the start.

That’s for sure, and we have known that for a while. Phelps was convinced that the ring was gold, but recent research at ECU indicates that it was made from brass.  Not a bit of gold in it at all.  And that is disappointing news, for many people.  Why?  After Phelps’ original discovery of the ring, Lawler notes,

A senior member of London’s College of Arms subsequently noted that the seal on the signet ring was of a lion passant, and suggested that it might relate to the Kendall family of Devon and Cornwall. A Master Kendall was part of the first colonization attempt in 1585, while another Kendall visited Croatoan when a fleet led by Sir Francis Drake stopped by in 1586. Though this link was never confirmed, the object was nicknamed the Kendall ring.

Since Phelps thought the ring was made of a precious material and likely belonged to the Elizabethan era, he argued it was an important clue. “That doesn’t mean the Lost Colony was here,” he told a reporter at the dig site after the ring’s discovery. “But this begins to authenticate that.”

When the artist and governor John White returned to Roanoke in 1590 after three years away, he found no colonists but he did find the word “Croatoan” etched into a post set by the English.  Historians have long thought that for a variety of reasons, some of the colonists may have relocated to Croatoan, today’s Hatteras, even though the evidence in White’s account shows that he thought the colonists had moved up the Albemarle Sound.  The only native peoples willing to talk to the English lived there–Manteo, baptized and named “Lord of Roanoke” by Ralegh, was from Croatoan, even though his people begged the English colonists not to hurt them and steal their food. Croatoan, morever, might have served as a workable lookout for English ships arriving through the southern route.  Phelps, as a result, felt that he had found something of significance, proof that the colonists had gone to Croatoan.

Still, archaeologists were skeptical from the beginning.  Phelps was slow in letting investigators see the ring, or his field notes.  When those were made available to researchers, the problems with linking it to the Roanoke colonists were obvious.  The ring, for instance, was found in the wrong archaeological context, deposited with items from a century after the Roanoke colonies.  The ring may have been traded from native person to native person.  There need not have been any English outpost for the ring to arrive at Hatteras.  As Charles Heath, an archaeologist who was present when Phelps discovered the ring and who Lawler interviewed pointed out, “a stray 16th-century artifact found here and there on the Outer Banks will not make for a Lost Colony found.”

This has been a tough truth for many of those who are determined to find the men, women, and children who settled on Roanoke in 1587. The fate of the Lost Colonists is one of those great American historical mysteries, even though the sands and shores of the “New World,” according to surviving European accounts, were littered with the remains of many, many Lost Colonists.  This fascination, which continues, is thus an example of American Exceptionalism, and it is one that students of Native American history ought to try to counter.  My book on Roanoke, published a decade ago, was one effort, but there is still much work to do.

A hundred or so colonists, who left Roanoke Island sometime between late 1587 and the summer of 1590, never to be seen again.  That is the story.  You can see it acted out in the “Lost Colony” drama, staged every year at the Fort Raleigh Historic Site. You can read about it in book after book.  And here is my problem with all that.  Rather than casting Roanoke and the fate of the colonists as an English story, it is more fruitful, I would argue, to recognize that the men and women sent by Sir Walter Ralegh to America intruded into a world dominated by Algonquian peoples.  The English planted their first outpost on Roanoke Island in 1585, after all, only because native peoples allowed them to.  When they returned in 1587, we know that they found themselves under attack, and that many of those same native peoples had little interest in assisting the newcomers.  Whatever happened to the colonists, in other words, was determined by native peoples. Whether they blended in with Indians on Croatoan, or in the interior, or were wiped out by Wahunsonacock and his warriors from the Powhatan Paramount Chiefdom, native peoples determined the fate of the Lost Colonists.  Yet native peoples in these stories are largely invisible, their motives and their perceptions of the English (and, yes, these perceptions can be unearthed through a careful reading of the surviving documents) not a factor.  Roanoke is an English story, when all the evidence suggests that this is a story of indigenous peoples dealing with a small group of outsiders who likely never learned how to play by Algonquian rules.

We historians who study the Native American past need to counter American Exceptionalism wherever it presents itself. We need to move native peoples into the heart of our national story: American history cannot be told accurately without Indians, and in the era before the Civil War especially, native peoples were far more dominant and powerful and sovereign than white American narratives allow.  These exceptionalist, settler-state narratives, then, are not only historically incorrect, but dishonest at a fundamental level, in that they erase native peoples from an American story that they helped to create and shape and make their defeat and marginalization and dispossession of these communities seem inevitable, foreordained and thus forgiveable.

Though Smithsonian is increasingly looking like a travel magazine for old people, like Modern Maturity with less stuff about heart health and diet, it has the resources to do a better job on these issues.  David Sutton Phelps thought the ring he found could prove the location and fate of the Lost Colonists.  He thought it was made from gold.  It wasn’t. The ring was, like his interpretation, brass, something much less than he thought.  The story of the Lost Colonists will not be complete until the native peoples with whom they interacted are placed at the center of the story.

 

We Are Teachers

Many years ago I served on a search committee for a position in the history of American Foreign Policy. For many reasons it was an odd search, and we ultimately did not succeed in hiring anyone for the opening.  We interviewed one candidate over the phone, with an exceptional record of publication, and a strong, Ivy League academic pedigree. He was doing a post-doc at some thinktank somewhere and, when asked about teaching said that, yes, he did enjoy it, and that it was for him a “nice break in the day.”  He would not have been a good fit for us. I teach in a department, and at a college, with a great number of very fine teachers, where teaching is Job One, and where we take great pride in the accomplishments of our undergraduates.

Don’t Be This Guy

I have served on many search committees since that time. It consistently strikes me how poorly served are many job candidates who come from elite research institutions.  The letters of recommendation, even when they are signed and printed on letter-head, are so long, with detailed and esoteric discussions of the significance of a candidate’s research.  In my view, they contain more detail than is necessary and, all too often, say little about teaching beyond expressing the belief that the candidate, based upon their personality, might be good at it.

Do not get me wrong. Research is important.  It makes you a better historian and, when done with eyes open, it makes for better teaching. It

…or this guy

forces you to remain engaged with the scholarship and to keep abreast of the developments in your field. Even at a college like ours, it is something that you are required to do in order to achieve tenure and promotion.

And even at a school like mine, with its heavy teaching load and limited travel funds, it is my view something that you are ethically bound to do. Were I to resign my position, and if my college was able to scare up the money to replace me and conduct a tenure-track search for a historian in Early American or Native American history, I would expect that at least a hundred people would apply for the job.  Many of these people would be fantastically qualified. Many of them would have published much more by the time they went out on the job market than my peers and I did back in the middle of the 1990s.

But, let’s face it, many of them will never land tenure-track teaching positions.  Because colleges increasingly rely on adjuncts to carry the weight of their college’s teaching obligations, or because public systems are strapped for cash and positions are not necessarily replaced, many of these outstanding young historians will never get the chance to do what I have done.  It is an unjust system, and no meritocracy.  Those of us with good jobs need to appreciate how privileged we are. We need to publish, and if we cannot, we should get the hell out of the way for those who can.  We cannot justly take up space.  Other people, were they so fortunate, would produce high quality work and in quantity if they could.  Many of them will never get that chance.

Many of those who apply for position after position and never find secure academic employment would make fantastic college teachers as well.  So those of us fortunate enough to have jobs have the obligation to put our best efforts forward, to realize that we speak to more students on any given teaching day than will likely ever read an article we publish or listen to a paper we give at this or that conference. We should realize that we can devastate a student with an unkind word or with criticism that is indelicate or overly harsh.

We should recognize as well that with words of confidence and encouragement we can change a young person’s life.  A student will remember us, and what we have said, perhaps long after we have forgotten that student’s name.  And to have that sort of positive impact as a teacher requires great effort and commitment and consciousness.  I once had a colleague when I taught in Montana who told me during my campus visit that being a college professor was “the best part-time job in the world.” He published shit, a bibliography here, a stupid article there.  He taught unimaginatively–presidents and scantrons in American history.  To do well requires an enormous amount of energy and sensitivity.  Teaching is the most important thing we do.

I have had many great teachers as colleagues.  Bill Cook, my medievalist colleague who retired a few years back, and who was adored by generations of students, told me that he reminded himself that every student he taught was the most important person in somebody’s life, and that they were entitled to the utmost courtesy, care, and respect.  His office for many years was across from mine, and I was always impressed by how much time he took with students, how much interest he showed in them.  It was a good lesson for me.

I had this student who took a couple of my classes–my Native American survey course and my course in American Indian Law. She wrote one of the finest research projects I had ever read. Her short papers were brilliantly insightful. They were well-researched and extremely well-written. They were theoretically sophisticated.  She was not a history major, but was the best student in each of the classes she took.  As she prepared to leave campus, having completed her last semester, she stopped by my office. She thanked me for the semester. I told her that I have been at this teaching thing a while.  I told her that I had a good idea of what it takes to succeed in graduate school and academia, and I told her that I am highly selective in who I recommend for graduate school–it is a tough job market, after all, and to succeed you need to be a hard worker, talented, and imaginative.  I told her that I did not know what her plans were after school but that I had every confidence that she could succeed in any endeavor she chose to pursue, and that I would be delighted to write a letter of recommendation for her.  She was visibly moved by this.

A couple of weeks later, I was talking to a colleague in her home department. I was sharing how talented I thought this student was, and thanked my colleague for sending her over to my department.  He said that she was a C student, that she did not seem that interested or motivated.  Damn.  That transcript.  Those grades.  Wouldn’t work for graduate school.  It was a conversation that left me deeply disappointed, and I feel it still, a couple of years later.  Was she really uninterested, or was he uninspired or ill-advised?  I wish I had the chance to meet this student earlier in her Geneseo career.  I have a feeling that I may have been the only professor she had who really let her know how exceptional and talented she was.

We teach. Sometimes, we get lucky, and we meet students who have such breath-taking talent that we learn more from them than they from us.  Sometimes students disappoint us, frustrate us, inspire us, and make us proud.  Sometimes they do not live up to what we believe is their potential.  But once in a while, you will change their life for the better, and, once in a while, they will make yours much better, too.

The Treaty of Big Tree–Let’s Follow the Money

The anniversary of the “Treaty of Big Tree,” signed on the 15th of September in 1797, is approaching. According to a New York State historical marker, the agreement was negotiated on land that now provides parking for students who attend the college where I teach.  It is a big deal in Geneseo. It is the one, big, historical event that occurred within the town’s bounds.

One thing that I think a lot of non-historians do not realize is the amount of research we do that never sees the light of day. Although we require our students quite often to come up with some meaningful sort of research project during the short fifteen weeks of a semester, we spend plenty of time following interesting questions that lead to dead ends.  It happens all the time. We are curious. We ask questions and, sometimes, despite our best efforts, we cannot find an answer.

A couple of years back I was asked to do some research for the Seneca Nation of Indians about the history of the annuities that often were attached to the agreements they entered into with New York State and the United States.  In exchange for their lands, Senecas would receive an annual payment.

I often see this bumper sticker in and around Indian Country.  The Indian Country Today Media Network, now apparently on hiatus, spoke frequently of broken treaties.  But some treaties, it must be remembered, were little more than real estate transactions in which white people obtained a title to Indian lands in return for very little at all.

I have always done research on Big Tree, but I had never bothered to look at whether the United States had fulfilled its part of the bargain. Certainly it acquired a lot of land. But did it pay to the Senecas what they were owed?  I travel with footnotes.

I tell the story of the treaty at Big Tree in Native America.  It is an important moment in the history of the Senecas.  Robert Morris had acquired from earlier land speculators a right of preemption, or first purchase, to all the Seneca lands in New York state. He sold this right to the Holland Land Company in December of 1792.[1]  A well-financed syndicate of Dutch merchants and bankers, the Holland Land Company was much better equipped than Morris to oversee the actual opening up of the Seneca homeland to white invasion and settlement—a massive undertaking that involved administering an enormous territory, and absorbing the costs associated with surveying, building roads, and laying out towns.[2]  Before they would pay, however, the Holland investors insisted that Morris extinguish the Senecas’ title to the lands in question.

What did that mean? It meant holding a treaty, and negotiating with the Senecas.  In 1797 Morris began laying plans for a council.  Because Morris was ill and because he feared prosecution for debt should he leave his home in Philadelphia, his son Thomas traveled to Big Tree on the Genesee River to conduct the treaty. (The treaty was held, according to a New York State historical marker, near one of the parking lots on my campus).  The story of this sordid council, involving the use of alcohol at the treaty ground and the bribing of important Seneca leaders, has been told many times before. My treatment in Native America is inspired by the great books written by Anthony F. C. Wallace and Laurence Hauptman, which are required reading for those who wish to understand the Iroquois.[3]

Morris obeyed the letter, if not the spirit, of the federal Indian Trade and Intercourse Law, the statute which governed relations between natives and non-natives.  The law required that for a purchase of Indian lands to be legally valid, the purchase must be overseen by the United States, and the resulting agreement must be approved by the United States Senate.  Morris requested and obtained the appointment of a federal agent, and the Senate did ratify the agreement. And at Big Tree, on the campus where I offer my courses in Iroquois history, the Senecas parted with all of their land, that huge region from the Genesee River westward to the Great Lakes and the Niagara River, save for 200,000 acres distributed across eleven reservations.  In exchange for this massive cession, Morris agreed to pay “the sum of one hundred thousand dollars, to be by the said Robert Morris vested in the stock of the bank of the United States, and held in the name of the President of the United States, for the use and behoof of the said nation of Indians.”  The Senecas would receive as a payment, each year, the interest earned on this investment.[4] 

So let’s follow that money, as far as the sources allow.  That was easier said than done.  I am no accountant.

In March of 1798 the United States used the $100,000 it had received from Robert Morris to purchase 205 shares in stock of the Bank of the United States “to be held in trust” for the Senecas “by the President of the United States.”  The dividends on this investment averaged slightly more than seven thousand dollars a year, though some of the revenues that would otherwise have been delivered to the Senecas were withheld to purchase additional stock: 9 shares in 1804 at a cost of $5328.00, an additional share in 1806 for $522.00, and five more shares in 1807 for a sum of $2580.00.  With the exception of this combined amount of 8430 dollars, the increase produced by the Big Tree investment was delivered to the Senecas by federal agents.  The dividend, paid twice a year, amounted to a minimum of sixteen dollars per share between 1798 and 1802, or $3280 every six months.[5]

The Bank of the United States, part of Alexander Hamilton’s (Stop singing, please) ambitious but controversial program for developing the new nation’s economy, had received a twenty-year charter from Congress in 1791.  When the Bank ceased its operations in 1811, the stock was liquidated, producing a sum of $95,040. (This sum was less than the $100,000 initially invested owing to shifts in the value of the stock).  The War Department credited $1980.00 of this sum to fund its Indian appropriations account, while investing the remaining $93,060.00 in 6% stocks in the name of the President of the United States, to be held in trust for the Seneca Indians.

The Senecas watched closely these funds, and saw the annual dividend as essential to their survival.  They said this, in writing, time and again.  A large group of “Seneca chiefs” told Secretary of War William Eustis in 1811, after the expiration of the Bank’s charter, that “we are told the field where our Money was planted is become barren.”  What they hell, they seemed to be saying. This concerned the Senecas, the chiefs said, because “our money has heretofore been of great service to us.  It has helpt us to support our old People, and our Women and Children.”  The Senecas sought assurance that the Big Tree fund—the result of their leaders’ difficult decision to transform their lands in western New York into an annual payment—would continue to be paid.  “Brother,” the chiefs wrote to Eustis, “we do not understand your ways of doing business,” and “this think is heavy on our minds.”  The Senecas wanted to continue “to hold our White Brethren of the United States by the hand, but this weight is heavy. We hope,” they concluded, that “you will remove it.”[6]

I am fairly certain that these Seneca chiefs understood more than they let on.  Signed by a large number of prominent Seneca leaders, the “Talk of the Seneca Chiefs” must have occasioned some alarm in the War Department.  With war with Great Britain looming, the chiefs suggested that if the United States did not uphold its part of the bargain and see to the continued payment of the dividends, they might then cease “to hold our White Brethren of the United States by the hand,” and instead embrace those other white brethren, who stood poised on the opposite side of the Niagara River and Lake Ontario, with whom they had aligned during American Revolution. Don’t mess with us. You need us to help secure the Niagara frontier.

The interest earned on the investment after 1811 produced only $5618 per year, but owing to the importance of the Senecas as allies while the United States muddled through its conflict with England, the sum of $6000 was paid to them from the general funds of the Indian department.  This fund, in turn, was credited with the dividend produced by the stock.  This arrangement continued until 1826 when the 6% stock was liquidated, producing $93,602.67, which the War Department invested in 3% stock.  The dividends, falling well short of the $6000 to which the Senecas had grown accustomed, posed a problem for the administration of John Quincy Adams.  To pay the usual $6000 would draw down the fund and perhaps force the sale of the stock from which the dividends derived.  In any case, the government would be expending more than the interest on the investment.  President Adams determined nonetheless “that the government would continue to pay” the Senecas six thousand dollars annually, “taking upon itself the protection of the fund.”  The United States, Adams believed, “was bound in good faith to do so.”[7]

Adams was willing to spend federal funds to uphold the honor of the United States.  His successor, Andrew Jackson, clearly did not share this view.  Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas McKenney disliked the idea of paying the $6000.00 when “the sum remitted” was “greater than the interest received on the Stock.”  Anticipating the new president’s views, McKenney decided to offer to the Senecas in 1829 nothing more than the divided, a sum of less than three thousand dollars by 1829.[8]

This unilateral decision angered the Senecas.  An elderly Cornplanter, writing from Kinzua, appealed to President Jackson.  The Senecas, Cornplanter wrote, had been well satisfied with the annual dividend of $6000, but now the news from Washington “fills our minds with concern that we cannot get our Money nor be informed why we should not receive [it] as in former years.”[9]  Writing less than three weeks after Congress enacted the Indian Removal Bill, surely Cornplanter recognized that he had directed his appeal to an ardent expansionist who coveted Indian land and wanted all eastern Indians relocated to new lands in the west. The Big Tree payment, Cornplanter continued, “was but a little but it enabled us to purchase Salt & some Blanketts and that would be a great help to those who are active & till their land.”  The Senecas could not accept anything less than the 6% to which they were accustomed.[10]

The President did not believe that any law existed which authorized him to pay to the Senecas a sum greater than the value produced by the stock.  Sticking to his rigid and self-serving code of constitutional interpretation, Jackson punted the question to Congress, which in the 1830s did things.  The resulting bill, introduced in the House of Representatives, would provide the Senecas with a permanent annuity of $6000, while whatever proceeds emerged from the stock would be credited to the United States.

Senator John Forsyth of Georgia, a determined advocate of the ethnic cleansing his state carried out against the Cherokees and the Creeks, opposed any measure that went beyond the strict language of the Big Tree treaty.  Nothing in that agreement, he believed, obligated the United States to pay to the Senecas 6% forever.  Paying the $6000 he said,

 

had already cost the Government a very considerable amount  over and above the product of the stock, and now the question arises, are we bound to do more, after doing all we have already gratuitously performed?  But it is said the Indians have been given to understand that the full amount of six thousand dollars should be paid to them. Who gave them to understand this? Who had a right to do so? And yet it was on such loose declarations that the whole merits of this claim seemed to rest.  It is contended that the Government is bound to realize to these Indians any expectations they may have been induced to entertain.  It is true, it is said that the late President of the United States [Adams], when the subject was before him, had given them these assurances. This, however, did not establish the justice of the demand.  He could see no sort of obligation on the part of the Government to pay them more than the amount produced by their stock.[11]

Forsyth’s argument failed to persuade a critical number of his colleagues, which is surprising given how they felt about Indians, and the bill became law in February of 1831.  Thereafter, the law read,

the proceeds of the sum of one hundred thousand dollars, being the amount placed in the hands of the President of the United States, in trust, for the Seneca tribe of Indians, situated in the State of New York, be hereafter passed to the credit of the Indian appropriation fund; and that the Secretary of War be authorized to receive, and pay over to the Seneca tribe of Indians, the sum of six thousand dollars annually, in the way and manner as heretofore practiced.

A subsequent act, signed into law in December of 1831, paid to the Senecas $2914.40, “that being the balance due on the annuity payable to said Indians for the year one thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine.”[12]

Congress did on a number of subsequent occasions revisit the Big Tree annuity.  An act passed in June of 1846 provided that “certain stocks, etc. held in trust for the Senecas should be cancelled and the funds deposited in the Treasury at 5 percent interest and the interest paid to the Senecas annually.”[13]  Fifty-three years later, in March of 1909, Congress directed the Secretary of the Treasury to place on the books of the Treasury Department “to the credit of the Seneca Indians of New York, the sum of $118,050, such sum to bear interest at 5 percent until withdrawn for the Indians, being the value of stocks held in trust for the Indians and taken by the United States and cancelled under the authority of the act of June 27, 1846.”  Congress authorized the Treasury Secretary in 1909 to place on the books of the treasury department $118,050, “such sum to bear interest at 5 percent until withdrawn for the Indians, being the value of stocks held in trust for the Indians and taken by the United States and cancelled under the authority” of the 1846 act.  This sum, Congress decided, the Treasury secretary would pay  “per capita to the members of the tribe entitled thereto.”[14]

I am not sure what happened as we carry the story through the rest of the nineteenth century and into and through the twentieth. The records of congressional appropriations show that the Congress continued to appropriate the $6000 dollars each year to pay its obligations under the Big Tree treaty.  Seneca Nation records, however, suggest that these payments were not received until relatively recently. I still have work to do to be able to sort this out.

But here is the thing. Honor Indian Treaties.  But a lot of them were not honorable at all, and the terms of many of them were never written with Indians’ interests in mind. Students in my Native American Survey course has just finished reading Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian, which says so much in such a breezy manner.  “Treaties,” King wrote, “were not vehicles for protecting land or even sharing land.” Rather, “they were vehicles for acquiring land.  Almost without fail, throughout the history of North America, every time Indians signed at reaty with Whites, Indians lost land.”

So let’s think about what we mean when we call upon the United States to honor its treaties. Certainly the government should keep its word. Certainly in the realm of Indian affairs it has behaved despicably and irresponsibly. Certainly treaties have been broken many times, with often devastating consequences. But, in many instances, native communities would have been better off if these treaties had never been negotiated, never signed, never ratified, and never proclaimed by the president.  So many of them were coerced, or fraudulent, or exploitative.  The colonization of this continent, and the dispossession of native peoples, to a great extent was achieved through the instrument of treaties.

 

[1] Charles E. Brooks, Frontier Settlement and the Market Revolution: The Holland Land Purchase, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 13-14.

[2] Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 179-180.  The Holland Land Company Papers are located at the State University of New York, College at Fredonia.

[3] Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 179-183; Taylor, Divided Ground, 313-316; Laurence M. Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 91-92; Norman B. Wilkinson, “Robert Morris and the Treaty of Big Tree,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 40 (September 1953), 257-278.

[4] Kappler, comp., Treaties, 1028.

[5] LR OSW IA, 1: 0188.

[6] Talk of the Seneca Chiefs, 9 October 1811, LR OSW IA, 1: 714.

[7] Nourse Report, 18 March 1829, LR OIA-Seneca, Roll 808.

[8] McKenney to Secretary of War John H. Eaton, 17 March 1829, Ibid.

[9] John O’Bail (Cornplanter) to Andrew Jackson, 2 August 1830, Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates in Congress, 3 February 1831, p. 79.

[12] Available at the Library of Congress “Century of Lawmaking” website.

[13] “Compilation of Material Relating to the Indians of the United States, etc., by Subcommittee on Indian Affairs of the Committee of Public Lands, House of Representatives, Pursuant to H. Res. 66, 81st Congress, 2d. Sess., 13 June 1950, Serial No. 30,” in Paul G. Reilly Collection, Buffalo State College, Box 37, p. 12.

[14] Ibid., 13.