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17 chapter one Reservation Life and Land Allotments Adaptation to New Homelands Now I hear the Government is cutting up my land giving it away to other people. . . . It can’t be so for it is not the treaty. These people who are they? They have no right to this land. It never was given to them. It was given to me and my people and we paid for it with our land back in Alabama. The black and white people have no right to it. Then how can it be that the Government is doing this. . . . It wouldn’t be justice. I am informed and believe it to be true that some citizens of the United States have title to land that was given to my fathers and my people by the government. If it was given to me, what right has the United States to take it from me without first asking my consent? Chitto Harjo, Muscogee Creek, 1906 The eastern thick darkness paled slowly as deep purple gave way to dawn’s red and orange on the horizon. Standing tall, looking distraught, Chitto Harjo prayed to the East for his people as his lamenting words rose from a heavy heart. His deep brown eyes focused on the red sky in the direction of his former homeland hundreds of miles away. Slowly shaking his head with sadness, he looked over the new homeland of his Muscogee Creek people as he stood near the Arkansas River of Tulsa town. The full-blood felt the painful memories of losing loved ones during the long walk to the West. The white man’s promises on paper meant nothing. Leaders of his people had signed a treaty in 1832 that called for exchanging their land in the East for land in the West called Indian Territory.1 Now, the white men wanted to divide the Creeks’ land and distribute pieces to each Muscogee. His mind voiced the words, “How could they do this? It is not right.” He bent down, clutched a handful of earth in his brown hand, turned it over, and thought about how this earth was the crux of all this disparity. 18 · Resilience Life on the reservation challenged the indigenous spiritual souls. Day after day, Native people grappled with intrusive changes in their new sedentary lives. Old ways met new ways. The federal government usurped their inherent sovereign right to be free through imposed boundaries described on pieces of paper—the white man’s treaties. Throughout Indian Country the federal government established nearly two hundred reservations over the course of the nineteenth century, and bureaucrats believed that they now had an “Indian problem” on their hands. The dwindled Indian population became wards of the United States, and the federal government had fiduciary care of their properties. Yet politicians thought that Indians still had too much land and called them a dying race.2 During the reservation era in the late nineteenth century, Native people found themselves challenged by the elemental reasons for life— survival, hope, and endurance. While these years proved to be the most challenging for Indians, bureaucrats and other Americans underestimated the resilience of Native people to survive and persist in their sovereign ways. Indian people endured conditions of imprisonment, and they survived an accursed land allotment policy that bureaucrats deliberately designed to individualize them and strip their reservations of more land. One would have thought that removing Indians to the West was enough punishment. This callous treatment carried over from early Indian policy east of the Mississippi, transplanting more than three dozen eastern tribes to the West. Of all the 374 ratified treaties, 229 agreements involved ceding land, and 99 addressed establishing reservations.3 White settler expansion in the spirit of Manifest Destiny mandated new destinations for Indians, who seemingly no longer controlled their own lives. Federal paternalism emerged from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Congress as these two parts of the government advised the U.S. president on what to do about the indigenous that stood in the way of white progress. Indians knew this man as the Great White Father in Washington, who had taken their lands in exchange for taking care of them. In the eyes of the Indians, the president represented a powerful figure, somewhat like the Great Power that they traditionally depended upon for their livelihood. The idea of established Indian reservations did not occur following the Plains Indian wars in the late nineteenth century, as one might think...

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