Native Relations Quotes
Most of the Colonies had laws against Indians possessing guns and any white seeing such was allowed to attack such Indians. Rhode Island had peaceful relations with the Indians and not only allowed Indians to carry firearms for hunting but hired them to do the hunting as they were better at it and did not value their time as highly as the whites. However, travelers coming from out of the colony would see an Indian with a gun, and shoot at him thereby killing or injuring friendly Indians and causing racial problems when there were few. The quotation also illustrates that there was little uniformity amongst the colonies as to how to deal with their various social and political problems.
The Cherokee's had fallen under the control of the Confederate military and Ross had urged Federal military protection for the tribe.
Like many of Jefferson’s ideas, this one had great merit but could not be enforced. The idea was to establish “trading houses” amongst the Indians which would operate on a NON PROFIT basis. However, fraud and corruption on the part of the managers of these trading houses in most cases left the Indians with far less than the fair market value of their goods and the “white” commodities were sold at inflated prices. Jefferson also believed in minimal government so he never set up any kind of audit mechanism or supervisory system of the “trading houses” and instead of helping the Indians often cheated them even more than private traders would.
His use of the “Great White Father” phrase was insulting to the Indians and Wilson’s tactic backfired. Wilson was, for an intellectual, quite racist by modern standards and was certainly not sensitive to ethnic issues.
In a tragic irony, the two chiefs were killed by a year later at the Sand Creek Massacre.
Indian treaties had legal problems from the beginning of the nation. An agreement had been made at Fort Harmar with 6 Indian nations. One man signed for the United States and several of the sachems, for the Indians. President Washington reported this to the Senate and there was much confusion as to how to proceed. Typically, agents for nations negotiated a treaty but it would not be binding until each ratified it. To the Indians this was not a familiar practice. In this case, the treaty was approved for ratification by the Senate, but what kind of ratification was to be required of the Indians? The Iroquois Indian tribes had formal, methods of reaching consensus, but other nations did not. Whites sometimes reneged on later treaties on the grounds that they were not ratified by the Indian nations. In others, the Indians themselves made the same claim and challenged the right of the Indian treaty signers to speak for the tribe or nation. The problem has never been resolved.
Browne, an Englishman by birth, was the instrument of the Protestant Reformation in Ireland.
