Name: Author Elliot West on The Last Indian War, Reservations, and Native Americans in the Gold Rush
Uploaded: 2023-11-07T18:35:04.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Author Elliot West on The Last Indian War, Reservations, and Native Americans in the Gold Rush' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-11-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Author Elliot West on The Last Indian War, Reservations, and Native Americans in the Gold Rush' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-11-07. Transcript available.

When do you think the first news arrived, that of this catastrophe? July 4th.
July 4th, 1876,
the 100th anniversary of the approval of the Declaration of Independence, our
100th birthday.
News arrives of this crushing of Custer. The nation, the military was not going
to let that stand.
So this was part of the reason that there was this extraordinary effort, you
know, to destroy
these people. So they very quickly broke up into these constituent bands and
tried to get away as
best they could. And less than a year, they were defeated. : And you talk about
what happened after
that in your other book on the Nez Perce, the last Indian War. : Yeah, right.
That was the next year, 1877. The Nez Perce were this extraordinary people in
the Pacific Northwest.
They were from Idaho, from Eastern Oregon. They, too, composed of these
different bands,
gathered together in this one common identity, the Nimipu,
which means the real people. And they were completely at peace with the whites.
In fact,
Lewis and Clark had been the first Americans, the first white people that they
had ever seen.
Lewis and Clark came over Lolo Pass, down in there. They were starving. And the
Nez Perce took them in,
saved them, helped them get some horses and canoes to keep on their way. And on
the way back,
Lewis and Clark stayed with them more than a month. And they formed, in the
eyes of the Nez Perce,
they formed this alliance with the Americans. And they swore, from this time on,
we're friends, we're allies.
You help us when we fight. We'll help you when you fight. And that was in 186.
They kept that promise
while they were there. They kept that promise. And then, finally, in 1877, the
government said, "Okay,
that's enough. You got to come into this reservation." And the ones who were
living off of it had to then,
within one month, within a month, they had to pack up everything, they had to
leave their homeland that
they had known for generations. They had to cross the Snake River at its
highest point, somehow get their
families -- you know, women, children, kids, old folks -- across this river to
gather, to go into this reservation,
end of a way of life. Even though the treaty that required them to do that was
a
was a fraud. And on the eve, literally the day before they were to go on to the
reservation -- to be forced
out of the reservation -- these young men sort of snapped. And these young men
took on to the reservation,
and they were forced to go on to the reservation -- these young men sort of
snapped. And these young men took
off and killed a bunch of white folks, you know, that they had grudges against.
That then triggered this war,
triggered this larger outbreak against whites. That then, of course, brought
the army in,
and the army tried to put this down. But as I researched that book, the
question that kept coming
back to me was, why did they do that? Because at the time of the war, they were
completely at peace
with the Americans around them. They had adapted beautifully. They were
prosperous cattlemen. They
were raising cattle, you know. They had silver tea sets, for Pete's sake. They
were more prosperous than the
whites who were living in the area. They threatened no one. They were living on
lands that the whites didn't want.
Why then? Why force them in? What's the reason? And the only reason I can think
of was
the Little Bighorn. This year before, this humiliating defeat at the hands of
the Lakotas and the Cheyennes.
With that, the government said, okay, that's it. Everybody, even our best
friends,
have to give up. And they have to come in into reservations where we will
control them. Yeah.
They'll control them and then force Christianity on them as well.
Yeah. Have you seen Taylor Sheridan's series 1923? It's a prequel to Yellowstone.
Have you ever
watched any of those shows? No.
Really good show. No.
But one of the things that 1923 documents, it stars Harrison Ford, and it's
very interesting,
but it documents these women that are forced from their tribe to go into these
schools where their
Christianity is forced upon them. They're beaten and treated horrifically. It's
very hard to watch
because you know that that is what happened. Of course. Yeah. That's the
boarding schools.
Yeah. That goes way back before 1923. By '23, it's sort of winding down. But
yeah,
there's all sorts of scandalous news recently, in the past year or two, about
the kinds of treatment
that came out of those schools. Here in Canada, the same sort of thing is being
revealed in Canada
about the abuses under those schools. It's not just Christianity that's being
forced on. They are
required to speak only English. They're punished if they speak their own
languages. Therefore, they give
up their appearance or cut their hair, dress in a certain way. Now, there's a
wonderful irony in that
show. I said a moment ago, most people, most public think of the Indian as if
there's one group of people.
: Right.
: The Indian. Native people, of course, didn't think at all like that. They
identified with tribal
groups. They identified with the band within the tribal groups, but often at
odds with each other.
You know, they've been fighting each other like everybody fights everybody else
in history.
: Right.
: So their identity was, you know, when you say, what are you? They would say,
well, I'm a Cheyenne,
I'm a Comanche, you know, I'm a Tlingit, you know, I'm a whatever. I belong to
this guy's band.
So the idea of the Indian was
completely foreign to them until boarding schools. And all of a sudden, in
boarding schools, all the kids,
all the young people are taken, required to go to these schools. All of these
different groups,
they're all living together. They're all forced to surrender much of their own
individual cultures,
those dozens of different cultures that they'd come from. And suddenly, it
begins to dawn on them,
they're now all speaking the same language, right? They're all...you know, we've
got much more in
common than we have differences among us. So there's a way in which, you know,
the supposed purpose
of a boarding school was to destroy Indianness, yeah? The famous phrase coming
from Colonel Pratt,
who was the one who founded Carlisle, was kill the Indian to save the man,
destroy Indian identity in order to allow these people to survive in the modern
world.
Wow.
But what the boarding schools did was, in fact, create the Indian. They didn't
kill the Indian,
the Indian didn't exist before that. It created this sense of common identity,
this sense of, okay, we may be Comanche, we may be Cheyenne, we may be Lakota,
we may be Duklingit,
or whatever. But we're all...we all have this common problem that we're facing,
these common difficulties.
So we need to think in terms of the Indian to bond...you know, to bond together.
Just like on a smaller scale,
when these bands decide to join and unite in order to fight the military, now,
on this much larger,
continental scale, Indians from all over, Native peoples from all over the
nation,
now begin to see that they are related, related in their circumstances, not by
blood. So the Indian
was created, not killed, in the boarding schools.
: That's fascinating. When they initially tried to move the Natives to
reservations,
were they doing it because where the Natives were, there was valuable resources?
Were they doing it
because geographically they could control them better in these regions? Like,
what was the motivation
initially? : It was all of that, yeah. Certainly, they were...especially when
they're in particular
places that are very rich in resources. The great examples, of course, were
mounting rushes.
: These people who were, again, hunter-gatherers living in some place, this
remote
mountain area up in California or Arizona or wherever, suddenly, you know, they're
overrun by
these people coming in, overrun because they are living on some of the richest
places in the nation.
: So you've got to get rid of them, right? But there's also the reasons, this
is a way to control
them and to, in the eyes of the government, to transform them, right? Put them
on these reservations
and you can turn them into the kind of people that you want them to be. Make
them American.
: Hmm. : And that's what...so it was both of those things, both of those things
together.
: Which is historic, like when we look back at it now, it's like one of the
most horrific aspects
of it, that we just tried to eliminate them and just integrate them into our
culture.
: Right. That was always the formal government goal.
: It wasn't simply give them a place to live the way they live. It was none.
: No. Virtually no one was saying that.
: Jeez.
: Even the people who were called, and it's sort of a formal term, Friends of
the Indians.
They were an organization called the Friends of the Indians. And they were
honestly in their own
hearts. They thought that they were doing what was necessary for the best for
these people.
: But this was...they said the only way we can do that, the only way that these
people can be saved,
is to transform them into people like us. To make them into our...to integrate
them into our culture.
: And that depended on really basically three things. It was they had to become
farmers,
because, you know, from the beginning in this country, you know, that's sort of
the ideal life.
That's how you begin your integration into the American economy, farming, you
know, the Jeffersonian
vision, you know, of the ideal farmer. They've got to be Christian. They have
to have this common religion.
And education. We've got to take their young people, and we've got to put them
in schools
where they will be not only learn the basics of the three R's and so forth, but
they'll be culturally
educated. They will be culturally transformed. So these boarding schools were
meant to
transform these people into Americans. But they, you know...so yeah. So you
often hear the term
genocide thrown around. And there are times in American history when that was
absolutely true,
when there was an effort to simply eradicate Indian peoples. But the whole
reservation system was not
meant for that. Sometimes it turned out that way. But the purpose of it was
this
control and transformation. That's what was supposed to happen. And then when
that happened,
once that was done, then the reservations would be done away with. Everybody
would live in harmony.
: Wow. It didn't happen, of course.
: Of course. It had to be so confusing to them what the resources were that the
white man wanted,
too. Because they're like, "Why do you want gold?" You can't eat it. You can't
use it as a weapon.
: Yeah. : So strange.
: It is. In a lot of ways it is. You know, gold, as you said, it's virtually
useless. It's very soft,
right? So you can't make it into a hammer. : What a strange thing to be the
most valuable
of all commodities. : It's really shiny.
: How bizarre that so many parts of the world had agreed upon that.
: That's right. It's just cross-culturally, across hundreds of years, you know,
the Egyptians,
you know? : Yeah.
: Egyptians called gold the breath of God, you know? The Aztecs consider it God's
scant.
This was the excrement of the gods, you know, that came...
: So strange. : So strange. Yeah. Now, it's not true, I think,
that once...there's some really interesting works going on right now by a
historian named Benjamin
Baddeley, who is studying in California. In the gold rush, there were Indians
who said, "Oh,
they're going to give me a bunch of stuff for this stuff."
: Of course. It adapted.
: And so they went to work, and there were hundreds of Indians who were
in the gold fields before the 49ers came.
: Really?
: Yeah.