U.S. Disputed on Injustice to Indians
U.S. Disputed on Injustice to Indians
Interior Secretary Rogers Morton, usually an affable sort, pulled a long face the other day and attacked us for our "great injustice to the Indian people."
He didn't like our reports on the Broken Treaties Papers, which the Indians filched from his files and turned over to us. The papers prove, of course, that Morton and his predecessors have been the real culprits. More than anyone else, they have been guilty of "great injustice to the Indian people."
Morton's own home on the fashionable Eastern Shore of old Maryland sits grandly on choice land once owned by the Delawares. Not until 1964, some 350 years after they were driven toward a bleak corner of Oklahoma, did the U.S. finally get around to awarding the Delawares the money for their land.
Much of the money, however, is still tied up in the bureaucracy. Among the Broken Treaties Papers, we found reference to a pitiful letter to President Nixon from the daughter of a Delaware, begging the President to send her needy mother some money from the 1964 settlement.
Mr. Nixon forwarded the letter to Morton, who bucked it down to a factotum. Though eight years have passed since the 1964 settlement, a Morton aide replied:
"We are sorry if the time your mother has waited to receive these funds has caused her any inconvenience ... We have to alternative but to wait the determination of the appeals before paying out this money."
Morton also gave the brush-off to California's Pit River Indians, who made headlines last week by sending back federal checks given them in payment for a U.S. land theft in 1853. The tribal chairman, Ross Montgomery, said his people didn't want the money; they wanted their land back.
Appeal to Morton
What the newspaper stories didn't report as that Montgomery had made a personal appeal to Morton only a few weeks later. The Interior Secretary bucked it down the line again to Carl Cornelius, the acting deputy Indian commissioner, who told the Indians to accept the settlement of a few pennies an acre.
"We know of no authority under which the case may no be re-opened – reheard or the award changed," he wrote the tribe.
We found other injustices in the stolen papers as we dug through the thick file on the Great Sioux Reservation case. This dates back to the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which gave the Sioux Nation the title forever to an enormous tract around the famous Black Hills.
The ink was hardly dry before the U.S., according to the documents, "permitted miners, settlers and other non-Indians to pass through the Sioux country, particularly after the discovery of gold ..."
The Indians fought for their rights but were smashed by the cavalry. Again the U.S. promised that "no person not members of said tribes shall ever be permitted on Sioux lands, except U.S. employees, without permission from the Sioux.
But more gold was discovered, and the documents declare: "Shortly thereafter, non-Indians in great numbers invaded the Great Sioux Reservation" again. Again the Indians tried to hold their ground, but the Army restricted them "to small areas" and began slowly starving them into submission, the papers say.
In the end, the U.S. simply took seven million more acres of Sioux land, treaty or no treaty, and gave the Sioux 900,000 acres as a dry bone. For decades, the Indian have been battling in the courts for justice. But the papers show that as recently as September, they were still getting the runaround.
Rogers Morton is a decent enough man, but he's been too busy to study Indian problems or even bother to answer Indian letters himself.