Solving the Problems Plaguing Native Americans

CARLOS MONTEZUMA, What Indians Must Do (1914)

The fate of Native Americans twisted and turned on the changing ideas and attitudes with which whites viewed them. The latter nineteenth century, witness to infamous Indian wars and deliberate efforts to decimate their population, toggled between policies of assimilation and separation on reservations. Carlos Montezuma, an Apache activist and doctor, emerged in the early twentieth century as a national leader for Indian civil rights, attacking the reservation system and the federal bureaucracy that supported it, by drawing on prevailing theories of social philosophy.

We must free ourselves. Our peoples’ heritage is freedom. Freedom reigned in their whole make-up. They harmonized with nature and lived accordingly. Preaching freedom to our people on reservations does not make them free any more than you can, by preaching, free those prisoners who are in the penitentiary. Reservations are prisons where our people are kept to live and die, where equal possibilities, equal education and equal responsibilities are unknown.

For our people to know what freedom is they must go outside of the reservation and in order for them to harmonize with it and get used to it, they must live outside of the reservations.…

Sons of the aboriginal Indians, do you know we have been driven from the heritage of our fathers from generation to generation until we can not take another step! What are we going to do? We must decide for ourselves very quickly. Are we to disappear as the buffaloes or rise above the horizon of the twentieth century and respond, “We are here!” The sound of your own voice at the roll call will be at the end of the final battle to gain your freedom, be your individual self. The Society of American Indians will not cease until Indians have gained that standard that makes one true and free.

We must do away with the Indian Bureau. The reservation system has debarred us as a race from acquiring that knowledge to appreciate our property. The Government after teaching us how to live without work has come to the conclusion “that the Indians are not commercialists” and, therefore, “we (his guardian) will remove them as we think best and use them as long as our administration lasts and make friends.” The Indian Department has drifted into commercialism at the expense of our poor benighted people. So they go on and say: “Let us not allot those Indians on that sweet flowing water because there are others who will profit by damming it up and selling it out to the newcomers; that the Indians do not use or develop their lands; five acres of irrigated land is all that one Indian can manage, but in order to be generous, we will give him ten acres and close up the books and call it square; that their vast forest does them no good, before the Indian can open his eyes let us transfer it to the Forestry Reserve Department. Never mind, let the Indian scratch for his wood to cook with and to warm himself in the years to come; that the Indians have no use for rivers, therefore, we will go into damming business and build them on their lands without their consent. Pay? No! Why should we?” They give us “C” class water instead of “A” class. They have got us! Why? Because we do not know the difference.…

My Indian friends, it seems that we have no voice in our affairs. It seems that all we can do is to sit there like dummies and see our property fade away and wonder what next. Our woods go to the forestry reserve; our fertile lands to the Irrigation Project; our rich minerals to the miners, and our waters to the interested parties that build dams and reap the profit within our reservations. In all of these it seems that we are counted out. If our Society is going to amount to anything do you not think we ought in some way stand up for our people? If this taking away what belongs to us continues very much longer, where do you suppose we will land?

As the Society of American Indians, it is our duty to protect and aid in some way, to stop these wholesale smuggling away of our people’s property. Can you imagine any other race allowing this without their consent?

The sooner the Government abolishes the Indian Bureau, the better it will be for we Indians in every way. The system that has kept alive the Indian Bureau has been instrumental in dominating over our race for fifty years. In that time the Indian’s welfare has grown to the secondary and the Indian Bureau the whole thing, and therefore a necessary political appendage of the Government. It sends out exaggerated and wonderful reports to the public in order to suck the blood of our race, so that it may have perpetual life to sap your life, my life and our children’s future prospects. There are many good things to say about the Indian Department. It started out right with our people. It fed them, clothed them and protected them from going outside of the reservations. It was truly a place of refuge. Then they were dominated by agents; now they are called superintendents. On the reservation our people did not act without the consent of the Superintendent; they did not express themselves without the approval of the Superintendent, and they did not dare to think, for that would be to rival, to the Superintendent. Yesterday, today, our people are in the same benighted condition. As Indians they are considered non-entities. They are not anything to themselves and not anything to the world.

It would be wrong for me to come here and tell you that the reservation system is good and helpful to our people, and that the Indian Bureau should be perpetuated when I know in my heart that it has been the greatest hindrance on the road from Indian life to civilization. Look at New York and Chicago, and then at the tepees on reservations. Look at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Madison, and then at the day schools on Indian reservations; hear the screeching locomotives and the whirr of industry and see the light of electricity; behold the grand panorama of agriculture of green gardens from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts, from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico; and then behold the lounging Indians around agency buildings and under shady trees. Paradoxical as the statement may sound, it is nevertheless true, that the greatest obstacle that lies along the path toward the solution of our problem is the existence of the “helpful” Indian Bureau at Washington. It is the power plant that supplies life current to the reservations. It is long range, outside life, and does not grow from within.

The Indian Bureau seems to exist for no other purpose than to preserve the reservations. In other words the source from which the Indian ought to find relief from the evils of the reservation system is the very source without which the evil would not exist.…

The time has come that we Indians are ready to battle our own way in the world. Justice from the world can be no worse than the reservation system.

After starvation, rubbing up against the world and perchance surviving our reward will be independence. Once upon a time our ancestors were supremely independent. All they surveyed was theirs. There was none to dispute their claim. It was an ideal independence and worthy of imitation, but time has changed and conditions have changed with it. Somehow and for no other reason but that our people were Indians were they enslaved to separate existence and governed under different rules from the general government of the country. It is an appalling thing to think of such a thing and it does not look right and just. As their children’s children we ought to be ashamed of ourselves that we tolerate this national abuse any longer without our resentment, without trying to redeem our people.

To a great extent it is our fault because we have taken no interest, no thought and no consideration to change and to look around to be really free. We Indians must let loose from these things that cause us to be separate from the laws and rules that other races enjoy. It is a delusion to think that we are free when we are reservation Indians and governed by the Indian Bureau.

We must be independent. When with my people for a vacation in Arizona I must live outdoors; I must sleep on the ground; I must cook in the fire on the ground; I must sit on the ground, I must eat nature’s food and I must be satisfied with inconveniences that I do not enjoy at my Chicago home. Yet those blood relations of mine are independent, happy, because they were born and brought up in that environment, while as a greenhorn I find myself dependent and helpless in such simple life. In order for we Indians to be independent in the whirl of this other life, we must get into it and get used to it and live up to its requirements and take our chances with the rest of our fellow creatures. Being caged up and not permitted to develop our facilities has made us a dependent race. We are looked upon as hopeless to save and as hopeless to do anything for ourselves. The only Christian way, then, is to leave us alone and let us die in that condition. The conclusion is true that we will die that way if we do not hurry up and get out of it and hustle for our salvation. Did you ever notice how other races hustle and bustle in order to achieve independence? Reservation Indians must do the same as the rest of the wide world.

As a full-blooded Apache Indian I have nothing more to say. Figure out your responsibility and the responsibility of every Indian that hears my voice.

Carlos Montezuma, “What Indians Must Do,” The Quarterly Journal of The Society of American Indians II, no. 4 (October–December 1914): 294–299.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS