Forgotten Period of Cruelty
Native Americans imprisoned
I could spend all of my days learning all the things I was never taught in school.
Most recently, I watched a You Tube entitled “Long Walk of Tears of the Navajo,” involving the period after the Civil War when the U.S. government violently forced native Americans off their land to make way for expansion of the white settlements and protection of the newly built and expanding railroad system. Specifically, the program tells the story of the Bosque Redondo Reservation, a camp in New Mexico that was called a reservation by the government but to those held against their will, it was a prison camp marked by horrific conditions.
The inhumane conditions at the Bosque Redondo Reservation had their roots in the 1850s, when the U.S. government had begun to assert control over the Indians by establishing forts in Navajo territory, namely Fort Defiance, Arizona and Fort Wingate, in northeast New Mexico.
To gain control, the U.S. Army made war on the Mescalero Apache and Navajo Indian tribes, destroying their fields, orchards, houses, and livestock. The campaign to route the Navajo began during the winter of 1863–64 when New Mexico Volunteers, aided by the Utes, ravaged the countryside at Canyon de Chelly in eastern Arizona. The soldiers conducted a scorched earth campaign as they killed or captured Navajo, burned crops and orchards, killed livestock, burned hogans and contaminated water sources. During a final standoff at Canyon de Chelly, the Navajo surrendered to Christopher “Kit” Carson and his troops in January 1864.
Carson, who has become a legendary symbol of America’s frontier experience, directed the destruction of the Indian property and organized the trek to the Bosque Redondo reservation. Like Carson, another legendary American figure is William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody, a soldier, bison hunter and showman who served as a civilian scout for the Army during the Indian Wars.
Cody got his nickname for his efforts to eliminate the buffalo herds that were critical to the Indians for food, clothing and other needs and to make way for the Transcontinental Railroad. Cody is purported to have killed 4,282 buffalo in 18 months in 1867 and 1868. In the mid-19th century, it was estimated that 30 million to 60 million buffalo roamed the plains. In the years that followed, an estimated 200,000 buffalo were killed each year.
Most Navajo were starved into submission and surrendered and in several marches, almost 9,000 people were forced to proceed for more than 400 miles, to the Bosque Redondo Reservation, a dry, inhospitable area along the Pecos River. By November 1864, 8,570 Navajo or Dine Indians were imprisoned at the Bosque Redondo Reservation and within four years, one out of four or more than 2,000 Navajo died of various diseases, malnutrition and other causes and remain buried in unmarked graves.
While imprisoned, the Navajo and Mescalero were prevented from practicing native ceremonies, singing songs, or praying in their own language. Food rationing was meager and included foods foreign to the Indians like coffee beans, white flour and rank beef, while the lack of wood for heating and cooking during the bitterly cold winters led to illness and high infant mortality. The prisoners were further decimated when a smallpox-like disease was contracted from the occupying military.
The Navajo prisoners were expected to embrace American cultural values, to abandon their religion to Christianity and to adopt the English language, all part of a comprehensive program known as the federal Indian assimilation policy.
By 1868, the U.S. government realized it could not sustain the Bosque Redondo Reservation and sent Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and Gen. Samuel F. Tappan to meet with the Navajo leaders. Sherman had succeeded President Grant as Commanding General of the Army and was responsible for the Army’s engagement in the Indian Wars from 1869 to 1883. Sherman’s main concerns were to protect the construction and operation of the railroads from hostile Indians.
Tappan was an American journalist, military officer, abolitionist and a Native American rights activist who advocated self-determination for native tribes. He proposed the federal government replace military jurisdiction over tribal matters with a form of civil law on reservations, applied by the tribes themselves.
The Treaty of Bosque Redondo between the United States and many of the Navajo leaders was concluded at Fort Sumner, N.M., on June 1, 1868.
The years leading up to the treaty had been a brutal campaign and a time of unbridled cruelty, all rationalized by the bigotry of a powerful white nation and its negative attitudes toward the Indians, something that has been repeated and repeated, from the treatment and perception of African American slaves as less than people to the current xenophobia and nativist attitudes about the Afghan refugees who are seeking safe refuge in the U.S.