The White Man's Indian by Robert F. Berkhofer

Author:Robert F. Berkhofer [Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76197-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1978-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Early United States Policy: Expansion with Honor

HOW AND WHAT ONE NATION built upon these colonial foundations may be seen in the history of United States Indian policy. Comparison of the larger aims and results of two hundred years of White American policy making with those of the preceding period reveals a remarkable similarity. From the founding of the nation until recent times, and some would include today as well, United States policy makers placed two considerations above all others in the nation’s relation with Native Americans as Indians: the extinction of native title in favor of White exploitation of native lands and resources and the transformation of native lifestyles into copies of approved White models. Whether White Americans pursued their crassest interests or their highest ideals throughout most of the two centuries, the results for Native Americans resembled those achieved earlier by the European powers, particularly England: dispossession of native lands and frequently displacement from native locales, disruption if not destruction of native cultures, and demographic decimation from White diseases and warfare. Given the larger similarities in goals and effects of the two periods of policy, the basic question then becomes not the morality or hypocrisy of United States Indian relations as such or in comparison to other nations’ dealings, important as this may be in another context,47 but why did the old policies (and consequences) persist so long in the new nation, even as its social, political, and economic organization changed so dramatically? The answer lies once again in the long-term competition for the same natural resources by peoples with different cultures and levels of social organization.

What was new in United States Indian policy was not, therefore, the continuing conflict over lands and resources or the persistence of old goals and results, but the ideology of “Americanism” that played such a crucial role in formulating and evaluating that policy over time. Although competition for the same natural resources by peoples of different social organization and economic institutions goes far to explain the general similarity of outcomes between the colonial and later periods, the cluster of ideas and images leading White Americans had of what their nation was and should be as a society accounts for the specific ways in which United States Indian policy was formulated and implemented to produce those similar outcomes—and even to judge them subsequently. To claim that this cluster of ideas and images, so conceptually integrated and consciously articulated by leading Americans as to constitute an ideology,48 demanded the idea of the Indian to rationalize and justify the continuing conflict oversimplifies the role of ideology in human affairs. The idea of the Indian, however, probably served more often to reconcile national interests with national ideals in regard to Native Americans than basic American values were held to condemn the policies formulated for the Indian. In any case, the Native American as Indian posed a moral as well as a practical problem in national life, since such a large component of Americanism stressed the normative side of American institutional arrangements.

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