NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 258, 29 July 1939, Page 6 (Supplement)

NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS

No Longer A Vanishing Race

The Red Indian of the United States, pictured at home as a member of a dying race and portrayed in many countries of Europe as a militant savage arrayed in feathered headdress and waving a tomahawk, is in actua. fact, in the year 1939, as completely different from one misconception as from the other. The Indian of the United States is not “vanishing,” and he is not (and has never been) as wild as he was painted, writes Floyd W. la Rouche, in “The Times,” London.

It is true that by reason of wars, disease, and maladjustment to a foreign economic and cultural pattern, the Indian population had diminished steadily for many years after the establishment of English colonies on the eastern seaboard in the early seventeenth century. It is also true tha'. full-blooded Indians became steadily less numerous as the assimilative processes went forward.

But in recent years these things have changed. The curve of Indian population has taken a sudden upward swing and the drift toward assimilation has apparently slowed down. And with these changes in the current of native existence there has come a resurgence of Indian culture, Indian economy, and Indian spirit, the end of which has not yet dimmed the horizon and the fruits of which no man can accurately foretell. Tire Indian is cominlg back, but his resurgence and his reorientation have not begun without dislocating first, a multitude of'deeply rooted prejudices, and secondly, an even stronger body of established property rights. Thus the new day for Red Indians has been accompanied by much misunderstanding, by a good deal of selfish white antagonism, and by some very honest, and, at times, effective opposition. But the record of the last 10 years seems to indicate that the overwhelming majority of American citizenry, though outwardly silent and apparently almost inarticulate, is nevertheless solidly supporting the Indian advancement. The best available statistics indicate that at the time Columbus landed there were living in what is now the United States approximately 846,000 Indians. By 1900 the population was reported as

270,000, and apparently had dropped at one time even below this point. Some notion of the causes of Indian decimation may be gleaned from James Mooney, who said : — ' “The chief causes of decrease, in order of importance, may be classed as smallpox and other epidemics: tuberculosis; sexual diseases: whisky and attendant dissipation; removals, starvation, and subjection to unaccustomed conditions; low vitality due to mental depression under misfortune; wars. “In the category of destroyers all but wars and tuberculosis may be considered to have come from the white man, and the increasing destructiveness of tuberculosis itself is due, largely -to conditions consequent upon his advent. Smallpox has repeatedly swept over wide areas, sometimes destroying perhaps one half the native population within its path. The destruction by disease and dissipation has been greatest along the Pacific Coast, where also the original population was most numerous. In California the enormous decrease from about a quarter of a million to less than 20,000 is due chiefly to the cruelties and wholesale massacres perpetrated by the miners and early settlers. The almost complete extermination of the Aleut is attributable to the same causes during the early Russian period. Confinement in mission establishments has also been fatal to the Indian, in spite of increased comfort in living conditions. “Wars in most cases have not greatly diminished the number. of Indians. The tribes were in chronic warfare among themselves, so that the balance was nearly even until, as in the notable case of the Iroquois, the acquisition of firearms gave one body an immense superiority over its neighbours.’ The Indian population continued to decline until the latter part of the last century, when it started slowly upward. Within the last decade the increase has been unmistakably rapid. In the United States today there are living 342.000 Indians, plus 30.000 Indians and Eskimos of Alaska. Of the 342,000, approximately half are fullblooded Indians and the remainder are mixed with whites in varying degrees and, in the case of a few tribes, with negroes. r