Severalty,” he says: “It is doubtful whether any high degree of civilization is possible without individual ownership of land. The records of the past, and the experience of the present, testify that the soil should be made secure to the individual by all the guarantees which law can devise, and that nothing less will induce men to put forth their best exertions. It is essential that each individual should feel that his home is his own; * * * that he has a direct personal interest in the soil on which he lives, and that that interest will be faithfully protected for him and for his children by the Government.”
The commissioner and the secretary who wrote these clear statements of evident truths, and these eloquent pleas for the Indians’ rights, both knew perfectly well that hundreds of Indians had had lands “allotted to them” in precisely this way, and had gone to work on the lands so allotted, trusting “that that interest would be faithfully protected by the Government;” and that these “allotments,” and the “certificates” of them, had proved to be good for nothing as soon as the citizens of a State united in a “demand” that the Indians should be moved. The commissioner and the secretary knew perfectly well, at the time they wrote these paragraphs, that in this one Winnebago tribe in Nebraska, for instance, “every head of a family owned eighty acres of land,” and was hard at work on it—industrious, self-supporting, trying to establish that “hearthstone” around which, as the secretary says, he must “gather his family, and in its possession be entirely secure and independent.” And yet the secretary and the commissioner advise the moving of this Winnebago tribe to Indian Territory with the rest: “all the Indians in Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota” could probably be “induced to move,” they say.
These quotations from this report of the Interior Department are but a fair specimen of the velvet glove of high-sounding phrase of philanthropic and humane care for the Indian, by which has been most effectually hid from the sight of the
