Cox, Secretary of the Interior, advised that all future covenants and arrangements with the Indians, about their reservations and the aid to be furnished them, should not be of the nature of treaties; as a treaty involves the principle of a compact between sovereign powers, each having authority and force to compel a fulfilment of obligations. But the Indians are not sovereignties with such strongly organized governments as to be able to enforce covenants. They have been led by these treaty dealings with them as independent nations to regard themselves as such, and so to believe that our Government has recognized them as having an absolute fee in the lands for which we have treated with them; whereas the Government has really regarded them as wards of the nation, having simply a possessory title to territory.
These sentences expose to us the very roots of the error under which our Indian policy has, till so recently, proceeded and been guided. Never until now — if even now — has our Government defined, judicially and positively, what is the legal status of an Indian, or of an Indian tribe possessing territory within our domain. For lack of such an authoritative definition, our own policy has been inconstant and inconsistent, having no guiding principle, and so to all effects it has been faithless and unjust. At the same time the Indians themselves, interpreting our covenants with them as acknowledging certain claims and rights of theirs, which in reality we did not recognize, have justly charged us with breach of faith towards them. In fact, without any legally defined status, the Indians have impersonated to us a very large variety of characters, all of them depreciatory to themselves, and admitting of wrong and encroachment on our part, as under none of those characters did we recognize them as appearing in that which we had ourselves assigned to them as independent peoples. The same Indian tribes have been to us alternately wards of the nation, independent proprietors, subject vassals, allied and inconstant friends,
