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California Indians and the Workaday West (10 pages)
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Page: of 10
CALIFORNIA INDIANS AND THE WoRKADAY WEST:
_ Labor, Assimilation, and Survival
by Albert L. Hurtado
history: the noble red man and the implacable savage. Both effigies are inaccurate stereotypes that exaggerate real and imagined qualities
of the native people of North America. On the one
hand, the noble Indian had high ideals, fought
courageously when he was wronged, delivered
powerful orations on the iniquities of white civilization, and always insisted on simple justice. The
noble Indian possessed one of the quintessential
qualities of the westerner. He was a square shooter.
His evil twin, however, was an altogether different
case. He was given to dark rages, and came equipped with an insatiable appetite for bloody revenge,
an unlimited capacity for violence, and a perverse
talent for outrageous torture.!
We must wonder how these radically dissimilar
stereotypes could persist side by side for so long.
Still, there is one area where the images seem to
converge. According to legend, neither noble nor
brute Indians ever did a lick of work. This is an
important point that verges on'the reality of the
American West and the Indians who lived there.
Tribal life—at least for Indian men—was a life of
unstructured ease, or so white Americans believed.
They defined much traditional male Indian work—
especially hunting and fishing —as sport, and failed
to recognize the agricultural heritage of many tribes.
To white eyes, only Indian women showed a spark
of ambition, but female work was the exception
Ti images of the Indian haunt American that proved the rule of Indian laziness. For Victorian
tastes, Indian women did entirely too much heavy
work while their men lounged about.”
Nineteenth-century reformers and Indian office
bureaucrats devoutly hoped to convert Indians from
hunters and gatherers to solid, laboring, Christian
citizens. Such a conversion, reformers believed,
would herald the temporal and spiritual salvation
of Indians. They also believed that Indians would
have to be educated to work— for their own good, of
course.” In 1881, after a stint as Secretary of the
Interior, Carl Schurz put the matter succinctly. He
declared that Indians would have to “be taught to
work by making work profitable and attractive to
them.”
Self-interest also informed nineteenth-cen
notions about tribalism and motivated those who
wanted to open Indian lands to white settlers.
Indians who continued to rely on hunting and
gathering retarded progress by hoarding lands
that white hands could make productive. To open
western resources to white ambitions, Indians
would have to be removed to reservations where
they would learn the arts of civilization, including the “art” of labor, as nineteenth-century social
thinkers understood that term. Once tribesmen
were properly trained, individual Indians would
receive one-hundred-sixty-acre homesteads from
tribal lands, and the excess could be opened to
white settlement. Indians could then be assimilated
2 CALIFORNIA HISTORY