Kevin Gover Quotes
There is great good will on Capitol Hill for the tribes but virtually none for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Kevin Gover, Director, Bureau of Indian Affairs (Democrat), Speech, University of South Dakota Law School, C-SPAN, April 19, 1998
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The Cherokee's had fallen under the control of the Confederate military and Ross had urged Federal military protection for the tribe.
This law allowed the President to forcibly move entire tribes from their native lands to sparsely settled land in the West. Oklahoma became knows as Indian Territory as so many Indians were relocated there. The act, and this clause in particular, gave the President the authority over all Indian tribes in the nation and established the difficult if not impossible relationship between the Indian nations and the Federal government. The act—the last sentence of the quote—also ratified all treaties with the Indians and pronounced them inviolate. That was not to be.
In the only presidential Special Message to Congress on the subject of Indians in American history:
The Indians did not have the wheel when the whites came, but soon there were wagons, stage coaches and railroads.
While Jefferson was clear on this point, there were other forces and points of view that did not recognize Indian rights and were prepared to use force to obtain Indian lands. These, together with some Indians who made bad and sometimes corrupt bargains and treaties ceding land, produced the loss of most of the Indian land in America.
Cass was negotiating with the Shawnees and Cherokees to persuade them to move to land west of the Mississippi. See John Henry Eaton for similar unkept promises.
Most of the Colonies had laws against Indians possessing guns and any white seeing such was allowed to attack such Indians. Rhode Island had peaceful relations with the Indians and not only allowed Indians to carry firearms for hunting but hired them to do the hunting as they were better at it and did not value their time as highly as the whites. However, travelers coming from out of the colony would see an Indian with a gun, and shoot at him thereby killing or injuring friendly Indians and causing racial problems when there were few. The quotation also illustrates that there was little uniformity amongst the colonies as to how to deal with their various social and political problems.
Kevin Gover is the director of the National Museum of the American Indian. A citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, he previously served as the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs under President Bill Clinton.
