Angie Debo - Böcker

The classic book that exposed the scandal of the dispossession of native land by American settlersAnd Still the Waters Run tells the tragic story of the liquidation of the independent Indian republics of the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles, known as the Five Civilized Tribes. At the turn of the twentieth century, the tribes owned the eastern half of what is now Oklahoma, a territory immensely wealthy in farmland, forests, coal, and oil. Their political and economic status was guaranteed by the federal government—until American settlers arrived. Congress abrogated treaties that it had promised would last “as long as the waters run,” and within a generation, the tribes were systematically stripped of their holdings, and were rescued from starvation only through public charity. Called a “work of art” by writer Oliver La Farge, And Still the Waters Run was so controversial when it was first published that Angie Debo was banned from teaching in Oklahoma for many years. Now with an incisive foreword by Amanda Cobb-Greetham, here is the acclaimed book that first documented the scandalous founding of Oklahoma on native land.

Here is the story of the Choctaws, a proud and gifted tribe among the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians. It is the record of a people whose forced migration from their ancestral homes in the South to what is now Oklahoma and whose subsequent efforts from the Civil War to the close of the century to maintain an autonomous government and institutions form a distinctive and arresting chapter in the history of the West.While the political, social, and economic customs of the Choctaws were closely circumscribed, the thread of Choctaw history was at all times closely interwoven witht he larger fabric of American history as a whole. Choctaw law was a curious combination of ancient tribal custom and Anglo-American legal practice; Choctaw churches and schools were copied almost wholly from the white man's society; and Choctaw economic institutions represented an attempt to adjust the customs of tribal control of the land to the white system of individual ownership.

Two hundred years ago, when the activities of the white man in North America were dominated by clashing imperial ambitions and colonial rivalry, the great Creek Confederacy rested in savage contentment under the reign of native law. No one in their whole world could do the Creeks harm, and they welcomed the slight white man who came with gifts and promises to enjoy the hospitality of their invincible towns.Their reputation as warriors and diplomats, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, extended to the most distant reaches of the Indian country. Secure in their careless strength, friendly toward the white man until his encroachment made them resentful and desperate, they learned that they had no guile to match broken promises, and no disciplined courage to provide unity against white ruthlessness. Broken, dissembled, and their ranks depleted by the Creek and Seminole wars, they were subjected to that shameful and tragic removal which forced all the Five Civilized Tribes to a new home in the untried wilderness west of the Mississippi.There, when they found the land good, they revitalized their shattered tribal institutions and rebuilt them upon the pattern of the American constitutional republic. But contentment again was short-lived as they were encircled by the encroaching white man with his hunger for land, his herds of cattle, and his desire for lumber, minerals, and railway concessions. They were faced, moreover, with internal political strife, and split by the sectionalism of the Civil War. Yet, they still survived in native steadfastness-a trait which is characteristic of the Creek-until the final denouement produced by the Dawes Act.In The Road to Disappearance, Miss Debo tells for the first time the full Creek story from its vague anthropological beginnings to the loss by the tribe of independent political identity, when during the first decade of this century the lands of the Five Civilized Tribes were divided into severalty ownership. Her book is an absorbing narrative of a minority people, clinging against all odds to native custom, language, and institution. It is the chronicle of the internal life of the tribe - the structure of Creek society - with its folkways, religious beliefs, politics, wars, privations, and persecutions. Miss Debo's research has divulged many new sources of information, and her history of the Creeks since the Civil War is a special contribution because that period has been largely neglected by the historians of the American Indian.""The vitality of our race still persists,"" said a Creek orator. ""We have not lived for naught.... We have given to the European people on this continent our thought forces-the best blood of our ancestors having intermingled with that of their best statesmen and leading citizens. We made ourselves an indestructible element in their national history. We have shown that what they believed were arid and desert places were habitable and capable of sustaining millions of people.... The race that has rendered this service to the other nations of mankind cannot utterly perish.""

On September 5, 1886, the entire nation rejoiced as the news flashed from the Southwest that the Apache war leader Geronimo had surrendered to Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles. With Geronimo, at the time of his surrender, were Chief Naiche (the son of the great Cochise), sixteen other warriors, fourteen women, and six children. It had taken a force of 5,000 regular army troops and a series of false promises to ""capture"" the band.Yet the surrender that day was not the end of the story of the Apaches associated with Geronimo. Besides his small band, 394 of his tribesmen, including his wife and children, were rounded up, loaded into railroad cars, and shipped to Florida. For more than twenty years Geronimo's people were kept in captivity at Fort Pickens, Florida; Mount Vernon Barracks, Alabama; and finally Fort Sill, Oklahoma. They never gave up hope of returning to their mountain home in Arizona and New Mexico, even as their numbers were reduced by starvation and disease and their children were taken from them to be sent to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.

In 1906 when the Creek Indian Chitto Harjo was protesting the United States government's liquidation of his tribe's lands, he began his argument with an account of Indian history from the time of Columbus, ""for, of course, a thing has to have a root before it can grow."" Yet even today most intelligent non-Indian Americans have little knowledge of Indian history and affairs those lessons have not taken root.This book is an in-depth historical survey of the Indians of the United States, including the Eskimos and Aleuts of Alaska, which isolates and analyzes the problems which have beset these people since their first contacts with Europeans. Only in the light of this knowledge, the author points out, can an intelligent Indian policy be formulated.In the book are described the first meetings of Indians with explorers, the dispossession of the Indians by colonial expansion, their involvement in imperial rivalries, their beginning relations with the new American republic, and the ensuing century of war and encroachment.The most recent aspects of government Indian policy are also detailed the good and bad administrative practices and measures to which the Indians have been subjected and their present situation.Miss Debo's style is objective, and throughout the book the distinct social environment of the Indians is emphasized - an environment that is foreign to the experience of most white men. Through ignorance of that culture and life style the results of non-Indian policy toward Indians have been centuries of blundering and tragedy.In response to Indian history, an enlightened policy must be formulated: protection of Indian land, vocational and educational training, voluntary relocation, encouragement of tribal organization, recognition of Indians' social groupings, and reliance on Indians' abilities to direct their own lives.The result of this new policy would be a chance for Indians to live now, whether on their own land or as adjusted members of white society. Indian history is usually highly specialized and is never recorded in books of general history. This book unifies the many specialized volumes which have been written about their history and culture. It has been written not only for persons who work with Indians or for students of Indian culture, but for all Americans of good will.