You are on page 1of 13

Introduction

Prisons, in the United States, have always held great importance to the people and to the
government. In the United State, vocabulary about Prisons has shifted in the recent years:
Prison-Industrial Complex has entered the corpus of available language to talk about prisons.
The idea of the prison-industrial complex, as not two independent complexes but as being a
singular, unified system of incarceration has taken the field by storm. Indeed, books such as The
New Jim Crow, not only expound the Prison-Industrial Complex, but continue by showing how it
is a racial and socio-economic system of incarceration. Opposed to that, but still within the
confines of the United States, are Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons for political prisoners,
and prisoners of war. Both Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib exist, not on American soil, but away,
in Indian country where the rules of humanity no longer apply. It is here that some of the most
atrocious violent acts have been perpetrated by American hands, away from the prying eyes of
decency.
But this collection is not about Guantanamo, or Abu Ghraib, but their predecessors, the prisons
that exists long before they were a thought, places where law and decency were left at the door: a
place apart.
America, and even before it was emancipated from England, as the colonies of England,
France, Spain and the Netherlands, knew that survival depended upon separation. Upon landing
they discovered that the land was not terra nollius, but quite densely populated with millions of
indigenous peoples from hundreds to thousands of tribes. These were a people who were
without access to the goods and technology of Europe. Indians ontological evolution was one
that was independent from Western influences until 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
Instead, Indians were intimately tied to the earth: for substanceseasonal migrations were taken
for the acquisition of additional resources, especially food, for languagestrong metaphors
depended upon the land for beauty and tact, and for spiritual strengththe Great Spirit was the
Creator of all things, the land, the plants they ate, the animals they depended on, the People.
Most Indigenous peoples in North America depended upon huge tracts of land upon
which they could hunt, fish, and in some cases, till, as they pleased without fear of over hunting,
fishing, or soil depletion. For others in the Great Plains of the Midwest, the horse, escaped from

Spanish and Portuguese corrals in South and Central America and having migrated north found
new homes part of the Sioux, Kiowa, Comanche, Crow, and Cheyenne, among others. These
Great Plains tribes restructured their already nomadic lifestyles to revolve around the horse,
using the animal to follow their primary food source, the buffalo, and wage increasingly violent
wars amongst each other. With the horse the entire plains opened up, and territories were vast,
enigmatic, and free.
Indians lived where their ancestors lived, and died, and where their children, and their childrens
children would live and die. Their bones would gather with the bones of their ancestors, and
family, and friends, and return to the earth, the mother, from which all life is born, and must
return. The land was the vessel through which one knew their ancestors and to exist for ones
decedents, and so the land held great spiritual importance for Indian people.
Indians depended not only upon the freedom of movement, but the land itself for their identity.
Tribes were based off of lands, and while customs and history defined a people, so too did their
lands, which was influential in determining both customs and history. Land could, and did, in the
Four Corners area for the Navajo, The Black Hills for the Sioux, White Mountain for the
Apaches, as memory objects. These places where the places were The People were made, where
their Creator breathed life into them and could be found, and where they made life for
themselves. It was the land that fed them, and continued their lives, and to the land that, when
their life was finished, Indians would offer thanks, and return. Indian Identity was thus intimately
tied to the land, but not any land, but to The Land.
When colonization became permanent settlement, and the Colonies became the United
States of America, the United States began to focus its militaristic efforts on the eradication of
the American Indian, despite being weakened from the fight against the British for freedom.
However, because wars were expensive, the practice of removing Indians to reservations began
to grow. Indeed, the wars with Indians were the wars of forced removal and submission. Despite
the millions of people living in North America, it was still considered terra nollius and thus up
for grabs, with the caveat that one had to remove the Indians living there. Reservations quickly
became the new means of quickly, quietly, and cheaply removing Indians without incredible
amounts of bloodshed and money. Reservations, being small parcels of land were carved out of a
much larger piece of what was once ancestral land, or someone elses ancestral land, became, in

the eyes of the government, perfectly acceptable new homes. Infinite substitutability for land
showed the amount of care the government had for Indians.
Because one piece of land was as good as any other, in the eyes of the government, and
with the exceptions of land with precious resources like gold, or extremely fertile soil, and the
like, places where Indians could live, away from the civility of white America became
increasingly easier to manage. Indian Country was the land beyond the official boundaries of
the United States of America. Sometimes Indian country was French (the Louisiana Purchase
land), or Spanish (Mexico), and sometimes Indian country was just unused American land, but
always Indian country was outside the boundaries of statehood. There, Indians lived and died
with relative freedom, away from the hand of the government yet still close enough for traders.
Indian country was a land without boundaries inhabited by many different tribes. It was here that
the government decided was an adequate place for the placement of Indians onto reservations.
The characteristic that both reservations and the Prisons of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib
have in common is not only that they are both in Indian country, but that they are all prisons.
All prisons, at their cores, are structures to limit mobility, and freedom Stone and mortar, and
chains and bars prevent the unwilling occupant from leaving. Prisons are a place of unwilling
dependency: because of the mortar and bars, occupants are unable to obtain basic human needs,
such as food, medicine, and security. The prisoners dependency creates a power differential that,
in some (most) cases leads to a power trip: occasionally culminating in human rights violations.
The political prisoners of Apartheid South Africa are one such example where prisoners were
frequently beaten and/or raped. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are another such example.
However, while they are state sponsored prisons, their location is integral to their existence.
Indian Country has been used for centuries to designate the place beyond. Indian
country has always been a savage place; without civilization (white colonialism), there could be
no laws, and thus Indian Country was a terrible, savage, dangerous, lawless, anarchistic place.
Indian country is a place apart, far from the eyes of the government, and the people. It was also
where Indians lived, and was (and is) the perfect place to place a prison where cruelty will
abound ((il)logically speaking).

Reservations hold to this definition of Prisons. Indian identity, which was so intimately
tied to mobility, was restricted: gone were the vast, endless plains, and deep forests. In their
place, small, barely arable tracts of land. Military presence, the spectral threat of even worse
conditions, and the involuntary seizure of communal and individual resources prevented escape.
The inability to cultivate sufficient amounts of crops and incredible poverty ensured the power
differential that predicates dependency. The neglect of the government to care for the interned at
reservations constitutes a violence that lack the tangible marks of torture, yet remains as thus
regardless.
Reservations are prisons. They bare many names: Rosebud, Cheyenne River, San Carlos,
White Mountain, Tahlequah, but all are prisons.
Giorgio Agamben, in The Camp as the Nomos of the Modern, argues that the moderns state is
reliant upon such spaces for the state to exist. He argues that a civilization can only be civil in
opposition to an Other. For Nazi Germany, the focus of his essay, it was the Jews and Gypsies,
and mentally and physically disabled. For America from 1492-arguably today, but definitively
1890 (the Massacre at Wounded Knee) it was Indians. Today, the Other takes many faces: usually
one with a beard and a gun. For all of the tenure of the United States of America these camps,
these Prisons have been reservations. Today, they are also physical prisons in the strictest and
more readily identifiable form.
Reservations came into being not for the benefit of Indian people, although that is how
reservations were sold, but instead as a means to dispose of the unfortunate waste of
colonization. They filled the need for a place to put all the Others where they couldnt bother
anyone white, or war with each other. Reservations were a supposed safe-haven for Indians but
instead made a safe haven for whites.
The following short collection of writings comes from across the country, and over a
period of 82 years beginning with the Cherokee in 1834. This period encompasses Some of
Americas most violent moments. The Trail of Tears would take place in 1838-9. The Indian wars
would commence in 1860 with the Long Walk of the Navajo and end with the Massacre at
Wounded Knee in the December of 1890. Armed Indian resistance would largely end there, and
their removal to reservations continued afterwards.

The stereotype that Indians were not political is patently false. Not only were Indians
highly political in the spheres they could reach, but they were uniquely political. Unlike other
prisoners, who are incarcerated (with or without due process) without a say, Indians were able to
negotiate their internment within certain bounds. Therefore, there are three distinct phases of
reservation writing: before the reservations, negotiation, and internment. The first takes place
before legislation was ratified, and spoke out as opposed to reservations. The Cherokee were
most prominent in this regard. The second is during the negotiations of reservations. Indian
occupation of reservations was dependent upon one of two outcomes: either voluntary surrender,
or involuntary forced submission. The former was far easier, and cheaper than the latter, and thus
preferable. Most negotiations started with this, then moved to war, and finally to forced
submission. Those talks too place on the battle field and in Forts, and determined to next events
in Indian-White relations. Finally, after their internment, some Indians wrote, speaking of the
injustice, violence, negligence, poverty, and hardship of their supposed promised land.
Despite only one of these phases of writing taking place on a reservation, all of them seek
to negotiate the space of the reservation as singularly opposed, resisting, accepting, and finally
critiquing. Even the writing from before either negation or internment came from a less formal,
but still separately designated Indian territory. The Indian territory where the Cherokee lived
still afforded the diminished rights of non-citizenship. Writings while negotiating were made in
the brief meetings as one ran, and the other gave chase.
This book is a collection of those writings. It is imperative that the stereotype that Indian
writers didnt exist before the 1970s be counteracted. Indians have been writing for
approximately 200 years. Why should that be forgotten? This collection also attempts to show a
history of not just Indian violence, and violence towards Indiansthat is the violence that was
the exegesis of these writingsbut resistance to violence and incarceration in forms other than
violence.
Their voices begged to be heard in their various days, and have been carried through time to
today on the same winds that blew across the prairie they were spoken on. We have little left of
many of these authors, so easily have they been written away, written out of history, but here, and
a select few other books they remain, to share their wisdom, sustained by their hope for change.

Before
That is not our country. Neither are they our people. We are at peace with them (The Coyoteros)
but never have mixed with them. Our father and their fathers before them have lived in these
mountains and have raised corn in this valley. We are taught to make mescal, our principal article
of food and in the summer and winter here we have a never failing supply. At the White
Mountains there is none and without it now we get sick. Some of our people have been a short
time at the White Mountains, but they are not contented, and they all say, Let us go to the
Aravaipa and make a final peace and never break it.
Eskiminzin of the Apaches to Lieutenant Whitman. 1871 (Brown, 201)

Resolved, That it is our decided opinion, founded upon the melancholy experience of the
Cherokees within the last two years, and upon the facts which history has furnished us in regard
to other Indian nations, that our people cannot exist amidst a white population, subject to laws
which they have no hand in making, and which they do not understand; that the suppression of
the Cherokee Government, which connected his people in a distinct community, will not only
check their progress in improvement and advancement in knowledge, but, by means of numerous
influences and temptation which this new state of things has created, will completely destroy
everything like civilization among them, and ultimately reduce them to poverty, misery, and
wretchedness.
Resolved, That, although we love the land of our fathers, and should leave the place of our
nativity with as much regret as any of our citizens, we consider the lot of exile immeasurably
more to be preferred than a submission to the laws of the States, and thus becoming witnesses of
the ruin and degradation of the Cherokee people.
Resolved, That we are firmly of the opinion, that a large majority of the Cherokee people would
prefer to remove, if the true state of their condition was properly made known to them. We
believe that if they were told that they had nothing to expect from further efforts to regain their
rights as a distinct community, and that the only alternatives left to them is either to remain
amidst a white population, subject to the white mans laws, or to remove to another where they
may enjoy pease and happiness, they would unhesitatingly prefer the latter.

Resolved, That we consider the fate of our poor brethren, the Creeks, to be a sufficient warning
to all those who may finally subject the Cherokees to the laws of the States by giving them
reservations.
Resolved, That we are disposed to contend for what we considered to be our own rights, as long
as there was any hope of relief to the nation, but that we never can consent to the waste of our
public moneys in instituting and prosecuting suits which will result only to individual advantage.
Resolved, That is is with great surprise and mortification we have noticed the idea attempted to
be conveyed to the minds of our people that the nation can be relieved by the courts of Georgia;
that we regard the appealing to those Courts, by the nation, for redress, as an entire departure
from the true policy maintained by the Cherokees in the struggle for national existence.
Elias Boudinot of the Cherokees (Peyer, 130-32)

Talk
I give myself up to you. Do with me what you please. I surrender. Once I moved about like the
wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.
Geronimo (Congress 17)
A dog will rush to eat provisions. The provisions you bring us make us sick. We can live on
buffalo but the main articles that we need we do not see---powder, lead, and caps. When you
bring us these we will believe you are sincere.
Gray Beard of the Cheyenne (Brown, 159)
I and my people want peace. We are tired of war. We are poor and have little for ourselves and
our families to eat or wear. We want to make a peace, a lasting peace, on that will keep. I have
washed my hand and mouth with cold fresh water and what I said is true.
Victorio to the Apache Agent, 1865. (Brown, 200)
I am but one man. I am the voice of my people. Whatever their hearts are, that I alk. I want no
more war. I want to be a man. You deny me the right of a white man. My skin is read; my heart is
a white mans heart but I am a Modoc. I am not afraid to die. I will not fall on the rocks. When I
die, my enemies will be under me. You soldiers began on me when I was asleep on Lost River.
They drove us to these rocks like a wounded deer.
I have always told the white man heretofore to come and settle in my country; that it was his
country and Captain Jacks country. That they could come and live there with me and that I was
not mad with them. I have never received anything from anybody, only what I bought and paid
for myself. I have always lived like a white man, and I wanted to live so. I have always tried to
live peaceably and never asked any man for anything. I have always lived on what I could kill
and shoot with my gun, and catch in my trap.
Kintpuash (Captain Jack) of the Modocs (Brown, 219)

But there are things which you have said to me which I do not like. They are not sweet like
sugar, but bitter like gourds. You said that you wanted to put on upon a reservation, to build us
houses and make us medicine lodges. I do not want them. I was born upon the prairie, where the
wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were
no enclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I wasnt to die there and not within walls.
I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas. I have hunted
and lived over that country. I lived like my father before me, and, like them, I lived happily.
When I was at Washington the Great White Father told me that all the Comache land was ours
and that no one should hinder us in living upon it. So, why do you ask us to leave the rivers, and
the sun, and the wind, and live in houses? Do not ask us to give up the buffalo for sheep. They
young men have hear talk of this, and it has made them hand and angry. Do not speak of it more.

If the Texans had kept out of my country, there might have been peace. But that which you now
say we must live on is too small. The Texans have taken away the places where the grass grew
the thickest, and the timber was the best. Had we kept that, we might have done the things you
ask. But it is too late. The white man has the country which we loved, and we only wish to
wander on the prairie until we die.
Parra-Wa-Samen (Ten Bears) of the Comanches (Brown, 242)

Ends
I do not think that I ever belonged to those soldiers at Apache Pass, or that I should have asked
them where I might go. I was kept a prisoner for four months, during which time I was
transferred to San Carlos. Then I think I had another trial, although I was not present. In fact I do
not know that I had another trial, but I was told that I had, and at any rate I was released.
Geronimo (Brown, 396)
The iron hand of the Indian Bureau has us in charge. The slimy clutches of horrid greed and
selfish interests are gripping the Indians property. Little by little the Indians land and everything
else is fading into a dim and unknown realm.
The Indians prognosis is badunfavorable, no hope. The foreboding prodromic [sic] signs are
visible here and there nowand when all the Indians money in the United States Treasury is
disposed ofwhen the Indians property is all taken from himwhen the Indians have nothing
in this wide, wide worldwhen the Indians will have no rights, no place to lay their headsand
when the Indians will be permitted to exist only on the out skirts of the townswhen they must
go to the garbage boxes in alleys, to keep them from starvingwhen the Indians will be driven
into the streets, and finally the streets will be no place for themthen what will the Indian
Bureau do for them? Nothing but drop them. The Indian Department will go out of business.
In other words, when the Indians will need the most help in this world, that philanthropic
department of the government that we call the Indian Bureau, will cease to exist; bankrupt with
liabilitiesbillions and billionsno assets, O lord, my God, what a fate has the Indian Bureau
for my people.
If we depend upon the employees of the Indian Bureau for our life, liberty, and pursuit of
happiness, we wait a long while. They are too busy looking after the machinery of Indian Affairs;
they have no time to look ahead; they have no time to feel the pulse of the Indian they have no
time to think of outside matters; they have no time to adjust matter. Well, what time have they?
you may ask. All of their time is devoted to the pleasure and will of their master at Washington,
that we call the Indian Bureau. Blindly they think they are helping and uplifting, when in reality
they are a hindrance, a draw-back and a blockade on the road that would lead the Indian to
freedom, that he may find his true place in the realms of mortal being.
The reservation Indians are prisoners; they cannot do anything for themselves. We are on the

outside, and it is the outsiders that must work to free the Indians from Buraeuism. There is no
fear of the general public. They are our friends. When they find out that we are not free, they will
free us. We have a running chance with the public, but no chance with the Indian Bureau.
The abolishment of the Indian Bureau will not only benefit the Indians, but the country will
derive more money annually from the Indians than the government has appropriated to them.
Why? Because by doing away with the Indian Bureau, you stop making paupers and useless
being and star the making of producers and workers.
Does this seem like a dream to you? Is your position a foreign attitude? From aloft do you look
down? Have you gone so far as to forget your race? Have you quenches the spirit of your
fathers? As their children, dare we stay back, hide ourselves and be dumb at this hour, when we
see out race abused, misused, and driven to doom> if this be not so, then let whatever loyalty and
racial price be in you awaken and manifest itself in the greatest movement of Let My People
Go!
Carlos Montezuma (Peyer, 337)

Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, Calif: Stanford
University Press, 1998.(95-102) Web.
Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, An Indian History of the American West. New
York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1971. Print.
Peyer, Bernd C. Editor. American Indian Nonfiction, An Anthology of Writings, 1760s-1930s.
Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. Print.
United States Congress. (1890). United States Congressional serial set, Issue 2686. Washington,
D.C. U.S. Government Printing office. Web https://books.google.com/books?
id=OU43AQAAIAAJ&pg=RA1-PA82&lpg=RA1-PA82&dq=%22I+give+myself+up+to+you.
+Do+with+me+what+you+please.+I+surrender.+Once+I+moved+about+like+the+wind.
+Now+I+surrender+to+you+and+that+is+all
%22&source=bl&ots=4IJ4e1nwRt&sig=XN6f5vy0rND4MBYzxj1N0sfIhwU&hl=en&sa=X&ei
=Z5U5VdLrHYbjsATkmoDYBg&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22I%20give
%20myself%20up%20to%20you.%20Do%20with%20me%20what%20you%20please.%20I
%20surrender.%20Once%20I%20moved%20about%20like%20the%20wind.%20Now%20I
%20surrender%20to%20you%20and%20that%20is%20all%22&f=false

You might also like