Wards of Government

Abstract

Governments in the United States and in Canada have, since colonial times and continuing into the present, taken an active role in relation to the indigenous peoples on their frontiers and, eventually, within their borders. Frequently—though not consistently—these peoples have been treated as semi-sovereign nations, with which relations should be governed by negotiated treaties. Policy has wavered back and forth between seeking to assimilate Indians into the majority population, on an analogy with immigrants of various ethnic origins, and assuming that they would remain distinct and unassimilated. The conflict was faced clearly in 1873 when the then-Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the United States said that, while the Indians were claiming to be independent nations (as indeed the Constitution implied), they were actually only wards of white Americans. “The comparative weakness of the whites made it expedient in our early history to deal with the Indian tribes as with powers capable of self-protection and fulfilling treaty obligations, and so a kind of fiction and absurdity has come into all our Indian relations.”¹