“Break up the Reservation” (1885) by Merrill E. Gates, in Seventeenth Annual Report o f the Board of Indian Commissioners (1885)

What does Gates identify as the defining characteristics of tribal life that “hold Indians back” and what are the characteristics of Anglo-Saxon Protestant life with which he seeks to replace them? How does property ownership define civilization and what is wrong with tribal organization? How does he define progress?

….For what ought we to hope as the future of the Indian? What should the Indian become?

Two peculiarities which mark the Indian life, if retained, will render his progress slow, uncertain and difficult. These are:

(1) The tribal organization.

(2) The Indian reservation.

I am satisfied that no man can carefully study the Indian question without the deepening conviction that these institutions must go if we would save the Indian from himself. . .

The tribal organization, with its tenure of land in common, with its constant divisions of goods and rations per capita without regard to service rendered, cuts the nerve of all that manful effort which political economy teaches us proceeds from the desire for wealth. True ideas of property with all the civilizing influences that such ideas excite are formed only as the tribal relation is outgrown. . . .

But the tribal system paralyzes at once the desire for property and the family life that ennobles that desire. Where the annuities and rations that support a tribe are distributed to the industrious and the lazy alike, while almost all property is held in common, there cannot be any true stimulus to industry. And where the property which a deceased father has called his own is at the funeral feast distributed to his adult relatives, or squandered in prolonged feasting, while no provision whatever is made for the widow or the children, how can the family be perpetuated, or the ideal of the permanence and the preciousness of this relation become clear and powerful. Yet this is the custom in by far the greater number of the Indian tribes. . . .

As the allegiance to tribe and chieftain is weakened, its place should be taken by the sanctities of family life and an allegiance to the laws which grow naturally out of the family! Lessons in law for the Indian should begin with the developing and the preservation, by law, of those relations of property and of social intercourse which spring out of and protect the family. First of all, he must have land in severalty.(Land in severalty means individual ownership of tract of land-RF)

Land in severalty, on which to make a home for his family. This land the Government should, where necessary, for a few years hold in trust for him or his heirs, inalienable and unchargeable. But it shall be his. It shall be patented to him as an individual. He shall hold it by what the Indians who have been hunted from reservation to reservation pathetically call, in their requests for justice, "a paper-talk from Washington, which tells the Indian what land is his so that a white man cannot get it away from him." "There is no way of reaching the Indian so good as to show him that he is working for a home. Experience shows that there is no incentive so strong as the confidence that by long, untiring labor, a man may secure a home for himself and his family." The Indians are no exception to this rule. There is in this consciousness of a family hearth, of land and a home in prospect as permanently their own, an educating force which at once begins to lift these savages out of barbarism and sends them up the steep toward civilization, as rapidly as easy divorce laws are sending some sections of our country down the slope toward barbaric heathenism. . . .

Thus the family and a homestead prove the salvation of those whom the tribal organization and the reservation were debasing. It was a step in advance when Agent Miles began to issue rations to families instead of to the headmen of the tribe. Every measure which strengthens the family tie and makes clearer the idea of family life, in which selfish interests and inclinations are sacrificed for the advantage of the whole family, is a powerful influence toward civilization. . .

We must as rapidly as possible break up the tribal organization and give them law, with the family and land in severalty as its central idea. We must not only give them law, we must force law upon them. We must not only offer them education, we must force education upon them. Education will come to them by complying with the forms and the requirements .of the law. . . .

Break up the reservation. Its usefulness is past. Treat it as we treat the fever infected hospital when life has so often yielded to disease within its walls that we see clearly the place is in league with the powers of death, and the fiat goes forth, "though this was planned as a blessing it has proved to be a curse; away with it! burn it!"

Guard the rights of the Indian, but for his own good break up his reservations. Let in the light of civilization. Plant in alternate sections or townships white farmers, who will teach him by example. Reserve all the lands he needs for the Indian. Give land by trust -deed in severalty to each family.

There is a great mission work to be done by laymen and farmers for these Indians. The spirit that settled Kansas in the interest of liberty and fair play for all men, however despised, is not yet dead in our land. And while I see clearly many difficulties in the way, I believe they can all be met in a plan that shall gradually substitute homes and family life for the tribal organization; settlements of mingled whites and Indians for the reservation system; and the reign of law, with the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, for the state of unprotected anarchy to which we have hitherto condemned the Indian.