The colonization of Indians by non-Indian society exemplified just how lines got drawn on the land in the Pacific Northwest. It was not a clear-cut or precise process, and it was not a process that was seen the same way by all the parties involved. Policy toward Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest was an extension of the Indian policy developed at the national level by the U.S. government. In other words, the rules and regulations for dealing with Indians were established and administered by various federal officials based in Washington, D.C.—by superintendents of Indian affairs and Army officers, by Senators and Congressmen, by members of presidential administrations and Supreme Court justices. Yet western settlers—the residents of states, territories, and localities—attempted with some success to modify national Indian policy to suit their own ends. Moreover, the natives who were the objects of these policies also attempted to modify and resist them, again with a limited degree of success.
Joseph Lane
To explain the development of relations between Indians and non-Indians in the Pacific Northwest, then, one needs to keep in mind that there were federal points of view, settler points of view, and native points of view. The plural—"points of view"—is deliberate. It is also crucial to keep in mind that there was no unified perspective among any of the parties involved. Neither the officials of federal government, nor the settlers of the Northwest, nor the Indians of the region were unanimous in their thinking about and responses to American Indian policy as it was applied in the Pacific Northwest. (Indians from the same band or tribe sometimes ended up fighting one another; some women proved more sympathetic to Indians than men did; the U.S. Army was often much more restrained in dealing with natives than settler militias were.) This lack of agreement was surely one of the things that complicated, and to some extent worsened, relations between Indians and non-Indians. It makes generalizations about those relations tenuous.
Joseph Lane (right). (Reproduced in Johansen and Gates, Empire of the Columbia, New York, 1957. Photo courtesy of Special Collections, University of Oregon Library.) Portrait of Isaac I. Stevens (below). The federal Office of Indian Affairs assigned to Stevens the task of carrying out the new reservation policy in Washington Territory. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Portrait files.)
Isaac Stevens
Although it is risky, then, I want to offer the generalization that 19th-century America was an achieving, acquisitive, non-pluralistic, and ethnocentric society. It had tremendous confidence in its way of life, and particularly its political and economic systems, and it aspired to disseminate its ways to those who seemed in need of them or able to benefit from them—including Indians (and Mexicans and, at times, Canadians). The nation was tremendously expansive, in terms of both territory and economy. Its assorted political and economic blessings (at least for free, white, adult males) seemed both to justify and feed this expansionism. Thus expansion was viewed as both self-serving (it added to the material wealth of the country) and altruistic (it spread American democracy and capitalism to those without them). The nation's self-interest was thus perceived to coincide with its sense of mission and idealism.
American Indian policy bespoke this mixture of idealism and self-interest. White Americans proposed to dispossess natives and transform their cultures, and the vast majority of them remained confident throughout the century that these changes would be best for all concerned. Anglo-American society would take from Indians the land and other natural resources that would permit it to thrive, while Indians would in theory absorb the superior ways of white culture, including Christianity, capitalism, and republican government. For the first half of the 19th century, federal officials pursued this exchange largely with an Indian policy dominated by the idea of removal. Removal policy aimed to relocate tribes from east of the Mississippi River on lands to the west, assuming that over time the natives would be acculturated to white ways. There were numerous problems with this policy, of course. For our purposes, one of the key problems was that removal policy regarded lands west of the Mississippi as "permanent Indian country." By the 1840s, numerous non-Indians were moving both on to and across those lands, ending any chance that they would truly remain "Indian country." By midcentury the Office of Indian Affairs had begun devising another policy based on the idea of reservations. This institution, new at the federal level, has had a central role in relations between Northwest Indians and non-Indians since 1850.
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