Indian-Killer Andrew Jackson Deserves Top Spot on List of Worst U.S.
Presidents
By Gale Courey Toensing
and ICTMN Staff
February 20, 2012
(Copyright Bettmann/Corbis / AP Images)
Portrait of Andrew Jackson
Unlike the statement in Indian Country Today Media
Network’s “Best
Presidents for Indian country” story, it’s a
bit easier identifying the “worst” presidents for Indian
country. Five tend to stand out with the majority of the
rest huddled together after that. Here are our nods to the
presidents who did more harm than good for Native Americans
while in office.
Portrait of Andrew Jackson (Copyright Bettmann/Corbis /
AP Images)
Andrew Jackson: A man nicknamed “Indian
killer” and “Sharp Knife” surely deserves the top spot on a
list of worst U.S. Presidents.
Andrew Jackson “was a forceful proponent of Indian
removal,” according to
PBS. Others have a less genteel way of describing the
seventh president of the United States.
“Andrew Jackson was a wealthy slave owner and infamous
Indian killer, gaining the nickname ‘Sharp Knife’ from the
Cherokee,” writes Amargi on the website
Unsettling America: Decolonization in Theory & Practice.
“He was also the founder of the Democratic Party,
demonstrating that genocide against indigenous people is a
nonpartisan issue. His first effort at Indian fighting was
waging a war against the Creeks. President Jefferson had
appointed him to appropriate Creek and Cherokee lands. In
his brutal military campaigns against Indians, Andrew
Jackson recommended that troops systematically kill Indian
women and children after massacres in order to complete the
extermination. The Creeks lost 23 million acres of land in
southern Georgia and central Alabama, paving the way for
cotton plantation slavery. His frontier warfare and
subsequent ‘negotiations’ opened up much of the southeast
U.S. to settler colonialism.”
Jackson was not only a genocidal maniac against the
Indigenous Peoples of the southwest, he was also racist
against African peoples and a scofflaw who “violated nearly
every standard of justice,” according to historian
Bertram Wyatt-Brown. As a major general in 1818, Jackson
invaded Spanish Florida chasing fugitive slaves who had
escaped with the intent of returning them to their “owners,”
and sparked the First Seminole War. During the conflict,
Jackson captured two British men, Alexander George Arbuthnot
and Robert C. Ambrister, who were living among the
Seminoles. The Seminoles had resisted Jackson’s invasion of
their land. One of the men had written about his support for
the Seminoles’ land and treaty rights in letters found on a
boat. Jackson used the “evidence” to accuse the men of
“inciting” the Seminoles to “savage warfare” against the
U.S. He convened a “special court martial” tribunal then had
the men executed. “His actions were a study in flagrant
disobedience, gross inequality and premeditated
ruthlessness… he swept through Florida, crushed the Indians,
executed Arbuthnot and Ambrister, and violated nearly every
standard of justice,” Wyatt-Brown wrote.
In 1930, a year after he became president, Jackson signed
a law that he had proposed – the
Indian Removal Act
– which legalized ethnic cleansing. Within seven years
46,000 indigenous
people were removed from their homelands east of the
Mississippi. Their removal gave 25 million acres of land “to
white settlement and to slavery,” according to
PBS. The
area was home to the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and
Seminole nations. In the Trail of Tears alone,
4,000 Cherokee people died of cold, hunger, and disease
on their way to the western lands.
Portrait of Dwight D. Eisenhower (Copyright
Bettmann/Corbis / AP Images)
Dwight Eisenhower: President
Dwight Eisenhower, the World War II hero who served as
President from 1953 until 1961, was an early advocate of
consultation. On August 15, 1953, he signed into law H.R.
1063, which came to be known as Public Act 280, because he
believed it would help forward “complete political
equality to all Indians in our nation.”
Public Act 280 transferred extensive criminal and civil
jurisdiction in Indian country from the federal government
to California, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, Wisconsin, and
Alaska. Other states were allowed to opt in later. In a
signing statement accompanying the bill, Eisenhower objected
to certain sections because they allowed other states to
impose H.R. 1063 on tribal nations, “removing the Indians
from federal jurisdiction, and, in some instances, effective
self-government” without requiring “full consultation.” He
recommended that Congress quickly pass an amendment
requiring states to consult with the tribes and get federal
approval before assuming jurisdiction on reservations.
The bad news is Eisenhower didn’t veto H.R. 1063. If he
had, the devastating termination and relocation era would
have been delayed and possibly stopped, according to Edward
Charles Valandra in his book
Not Without Our Consent: Lakota resistance to
termination, 1950-59. “Indeed, his veto could have
stopped its passage. Arguably, had Eisenhower vetoed H.R.
1063, the termination program would have been effectively
curtailed long enough for Native peoples to mobilize a
preemptive campaign against further measures similar to H.R.
1063. At the very least, Native, state, and U.S. relations
would have taken a much different course from what the
Native population actually experienced,” Valandra wrote.
Although the termination era had its roots in the post
World War II years and lasted through the 60s, it came under
full steam during Eisenhower’s presidency. During that time,
Congress “terminated” – withdrew federal acknowledgment from
and the trust relationship with –
109 tribes and removed more than
1,365,000 acres of land from trust status. More than
13,260 people lost their tribal affiliation.
A writer on the
Native American Netroots website sees the termination
era as part of America’s Cold War battle against global
communism, “Following World War II, the United States turned
its energies into fighting communism. Indian reservations
and policies which would allow Indians to determine their
own futures were deemed communistic and the federal
government set out once again to destroy (terminate) Indian
tribes and to ‘allow’ Indians to assimilate like other
immigrants. Indian people and their tribal governments
vigorously opposed these policies,” the writer says.
President Richard Nixon ended the termination era in
1970 and introduced the “self-determination”
era.
George W. Bush (AP Photo/The White House, Eric Draper)
George W. Bush: While George W. Bush was
one of three presidents since 1995 to issue proclamations
designating November as National American Indian Heritage
Month, his understanding of tribal sovereignty is limited.
At the Unity: Journalists of Color Conference (see video
below) in 2004 when questioned by Mark Trahant, the then
editorial page editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
about sovereignty in the 21st century, Bush gave
a muddled answer.
“Tribal sovereignty means that. It’s sovereign. You’re…
You’re a… you’ve been given sovereignty and you’re viewed as
a sovereign entity,” Bush stumbles through his answer. “And
therefore the relationship between the federal government
and tribes is one between sovereign entities.”
And sovereignty isn’t the only Native American issue Bush
was unclear on during his presidency. A 2004 report titled
“The Civil Rights Record of the George W. Bush
Administration, 2001-2004” by the U.S. Commission of Civil
Rights details where the president fell short on civil
rights for Native Americans.
“President Bush has acknowledged the great debt America
owes to Native Americans. However, his words have not been
matched with action,” the report states.
To back up its claims, the report details how Bush did
not provide sufficient funding for
tribal colleges and universities, and even proposed
cutting $1.5 billion in funding for
education programs that benefit Native Americans.
The report also detailed how the Bush administration
provided inadequate funding for the Indian Health Service,
funding it at $3.6 billion in 2004 when health needs in
Indian country called for $19.4 billion.
Housing in Indian country wasn’t funded adequately by
Bush either. He failed to provide enough funds to cover the
cost of the 210,000 housing units that were needed.
The final point made by the commission was Bush’s
termination of critical law enforcement programs, like the
Tribal Drug Court Program.
Watch Bush’s response to tribal sovereignty in the 21st
century:
Abraham Lincoln: The majority of the
United States knows Lincoln as the president who “cannot
tell a lie,” and as the leader of the Emancipation
Proclamation. However, if you were to ask Native Americans
their perception of the great president, the image would be
much darker. Lincoln made no effort to work with Native
Americans, instead he worked against them. When the Sioux
demanded its $1.4 million they had been promised for the
sale of 24 million acres of land, that had already started
to be settled by whites, Lincoln did nothing. According to
an
article on the United Native America website, The Sioux
revolted and Lincoln called upon General John Pope to handle
the uprising. Pope began his campaign by saying, “It is my
purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux. They are to be
treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people
with whom treaties or compromise can be made.”
President Abraham Lincoln (Copyright Bettmann/Corbis /
AP Images)
Lincoln did not argue, the Indians were defeated, and
Lincoln ultimately signed the fates of 38 Indian prisoners
in Mankato, Minnesota according to
Greatdreams.com/lies.htm. In Lincoln’s defense, 303
Indian men were sentenced to death, but Lincoln only signed
for 38. On December 26, 1862 the largest mass execution in
United States history took place, based on a cloud of doubt.
The Navajos were subjected to a similar situation as the
Sioux, as were others. Lincoln followed his “American
System” through battles in the Plains, South and Southwest
crippling tribes and forcing them from their lands.
Before he was president, Lincoln was the attorney for the
railroads, which in order to be completed, the Indian
“situation” had to be taken care of—a belief Lincoln carried
into office with him. His railroad connections according to
United Native America would lead, not only to the attempted
annihilation of the Indian, but to tremendous scandals in
the administration of another of Lincoln’s war criminals,
Ulysses S. Grant.
Author David A. Nichols when describing how Lincoln
handled the conflicts with the Indians in
The Other Civil War: Lincoln and the Indians
addressed it by saying, “in his response to these crises,
Lincoln was instrumental in determining the fate of Native
Americans in the years following his death.”
General Ulysses S. Grant in Uniform (Copyright
Bettmann/Corbis / AP Images)
Ulysses S. Grant: Grant made it on our
‘Best’ Presidents list as well. Mostly because his
intentions were in the right place and something that hadn’t
been seen in that time. But those good intentions can’t save
him from the fact of the matter. Ultimately it was one word
that sealed Grant’s fate for this list—reservations. His
hopes to move Indians closer to white civilization by
creating these “Native communities” backfired. They became a
form of bad policy that did more harm than good by cutting
ties for Native Americans to a vast area of land they had
been used to occupying for hundreds of years. Reservations
isolated Native Americans to an area that was and is taken
advantage of by federal government administrations for years
to come.