|
|
“Give the Red Man a Chance”
Make him a citizen, with all the privileges which that implies
Thomas
Nast supported citizenship and voting rights for Native Americans, and their
cultural assimilation
into American society. In
this cartoon, however, the artist's emphasis on the privileges of
citizenship is sarcastic, encompassing the jurisdiction of American
courts to try accused murderers and impose the death penalty. The
image was inspired by the slaying of Spotted Owl, a Sioux chief, by Crow
Dog, another Sioux, on a reservation in the Dakota Territory. The
question of legal jurisdiction over the incident led to an important
court case, Ex Parte Crow Dog, concerning the status of American
Indians within the American legal system.
On August 5, 1881, Spotted Tail visited
the reservation's Indian agent to discuss the chief's scheduled trip to
Washington, D.C., as an official representative of the Sioux
nation. It was decided that Spotted Tail would depart the next
morning, so he convened a meeting that afternoon to solicit the tribe's
views on the issues under consideration at the Washington
conference. After the council adjourned, Crow Dog approached
Spotted Tail, shot and killed the chief, and then left for his camp nine
miles away. At that point, two very different systems of
justice--Native and European American--went into motion.
The Sioux called a tribal council to
decide proper restitution and to reconcile the families of Spotted Tail
and Crow Dog. The situation was resolved by agreeing that Crow
Dog's family would give $600 cash, eight horses, and one blanket to
Spotted Owl's family, and that Crow Dog was thereafter responsible for
supporting Spotted Owl's family as long as he lived. He was not,
however, subject to execution. On the other hand, the federal
Indian agent ordered the killer of Spotted Owl arrested under the
authority of an 1868 treaty. In 1882, after almost a year in jail,
Crow Dog was tried and convicted of murder in a territorial court, and
sentenced to death by hanging.
Crow Dog's lawyer sued for his client's
release under a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that the tribe, not the
territorial government, had jurisdiction over crimes committed on
reservations by Indians against other Indians. Lawyers for the
U.S. government argued that treaties in 1868 and 1877 granted such
authority, and therefore overrode an earlier statute that denied
it. In a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1883, Justice
Stanley Mathews declared that the territorial government did
not have jurisdiction over inter-Indian crimes committed on
reservations. The ruling did not mean that Congress could not
legislate an expanded jurisdiction over Indians on reservations, but
that it had not done so in either the 1868 or 1877 treaties. The
Court also expressed concern about imposing "an external and
unknown code [of] ...the white man's morality" on the
Indians.
Reformers (like Nast) who favored the
assimilation of the Indians into the broader American society were
shocked by the decision, which they saw as letting a convicted murderer
go free. Consequently, as part of an appropriations act in March
1885, Congress specified that Indians on reservations were subject to
federal law for crimes such as arson, burglary, manslaughter, murder,
and rape. (Today, there are 14 such crimes legislated.)
Nevertheless, Crow Dog continues to be a major precedent in
relations between the federal government and Native Americans in two
important ways: 1) the interpretation of laws and treaties
concerning American Indians should give favorable preference to tribal
self-government and property rights; and 2) the tribe does not have to
embody any certain model of social or political organization in order to
retain federal protection.
Robert C. Kennedy
|
|
|
