The Lesson of the Tribes
A labor editorial invokes the history of Indigenous dispossession to argue that unions must unify or face the same fate as the tribes of North America.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A labor orator could make a telling address by pointing to the downfall of the Indians of North America. There was never a time when the lesson which the Indians teach was more necessary than it is today. Four hundred years ago there was not a white man living in America. The Indians were the owners and masters of the whole continent. Today all who remain of the great tribes are penned up in narrow strips of land in the western states without power, influence or the right of self-government. The Indians had America and lost it. Why? Because they were not intelligent enough to organize a national federation. They were bad unionists; if the Algonquins went on strike against the whites, the Ojibwas became 'scabs' and joined the whites. Every tribe thought it was big enough to stand alone. There are thousands of American workingmen today who have 'Indian minds'—in fact, they are lower than Indians, for they do not even join their own tribes. They imagine that the rights of an individual will be respected in a country where even the strongest organizations have to fight for fair play. This is no time for squabbles over petty matters of trade jurisdiction or for concocting wild schemes of political revolution. This is a time to close up ranks, to enlist new members and new trades, to strengthen the weak places, and to remember how the Indians lost America and to prevent it from being lost a second time by the people of the United States.
“The idea of a great irresistible federation of all the tribes was too big an idea for the narrow brain of the red man. He was afraid that if he organized he would lose his individual liberty. As a result of not organizing he lost his liberty, his country and his life as well.”
This editorial represents a jarring example of how 20th-century labor movements appropriated the history of Indigenous dispossession to serve their own political metaphors. While labor organizers sought to build power against corporate interests, they simultaneously erased the actual agency and specific history of the Native peoples they cited as a cautionary tale.
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