Expeditions organized or participated in by the Smithsonian . ber companiesand white settlers took full advantage of the situation, with theresult that in a few years hundreds of Indian families and individualswere practically destitute, and those who were induced to sell includednot only the easily recognizable mixed-bloods, but also f|uite a numberof those who claimed to be full-bloods, or who could not by anyordinary means be recognized as having any white blood in theirveins. Moreover, in some of these cases the sale of the timber orland by the Indians was obtained by misrepr
Expeditions organized or participated in by the Smithsonian . ber companiesand white settlers took full advantage of the situation, with theresult that in a few years hundreds of Indian families and individualswere practically destitute, and those who were induced to sell includednot only the easily recognizable mixed-bloods, but also f|uite a numberof those who claimed to be full-bloods, or who could not by anyordinary means be recognized as having any white blood in theirveins. Moreover, in some of these cases the sale of the timber orland by the Indians was obtained by misrepresentation and even byactual fraud. 72 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 66 The full-l:)lood Indians, however, and those who could not belegitimately recognized as mixed-bloods, were under the protectionof the United States Government. They had no right or power toalienate their property without the Governments consent; and whenthe attention of the authorities was called to the wholesale depriva-tion of the Indian of his land and timber, due steps were taken not. Fig. 87.—C h i p p e w a mixed-blood,French-Indian, looking strikingly like aJapanese. only to prevent the continuation of such deprivation but to recoverfor the Indian all property that was taken from him illegally. Com-missions were appointed to investigate the conditions ; the Indianswere thoroughly questioned as to their genealogy and blood mixture,and in the course of years hundreds of actions were brought beforethe courts for the recovery of their property. As these cases proceeded and the defense developed, it becameevident that the most urgent and important problem was to deter- NO. 3 SMITHSONIAN EXPLORATIONS, I915 73 mine in many of the contested cases who was, and who was not, afull-blood Indian. There was no difficulty in this respect where theamoimt of white blood was considerable or the mixture fairly recent;but in many instances the mixture first took place many generationsago, and the proporti
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectscienti, bookyear1912
