Court Opinion

ID: 9419610
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:50:27.211754+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:19.392549
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Jackson,
concurring.
Mr. Justice Black and I think it may be desirable to state some of the difficulties which underlie efforts to leave such an Indian grievance as this to settlement by a lawsuit.
It is hard to see how any judicial decision under such a jurisdictional act can much advance solution of the problem of the Shoshones. Any judgment that we may render gives to these Indians neither their lands nor money. The jurisdictional act provides that the proceeds above attorneys’ fees shall “be deposited in the Treasury of the United States to the credit of the Indians” at 4 per cent interest and “shall be subject to appropriation by Congress only for the health, education, and industrial advancement of said Indians.” The only cash payment is attorneys’ fees. Section 7 provides that the Court of Claims shall determine a reasonable fee, not to exceed 10 per cent of the recovery, together with expenses, to be paid to the attorneys for the Northwestern Bands out of the sums found due. After counsel are thus paid, not a cent is put into the reach of the Indians; all that is done for them by a judgment is to earmark some funds in the *355Treasury from, which Congress may as it sees fit from time to time make appropriations “for the health, education, and industrial advancement of said Indians.” Congress could do this, of course, without any judgment or earmarking of funds, as it often has done. Congress, even after judgment, still must decide the amount and times of payment to the Indians according to their needs.
We would not be second to any other in recognizing that — judgment or no judgment — a moral obligation of a high order rests upon this country to provide for decent shelter, clothing, education, and industrial advancement of the Indian. Nothing is gained by dwelling upon the unhappy conflicts that have prevailed between the Shoshones and the whites — conflicts which sometimes leaves one in doubt which side could make the better claim to' be civilized. The generation of Indians who suffered the privations, indignities, and brutalities of the westward march of the whites have gone to the Happy Hunting Ground, and nothing that we can do can square the account with them. Whatever survives is a moral obligation resting on the descendants of the whites to do for the descendants of the Indians what in the conditions of this twentieth century is the decent thing.
It is most unfortunate to try to measure this moral duty in terms of legal obligations and ask the Court to spell out Indian legal rights from written instruments made and probably broken long ago and to put our moral duty in figures as legal damages. The Indian problem is essentially a sociological problem, not a legal one. We can make only a pretense of adjudication of such claims, and that only by indulging the most unrealistic and fictional assumptions.
Here we are asked to go back over three quarters of a century to spell out the meaning of a most ambiguous writing made in 1863. One of the parties did not keep, or know how to keep, written records of negotiations. *356Written evidence bearing on intention is only that which the whites chose to make. It does not take a particularly discerning eye to see that these records, written usually by Indian agents, are quite apt to speak well of the writer's virtue and good intention. Evidence from the memory of man is no longer available. Even if both parties to these agreements were of our own stock, we being a record-keeping people, a court would still have the gravest difficulty determining what their motives and intentions and meanings were. Statutes of limitations cut off most such inquiries, not because a claim becomes less just the longer it is denied, but because another policy intervenes — the policy to leave in repose matters which can no longer be the subject of intelligent adjudication.
Even if the handicap of time could be overcome, we could not satisfactorily apply legal techniques to interpretation of this treaty. The Indian parties to the treaty were a band of simple, relatively peaceful, and extremely primitive men. The population of the band was only about 1,500, and the territories claimed to have been occupied as their home consisted of over 15,000,000 acres of land in Idaho, Utah, and Nevada — about 10,000 acres for every individual in the band. Of course so few could not patrol and defend so vast a territory against inroads by the more aggressive and efficient whites. The white was a better killer. The game disappeared, the lands were not productive, and in peace the Indians became destitute. Desperation stimulated or perhaps produced predatory tendencies and they began to fall upon the overland caravans and to steal and rob. The whites brought forth their armies and reduced the Indians to submission. Then the whites “negotiated” a treaty.
We realize that for over a century it has been a judicial practice to construe these “agreements” with Indians, as if they were contracts between white men. In some cases, where the provisions are simple and definite and deal with *357concrete lands or matters, this may be practicable. But despite antiquity of the custom, to apply the litigation process to such a problem as we have here seems farfetched. The most elemental condition of a bargain was not present, for there was nothing like equality of bargaining power. On one side were dominant, powerful, shrewd, and educated whites, who knew exactly what they wanted. On the other side were destitute, illiterate Indians who primarily wanted to be let alone and who wanted by some means to continue to live their own accustomed lives. Here we are asked to decide whether their intent was to relinquish titles or make reservations of titles or recognition of titles. The Indian parties did not know what titles were, had no such concept as that of individual land title, and had no sense of property in land. Here we are asked to attribute legal meanings to subscribers of a written instrument who had no written language of their own in which to express any meaning. We doubt if any interpreter could intelligently translate the contents of a writing that deals with the property concept, for the Indians did not have a word for it. People do not have words to fit ideas that have never occurred to them. Ownership meant no more to them than to roam the land as a great common, and to possess and enjoy it in the same way that they possessed and enjoyed sunlight and the west wind and the feel of spring in the air. Acquisitiveness, which develops a law of real property, is an accomplishment only of the “civilized.”
Of course the Indians may have had some vague idea that thereafter they were to stay off certain lands and the white men in return were to stay off certain other land. But we do not think it is possible now to reduce such a nebulous accord to terms of common-law contract and conveyancing. The treaty was a political document. It was intended to pacify the Indians and to let the whites travel in peace a route they somehow were going to travel anyway.
*358How should we turn into money’s worth the rights, if any, of which the Indians have been deprived? Should we measure it in terms of what was lost to a people who needed 10,000 acres apiece to sustain themselves through hunting and nomadic living, who had no system or standard of exchange, and whose representatives in making the treaty appear to have been softened for the job by gifts of blankets and trinkets? Should we measure it in terms of what was gained to our people, who sustain themselves in large numbers on few acres by greater efficiency and utilization? Of course amends can be made only to progeny in terms of their present needs as the jurisdictional Act recognizes will ultimately be done. The Indians’ grievance calls for sympathetic, intelligent, and generous help in developing the latent talents and aspirations of the living generation, and there is little enlightenment for that task from endless and pointless lawsuits over the negotiation of generations long gone to their rest.
We agree with Mr. Justice Reed that no legal rights are today to be recognized in the Shoshones by reason of this treaty. We agree with Mr. Justice Douglas and Mr. Justice Murphy as to their moral deserts. We do not mean to leave the impression that the two have any relation to each other. The finding that the treaty creates no legal obligations does not restrict Congress from such appropriations as its judgment dictates “for the health, education, and industrial advancement of said Indians,” which is the position in which Congress would find itself if we found that it did create legal obligations and tried to put a value on them.