And should the superficially informed person visit the Southwest and a closed Indian reservation, to witness the Snake Dance of the Hopi, for instance; to view one of the pageants of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico; or to hunt on Apache grounds,—and always providing that such Indians have an Agent not afraid of his political shadow, he will find that the supervision and control of the Indians, and of the superficially informed person, is based on the authorities related, which have not been revoked, and which any Indian Agent may invoke at any time he thinks necessary. In Arizona the State Legislature has granted additional powers to Indian Agents, as the residents of this colossal State have no false ideas with respect to its Indian inhabitants, and wish them managed in the most efficacious way consistent with justice.
As instances, Arizona has these laws:
Civil Code.
Section 3837: “All marriages of persons of Caucasian blood, or their descendants, with negroes, Mongolians or Indians, and their descendants, shall be null and void.”
Section 3839: “All marriages valid by the laws of the place where contracted, shall be valid in this state; PROVIDED, that all marriages solemnized in any other state or country by parties intending at the time to reside in this state shall have the same legal consequences and effect as if solemnized in this state; parties residing in this state cannot evade any of the provisions of its laws as to marriage by going into another [[222]]state or country for the solemnization of the marriage ceremony.”
Arizona and its people have no desire for a population of half-breeds; and it is a pity that not all the sovereign States of the Union have been filled with an equal pride. There is one State where it has been found to be necessary to proscribe by law the usage of the term “squaw man.”
While the Agents of to-day have not the military with which to coerce obedience, they have, as Stevenson once wrote of dogs, a strong sense of their rightness and superior position in action. The moral authority is theirs, and the legal means has not been emasculated.
The Regulations for the Indian Service, dated 1904, and unamended in so far as control of closed reservations is concerned, were based very largely on the Act of 1834. Since these regulations were issued, the Indian Agents have been engulfed by 2000 additional rules, advices, warnings, sermons, and remonstrances; but no modification of law-and-order guides has been encountered; and these original regulations have been consistently sustained by the United States District Courts.
An Indian of the Enchanted Empire may be dealt with by his Agent as surely as were the Sioux of the ’80’s. I had occasion to revive the permit system for both whites and Indians, to supervise the conduct of whites within Indian country, to protect native ceremonies, ruins, and graves, to deport those visitors and Bolsheviks considered of no immediate benefit to the quiet Indian population, to arrest and arraign both Indians and whites for offenses, to sentence them, and to see that the sentence was respected.
Now mark you! This does not mean that every Indian [[223]]Agent is a functioning Agent. It may as well be said, frankly, so long as this is getting out of the family circle, that few Indian Agents perform their fully authorized duty when it is possible to intimidate them: a process often recognized by quavering superiors at Washington who hope to outlast a dying Administration.
But before coming to the field in 1910, I saw three Secretaries of the Interior steadfastly uphold these Regulations; and as an Indian Agent in the field I have been strongly supported by three other Secretaries of the Interior, to the end that my Indian charges, until 1922, were the best-protected people on earth. [[224]]