Daily Inspiration Quote by George Crook

What sounds like pragmatic advice is really a blueprint for cultural erasure dressed up as “help.” Crook’s language is managerial and chillingly confident: “Give,” “survey,” “let them,” “it will do away.” Indigenous people appear not as political nations but as a problem to be processed by policy. The verb that matters most is “survey.” Measurement becomes power. Once land is mapped, it can be broken apart, priced, taxed, seized, and policed. Fences aren’t just boundaries; they’re a technology of conversion, turning communal territory into private property and turning governance into paperwork.

Crook frames the shift to “little farms” and livestock as a neutral upgrade in self-sufficiency, but the subtext is assimilation through dependency on a Euro-American economic system. Horses, cows, sheep: portable symbols of “civilization” that also tether people to markets, debt, and the state’s rules about ownership. The promise that they can “call their own” is a bait-and-switch: individual title is posed as dignity while the real outcome is the dismantling of collective land bases and the political authority that comes with them.

Context sharpens the edge. Crook was a U.S. Army officer in the late-19th-century Indian Wars, when military campaigns were increasingly paired with “peace policy” reforms. His statement anticipates the logic of allotment, later codified in the Dawes Act (1887): break tribes into individual parcels, dissolve tribal cohesion, and make the “tribal Indian” disappear without having to say the quiet part out loud. The quote works because it weaponizes benevolence; it sells domination as common sense.