Politics & Power Quote by Nelson A. Miles

Miles isn’t lamenting cruelty so much as litigating cost. The sting of the line comes from its casual sequencing: “after subjugating them” is treated as settled business, a bureaucratic preface, before the real grievance arrives - that the state now “support[s] them at the expense of our people.” It’s a soldier’s view of Indian policy reduced to logistics and ledger entries, where conquest is normalized and the moral question is quietly swapped for a fiscal one.

The specific intent reads as political pressure. By framing reservations as a burden on “our people,” Miles taps a dependable settler resentment: taxes and rations as an undeserved subsidy, not as partial recompense for dispossession. The subtext is sharper: Indigenous nations are positioned as wards created by government action, then blamed for the ongoing administrative inconvenience of that action. He’s also implying a policy contradiction - we used force to break autonomy, then paid to manage the aftermath - but he treats the contradiction as inefficiency, not injustice.

Context matters. Miles built his career in the Indian Wars and later became Commanding General of the U.S. Army; he saw the reservation system up close as a tool of control following military defeat. By the late 19th century, “collecting” tribes and provisioning them wasn’t benevolence; it was containment, paired with assimilation policy (including boarding schools) and the steady erosion of landholdings. The quote works because it exposes the imperial sleight of hand: conquest presented as necessity, and the human consequences rebranded as a budget problem.