War & Peace Quote by Nelson A. Miles

Miles’s phrasing has the cold clarity of an after-action report: not a lament, not a defense, but a ledger. “Governed chiefly” turns dispossession into administration, as if Indigenous nations were a policy domain like tariffs or railroads. The paired options he offers - “treaties and trade” or “war and subjugation” - sound balanced, almost civilized. The subtext is that the United States kept presenting Native sovereignty as a negotiable contract until it became inconvenient, at which point coercion took over. Even the word “relations” carries a diplomatic sheen that masks a lopsided power dynamic.

Context matters: Miles was a high-ranking Army officer whose career ran through the closing chapter of the Indian Wars and into the era when the frontier was declared “closed.” He knew the machinery firsthand: treaty-making used to clear land, markets used to bind communities to federal oversight, military campaigns used to punish resistance, and “subjugation” used to rebrand conquest as stabilization. The line’s bluntness suggests an insider conceding what polite national mythmaking tries to blur: that U.S. Indian policy wasn’t a coherent moral project, but a toggling between transaction and violence.

What makes the quote work is its unintentional candor. It compresses a century of nation-building into two verbs: bargain or break. Miles doesn’t have to mention broken treaties, forced removal, or boarding schools; the structure of his sentence implies the pattern. It reads less like history and more like a diagnosis of empire’s default settings.