Daily Inspiration Quote by Nelson A. Miles

Spoken in the cool, bureaucratic key of “however” and “as readily,” Miles’s line performs a familiar maneuver of U.S. Indian policy: it frames coercion as constraint, then treats that constraint as a natural fact. A people “could not migrate,” as if mobility were a weather system rather than something fenced in by passes, agents, troop enforcement, and the legal architecture that made Native movement suspicious by default. The sentence sounds like an observation. It’s also an alibi.

Miles, a career soldier who helped execute federal campaigns in the West, writes from inside the machinery that produced the very immobility he notes. The passive construction blurs responsibility: who, exactly, prevented migration? Who decided that leaving a reservation could be grounds for arrest, or that “beyond the Indian reservations” was a space policed not just by law but by violence and prejudice? The phrase “obtain employment” carries its own quiet menace. It reduces survival to labor-market access while skipping the upstream causes: dispossession, the deliberate wrecking of subsistence economies, and the reservation system’s design as a tool of dependency.

Context matters: late 19th-century federal policy shifted from outright warfare to administrative containment and assimilation, with the Dawes Act and the boarding-school system recoding conquest as “civilization.” Miles’s quote sits at that hinge point. It acknowledges inequality without indicting the state, inviting sympathy while leaving power intact. The intent isn’t simply to describe hardship; it’s to make that hardship legible in terms palatable to a governing class: not stolen land and broken treaties, but “limited mobility” and “employment difficulty,” as if the problem were unfortunate logistics rather than engineered confinement.