Daily Inspiration Quote by Nelson A. Miles

A U.S. general praising Canada for not having to do what the United States chose to do is a masterclass in institutional self-exoneration. Nelson A. Miles frames Indigenous “customs” as a matter of taste, not survival, and casts coercion as an almost regrettable administrative necessity. The sentence performs a kind of moral bookkeeping: yes, “we have not” allowed Native people to live as themselves, but it’s implied that the problem is scale and circumstance, not policy or ideology.

The key maneuver is in the comparison. Canada’s lighter “tide of immigration” becomes a convenient alibi: fewer settlers, fewer conflicts, therefore more room to “allow” Indigenous life. That verb matters. “Allow” positions Indigenous autonomy as a permission granted by the state, not a right preceding it. Miles’ language also dodges the brutal specifics of the era he helped shape: forced removals, reservation confinement, military campaigns, and assimilation programs in schools and law. By reducing these to “attempt[s] to force” distasteful customs, he sanitizes violence into cultural mismatch.

Context sharpens the edge. Miles was not a distant commentator; he was a central actor in the late-19th-century U.S. Indian Wars and the machinery that followed them. The quote reads less like repentance than reputational management: a soldier-intellectual signaling benevolence and pragmatism while leaving the underlying premise untouched - that Indigenous life is something the settler state can permit, modify, or withdraw depending on demographic pressure.