2024050902

In weeks four and five of the semester, coursework pertained to early American attempts to classify and handle Natives and how those Natives resisted, survived, and worked alongside the government and the United States people along the way. These readings encompassed a large period of time between 1891, post-contact, to 1945, just before the end of World War II. Many of the readings to be discussed describe the period before World War I as Americans debated who to entrust the Natives to and how to assimilate or erase them best.

Treuer (2019) prefaces his chapter on the pre-war era introducing the realpolitik approach of the late 18th century, and he explains how this approach shattered through the 19th century. Changes to the treatment of Natives began with the establishment of the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) in 1824 but maintained this ideology. The office succeeded prior attempts to manage Native matters in commerce and war. It prioritized treaties, punishments for Confederate-aligned tribes, and governing over exchanges with Native tribes.

This approach was first upturned by 1871, during the Grant presidency, as religious workers took control of Native affairs, and followed by the Indian Appropriations Act in 1871, which invalidated Natives’ status as citizens and turned them into wards of the United States. To make good on this, the OIA appointed “Indian agents”: non-Indian federal workers who became the advisor and spokesperson for a tribe. Indian agents were given leeway on how to control and fix their respective tribe. Agents encouraged sending Native children to boarding schools once established and appointed Native-led law enforcement to resolve poverty, cultural art, and social disorder. They embraced and encouraged American ideas of expansion as they divided and doled out reservation land to select subgroups of tribes through allotment and homesteading. All this was done to erase reservations, redistribute resources to Americans, and to eliminate all traces of the people who lived on them. They were not citizens, and the government sought to ignore them as people for as long as they could. Meanwhile, other Americans criticized these acts, implored Natives should attain citizenship and rights to free enterprise and private ownership, and sought to overturn the government’s present trusteeship of the Native ward.

The boarding school project exemplified this patriarchal, non-personal view of the “typical Native”. In the government and the faculty’s eyes, particularly founder Richard Henry Pratt, they were worthwhile experiments and comparable to “wild turkeys”. The boarding school project was the first attempt to assimilate Natives into the American, Eurocentric concept of civilization. One account, “Away from Home”, describes the variety of children experimented on in these schools: hostages to force parental cooperation, those forcibly removed, curious and eager children, and children who had no other educational resources or opportunities (Child, et al., 2000). Child describes the tremendous differences in who, why, and where Native children attended boarding schools, and though it had success in instructing many in European and American culture, it also failed through uniting and reaffirming the Native cultures of children who managed to resist.

Troutman (2009) also delves into these successes and failures by focusing on the musical instruction of many boarding schools. He details the classical instruction received at Chilocco, Flandreau, and other boarding schools, how it was used to reinforce disciplinary and anti-Native teachings for the entire student body, and how it was used to portray the image of the “rehabilitated Native” to outsiders. Despite that and evidence of its successes, Troutman also shows how Natives resisted this rehabilitation whilst coopting their classical lessons, including by using them for Native performances after returning to their reservations.

Although this practice continued into the end of the 20th century, it was seen simultaneously with older Natives’ participation in the World Wars. The next chapter in Treur’s (2019) book shows that though Natives participated in both World Wars, they were treated to identically unfair extents as those on reservations and boarding schools were, and they returned to the aftereffects of homesteading, allotment, and American enterprise. In some regions, like the lands of the Red Lake and Pembina bands, Natives reclaimed their governments and political power, expelling their Indian agent and federal forces. Many did not; and as John Collier tried to fix this problem further by funding and reshaping Native governments with American methods, World War II began—and Natives allied with the United States against the Axis nations. Famously, Natives became invaluable as code-talkers through the use of language the United States had tried to erase. Many others were drafted in, attempting to gain better income for families on the reservation. The war era exemplified the United States’ failure to stamp out Native culture; in the same breath, it highlighted a hypocrisy to praise and rely on it to win another imperial war.

This set of coursework reeks of paternalism. In every interaction depicted, one can see the 19th century’s prideful fervor of American ideology. Two quotes stand out from Treur’s (2019) texts: that America wanted to civilize Natives “at a time when it was drunk on its own power and sense of the rightness of its ways”, and that the people of the Indian Rights Movement “wanted to, and did, hang on to the heedless paternalism of the prior age”. Ultimately, all Americans who worked on Native affairs at this time wanted to oversee and control the freedom and actions of Natives. They wanted to reincorporate them into systems which they used, including property ownership and free commerce, even though these systems were antithetical to Native cultures and systems already in place. Americans handling “the Indian problem” were disadvantaged from the start: they could not abandon their ideology and see any issue from the Natives’ side, nor did they want to. That was why so many early attempts to “fix” it failed.