• Purgatory: 1891-1934

U.S.-native relations before “purgatory”

• “the intelligence and capability of Indian people”; the emphasis of tribal self-determination and self-governance vs. the ruling of the u.s. federal government
• “when you change anything, anything at all, it gives people standing to complain”

1775: governmental treaties

• 1775: treaties conducted through governmental agencies; points of contact for negotations, compared to embassies
  • realpolitik mindset: avoid induction of natives on loyalist armies
    • “a system of politics or principles based on practical rather than moral or ideological considerations.”
    • many tribes sided with the British regardless due to assumed strength; Iroquois Confederacy (not Oneida)
• offensives launched against I.C. in “scorched-earth policy”; treaties were only extended to those who allied with U.S., then were engulfed
  • “After the war Congress signed a treaty with the Oneida in recognition of their contributions to American victory. It read, in part: “The United States acknowledges the lands reserved to the Oneida . . . to be their property; and the United States will never claim the same, nor their Indian friends residing thereon and united with them, in the free use and enjoyment thereof.” A mere thirty years later when General Lafayette returned to America, he was welcomed as a hero in Utica where Revolutionary War veterans met him on a street bearing his name. He wondered to his hosts where the Oneida were, because it was they who had saved the revolutionaries at Oriskany. The whole region had been Oneida territory, and Washington and Schuyler and others had promised it would remain so. No one knew what he was talking about. The Oneida contributions to American victory and the promises that had been made to them, as well as their homelands, had faded away.”
• shift in policy from militia to economy and trade; extension of conquest via commerce
  • factories induced commerce and political stability; fortlike and institutionalized
  • double-side of Indian Intercourse Acts
  • lasted until 1822 (post Louisiana Purchase and War of 1812, erection of borders)

1824–1871: Office of Indian Affairs

• 1824: Office of Indian Affairs (1947, Bureau of Indian Affairs)
  • “relationships with tribes weren’t merely military or transactional anymore. Scores of treaties had been signed in the intervening years, most of which, in addition to defining Indians’ rights and the borders of their homelands, included provisions for annuities in the form of cash, seed, iron, trade goods, and blankets. Thus the government, long an overbearing trading partner and military threat to the tribes, had added yet another role: trustee of money and goods promised to them by treaty.”
• Confederate-aligned tribes were punished similarly to I.C.; 1865 treaties of the Five Civilized Tribes that forced:
  • abolishment of slavery
  • tribal citizenship to former slaaves
  • land cessations to other tribes and the establishment of civil governments
• moved office from war dept to interior
  • attempts were made during Grant/Parker’s tenures to return it to the war dept., but the end of Parker’s tenure and the 1871 act resulted in Congress obtaining full control over the department and over native communities and policy
• 1869: first Indian placed in charge of office, Ely Parker (Seneca)
  • many connections with prominent characters in U.S. history, including Grant
  • political and ceremonial worker of the Seneca Longhouse; fought against federal/state/private economic interests against Seneca and Tonawanda land
  • Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency → Ely Parker appointed as commissioner of Indian affairs; changes in federal and native relationships and communications
    • Board of Indian Commissioners: legal status, rights, and obligations in the U.S.; treaties and legislations
  • findings were disastrously used
    • “the first aggressions have been made by the white man, and the assertion is supported by every civilian of reputation who has studied the subject. In addition to the class of robbers and outlaws who find impunity in their nefarious pursuits upon the frontiers, there is a large class of professedly reputable men who use every means in their power to bring on Indian wars, for the sake of profit to be realized from the presence of troops and the expenditure of government funds in their midst”
    • → Indian affairs taken over by religious orders
  • end of Parker’s tenure (1871 resignation) followed by the Indian Appropriations Act of 1871, which invalidated all treaties and invalidated Indians as U.S. citizens; as “wards” under the protection of the U.S.

1871–1934: Indian agents

• non-Indian workers became Indian agents who represented a tribe in the government and became synonymous with a “tribal government” that poorly advocated for and advised its territory
  • “bureaucracy” formed around the Indian agent, “Americanizing” the Indian; private ownership, religion, and education espoused
    • goals to dismantle reservations and relations, “settle” and integrate Indians as citizens
    • “What America wanted, at a time when it was drunk on its own power and sense of the rightness of its ways, was for Indians to “wear civilized clothes . . . cultivate the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink whiskey [and] own property.” ”
• “two greatest weapons: schools and land”
• assimilation

Nez Perce and Ponca

• atrocities against Native tribes in the 1870s
  • Jan. 1870: 173 Blackfeet Indians killed over defense
  • 1871: 30 Yahi (2/3 of tribe)
  • 12/28/1872: 76 Yavapai – Skeleton Cave Massacre, AZ
  • 1877: 90 Nez Perce, Big Hole, MT
  • 1879: Northern Cheyenne slaughtering
• Nez Perce (Chutepalu) had been promised a reservation by treaty, but instead forcibly moved to another reservation and fled with combat
  • Chief Joseph
  • until 10/5/1877
  • 1879: DC speech
• Ponca walking back from Indian Territory to ancestral lands on SD border
  • 1000 at first contact → 200 1807 (smallpox)
  • Chief Standing Bear
  • land ceded, starved to death, unfavorable terms, land ceded to Lakota and moved to non-arable territory in 1877; several starvation events
  • habeas corpus
  • United States ex rel. Standing Bear v. Crook: first times Indian spoke against wrongs in open court
    • Thomas Tibbles, George Crook
    • determined an Indian is a “person” within the meaning of the laws of the U.S.; Ponca unrightfully removed by force; right to expatriation; must be disscharged and allowed to return
• ruled as people but not ruled as citizens; still the beginning of acknowledgement of the Native peoples by a government that ignored them

1881+: Indian Rights Movement

• 1881: Helen Hunt Jackson publishes A Century of Dishonor, criticizing Indian affairs in federal policy and striking against
• 1884: Ramona, based on use of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• 1882: Indian Rights Association
• 1883+: “Friends of the Indian”, DC and MS; began meeting in NY
  • Clinton B. Fisk, Albert Smiley
  • citizenship, free-labor ideology, personhood
• formation of IRA, Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA), Lake Mohonk Conference
  • fighting for civilization through citizenship, free enterprise, and private ownership
  • “They may have wanted to destroy old systems that they felt hurt Indian people, but they wanted to, and did, hang on to the heedless paternalism of the prior age. As such, their reforms were bound to go astray. The friends positioned themselves as guardians of Indian interests and assumed an unofficial capacity as auditors of the Office of Indian Affairs—overseeing the work of agents in the field and writing reports to the Bureau of Indian Commissioners and to Congress.”

1879–1930s: Boarding Schools

• cannot be at “war” with wards but cannot “repatriate”; result was to imprison for life on territories
• Richard Henry Pratt relocated Indians and during this time began to experiment via education; “if wild turkeys could be domesticated, then surely Indians could be civilized”
• 1879: Carlisle Indian Industrial School, PN
  • “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man”
  • civilization through clothes, physical changes, mourning
  • militarization and punishment
• “assimilation was the only hope for the survival of their children”
  • “Even as Carlisle was a stab at equality, it was also a knife in the heart of the Indian family.”
  • “To be a person was to be a certain kind of person: an American (or Canadian) who owned property and was culturally white. Indian kids went to school to be not-Indian. They also went there to die.”
• Office of Indian Affairs began to start new “agency schools” and religious (Catholic) boarding schools; federal budgeting
• different responses to boarding schools
  • worse conditions back home; schools given children because couldn’t afford to feed them
  • many resisted boarding schools and were coerced through the removal of their rights and agency, physical violence, starvation
• unmarked graveyards; Indians were 6x more likely to die at boarding schools in childhood than others
• 1982 investigations
  • loss of languages, shame, inability of communication
  • Meriam Report on unqualified, poor conditions in Indian education; 800+ detailed pages; child labor, malnourishmeent, non-educational, conformatively, unhealthy
• last compulsory boarding school programs suspended in late 1930s

1887–1934: Allotment

• Herbert Welsh: remove Indian service and corruption by removing reservation
• 1887: General Allotment Act / Indian Severalty Act / Dawes Act
  • reservation lands were disbanded and allotted to individual groups by age and “priority”
  • no consent from Indians
  • strength in dismantling the social unit of the tribe, enforce private enterprise and farming, fund white practice over native governance
    • “If we look back at the period now, it is impossible not to feel a kind of sickness at the thought that the government stole Indian land in order to fund the theft of Indian children.”
  • allotments were all owned by government in trusts and written off to Indians without the ability to buy or sell
  • tribes were enrolled by American rulings and ideas of “deserving”: European-derived blood quantum and bribery/bias
  • excluded Five Civilized Tribes
• first waves in 1890s and continuing
• several following amendments
  • Nelson Act, Minnesota: “disappear” all reservations and remove Ojibwe to new reservation??
  • 1898 Curtis Act: allotment for Five Civilized Tribes
    • abolishment of tribal community
    • “fee-simple” lots: owned by Indians instead of government trusts
    • public schools, towns; difference in communities in Oklahoma
    • Charles Curtis
  • 1906 Burke Act: “fee-simple” patents for the Dawes Act
    • accrual of taxes without education of taxes or profits
    • determined by matters of European competence; European blood
    • led to foreclosures; led into Great Depression and Dust Bowl; land was passed into white ownership
• end of allotment period: Indian landholdings went from 138→48mil acres; ⅔rd reduction
• disease, unemployment, poverty, abuse, and homelessness across communities; compounded by boarding schools and policing

1878: Indian policing

• poverty was “solved” by increased law enforcement presence through the employment by Indian agents of Native police forces
• fully funded in 1881
• police placed in 1882; court placed in 1883
• additional policing of marriages, regulation, medicine, culture, and property ownership; disruption of ceremonies and tradition
• nine provisions of Court
  • three: makeup and procedures
    • first three officers in rank of police force in each agency, hierarchically underneath the commissioner
    • court met twice a month
    • court judged all questions presented by agents
  • others discussed offenses and punishments
    • dances → withheld rations and incarceration
    • polygamy → fine, hard labor, withdrawn labor
    • medicine-men → imprisonment and condemnation
    • destruction of property → return property or pay fine and imprisonment
    • paying money as bribery/dowry for marriage → withdrawn rations or imprisonment or removal
  • induced coercion and intrusion

1885–1934: Indian Resistance

• National Indian Defense Association, NIDA: uphold private ownership and allotment, and tribal rights
  • corruption and condemnation
    • Thomas A. Bland, founder, was spectator to 1868: Red Cloud’s War; Teton Lakota reservation stolen andd decimated via treaty
    • noting benefits of IRA acts were in favor of railroads and commerce
  • 1885 Dawes bill was rewritten after NIDA arguments to include language that tribes had to agree to allotment, did not endure allotment “in severalty”, and had 25 years before allotments were transferred as private property and taxed
• 1863: resistance of Ojibwe (Red Lake and Pembina tribes) at Red Lake to ceding via Old Crossing treaty
  • 1886: leaders of Ojibwe clans relentlessly banded together and refused allotment
  • repeat in 1889 after Nelson Act
  • Red Lake Reservation government repealing 1934 pushes for modern Indian governance through united factions
  • resolute paganism in Ponemah; resistance, strong communities in spite of boarding schools
    • fought off allotment and forced conversion
• 1898: Chickasaw civic structures
  • Chickasaw council created towns and citizenships in similar institutions to U.S., creating self-sufficiency when abandoned by the U.S.
• 1856: Menominee (Algonquian) resistance in the NW Green Bay forestry reeservation
  • logging operations, civilization and economy, self-sufficiency
  • 1908: La Follette senator and governor for WN; fought for Menominee andd created a bill which allowed tribal logging and forestry, and healthy maintenance of forest
    • “OF THE FOUR HUNDRED YEARS of contact with Europeans showed anything, it wasn’t merely the rapaciousness of Europeans and European colonization or the terrible effectiveness of European diseases. Rather, it showed the supreme adaptability and endurance of Indian tribes across the continent.”

1862–1900s: Homesteading

• 1862: 1st homestead act
• 1865: Wisconsin tribe homesteads
• 1866: 2nd
• radiation/diaspora of Indians to homesteading in prairie states; tribes were brought with them in culture and mindset and principle