Indian agents strove to tie Kickapoo women to settled households, believing that their path to civilization lay in housekeeping. For these and other indigenous women, domesticity meant spatial constriction.
Photograph of Kickapoo women, 1906. The back of the photograph says: “Mrs. Anderson (Kickapoo), Ubya daughter of Masheena, Kawkeas grand-daughter.” Courtesy of the McLean County Museum of History, Bloomington, Illinois.
The allotment policies of the second half of the nineteenth century hit them particularly hard. Allotment had two significant implications. The first was to shift land from tribal control to individual ownership, making it alienable to non-Indians. The second was to reduce the amount of acreage in Indian hands, for once each tribal member had been allotted his or her stipulated parcel, the remaining land was sold to white settlers. According to the treaty that began the allotment process among the Kansas Kickapoos in 1862, chiefs were entitled to 320 acres, other heads of family 160 acres, and everybody else a mere 40 acres. Those who “went south” would get nothing at all unless they returned within the year and pledged to “occupy, improve, and cultivate” their allotment. In a generous corporate giveaway, the treaty granted the Atchison and Pike’s Peak Railroad Company the right to buy the remainder of the land at $1.25 per acre, without granting the Kickapoos any corresponding right to ride the rails.14
Several years after their land had been divided up, the Kansas Kickapoos still could not “point out with accuracy the boundary lines of these allotments.” This troubled the superintendent of Indian affairs for Kansas, who thought it “very desirable that the Indians should know the exact boundaries of their several allotments.” The point seems not so much that they should be able to protect their holdings from outsiders. Rather, the superintendent seemed concerned that if they did not know where the boundaries were, they would stray onto the lands recently occupied by white farmers. The purpose of clarifying the boundary lines was to keep the Kickapoos within them.15
The Kickapoos who left Kansas for Oklahoma did not escape the allotment process, they only delayed it. An 1891 treaty reduced the Kickapoo land in central Oklahoma to eighty acres for each member of the tribe, freeing up eighty thousand acres for “home seekers,” a term understood to mean white settlers.16 In anticipation of the impending land grab, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad Company printed pamphlets on how to reach the reservation from distant points such as Texas, California, and Chicago. Only at the end of the pamphlets, in the equivalent of small print, did the company remind those hopeful of overnight riches that ownership would require “actual residence on the land.”17
When the Kickapoos heard about the 1891 allotment treaty for their Oklahoma lands, they sent members of the tribe to Washington to defend their claims to home.18 Failing to achieve a change in the treaty, the Oklahoma Kickapoos refused to parcel out and open up their reservation.19 Fed up with this resistance, their agent set aside eighty acres for each member of the tribe who would not make an allotment selection. If the Kickapoos wouldn’t pick, he would do it for them.20
The Oklahoma Kickapoos continued to resist. About a hundred of the objectors built a village “on a section of fine school land” and declared they would not vacate. The governor threatened to ask the United States Army to eject them.21 Unable to prevent the land seizure, the protesters set fire to their reservation, obscuring the sun with the smoke. “They have burned the whole reservation bare,” claimed one newspaper account. “Flames swept over into the settled country and ruined scores of farmers. Hundreds of settlers awaiting on the line of the reservation have been burned out.”22 Yet even this last-ditch gesture of defiance did not stop the seizure of their land.
The process by which the would-be farmers who had rushed in from all directions claimed Kickapoo land showed that this generation of settlers, like the pioneers who preceded them, had little respect for the Kickapoos, much less their attachment to place. Accounts of the growing crowds who gathered on the outskirts of the reservation prior to the 1895 land rush spoke of each land rusher’s eagerness to “outstrip the other and secure for himself a homestead settlement.”23 Their eagerness to strip the Kickapoos went without saying. The new arrivals divvied up the Kickapoos’ land in a mad scramble lasting less than an hour.24 When the dust had settled, the Kickapoos found their Oklahoma holdings reduced by about 168,000 acres.25 Once again, colonial encroachments had forced both mobility—this time onto allotment parcels—and tighter spatial containment, from a net loss of land.
BECOMING UNDOCUMENTED
As onetime Indian lands were privatized by state-supported white proprietors, it became increasingly difficult for Kickapoos to move through them, because of fencing, hedgerows, and proscriptions against trespassing.26 Some of these barriers had been erected with Indians specifically in mind: barbed wire advertisements in the nineteenth century touted the capacity of the product to keep marauding Indians out as well as to keep livestock in.27 As the inrush of white settlers depleted game and other wild foodstuffs, and as settler colonists passed laws prohibiting hunting on private land without permission, it became more difficult for the Kickapoos to sustain themselves on their travels without running into trouble.28 Even though their growing reliance on railroads offered more opportunities for speed and distance, it also had costs that went beyond the occasional accident. In 1911, a group of Oklahoma Kickapoos decided to travel to Washington to discuss their allotments. They secured the necessary permission from their agent, but they did not make the trip, because railroad tickets cost money, and they could not raise enough.29
Their increasing visibility in ever whiter ethnoscapes further altered the Kickapoos’ relations to space. The mere appearance of Kickapoos “taking in the sights” in town sometimes made the papers. The scrutiny to which off-reservation Kickapoos were subjected can be gleaned from newspaper reports that they walked single file and that the women carried the loads. Crowds reportedly gathered to watch them “in open-mouthed wonder,” intrigued by their “peculiar dress.”30 When ten Kickapoos attended the circus, they reportedly attracted as much attention as the show.31 This kind of visibility made it more difficult for the Kickapoos to travel without altercations or assault. It helps explain why a Kickapoo man named Wa-pah-ka asked a U.S. Indian agent to notify distant military posts that he would be passing by. As the agent subsequently reported, Wa-pah-ka “did not wish to be punished, for he would be going peaceably on his way.” The agent told Wa-pah-ka that even advance notice would not assure his safety if he went without a military escort.32
The Kickapoos’ increasingly constrained spatial experience was a racialized experience, in keeping with the enslavement-enforcing pass laws that inhibited the movement of black people in the U.S. South. Northern states also limited the mobility of people of color through Black Laws that restricted residence and employment to proven freemen, facilitated the expulsion of poor African Americans, offered no sanctuary to runaway slaves, and enforced the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.33 Though the United States did not require passports for entry prior to World War I, Mah-Qua-Ta-Uathena and his band had to carry a “Pass Port” to travel across Texas to Kansas in 1875.34
However much their supporters touted reservations as preserves that would enable native peoples to maintain traditional ways apart from hostile settlers, their residents well knew that reservations kept inhabitants in as much as they kept would-be encroachers out. Reservations became particularly restrictive during the Reconstruction period, but their jail-like character can be seen as early as the Indian Intercourse Act of 1802, which gave U.S. courts the right to arrest and press criminal charges against Indians who left their reservations. Another section of the act made it an offense for Indians to use the roads that led to white settlements.35 Such provisions led to policies requiring Indians who wanted to leave their reservations to first obtain passes from their agents.36 Whether to go hunting, visit friends, pick berries, or find materials to construct the
wickiups that sheltered them, off-reservation Kickapoos needed proper documentation.37
The necessary permission was not always granted. As one account put it: “Due to the fear inspired by these Indians in their recent conduct, i.e. raiding into Texas, it was deemed unwise to permit them to leave their reservation to follow the chase.”38 Another request to travel was denied on the grounds that the trip would be too expensive and that it would take the delegates away from their fields “at a time of the year when your agricultural interests demand your presence.” In response to the petitioners’ point that they would like to represent their own interests pertaining to a proposed treaty, the Interior Department official who denied their request told them that correspondence would suffice. The words written by their agents went to Washington; the Kickapoos did not.39
When U.S. officials did grant Kickapoos permission to travel off-reservation, they sometimes instructed the Kickapoos’ agents to accompany their charges or delegated someone to tag along as an overseer.40 After smallpox hit the Oklahoma Kickapoos in the late nineteenth century, a company of armed soldiers enforced the quarantine placed upon them. The military escorted Kickapoos to their reservations, and on more than one occasion it held Kickapoos prisoner to forestall potential trouble. When bands of Kickapoos slipped out of reservations without passes, or when they failed to return in a timely fashion, the War Department sent detachments to track them down.41 The land of the free had become a policed state for the Kickapoos.
STRATEGIES OF CONTAINMENT
Reservations were not the only, nor the most extreme, forms of containment. Indian agents issued arrest warrants commanding Kickapoo children to attend boarding schools created for the express purpose of destroying Indian identities.42 There they spent long hours seated inside at desks, learning their geography lessons from a textbook, rather than from firsthand experience, as their unconfined ancestors had.43
Kickapoo students sitting primly at their desks, under the watchful eye of their American teacher. The colonial state sought to foster assimilation through sedentarization, starting with schoolchildren.
“A Class in the Kickapoo Indian School, Brown County, Kansas, 1905,” courtesy of the McLean County Museum of History, Bloomington, Illinois.
Of all the state efforts to restrict the Kickapoos, prisons squeezed the tightest. The Kickapoos had no history of imprisoning each other for offenses. Although they had a long history of taking and exchanging captives and of being taken captive themselves, their experiences of captivity meant time on the trail typically followed by death or incorporation into the other group. Captivity did not imply incarceration. Early treaties had recognized that incarceration had no place in the Kickapoos’ legal practices by spelling out other forms of punishment, with one treaty from the 1820s stipulating that murders between Indian groups could be settled by a penalty of $1.00 for each individual killed.44 But the practice of payouts in place of prison did not last. When a Kickapoo man killed another man in St. Louis some years later, his associates tried to atone for the offense by offering horses. White authorities decided that jail was more appropriate, and they stuck to that reasoning in later cases.45
In the absence of personal accounts from the time, we can only imagine what such confinement meant to people who experienced imprisonment not just as an individual punishment, but more generally, as a form of colonial domination. The incongruity of imprisoned Indians was not lost on white observers. In 1896, White Water, identified as “a full blooded Kickapoo Indian” by the Atchison Daily Globe, was arrested for drunkenness and sentenced to ten days of manual labor. “Think of it!” exclaimed the article in the Globe. “White Water’s grandfather roamed the present townsite when this section was a wilderness. The vulgar whites not only destroyed the Kickapoo hunting grounds, but now they take one of the tribe’s poor wronged braves, and actually put him on the rock pile!”46 Rather than demand justice for this greater wrong, the Globe just marveled at how far white settlers had come, how diminished the people they had dislodged.
Not only did the Kickapoos have to leave homes and relinquish lands that were deeply meaningful to them, they also found their ability to go where they pleased increasingly constrained. Although many Kickapoos tenaciously defended their new homes and lands during the removal and allotment eras, they experienced localization as a form of oppression. Localization meant surveillance, control, material deprivation, and attenuated social ties. If the freedom of mobility made the Kickapoos more able to realize their identities as Kickapoos, localization threatened the Kickapoos’ culture and existence as a people.
The Kickapoo poet Ekoneskaka said as much more than a century after the forced removal from Illinois. Rejecting the word Kickapoo as “some name the white people came up with because they didn’t have the inclination to fit their mouths around Ki-ki-ka-pa-wa,” Ekoneskaka explained that Ki-ki-ka-pa-wa meant to walk about, “like to walk from here over to there, and then maybe to walk back, or then maybe to keep going. But it means you go out on foot, maybe hunting, maybe just wandering free and easy, but always moving only on your own two feet; maybe you’re looking for something, anything, and maybe you’re not, but you’re walking around, that’s for sure, you’re walking about here and there, usually searching and seeking, but always waiting for something to happen.” Even after “walking about here and there” had come to imply driving around in four-wheel drive pickups, the point remained: the term for his people referred to free and easy movement, not claims to only one particular place.47
For a people who had begun referring to migratory birds as “Indian birds” because of their travels to distant reaches, to be spatially constrained meant to lose a fundamental part of what it meant to be Kickapoo.48 The Kickapoos experienced spatial compression as a form of colonial violence. The existential importance of this issue to the Kickapoos can be seen in the lengths to which they went to resist.
EXODUS
One of the most astounding components of the Kickapoo resistance was the exodus of several groups to Mexico. The nineteenth-century Illinois Kickapoos who left the tallgrass prairie for cactus-studded ranges followed earlier footsteps. In 1763, when New France ceded the trans-Mississippi West to Spain, a Kickapoo band had accepted a Spanish invitation to build a village on the Missouri River near St. Louis. (This served Spanish interests by providing a buffer against the Osages.)49 Building on that earlier relationship, the Spanish government persuaded some Kickapoos to move to its Mexican colony’s northern province of Tejas in 1805, as a bulwark against Americans in Louisiana and Kiowas and Comanches on the plains. Another band of Kickapoos relocated to the Nacogdoches area (then part of the Lone Star Republic) in 1838. Yet another group, led by a man named Papicua (or Papequah), crossed the Rio Grande in 1850, in company with a band of Seminoles and their slaves.50
Like the Spanish before them, the Mexican government welcomed the newcomers as allies against the Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches, who had been devastating their northern settlements. Although the leader of an 1828 boundary commission, General Mier y Terán, vilified the Kickapoos as nearly as savage as the Comanches, he recognized the value of immigrant Indian groups in a newer struggle: offsetting immigrant Anglos. When the Kickapoos and Seminoles sent delegates to Mexico City in the 1850s to ask for land, they received grants in Coahuila. This fostered further settlement, for in 1862, about six hundred Kickapoos led by a man named Machemanet went to Mexico from Kansas.51 After the Seminoles and another immigrant group, the Muscogees, returned to the United States, the Kickapoos added some of their former holdings to their own.52
Wherever the destination, the choice to move came with considerable costs. Perhaps most painfully, it meant greater distances from other Kickapoos. The anguish of diaspora can be glimpsed in an 1855 appeal to the Office of Indian Affairs, which lamented how the tribe had been “broken up and scattered.”53 Rather than ending the violence that the Kickapoos had known in Illinois, dispersal produced
new conflicts, including with other native nations that had reason to see groups such as the Kickapoos as encroachers who exacerbated the threat posed by Anglo pioneers.54 White settlers were no more welcoming. Texas Rangers and Confederate Texans launched particularly brutal attacks—including on family groups en route to Mexico—that bred long-lasting bitterness among the Kickapoos.55 A delegation of Kickapoos that met with Emperor Maximilian at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City in 1865 complained of ongoing raids on the part of American (presumably Confederate) deserters. Maximilian’s promise that the French army would protect them came to naught.56
A delegation of Kickapoo Indians in Mexico City around 1865. Kickapoos met with the Austrian-born emperor Maximilian to secure their rights to land and to discuss their security situation vis-à-vis other Native American nations and U.S. raiders.
François Aubert, “Indios Kikapos,” Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (96.R.122).
Moving did more than stretch group ties and embroil the Kickapoos in new cycles of violence—it distanced them from meaningful places and the ecosystems that had sustained their ancestors in the Great Lakes area. This was not completely new to the Kickapoos. In 1827, a group that requested land in Nacogdoches, Texas, claimed, through their interpreter, that the Americans had moved them “from their own country” to a bad country, one in which women and children were dying.57 Yet Coahuila had even less in common with the lands that they had known. As one group of Kickapoos that decided not to relocate said of northern Mexico: “There was no grass and the land was no good, and the weather was too hot.”58
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