The Heartland

by Kristin L. Hoganson

  The U.S. minister to Mexico followed up on the noncooperation complaint with a protest to the minister of foreign affairs. The ministry replied that it would do all it properly could to “facilitate the return of the Indians to the United States,” but that it had “no power to require their extradition.” It attributed whatever support the Kickapoos enjoyed among their neighbors to the U.S. “projects of invasion and acquisition of territory.”99

  Refusing to accept that logic, the U.S. minister in Mexico City penned another note to the Mexican minister of foreign affairs. “I am constrained to express the conviction that your Excellency’s Government has erred in deciding that it could not require these Indians to return to their reservations. . . . They could only be considered as refugees from the authority of the Government of the United States, and in the spirit of international comity, should have again been returned to the territory of the United States.”100 The Mexican government caved. It issued instructions to the governors of the states where the Kickapoos were located to “remove any obstacle that may present itself whenever their removal is again attempted.”101 The next visit from a U.S. agent resulted in the departure of a “small band” of Kickapoos for Indian Territory, leaving an estimated eighty still in Mexico. At this point the United States changed tack: instead of demanding removal from Mexico, it shifted to removal within Mexico. As the agent who proposed the idea put it, if the Kickapoos were required to remove to the interior of Mexico, “they could not raid upon the Texas border, by reason of their remoteness from it.” Not only would this approach stop the raids, it would also “relieve the Government of their care, which is no small consideration.”102

  Once again, Mexican officials yielded to U.S. demands, prodding the Kickapoos in the vicinity of Santa Rosa to move farther from the border. By 1876, however, there were enough Kickapoos back in Santa Rosa to merit another visit from a U.S. Indian agent. This one, too, failed to persuade the Kickapoos to move to the United States, but the visit did prompt about sixty families to move to Chihuahua, farther from the threat of U.S. forces. The group camped outside the city in “destitute condition” while their scouts investigated the resettlement prospects in the mountains to the north.103 In July of that year, a U.S. cavalry unit attacked a Lipan and Kickapoo camp near Zaragoza, in the state of Chihuahua. More raids across the border, in pursuit of other Indian groups, followed.104

  Fearful that the United States would again go after the Santa Rosa Kickapoos, the Mexican government took action. It moved one group of Kickapoos to Mexico City, where they subsisted for a while as street beggars, and from there on to Querétaro (about a hundred miles to the north of the capital). It moved others to the Chihuahuan municipality of Guerrero, in hopes that the German colony there would transform them. It set others to work on the railroad line between Mexico City and Cuernavaca. Resisters went to prison.105 The U.S. military stopped pursuing the Kickapoos, because it did not have to, the Mexican government having done the dirty work for it.

  Yet as cross-border raids by other groups continued, U.S. Secretary of State William M. Evarts reaffirmed his nation’s right to send forces into Mexico in pursuit of marauders: “Undoubtedly it would be preferable to enter Mexican territory for the purpose indicated with the consent or with the acquiescence of the government of that republic. If, however, these should be refused and the outrages persisted in, this government may deem itself warranted in punishing the wrong-doers wherever they may be found.”106 U.S. forces rode into Mexico about a dozen times in the late 1870s.107 Mexican displeasure with these incursions contributed to the 1882 “Treaty on Reciprocal Consent to Pursue Savage Hostile Indian Marauders Across the Border” that allowed the Mexicans to respond in kind.108 In authorizing cross-border raids against Indians, and Indians only, the two governments agreed that place claims meant different things to Indians than to other people. They also revealed that the Kickapoos were not the only ones who associated security with an ability to move unfettered through space.

  AMERICANS ABROAD

  Just as the Mexican Kickapoos could not escape the long arm and influence of the U.S. government, neither could they escape the reach of border-crossing U.S. citizens and capital. By the 1880s, the Coahuila Kickapoos had to compete for game with wealthy U.S. hunters who went down to the Sierra Carmen Mountains to bag deer, antelope, and bear.109 Soon the competition for resources came to involve land. During the regime of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911), the Mexican government gave collectively owned Indian lands to railroad builders and hacienda owners. Among the expropriated were the Kickapoos, who lost about sixty thousand acres in Nacimiento to some Texas cattlemen in 1883.110 When the Kickapoos refused to vacate the property, the Mexican government removed them, in hopes of assuring investors “that property rights of strangers will meet with full protection.”111

  Things got worse in 1898, when three U.S. investors purchased the first chunk of what eventually became a 1.237-million-acre hacienda, Piedra Blanca. The Kickapoos charged them with “usurpation,” to no avail. Although the Kickapoos had been living in Mexico for years, U.S. hacenderos who ended up with parcels of their land benefited from closer ties to the Mexican political elite and a greater ability to negotiate the Mexican court system. In pressing their claims, the investors dismissed the Mexican Kickapoos as Oklahomans, the implication being they had no rights to place in Mexico. Some Kickapoos cut down the ranchers’ pecan trees in protest, but they could not recover the disputed land titles.112 The ranchers proceeded to string up fences that impaired the Kickapoos’ ability to hunt.113 By 1903, papers in Mexico City reported that the “Kickapoo Indian Chieftain” Wapichi Cucha had been seen wandering the streets of the capital as he sought a government grant of land.114

  The Rosita smelter may have brought clean water to its workers, but not to the nearby Kickapoos. Even Mexico offered little refuge from the long reach of U.S. power.

  Rosita, 1946, Serie Oblicua, Número de Control FAO 01 003795, Fondo Aerofotográfico Acervo Histórico Fundación ICA, A.C.

  In addition to reducing the Kickapoos’ access to land and game, U.S. border crossers threatened another resource fundamental to the Kickapoos’ survival: their water. In 1919, a U.S. company controlled by the Guggenheim family purchased a coal operation in Rosita. By 1925, the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) had broadened its Rosita operation to include the smelting of zinc. Its smokestack was the highest in Mexico, its plant the largest of its kind in the world.

  A corporate history of the 1940s described it as being “like a cross-section of Pittsburgh transplanted to the Coahuila plain.” The history went on to praise ASARCO for providing water to its workers and their families, and not just any water, either, but water “treated in a modern treatment plant, which includes chlorination, filtration, and sedimentation.” What this account did not say was that the company polluted the Kickapoos’ water supply and, making matters worse, further drained their depleted water table in a time of drought.115 Already suffering from restricted hunting possibilities, the Kickapoos had to contend with withered fields and decimated herds.116 They were not the only ones, it seemed, who could be accused of cross-border depredations.

  Rather than being a refuge, by the turn of the twentieth century, Mexico had become like the United States, with its forced removals and land grabs. Instead of standing up for the Kickapoos, Mexican officials collaborated with U.S. opportunists, including those who sought Kickapoo holdings north of the border. In the spring of 1907, a partnership of U.S. deed seekers—referred to in the subsequent hearings as “the Chapman, Grimes and Conine people” but known more widely as the “Shawnee wolves”—traveled to Coahuila to defraud some visiting Kickapoos of their increasingly valuable lands in Oklahoma. The conspirators paid the Múzquiz police to have all the leading members of the tribe arrested and thrown into jail. Having intimidated their intended victims, they then took “a large number of Indians by force and under guard of policemen”
to the house of the “jefe politico of that district.” There they urged the Kickapoos to sell their lands in the United States. The captive men declined.

  Undeterred, the conspirators faked the papers, putting down the names of men who were not in the area at the time. They also claimed to have a deed executed at the jefe politico’s house by a Kickapoo woman named Pah-na-tho, who had died more than five years earlier. Another deed bore the name of Paw-kaw-kah, “a known imbecile, who could not utter a word or make a sound and to whom no member of the tribe could talk nor make himself understood.” Minors, too, supposedly signed their names to deeds. From Múzquiz, the schemers headed north, to the border town of Eagle Pass. After plying the Kickapoos there with liberal amounts of whiskey and mescal, they “herded” them into a wagon yard where they kept them interned until they signed away Oklahoma land. Resisters were arrested and sent across the border to Múzquiz, to work on the streets in chains.117

  Fortunately for the defrauded Kickapoos—or at least it seemed at the time—their agent from Oklahoma, Martin Bentley, took the conspirators to court. But Bentley had his own ambitions involving Kickapoo land, ones that can be traced back at least as far as 1901, when he traveled with Pan O Wa and Pah Ko Tah to Mexico City, where they stayed in the Grand Hotel while seeking meetings with government officials who might grant them land. Bentley’s scheme was to buy deeds from the Kickapoos near Shawnee, Oklahoma, and resell them for much higher amounts. He planned to pocket most of the difference himself but use some of the proceeds to buy cheaper land in Mexico. After one of his victims, Thapathethea, complained that she had never meant to sell her land, investigators found Bentley guilty of fraud. But Congress ignored their findings, leaving Bentley free to machinate.118

  Promising his followers that in Mexico they would once more find “room to roam once more limitless prairie, vast forests and inaccessible mountains,” Bentley persuaded over a hundred Oklahoma Kickapoos to go from Coahuila to Sonora with him in the latter part of 1907. Cashing in some of the titles that had been signed over to him in trust, Bentley bought an abandoned ranch. It was a disappointment, a tract of “mountain breaks and crags, through which is the channel of an intermittent stream, at times so violent with the water rush from the mountains as to tear out the surface of the only little valley they have.” If this were not bad enough, the title to all this was of doubtful legitimacy. Left in straitened circumstances, the Sonoran Kickapoos were taken in by the Yaquis, an indigenous nation that had been largely dispossessed by the Mexican government, with survivors fleeing to the mountains and across the border into the United States to avoid enslavement on the plantations of the Yucatán, or, even worse, extermination.119 Upon realizing that Mexico was not the answer to their dreams, some of Bentley’s former followers sued him for defrauding them of their land in Oklahoma.

  A group of displaced Kickapoos heading toward Sonora, Mexico, in 1907. Like refugees in other places and times, they had to adjust to wildly different social and ecological conditions.

  Natives Migrating to Mexico in Wagons, Feb. 1907, BAE GN 00741A 06177300, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

  The brief filed on their behalf by their new agent suggested that Bentley’s motives had been more sinister than his followers had realized. As long as the Kickapoos lived in the United States, they could not alienate their land without consent of the U.S. government. But if they became “resident citizens of some foreign country,” such consent was no longer necessary. From Bentley’s perspective, expatriation was not so much the pathway to self-determination as the pathway to expropriation. The court sided with the Kickapoo plaintiffs. When their allotments were restored, some of the emigrants traveled straightaway to Oklahoma.120 Others did not. In 1912, the secretary of the interior authorized the First National Bank of Douglas, Arizona, to cut checks payable to fifty-two Mexican Kickapoo Indians, ranging in age from about seventy-one (Ah che che), to a ten-year-old youth (Thy ka toke). More than half the recipients were women, among them Inez Hale, Ke o si ah quah (also known as Rachel Kirk), Keah quah quah, and Nah me pesh qua.121 Some of these so-called Mexican Kickapoos circled for years between Sonora, Coahuila, and Oklahoma, preferring a life on the move, however hard, to fixed residence in one of three scattered places.122

  The era of great exoduses came to an end with the Bentley fiasco. Realizing that pulling up roots and relocating to Mexico meant losing place without gaining unlimited space, that not even an international border offered protection from Yankee incursions, that crooked schemers could manipulate the border as strategically as livestock raiders, most Kickapoos united behind the strategy of holding tight to place, with visits across the diaspora. The Kickapoos might return to places their people had once frequented, but in a larger sense, there was no going back.

  FROM PAROLEES TO CITIZENS

  About a hundred and fifty years after their ancestors had been expelled from the fledgling state of Illinois, some members of the Kickapoo nation gathered in a congressional committee room in Washington, D.C., to make a case for U.S. citizenship. This band had lived for many years next to the northern side of the International Bridge that connected Eagle Pass, Texas, to Piedras Negras, Mexico, on opposite banks of the Rio Grande. After their camp had been bulldozed, fenced, and turned into a parking lot, the Eagle Pass Kickapoos rebuilt their homes under the bridge, literally on the U.S.-Mexican border.

  Kickapoo wickiups under the International Bridge connecting Eagle Pass, Texas, to Piedras Negras, Coahuila.

  “Confirming the Citizenship Status of the Texas Band of Kickapoo Indians,” Hearings Before the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, 97th Congress, House of Representatives (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1983), 82.

  Life in this marginal spot was marked by daily tribulations. Commuters tossed their garbage down upon the cane and cardboard houses. The area was too small to perform important ceremonies. Given their uncertain citizenship status—some having been born in Mexico, some in the United States, with no documentation as to one case or the other—the Eagle Pass Kickapoos did not qualify for U.S. public health services and could not enroll their children in public schools.123

  Things had only gotten worse. Eagle Pass officials had recently forced them to relocate to city land. As Wipecuinacudita (also known as Jose Naco Jiminez) put it: “We have no outhouses and sometimes no water. We have many mosquitoes. We have no stoves and we must use an open fire. My biggest fear is that we could be thrown out at any moment.” In introducing the citizenship bill, Texas congressman Abraham Kazen played up this theme of dispossession, claiming: “They just want a place they can call home.”124 Kickapoo representative Makateonenodua (also known as Raul Garza) agreed in his plea for “a permanent land base where we can worship in peace and privacy.”125 This logic seemed compelling to the committee, and later to Congress and the president. In 1983 the Eagle Pass Kickapoos obtained U.S. citizenship and tribal recognition.126

  But the Eagle Pass Kickapoos wanted more than a home. Those who spoke at the hearing also made it clear that they wanted the right to cross the border—into the United States and back to Mexico again. They did not want to be fenced in any more than they wanted to be displaced. They wanted what their people had been struggling for since their first encounters with the pioneers—rights to the kinds of belonging associated with place and to the freedoms associated with movement through space. The officials in the hearing room construed this desire as wanting dual citizenship—U.S. and Mexican. But the Kickapoos who testified spoke of their desire to be Kickapoos. And that implied the right to a home and a way of being in the world that had preceded both the United States and Mexico. In a time of tightening border enforcement, the Eagle Pass Kickapoos testified that they had been Americans—Kickapoo Americans—first. Long before the United States and Mexico began drawing lines between insiders and outsiders, Kickapoos had belonged in the heart of the land. As in the cases of ot
her indigenous people and their descendants (some of them coming to identify as Mexican), border-patrolling efforts to produce national safe spaces had led to insecurity, suffering, and pain.

  So how did this group of Eagle Pass Kickapoos end up in a congressional hearing room in 1982? As their water dried up, their hunting options shrank, and their land began to suffer from overgrazing, the Mexican Kickapoos had begun to seek work as migrant laborers in the United States. Starting in the drought years of the 1940s, they sought seasonal agricultural work in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, California, and New York. With the end of the Mexican bracero (guestworker) program in 1964, the demand for Kickapoo workers increased.127 Unlike most Mexican farmworkers, Kickapoos could still enter the United States, thanks to notarized photocopies of a pass written for them by a U.S. Army major at Fort Dearborn, Michigan, in 1832. This document certified that the Kickapoos were “to be protected by all persons from any injury whatever, as they are under the protection of the U.S. and any person so violating shall be punished accordingly.”128 Although intended to allow the Kickapoos of Michigan to move around the Detroit area without injury, over a century later this document enabled their Mexican descendants to visit friends and relatives in the United States and, increasingly, to work.