by David Treuer
“what should be the legal status”: “Instructions to the Board of Indian Commissioners,” in Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 126.
“the first aggressions have been made by the white man”: Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker, 139.
In 1871, Ely Parker resigned: Ibid., 156.
“No Indian nation or tribe within the territory”: U.S. Title Code 25, Section 71, “Future Treaties with Indian Tribes,” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/25/71.
“the Indian agent had, in effect”: Sharon O’Brien, American Indian Tribal Governments (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 272.
“There are bluffs and bunches of timber”: Richard Harding Davis, “The West from a Car Window,” Harper’s Weekly, May 14, 1892, 461, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015014126026;view=1up;seq=439; and The West from a Car-Window (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1892), 158, 160.
“Their supplies had been limited”: Clark Wissler, Red Man Reservations (New York: Collier Books, 1971), 64, quoted in Fixico, Bureau of Indian Affairs, 61.
“It has become the settled policy”: Thomas Jefferson Morgan, in Fifty-ninth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1890), vi.
“wear civilized clothes”: Henry Dawes, quoted in Gerald E. Shenk, “Work or Fight!” Race, Gender, and the Draft in World War One (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 54.
Grant and Ely Parker hoped: Cathleen D. Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 19.
“My friends, I have been asked to show you my heart”: In-mut-too-yah-lat-lat [Chief Joseph], speech at Lincoln Hall, Washington, D.C., 1879, published in North American Review 128, no. 269 (April 1879), 412–34. Courtesy Cornell University’s Making of America, http://psi.mheducation.com/current/media/prints/pr_105.html. “Clarke” in the online document has been edited to “Clark” here.
“It was late in the afternoon”: “Standing Bear’s Speech,” from The Indian Journal, Timeless Truths, http://library.timelesstruths.org/texts/Stories_Worth_Rereading/Standing_Bears_Speech/.
“I wanted to go on my own land”: U.S. Courts Library, Eighth Circuit, “Chief Standing Bear: A Person Under the Law,” 5, http://www.lb8.uscourts.gov/pubsandservices/histsociety/neb-chiefstandingbear-booklet.pdf.
“During the fifteen years” . . . “On the one side” . . . “Every ‘person’ who comes” . . . “1. That an Indian is”: Standing Bear v. Crook (1879), in Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 150–52.
Yet even as people: Gretchen Cassel Eick, “U.S. Indian Policy, 1865–1890 as Illuminated Through the Lives of Charles A. Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman,” Great Plains Quarterly 28 (Winter 2008), 27–47, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2396&context=greatplainsquarterly.
“Look Upon Your Hands!”: Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), xiii.
“If I could write a story”: “Helen Hunt Jackson Tries to Write Her Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” New England Historical Society, http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/helen-hunt-jackson-tries-write-uncle-toms-cabin/.
“We could not fit the negro for freedom”: Quoted in Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers, 27.
“every man is born into the world with the right”: Ibid.
“The reservation shuts off the Indians”: Ibid., 29.
“keeps the Indian more dependent” . . . “fatal to the Indian”: Ibid.
“Treating the black man as chattel”: Ibid.
“A great general has said”: Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (Denver, June 23–29, 1892), ed. Isabel C. Barrows, (Boston: Geo. H. Ellis, 1892), 58–59.
“The ‘civilizing’ process”: Luther Standing Bear, recollections of 1879 experiences at Carlisle school, 1933, quoted at http://faculty.whatcom.ctc.edu/mhaberma/hist209/luthsb.htm.
“I want to tell you something”: Quoted in Barbara Landis, “Carlisle Indian Industrial School History,” Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879–1918), http://home.epix.net/~landis/histry.html.
“It was deemed necessary to establish”: Arthur Grabowski, Superintendent, Haskell Institute, in Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1886, quoted in Charla Bear, “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many,” Morning Edition, May 12, 2008, NPR, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16516865.
“[Grace] was at the office yesterday”: Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 48–49.
“I understand you will let me know”: Ibid., 49.
“the parents of these Indian children”: John S. Ward, United States Indian Agent, Mission Agency, California, in Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1886, quoted in Bear, “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many.”
“Compulsion through the police”: John P. Williamson, Dakota Agency, in Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1886, quoted in Bear, “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many.” The word “metered” in Bear’s version has been corrected to “meted,” as appears in older editions of the report.
“We would cower from the abusive disciplinary practices”: Margaret L. Archuleta, Brenda J. Child, and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, eds., Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences (Phoenix: Heard Museum Publications, 2000), 42.
“When the school is on the reserve”: Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, in Official Report of the Debates of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada, May 9, 1883, 1107–08, quoted in “Residential Schools in Canada: Education Guide,” 2, http://education.historicacanada.ca/files/32/ResidentialSchools_English.pdf.
Annie Dickson . . . Andrew Big Snake: List compiled from Child, Boarding School Seasons, appendix 4, 112–13.
According to the Meriam Report: Institute for Government Research, Studies in Administration, The Problem of Indian Administration (Meriam Report) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1928), https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED087573.pdf; also found in “The Challenges and Limitations of Assimilation: Indian Boarding Schools,” The Brown Quarterly 4, no. 3 (Fall 2001), 4.
“if the labor of the boarding school” . . . “there are numbers of young children”: The Problem of Indian Administration (Meriam Report), 375.
“is in no sense educational”: Ibid.
“there is no individuality”: Ibid., 386.
“maintain a pathetic degree of quietness”: Ibid., 329.
“The generally routinized nature of the institutional life”: Ibid., 393.
“At present the rich Indians” . . . “Congress and the Executive of the United States are the supreme guardians”: Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1886 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1886), vi, xi–xii, retrieved at http://images.library.wisc.edu/History/EFacs/CommRep/AnnRep86/reference/history.annrep86.i0004.pdf.
“must be imbued”: John Oberly, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, for the Year 1888 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1888), lxxxix.
“We must make the Indian”: Merrill E. Gates, “The Indian of Romance,” address to 14th Lake Mohonk Indian Conference, 1896, Proceedings of the 14th Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian (Lake Mohonk, New York, October 14–16, 1896), ed. Isabel C. Ba
rrows (Lake Mohonk Conference, 1897).
“Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives”: An Act to Provide for the Allotment of Lands in Severalty to Indians on the Various Reservations . . . , 49th Congress, 2nd session, Our Documents, https://www.ourdocuments.gov/print_friendly.php?flash=true&page=transcript&doc=50&title.
“It is still the conviction of this office”: Department of the Interior, “Annual Report of the Pine Ridge Agency,” South Dakota, August 1, 1913.
For the purposes of determining: Melissa L. Meyer, The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
“I have lost my wife and left me with six children”: Child, Boarding School Seasons, 15.
“was first sent away to boarding school”: Ibid.
“Civilization has loosened”: Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, for the Year 1877 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877), 2.
“real aim of this bill is to get at the Indian lands”: Frank Pommersheim, Broken Landscape: Indians, Indian Tribes, and the Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 128.
“what I regard as a great hindrance . . . These dances, or feasts, as they are sometimes called”: Code of Indian Offences (1883), https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Code_of_Indian_Offenses. See also “Courts of Indian Offenses” (November 1, 1883), in Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 159.
“hear and pass judgment upon all such questions”: Ibid.
“4. The ‘sun-dance,’ the ‘scalp-dance,’ the ‘war-dance’”: Ibid.
He drew attention to the fact: Jo Lea Wetherilt Behrens, “In Defense of ‘Poor Lo’: National Indian Defense Association and Council Fire’s Advocacy for Sioux Land Rights,” South Dakota History 24 (Fall/Winter 1994), 161, retrievable at https://www.sdhspress.com/journal/south-dakota-history-24-3/in-defense-of-poor-lo-national-indian-defense-association-and-council-fires-advocacy-for-sioux-land-rights/vol-24-no-3-and-no-4-in-defense-of-poor-lo.pdf.
The wording of the treaty: “The Old Crossing Chippewa Treaty and Its Sequel,” Internet Archive, https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-fa00v1iDcvybuUVD/The%20Old%20Crossing%20Treaty_djvu.txt.
“We have written a great many times”: Anton Treuer, Warrior Nation: A History of the Red Lake Ojibwe (Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2015), 81.
“We can see the possibility of a misunderstanding”: Ibid.
“This property belongs to us”: Ibid.
“My friends it has been reported to me”: Ibid., 153.
“We Indians in the vicinity of Ponemah”: Ibid., 154.
“Its legislature appoints a superintendent of schools”: Annual Reports of the Department of the Interior of Indian Affairs for the Fiscal Year ended June 30, 1900: Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900), 110–11.
“given to some strange Indians”: Frederic Baraga, A Dictionary of the Otchipwe Language, Explained in English (Cincinnati: Jos. A. Hemann, 1853), 243.
“Start with the rising sun”: Ronald L. Trosper, “Indigenous Influence on Forest Management on the Menominee Indian Reservation,” Forest Ecology and Management 249 (2007), 134–35, http://courses.washington.edu/dtsclass/TEK-Menominee.pdf.
“I will continue on this floor”: Stacy Conradt, “5 Famous Filibusters,” Mental Floss, http://mentalfloss.com/article/49360/5-famous-filibusters.
“For many months we have fought together”: Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History 1946–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 100.
Part 3. Fighting Life: 1914–1945
“There are people who think that wrestling”: Roland Barthes, A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 18.
“primary virtue of the spectacle”: Ibid.
He graduated from high school: Statistics are drawn from Patrick Stark, Amber M. Noel, and Joel McFarland, Trends in High School Dropout and Completion Rates in the United States: 1972–2012, Compendium Report, U.S. Department of Education, National Center of Education Statistics, NCES 2015-015, https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2015/2015015.pdf, and Christopher Hartney and Linh Vuong, Created Equal: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the US Criminal Justice System, National Council on Crime and Delinquency, 2009, http://www.nccdglobal.org/sites/default/files/publication_pdf/created-equal.pdf.
In Minnesota in 2002: Andy Mannix, “Minnesota Sends Minorities to Prison at Far Higher Rates than Whites,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 14, 2016, http://www.startribune.com/minnesota-sends-minorities-to-prison-at-far-higher-rates-than-whites/374543811/.
My nephew!: As related by Anton Treuer.
The Onondaga and Oneida: “Onondagas to Declare War on Germany,” Leadville, Colorado, Herald Democrat, August 1, 1918, 2, https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/cgi-bin/colorado?a=d&d=THD19180801-01.2.18.
“They are not citizens”: Quoted in Ojibwa, “World War I and American Indians,” July 6, 2010, Native American Netroots, http://nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/573.
The army detained more than a hundred men: Ibid.
Ultimately, her case was postponed: Ibid.
All in all, Indian participation: Russel Lawrence Barsh, “American Indians in the Great War,” Ethnohistory 38, no. 3 (Summer 1991), 277.
“the Aviation Corps of the Army”: Ibid.
“the richest nation, clan or social group”: Margo Jefferson, “Books of the Times: Digging Up a Tale of Terror Among the Osages,” The New York Times, August 31, 1994.
Lee Rainbow . . . Henry Tallman: Barsh, “American Indians in the Great War,” 279.
Graduates of the Phoenix Indian School: Thomas A. Britten, “American Indians in World War I: Military Service as Catalyst for Reform” (Ph.D. diss., Texas Tech University, 1994), 111, https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/ttu-ir/bitstream/handle/2346/16718/31295008461237.pdf?sequence=1.
“worldwide festival of death”: Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John Woods (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 706.
Farther north at the Somme: C. N. Trueman, “First World War Casualties,” History Learning Site, April 17, 2015, http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/world-war-one/world-war-one-and-casualties/first-world-war-casualties/.
“at night barehanded and alone”: “An Indian Gets a Move on Himself: A Match for Twenty Huns,” Word Carrier 46 (October–December 1918), 20, quoted in Thomas A. Britten, American Indians in World War I at Home and at War (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 77.
During the fray he was shot: Britten, American Indians in World War I at Home and at War, 77.
“Lieutenant Breeding had the distinction”: Ibid.
“saw another Indian soldier crawling”: Ibid.
“Indians in the front ranks”: Herman Viola, Warriors in Uniform: The Legacy of American Indian Heroism (Washington, DC: National Geographic Press, 2008), 68.
“Bull Durham is the name”: “IQ Tests Go to War—Measuring Intelligence in the Army,” History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5293. See also Richard Conniff, “God and White Men at Yale,” Yale Alumni Magazine, May/June 2012, https://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/3456-god-and-white-men-at-yale?page=3.
they disproportionately served as scouts and snipers: Barsh, “American Indians in the Great War.”
“ten or more regiments of Indian cavalry”: Joseph Kossuth Dixon, North American Indian Cavalry, Argument before the Committeee on Military Affairs, House of Representatives, 65th Congress, H.R. 3970, July 25, 1917, retrieved at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.32000009944994;view=1up;seq=7.
“author, explorer, ethnologist and authority”: Russel Lawrence Barsh, “An American Heart of Darkness: The 1913 Expedition for American In
dian Citizenship,” Great Plains Quarterly 13 (Spring 1993), 92, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1750&context=greatplainsquarterly.
“nearly every Indian tribe” . . . “the grave of their race”: Joseph Kossuth Dixon, The Vanishing Race, the Last Great Indian Council; a Record in Picture and Story of the Last Great Indian Council, Participated in by Eminent Indian Chiefs from Nearly Every Indian Reservation in the United States, Together with the Story of Their Lives As Told by Themselves—Their Speeches and Folklore Tales—Their Solemn Farewell and the Indians’ Story of the Custer Fight (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1913), 9, 200–13.
“would not yield”: Ibid., 4.
“For one splendid moment”: Ibid., 214.
“There are some dark pages”: The Indian’s Friend: The Organ of the National Indian Association 23–29 (July 1913), 2.
“Indian spirit would be crushed”: Britten, American Indians in World War I at Home and at War, 40.
“military segregation of the Indian”: Ibid., 43.
Not even all the men and women: Ibid., 160.
“undemocratic bureaucracy”: Theodore D. Beaulieu, The American Indian (Washington, DC: Society of American Indians, 1920), 141.
American Indian births outstripped Indian deaths: Nancy Shoemaker, American Indian Population Recovery in the Twentieth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 75.
responded that the German leader: Britten, American Indians in World War I at Home and at War, 185–86.
“The Indian, though a man without a country”: Quoted in “Native American Citizenship: 1924 Indian Citizenship Act,” Nebraska Studies 1900–1924, http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0700/frameset_reset.html?http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0700/stories/0701_0146.html [inactive].
“Be it enacted by the Senate”: Ibid.
“empowered them to be the primary”: Anton Treuer, Warrior Nation: A History of the Red Lake Ojibwe (Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2015), 196.
