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This Indian Country
THE PENGUIN PRESS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2012 by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Frederick E. Hoxie, 2012
All rights reserved
Photograph credits appear here.
Map illustrations by Tom Willockson
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Hoxie, Frederick E., 1947–
This Indian country : American Indian political activists and the place they made / Frederick E. Hoxie.
p. cm. — (Penguin history of American life)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-101-59590-9
1. Indians of North America—Politics and government. 2. Indian activists—United States—History. 3. Political activists—United States—History. 4. United States—Race relations. 5. United States—Politics and government. I. Title.
E98.T77H69 2012
323.1197—dc23
2012009287
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For My Sons, My Best Audience
Stephen
Philip
Silas
Charlie
At the particular time when these discoveries were made, the superiority of force happened to be so great on the side of the Europeans, that they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries. Hereafter, perhaps, the natives of those countries may grow stronger, or those of Europe may grow weaker, and the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent states into some sort of respect for the rights of one another.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976; originally published in 1776), Book 4, ch. 7, Part 3, 626
CONTENTS
Other titles in this series
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
ERASED FROM THE MAP
CHAPTER TWO
THE FIRST INDIAN LAWYER: James McDonald, Choctaw
CHAPTER THREE
THE MOUNTAINTOP PRINCIPALITY OF SAN MARINO: William Potter Ross, Cherokee
CHAPTER FOUR
THE WINNEMUCCA RULES: Sarah Winnemucca, Paiute
CHAPTER FIVE
THE U.S. COURT OF CLAIMS: The Mille Lacs Ojibwes
CHAPTER SIX
THE GOOD CITIZENSHIP GUN: Thomas Sloan, Omaha
CHAPTER SEVEN
THREE INDIANS WHO DIDN’T LIVE AT TAOS: Robert Yellowtail, Crow; Alice Jemison, Seneca; and D’Arcy McNickle, Salish
CHAPTER EIGHT
INDIAN AMERICAN OR AMERICAN INDIAN? Vine Deloria, Jr., Sioux
AFTERWORD
THIS INDIAN COUNTRY
Photographs
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION
For the past several years I have taught Native American history to college students in the Midwest. Since the subject is new to most of them, I usually begin each course with a simple exercise. I ask students to take out a sheet of paper and write down the names of three American Indians. Most who have responded to this question—bright young men and women in settings that have shifted with me over the years from a small liberal arts college to a large private university to the massive research institution where I now work—have grown up in middle-class suburbs or urban neighborhoods where they rarely have encountered Native people. “Everybody knows something about Indians,” I tell them; “this exercise is a way of inventorying the extent of your knowledge as it exists today.” I have conducted this exercise dozens of times, and the results seldom vary. Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo are the Indians most frequently mentioned. (Following the release of Disney’s Pocahontas in 1995, the Virginia “princess” frequently nudged one of the other three off the podium.)
After tabulating their answers, I ask the students to reflect on the result. If visiting Martians were to arrive suddenly and examine this outcome, what would they learn? The ensuing discussion always generates new insights, but the general conclusion is inescapable. Most Americans instinctively view Indians as people of the past who occupy a position outside the central narrative of American history. Three of the most frequently mentioned individuals were warriors, men who fought violently against American expansion, lost, and died. (Pocahontas was a “good Indian,” remembered for assisting European expansion—and then dying.) The exercise suggests that Americans believe “real” Indians dwell in some distant time and place, apart from their own lives, and that Native history has no particular relationship to what is conventionally presented as the story of America. The images in my students’ heads seem to underscore the idea that the United States is a “new” nation whose history stretches back to a founding moment that involved violent conflicts that “won” the land for
“us” and left the Indians dispossessed. These images suggest Indians had a history too; but theirs was short and sad, and it ended a long time ago.
There is of course a great deal of truth in this conventional view. Native Americans were (and are) outsiders in America. Over the past two centuries most Indians resisted the rule of the United States and scoffed at the Americans’ claim that their new nation embodied the triumph of human freedom. Native people had their own traditions which differed fundamentally from those the early explorers brought with them from Europe. At their first contact with Europeans, Indians were not Christians, nor were they preoccupied with private property. While consensual, their societies were not “democratic” in the European sense of the term. To Indians, iconic American frontiersmen like Daniel Boone or Andrew Jackson were hardly heroic or admirable; they were simply the latest intruders. They were not impressed that Jackson championed the “common man” because they understood the connection between his populist politics and his equally fervent campaign to expel the tribes from the eastern United States. Native people understood that opening new areas for “settlement” would mean the devastation of their ancient homelands.
The point of my first-day exercise is not to heap scorn on the nation’s pioneers but to kindle curiosity about the real story of American Indians in the United States. If “real” Indians are warriors and the warriors were defeated and killed, how do we explain the Native people who survived the founding of the United States? What about the vast majority of Indians who were not warriors and who refused the Pocahontas role of assisting European settlement? Were they “real”? Do they have a history? And if the national myths tell only part of the story of the Native past, where do we look to find the rest? My informal quiz is intended to prod students to look beneath the surface of the popular beliefs that define Native people as exotic and irrelevant. I also ask students to consider why it is that Americans so easily accept the romantic stereotype of Indians as heroic warriors and princesses? Why don’t we demand a richer, three-dimensional story? I pose a Native American version of the question the African American writer James Baldwin often asked white audiences a generation ago: “Why do you need a nigger?” My question is the same: Why do Americans need “Indians”—brave, exotic, and dead—as major figures in national culture?
My first-day questions are not unique. For many years historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars have repeated versions of my exercise in both their teachings and their writings about the Native American past. Confronting an earlier scholarly tradition that viewed Indian people as tethered to tradition and bound down by their exotic tribal cultures, proponents of a “New Indian History” have pierced through old stereotypes and distortions to portray Native Americans as three-dimensional actors, performing on the stage of history in accessible and comprehensible ways. This scholarship has uncovered the record of remarkable men and women who managed to survive the European invasion and participate actively in the creation of the modern world. While not denigrating nineteenth-century warriors like Tecumseh or Chief Joseph, the “New Indian History” has taught that since 1492 Native people spent far more time negotiating, lobbying, and debating than they spent tomahawking settlers or shooting at soldiers. This insight has inspired historians to tell stories of men and women who adapted ancient traditions to new circumstances or married new phenomena like Christianity or Western technology to the needs of their people. The “New Indian History” has recovered Native voices that allow students to hear previously ignored tribal perspectives on historical events. But even as we framed this new history, historians were confronted again and again by the public’s enduring preference for warriors, feathers, and stories of Indian defeat.
This book counters that preference by presenting portraits of American Indians who neither physically resisted, nor surrendered to, the expanding continental empire that became the United States. The men and women portrayed here were born within the boundaries of the United States, rose to positions of community leadership, and decided to enter the nation’s political arena—as lawyers, lobbyists, agitators, and writers—to defend their communities. They argued that Native people occupied a distinct place inside the borders of the United States and deserved special recognition from the central government. Undaunted by their adversary’s military power, these activists employed legal reasoning, political pressure, and philosophical arguments to wage a continuous campaign on behalf of Indian autonomy, freedom, and survival. Some were homegrown activists whose focus was on protecting their local homelands; others had wider ambitions for the reform of national policies. All sought to overcome the predicament of political powerlessness and find peaceful resolutions for their complaints. They struggled to create a long-term relationship with the United States that would enable Native people to live as members of both particular indigenous communities and a large, democratic nation.
The story of these activists crosses several centuries. It opens in the waning days of the American Revolution, as negotiators in Paris set geographical boundaries for the new nation that ignored Indian nations that had fought in the conflict and had been recognized previously in international diplomacy. Native activists take center stage in the 1820s, when nationalistic U.S. leaders abandoned an earlier diplomatic tradition and pressed Indian leaders to surrender their homes to American settlers. The Choctaw James McDonald, the first Indian in the United States to be trained as a lawyer, is the protagonist of chapter two. McDonald became his tribe’s legal adviser and drew on American political ideals to defend Indian rights, thereby laying the foundation for future claims against the United States.
A generation after McDonald, the Cherokee leader William Potter Ross developed and widened the young Choctaw’s arguments. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century he traveled among Indian tribes in the West as well as to Washington, D.C., to recruit other Native leaders to defend tribal sovereignty. Among those who followed in Ross’s wake were Sarah Winnemucca, a Nevada Paiute who in the 1880s became a nationally famous writer, lecturer, and lobbyist, and a group of remarkable Minnesota Ojibwe tribal leaders who battled both at home and in Washington, D.C., to preserve their tiny community on the shores of Mille Lacs Lake.
In the twentieth century the leading activists were often polished professionals like Thomas Sloan, an Omaha Indian who became an attorney and established a legal practice in Washington, D.C. The first Indian to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, Sloan helped found the Society of American Indians in 1911 (serving as its first president) and encouraged other community leaders to create similar networks of support. In the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal offered those leaders opportunities to speak out in defense of their tribes, these networks brought forth tribal advocates such as the Seneca Alice Jemison and the Crow leader Robert Yellowtail, as well as a new generation of intellectuals and thinkers, among them the Salish writer and reformer D’Arcy McNickle and the visionary scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., who by the time of his death in 2005 had become the leading proponent of indigenous cultures and tribal rights in the United States.
By the start of the twenty-first century the threads of activism developed by these individuals had woven themselves together so tightly that they produced the complex reality we observe today: a world where the descendants of indigenous societies and the children of the Americans who had dispossessed them can imagine living together as fellow citizens. The eight chapters that constitute this book focus on a dozen or so individuals who, at different times and places, took up the challenge of winning recognition for their communities within the political and institutional framework of the United States. While a great many other men and women were involved in this process, the stories of this small group of activists allow us to view the broad outlines of Indian America’s long engagement with the power and political pretensions of the United States. They shared a common conviction that Native Americans, who had never consented to the establishment
of the United States, nonetheless deserved recognition from its institutions and justice from its leaders.
The activists in this book were originals and innovators. Sarah Winnemucca, for example, had no more than a grammar school education, yet she forged alliances with humanitarian reformers across the country and argued forcefully that the trans-Mississippi West, which most non-Indians believed had already been “won” for civilization, was still a landscape of violence and brutality. Thomas Sloan, the Omaha lawyer, proposed that American citizenship would give Indian people the freedom they needed to claim their rights as members of tribal communities as well as the legal status to resist the dictatorial power of government bureaucrats and Indian agents. Similarly, the leaders of Minnesota’s Mille Lacs band of Ojibwes, many of them illiterate in English, took the unprecedented step of hiring a team of prominent attorneys to press their claim for recognition and justice in U.S. courts.
These figures overlapped sufficiently with one another that through them we can follow an ongoing train of thought and action. This is not a simple story of linear progress and triumph in a climactic court case or legislative victory. Rather, it is a tale of continuous reflection, argumentation, and reform. The activists presented here were engaged in a grand conversation that produced a collective achievement beyond each one’s imagination. James McDonald was a mentor and friend of Peter Pitchlynn, the Choctaw leader who later fought alongside William Potter Ross on behalf of autonomy for Indian Territory. Ross protested encroachments on Cherokee sovereignty in Washington, D.C., just as Sarah Winnemucca was speaking out against American national expansion in major cities across the country. Thomas Sloan established his Washington legal practice at the same time that the Mille Lacs Ojibwes were bringing their case into court. Sloan, in turn, was an ally of Robert Yellowtail, a successful Crow reservation politician who was promoted to agency superintendent by the same New Deal reformers who appointed D’Arcy McNickle to a senior post in the Indian Office. The latter two leaders worked together in the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) during the 1940s, debating their views with the Seneca activist Alice Jemison, and joining with her to defend treaty rights and the power of tribal governments. Both Yellowtail and McNickle lived long enough to work alongside Vine Deloria, Jr., the author, lawyer, and activist who championed Native sovereignty in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and who carried their struggle into the twenty-first century. The connections among these activists grew stronger over time, reflecting the rise of pan-Indian organizations such as the NCAI and the growing prominence of lobbyists who traveled to Washington, D.C.
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