This Indian Country

by Frederick Hoxie

  Sarah Winnemucca followed up the publication of Life Among the Piutes with a furious schedule of lecturing and lobbying. Elizabeth Peabody reported to a friend late in 1883 that the new author had made a private visit to the home of Senator Henry Dawes, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and “she has spoken in my hearing in Providence, Hartford, New York, Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, Dorset in Vermont, Salem, Cambridge, Boston again, and in Philadelphia.”23 In these presentations she no doubt repeated the charges in her book, but at the conclusion of all her speeches she asked her audience to add their signatures to a petition asking congress to restore the Malheur Reservation to the Paiutes. The petition asked for the grant of this land so that her kinsmen could “enjoy lands in severally [sic] without losing their tribal relations so essential to their happiness and good character and where their citizenship . . . will defend them from the encroachments of the white settlers, so detrimental to their interests and their virtues.”24 The appeal for a homeland that would preserve the “essential” relations among members of her tribe and prevent whites from any further “encroachment” was a fitting extension of Winnemucca’s indictment of American expansion. She sought a future in which the Paiutes could survive as a community, apart from the violence and disruption that were sure to accompany any contact with American settlers. They would lead their own lives—both public and private—in their own community.

  CHALLENGING “CIVILIZATION”

  Sarah Winnemucca spoke out against the morality of American expansion just as federal officials were embarking on a national campaign to “civilize” all American Indians. Of course missionaries had striven to convert and “uplift” Indian people from the seventeenth century forward, but it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the U.S. conquest of the continent became complete, that federal officials and the general public shifted the bulk of their attention from extending the nation’s borders to creating a comprehensive system for incorporating indigenous communities into the nation. They hoped to integrate these individuals into the lower rungs of a modern industrial state.

  It is difficult to identify the moment when the shift from public diplomacy to domestic reform first occurred. It probably began in 1849, five years after Winnemucca’s birth, when, in the wake of the Mexican War and the settlement of the Oregon boundary dispute, Congress transferred the Indian Office from the Department of War to the newly created Department of the Interior. This transfer symbolized the American government’s desire to move from an age of expansion, when Indians were external enemies to be defeated in war, to a period of consolidation, when civilian agents would oversee the national control in the interior. Under this new bureaucratic arrangement, the Indian Office set about creating federally protected enclaves for Indians within states and territories. These enclaves became known as reservations. The commissioner of Indian affairs promised in 1850 that these protected areas would be “supplied with stock, agricultural implements and useful materials for clothing,” and he assured the public that the government would “encourage and assist [residents] in the erection of comfortable dwellings, and secure to them the means and facilities of education, intellectual, moral, and religious.”25

  The Indian Office’s goal of making all the nation’s Indian reservations places of “intellectual, moral, and religious” education was remarkably ambitious, but the program itself was implemented slowly and unevenly. In view of the many hardships surrounding the eastern removals, federal officials often found it difficult to persuade tribal leaders to lead their communities onto reservations or to accept the dramatic cultural changes required in these new “educational” settlements. Initially, a number of powerful Native groups, such as the Sioux and Cheyennes on the Plains, the Navajos in the Southwest, and the Yakamas in the Pacific Northwest, resisted this extension of American authority in their tribal homelands. This resistance, along with the many hardships that accompanied the transition to reservation life, triggered a number of violent conflicts with authorities. Fighting of this kind constituted the bulk of the Indian wars that captured public attention during the middle of the century. Crazy Horse and Geronimo, for example, were the objects of military campaigns precisely because they refused to live on reservations the government had created for their “education.”26

  It was not until after the reunification of the national government in 1865, when Sarah Winnemucca was in her twenties, that public support and federal authority seemed sufficient to launch a national campaign to transform Indian ways of life. The potential for this new effort became evident first in 1871, when Congress declared that it would no longer negotiate treaties with Indian tribes. In the future, congressional leaders announced, federal power alone would dictate the government’s policy toward the tribes. In 1872, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis Walker, an economist who soon became the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained this abandonment of negotiation by noting that national expansion had reduced Indians to powerlessness and widened the cultural gulf separating them from whites. “The westward course of population is neither to be denied nor delayed for the sake of the Indians,” he declared. “They must yield or perish.” The federal government’s responsibility, Walker added, was not “to stay this tide (through the negotiation of treaties) . . . but to snatch the remnants of the Indian race from destruction. . . .” The commissioner advocated replacing treaties with a program of “directing these people to new pursuits which shall be consistent with the progress of civilization upon the continent.” 27

  Commissioner Walker’s observation that Indians must “yield or perish” and his sequential references to the “advance” of the frontier and the “wretchedness” of Indians underscored his conviction, shared by many in President Grant’s administration, that the United States had an obligation to transform Native communities. For national leaders from the victorious North, the post–Civil War years seemed an era of triumph. “Every year’s advance of our frontier takes in a territory as large as some of the Kingdoms of Europe,” Commissioner Walker wrote in 1872. American success was assured and self-affirming. He added, “We are richer by hundreds of millions; the Indian is poorer by a large part of the little that he has. This growth is bringing imperial greatness to the nation; to the Indian it brings wretchedness, destitution, beggary.”28 Because American officials viewed themselves as people charged with promoting “imperial greatness,” they felt unconstrained by previous treaties or informal understandings with the tribes.

  The commissioner’s self-confidence was reinforced by the nation’s leading scientists. The Smithsonian Institution’s John Wesley Powell, for example, the geologist who had led the first American expedition through the Grand Canyon and who later became the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, wrote in 1880 that enforcing treaties with Indians would fulfill only “a minor part of the debt” that the government owed Indians. “The major portion of that debt,” Powell wrote, “can only be paid by giving to the Indians Anglo-Saxon civilization, that they may also have prosperity and happiness under the new civilization of this continent.”29 For Powell, Walker, and their generation of government officials, bestowing “civilization” on the tribes would not only add to the nation’s “imperial greatness” but would also compensate the Indians for their dispossession. The stakes for people like Walker and Powell were very high. They believed that with one stroke, “civilizing” the Indians would eradicate Native identities, scrub clean the nation’s guilty conscience, and burnish its global image.

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  DURING THE SAME DECADES when policy makers were turning their attention to Indian civilization, a parallel conversation was regarding the role of women in a rapidly expanding “civilized” nation was taking place. Fiction writers, political leaders, and social theorists such as the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan argued that only communities comprised of nuclear families would be capable of producing social harmony and economic prospe
rity across the continent. Families headed by male breadwinners and served by female spouses who maintained the household and instructed the family’s children were viewed as the building blocks of a progressive and modern society. Monogamy and good housekeeping were essential ingredients of this imagined America.30

  It was logical, then, that as the Indian Office and other agencies began to organize methods for “giving the Indians Anglo-Saxon civilization” and for “directing” tribes to programs of “intellectual, moral and religious” education, government officials turned to contemporary models of domesticity for their inspiration. When architects of the reservation system spoke of “comfortable dwellings,” for example, or called for the distribution of tribal lands to individuals, they regularly conjured up a gendered image of civilized American families. They imagined Indian men would fence and farm small plots of land while their wives maintained households for themselves and their children. Government schools would teach men a trade or instruct them in efficient agricultural techniques, while Native girls and women learned cooking, sewing, and other domestic arts. Reformers viewed the inculcation of an array of American domestic habits as the central avenue by which Indian families would travel from wretchedness to modernity.31 “Civilized” Native men and women would lay the foundation for new Indian communities that would transcend their backward traditions and ignore their recalcitrant traditional leaders.

  The centrality of domestic reform to the Indian civilization effort had been apparent even in prewar proposals to establish reservations, but those ideas were given new life after the Civil War by reformers such as Lydia Maria Child, who sought to extend the promise of American civilization from newly freed slaves to Indians. A former abolitionist, Child declared in 1870 that “human nature is essentially the same in all races and classes of men,” adding, “My faith never wavers that men can be made just by being treated justly, honest by being dealt with honestly, and kindly by becoming objects of kindly sympathy.”32 Women like Child and Amelia Stone Quinton, who had taught newly freed African Americans in the South immediately after the Civil War, were at the forefront of this effort. Their commitment to “all races and classes of men” inspired them to press for Indian schools and Indian citizenship. In 1879 Quinton founded the Women’s National Indian Association, a forerunner of the later male-led Indian Rights Association. This activity inspired younger women, such as the anthropologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher and the popular author Helen Hunt Jackson, to join the effort. 33

  These women saw domestic reform aimed at civilization (education, traditional marriage, and individual landownership) as a solution for Native communities increasingly surrounded by land-hungry whites. Fletcher became an early advocate of replacing reservations with individual landownership and a firm supporter of the nation’s growing network of boarding schools. Helen Hunt Jackson offered her prescriptions in the form of popular essays and stories. Her most famous effort was a romance set in the Mission Indian communities of southern California. Published in 1884, just a year after Life Among the Piutes appeared, Ramona portrayed the struggle of a Christian Indian woman striving to establish a household for her pious husband and son. Jackson’s account of the heroine Ramona’s homemaking in the face of racial hostility and rampant lawlessness echoed the domestic images in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s more famous Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other works that illustrated the nuclear family’s ability to protect individuals from hostile outsiders. For Jackson, as for Fletcher and Stowe, a civilized home managed by a Christian matron could be both a refuge from lawlessness and a vehicle for transporting its members to a better place.34

  Life Among the Piutes attacked the heart of this national campaign of uplift and domestic reform. Winnemucca’s angry words were hurled at a uniform set of self-serving popular attitudes and a rapidly hardening government policy: Indians represented the past, treaties were obsolete, Native cultures must yield, and the incorporation of conventional American domestic behaviors was the surest recipe for civilization. Her speeches and writing, coming from an eloquent, self-confident woman, challenged that mind-set and proposed an alternative scenario in which Indian communities consolidated and progressed on their own within protected enclaves inside America’s borders.

  As early as 1870, Winnemucca had argued from her post at Camp McDermitt that the solution to Indian suffering was “a permanent home on [the Indians’] own native soil” and sufficient protection for that home so that “white neighbors can be kept from encroaching on our rights. . . .” This approach, she declared, would render “the savage (as he is called today) . . . a thrifty and law-abiding member of the community. . . .”35 Thirteen years later, when she published Life Among the Piutes, she proposed the same solution, pleading in the closing pages of her narrative for the government to “give us homes to live in, for God’s sake and for humanity’s sake.”36 The common thread of her activist career was the dignity of Indian communities and the role within them of powerful Indian women who upheld the best standards of their tribal traditions.

  Mary Peabody Mann promised Life Among the Piutes would tell “in detail to the mass of our people . . . the story of [Sarah Winnemucca’s] trials.”37 Rooted in the story of herself and her family and aimed at establishing “homes to live in” for her community, the book was intended as a public testimonial that would provide a guide for Indian survival that challenged conventional non-Indian definitions of Native private life and civilization. Winnemucca’s assault on the images outsiders held of Indian women and Native cultural life and her consequent assertion that Indians deserved a “home” within the conquered American continent were the central elements of her unique political agenda.

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  NON-INDIANS ATTACKED Life Among the Piutes almost from the moment of its publication. One group charged that Winnemucca’s criticism of the Indian Office had been manufactured by senior military commanders who wanted to take control of the agency. “It is a great outrage on the respectable people of Boston,” one critic charged, “to foist such a woman of any race upon us.” Others saw her as the puppet of eastern elites. A reporter from her home state of Nevada, for example, dismissed the forty-year-old author as someone “who used to romp around in this country with an old blanket tied at the waist with a piece of clothesline. . . . It is probable,” the journalist continued, “that she will never be appreciated in the West as she is in the East.”38

  In the years following the book’s publication, Winnemucca’s enemies became even more outspoken. The Indian Rights Association, an organization of white reformers founded in Philadelphia in 1882, dismissed her as a self-promoter. It declared that “nothing which has been done for her by her friends in the East or elsewhere has, so far, had any relation to her own or her people’s progress.” The association told its members that any support for Winnemucca would be “misplaced.”39 General O. O. Howard, a sympathetic army officer whom the activist had earlier counted as an ally during her campaign against Indian Office incompetence, dismissed her pleas as hysterical and baseless. The general noted in his own memoir published after the activist’s death in 1891 that the Paiutes did not deserve any special consideration because they “were not yet far enough along the ‘white man’s road’ to take advantage of [such] good fortune.”40 Even Winnemucca’s tribe grew reluctant to endorse her. Her father’s death in 1882 greatly reduced her political standing among the dispersed Paiute community, and her repeated trips away from Nevada to give lectures and raise money, compounded by her failure to deliver the assistance she had promised, fueled rumors that she was a self-serving fraud, an immoral woman, or, worse, a collaborator with the whites.41

  Hostility to Winnemucca’s political message remained the norm for most of the century following her death. The Paiute author has been remembered best by literary critics who discovered her in the 1980s but focused most of their attention on her relationship to her white sponsors and her support for the government’s reservation system.
Critics searching for an authentic Indian “voice” in Winnemucca’s writings have expressed their doubts based on the author’s collaboration with white editors and her apparent advocacy of “civilization.” They accused her of pandering to her genteel audiences and presenting an “acculturated and Christianized viewpoint.”42 Even today few scholars look carefully at the significance of the political message she tried to deliver or at the reasons why she was so quickly forgotten by both reformers and the general public.

  THE SARAH WINNEMUCCA RULES OF INDIAN PROTEST

  The responses to Winnemucca’s lectures and writing made it clear that her attacks had struck a nerve. Nevada newspapers had dismissed her as an immoral character as early as 1873, and the government agent she attacked in Oregon three years later cited her recent divorce and accused her of being a prostitute, “not a proper person to serve in any capacity at this or any other Indian agency.”43 James Wilbur, the Methodists’ appointee at the Yakama Reservation, filed a similar report in 1881, noting that if Sarah Winnemucca’s “influences could be removed, I have no doubt but the Piutes would cheerfully acquiesce in the desire of the Department. . . .”44 Other agents echoed these charges, and stories of Sarah Winnemucca’s troublemaking and immorality filled the correspondence files of the Indian Office. In the wake of the book’s publication, officials in Washington rejected her plea that her kinsmen be allowed to return to Nevada or to reassemble at the Malheur Reservation. They recommended instead that the Malheur agency be closed.45