This Indian Country

by Frederick Hoxie

  Questioning the ideology of American progress and equating the reform community’s agenda with a plan to “hoodwink the civilized world” Parker too was observing the Winnemucca Rules of Indian Protest. He understood that his views were of little interest to the American public; he knew that “no good” would come from discussing them in public. Parker’s angry private letter tells us nothing about his possible link to the Paiute author, but its tone and substance reinforce the impression that Winnemucca’s public protests were not unique. They surfaced frequently in muted form among the activists who came after her. Indian leaders like Parker certainly would have understood the reasons for her disappearance from public view. While we cannot know for certain that the scattered Indian voices of Winnemucca, Parker, La Flesche, and Eastman spoke to one another a century ago, it is clear that they shared the former commissioner’s conviction that the expanding American nation was intent on “dispossessing the Indians of every vested and hereditary right.” Of all those voices, Sarah Winnemucca’s was the loudest.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE U.S. COURT OF CLAIMS

  The Mille Lacs Ojibwes

  In the fall of 1880, Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz proudly announced that the Indian Office was pursuing a “fixed line of conduct” that would “dissolve, by gradual steps, [the Indians’] tribal cohesion, and merge them in the body politic as independent and self-reliant men. . . .”1 But as they set about “dissolving” the Indians’ “tribal cohesion,” the government’s new programs instead stimulated a new round of Native activism. Officials like Schurz assumed they were managing the affairs of a conquered people who would ultimately do their bidding. They were wrong.

  Across the continent, as tribal leaders confronted government initiatives aimed at disrupting and transforming their lives, they quickly grasped the connection between their local predicaments and the direction of national policy. Not all were successful, but many resisted the Indian Office’s new initiatives and by century’s end had generated an array of new arguments. They demanded, for example, that tribes should have a significant role in the development of their own lands and resources and insisted that tribal governments should continue to function as representatives of community interests. They pointed out that the promises written into past treaties, having never been repealed, should be enforced. They insisted on being heard.

  As tribal leaders framed their opposition to the Indian Office, they grew comfortable using words like “democracy,” “freedom,” and “justice” to buttress their claims. They enjoyed tossing these American words back at government officials and became increasingly adept at finding forums where their arguments would carry special weight. While Indian activists shied away from Sarah Winnemucca’s outspoken attacks on westward expansion, they understood that groups like the Indian Rights Association and other sympathetic individuals could be recruited to oppose cases of stark injustice and publicize their grievances. Similarly, while most American political leaders were reluctant to stand in the way of homesteaders or local boosters, incidents of lawlessness or violence frequently attracted the attention of outside authorities. Just as bloody massacres had often triggered public sympathy during the Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s, so egregious cases of unfairness or mismanagement could now become the subject of reports issued by reform groups and religious leaders. Despite these gradual changes in white attitudes, the most famous Indian leaders of the era—Geronimo and Sitting Bull—continued to advocate military resistance even though both eventually surrendered to the American authorities.2 Others sought escape, either directly, by crossing into Canada or Mexico, or indirectly, by joining one of the religious movements that emerged, as they had in previous moments of crisis, to offer their followers spiritual relief. 3 Most tribes rejected both of those options, however, choosing instead to remain at home and rally their communities to challenge the Americans with whatever political force they could muster. Outnumbered and outgunned, they pursued the tactics pioneered by earlier activists: they argued, they lobbied, and they searched the horizon for allies. In an age of upheaval they clung tenaciously to the belief that through political ideas and political actions, Indian people could survive the onslaught of white settlement and the government’s campaign to “dissolve” their tribal communities.

  The Mille Lacs Ojibwes were one such group. Occupying the shores of a central Minnesota lake, this tiny Ojibwe band insisted on its right to live undisturbed within the territory the government had guaranteed to it in treaties and other agreements. For decades the leaders at Mille Lacs turned aside the government’s demand that they abandon their homeland and join other Ojibwe bands on the large, consolidated reservation at White Earth. Their impressive campaign began during contentious negotiations with the Indian Office, but over time it expanded to include appeals to the Indian Rights Association in Philadelphia, visits to elected officials in Minnesota and Washington, D.C., and, ultimately, a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Claims. Despite the band’s small size and lack of political assets, its leaders managed to stop the Indian Office in its tracks. They refused to comply with the government’s orders, demanding instead that the United States honor its promises. The Mille Lacs leadership’s campaign of resistance demonstrates how political tactics and legal arguments devised generations earlier in the Southeast and carried on to Indian Territory and beyond had created new avenues for activists across the continent.

  FIGHTING REMOVAL AT MILLE LACS

  The forced removal of Indians from their homelands did not end when the Cherokees were driven from Georgia in 1838. The Seminoles were pursued through the swamps of Florida during the 1840s, and in the 1850s local militiamen and regular army troops forced Indians in Oregon, Washington, and California away from their ancestral territories in order to accommodate American settlements. A decade later American bluecoats began a similar effort in Montana and the Dakota Territory. As late as 1903 Indian families living near San Diego were forced by federal officials onto the nearby Pala Reservation, while across the continent in Mississippi, Choctaws who had chosen to remain in the state a century earlier were forced to join their kinsmen in Indian Territory before Congress acted formally to dissolve the tribe.

  This process of removal and relocation also took place throughout the vast Ojibwe homeland stretching across the inland watersheds of the Great Lakes and Lake Manitoba. These communities, which together formed the largest language group in North America, had first become known to Europeans in the early seventeenth century, when French and English traders discovered their hunting communities north of Lake Huron. Over the next two centuries the Ojibwes spread gradually westward as they learned to exploit their rich environment by combining gardening with seasonal rounds of gathering and hunting. Because their sophisticated knowledge of the region made them skilled partners in the hunt for animal furs, the Ojibwes also entered the orbit of trading companies based in the East. The group never recognized a single tribal leadership, but many gathered each summer for religious ceremonies or for communal rice harvesting, hunting, and fishing activities, and many of these groups came to see themselves as bands that shared a common habitat and history.

  As they moved west along what became the border between the United States and Canada, the Ojibwes were most commonly identified through these bands, small multifamily groups that clustered in regular places that were rich in resources. They followed political and religious leaders and expanded and contracted with the seasons. As they migrated across the immense interior landscape of North America, band and family loyalty or ties to a particular location or hunting ground became a powerful source of identity. Over time non-Indian traders joined these bands, and the traders’ mixed-heritage descendants came to dominate their business relationships with the outside world. Ojibwes avoided the first American removal campaigns because U.S. settlers were slow to reach the upper Great Lakes. The first railroad connecting Chicago to Lake Superior, for example, was not completed unt
il 1883, fourteen years after trains had begun running between the east and west coasts. Limited by the region’s short growing season and dense forests, homesteaders moved to Kansas and Nebraska before they considered migration to Minnesota. As a consequence, while they agreed to establish a half dozen scattered reservations in treaties signed in 1854 and 1855, nineteenth-century Ojibwes saw little reason why an alliance with the Americans should cause them to alter their way of life. They relied on the federal government’s promise that they could continue to harvest the resources of lands they had formally ceded so long as they did not come into conflict with settlers. The specifics of landownership were largely immaterial until the 1860s, when the fur trade waned and the timber industry began to expand north and west of St. Paul.4

  The first discussion of Ojibwe removal occurred in March 1867, when ten leaders of bands the government called the Chippewas of the Mississippi agreed to a new treaty that carved the White Earth Reservation, an eight-hundred-thousand-acre “suitable farming region,” out of their traditional territory in northwestern Minnesota.5 The United States proposed that all the Ojibwe people in the state eventually relocate to White Earth. This process soon lagged, however, and both local white settlers and Minnesota’s congressional delegation grew impatient.

  After several years of debate the state’s Republican U.S. senator, Knute Nelson, proposed a solution. Nelson was a Norwegian immigrant who had recently moved to the state’s western prairies to participate in the region’s agricultural land boom. He submitted a bill that would give members of Ojibwe bands the option of resettling immediately at White Earth or taking individual homesteads (called allotments) on their current reservations. Passed in January 1889, the Nelson Act also provided for the sale of any remaining “surplus” tribal land following a band’s allotment or removal to White Earth. The proceeds from those sales would be deposited in a Chippewa fund to benefit all Ojibwes in the state.

  In the summer of 1889 a three-member Chippewa Commission toured the state’s remaining Ojibwe reserves to negotiate the agreements that were to initiate the distribution of allotments and the transfer of bands to White Earth. When the commission reached the community living along the shores of Mille Lacs Lake, the easy scenario imagined by Senator Nelson came to a halt. Instead of finding people willing to give up their subsistence lifestyle and relocate to “a suitable farming region” two hundred miles away, they met band leaders who confronted them with demands that reflected both a clear sense of their own history and a keen awareness of the promises government men had made to them over the previous three decades.

  Henry Rice, a former fur trader who had been one of the state’s early U.S. senators, chaired the Chippewa Commission. He was joined by Bishop Martin Marty, a former Catholic missionary in the Dakota Territory, and Joseph Whiting, a Wisconsin businessman. The commission began its four-day encounter at Mille Lacs with a series of welcoming speeches and a formal reading of the Nelson Act.6 With these formalities completed, Shobaushkung, a Mille Lacs band leader whose principal residence lay along the western edge of the lake, rose to speak. In traditional Ojibwe style, Shobaushkung emphasized that he spoke “from the feeling of the young men, from the old men and from myself. Whatever is said,” he added, “will be said in the name of the whole tribe here. . . .”7 The next day Manzomaunay, another band leader, whose village lay at the opposite end of the group’s territory on the south shore of the lake, offered his greeting but added that the group had many concerns beyond the prospect of acquiring a homestead at White Earth. Referring to Commissioner Rice’s long experience in Minnesota Indian affairs, the chief observed, “[Y]ou are not ignorant of the amount of money that has been taken from our annuities in the past.”8

  The leaders’ opening statements alluded to a complex and contentious history they knew Rice and the other commissioners understood and were eager to avoid. In fact Rice had been present in 1855, when the Mille Lacs agency was created by a treaty with the United States. He well knew that the treaty reserved portions of four townships on the shores of Mille Lacs Lake, together with three nearby islands, “for the permanent homes of the said Indians.”9 He also knew that the bands occupying these lands had peacefully continued their traditional way of life over the ensuing thirty-five years.

  Despite the fact that the commissioners were meeting with a group of Ojibwe men, they were aware that the community they represented contained dozens of families that sustained a stable and satisfying existence at Mille Lacs Lake. Operating in family groups, they gathered fish and wild rice from the lake each summer. Women maintained small gardens that supplemented their families’ diet in summer and produced surpluses to keep them through the long winter. After camping near one another during the warm months, families dispersed to hunting camps in the surrounding woods once the frosts came. In spring they returned to the lake to reassemble in small villages, collect sugar, and reestablish their gardens and fishing camps. When possible, trapping and occasional wage labor supplemented their incomes. This cycle of gardening and gathering had been largely unaffected by the arrival of lumbermen who coveted the Indians’ virgin pine or by the commission’s program of removal to White Earth.

  For the people at Mille Lacs, the most frightening event of the previous three decades had occurred in 1862, when Dakota Indians in southern Minnesota had attacked the Santee agency and neighboring white settlements in a desperate attempt to escape starvation on a barren, mismanaged reservation. Frustrated by the government ineptitude that had produced the revolt, several of the state’s Ojibwe bands had considered joining forces with the Dakotas and clearing Minnesota of Americans. But the leaders at Mille Lacs Lake, frightened by the prospect of retaliation from nearby white settlers, refused to support the rebellion. Instead, Shobaushkung and the other chiefs warned the Americans of the impending danger and pledged publicly that they would remain loyal to the United States. As a consequence, when hostilities ended and a new treaty, punishing those who had participated in the fighting was written, a separate article declared that “owing to the heretofore good conduct of the Mille Lacs Indians, they shall not be compelled to remove so long as they shall not in any way interfere with or in any manner molest the persons or property of the whites.”10

  Because Shobaushkung was one of the signers of the 1863 agreement, he understood how important it would be to maintain a policy of strict nonviolence. He told Henry Rice at the outset of the 1889 conference that “the Indians do not wish to do anything that may hurt the feelings of the honorable commissioners or mar the peace and friendship that exists between us.” He also reminded the Americans of his tribe’s past service. “You know very well,” he told the delegation, “that at the time the country was in difficulty and there was an outbreak what was the attitude of the Mille Lacs Indians. . . . The loyalty they showed [then] they still preserve.” But Shobaushkung had more on his mind than reminding Henry Rice of his loyalty. He went on to describe the meager recompense his followers had received for their good behavior. “It now seems as if this reservation was shaking all the time, on account of the excitement and conflicting interests,” he declared. “We wish you to quell that shaking. We wish to remain here, quiet and at peace.”11

  From Shobaushkung’s perspective, the reservation was “shaking all the time” because timber speculators and white farmers were eager to take possession of the tribe’s land. He was aware that almost immediately after he had signed the 1863 agreement, local settlers had begun accusing him and his kinsmen of violence and drunkenness. Squatters had appeared, claiming illegal homesteads on the reservation, and local government officials had ignored the Indians’—and the Indian Office’s—protests. Shobaushkung and his colleagues had quickly mounted an opposition to these incursions. In 1875 they had returned to Washington to insist that the Indian Office uphold its commitments.

  At a meeting with the commissioner of Indian affairs during that visit, Shobaushkung protested that “[w]e have clean
hands and clean hearts.” He assured the officials that the pledge of friendship he and his followers had made in 1863 was unchanged, and he reminded the commissioner that the band’s title to its land flowed directly from personal encounters with American leaders. “The Secretary of the Interior and the President said that we should be considered good Indians and remain at Mille Lacs so long as we want to,” Shobaushkung declared. When the commissioner cautioned him that the provision of the treaty he was relying upon was rather vague, Shobaushkung shot back: “I know what was on the paper.” When the commissioner raised the possibility of moving to White Earth, Shobaushkung was equally explicit. He repeated that his community was united in its desire to remain where they were. “I do not know why it is that the Mille Lacs Indians, men, women and children, should feel so strong an attachment to the lake,” he mused, “but if we should hear at any time that a removal was to be made, we should feel very bad.”12

  —

  FOURTEEN YEARS LATER, when he faced Henry Rice and the Chippewa Commission, Shobaushkung’s position was unchanged. The chief was willing to have the government divide the reserve into individual landholdings and issue land titles to his kinsmen (as the Nelson Act provided), but his followers would not remove to White Earth. His position was remarkably similar to the one Sarah Winnemucca had taken in her conversations with Carl Schurz a decade earlier. The Mille Lacs chief was indifferent to the legal particulars of his land title (whether property was to be individually or communally owned), but he remained adamantly loyal to his ancestral homeland. Shobaushkung assured the commissioners that the entire community agreed with him. “They say they wish to have their allotments made here and made solid under their seats,” he declared. “Solider and solider every move of their bodies; that is what we want.”