This Indian Country

by Frederick Hoxie

  But Wadena, Meegeesee, and the other Mille Lacs Ojibwes took little comfort from their victory. Like Sarah Winnemucca, the Ojibwes who continued to resist removal to White Earth understood that after years of conflict they were unlikely to reverse the power imbalance that had produced their predicament in the first place. Just as Winnemucca’s white supporters were quick to sympathize with her plight and pity her for her suffering, lawyers, judges, and even members of the Minnesota political establishment acknowledged the suffering inflicted on the tiny Mille Lacs band. The parallel between their case and the Paiutes runs even deeper, for just as the charity extended to Sarah Winnemucca stopped short when she refused to endorse the virtues of American progress, so the justice delivered by the Court of Claims was limited to dollars deposited in a fund controlled by the Indian Office. The victorious Mille Lacs band was forced to accept a symbolic payment that left them short of their central objective.

  Orchestrated by white politicians and opportunistic figures like Gus Beaulieu and the cooperative chiefs who had already relocated to White Earth, the Mille Lacs case nevertheless reflected the remarkable utility of the American judicial system for embattled Indian communities. The Court of Claims had cast its spotlight on this obscure band and amplified the voices of GoGee, Meegeesee, and the now homeless Wadena. Their views had been affirmed by the court and recorded in the journal of its decisions. New precedents and principles had been established despite the fact that at least in the short run no one in the American government would recognize Naygwonabe’s simple declaration that the “Great Spirit gave me this land.”

  INSISTING ON MILLE LACS

  In the two decades following the Mille Lacs band’s favorable judgment in the Court of Claims, its leaders continued to insist that local white settlers and government officials recognize their title to at least a portion of their original tribal homeland. During these years, several individuals, including the evicted Chief Wadena, were able to secure title to small homesteads within the boundaries of the original reservation. Some of those acquisitions were made possible by a 1914 congressional resolution allocating forty thousand dollars of the Minnesota Chippewa fund for land purchases. Nearly two thousand acres were purchased under this program, and another several hundred acres of that parcel were later allotted to band members under a second congressional appropriation approved in 1923.

  During the 1920s, as hundreds of Mille Lacs band members gathered on these small but secure homesteads, the Indian Office gradually accepted the fact that the band would never leave its lakeside home. As talk of removal ended, federal officials moved to deliver services to the group. The Indian Office opened a tribal school in 1924, and the new building in Vineland became a visible focus for community life. When Meegeesee died in 1927, the community used the memorial service held there to celebrate both his leadership and their survival. As a tribally commissioned history recently observed, the chief was a “self-reliant and courageous man” who “inspired these same qualities in his people. In death he left them physically. In spirit he lives on in the people.”73

  When federal policy changed dramatically during the 1930s, the Indian Office embarked on a program of encouraging the formation of modern tribal governments. The Mille Lacs community was ready to respond. In 1934 the band organized a local government as an autonomous unit of the Minnesota Chippewa tribe. In the ensuing decades the Mille Lacs band developed new political institutions (including a reservation business committee), its own educational and cultural organizations, and a thriving set of tribal businesses.

  The band’s remarkable victory in the Court of Claims was imperfect. It embarrassed and disrupted the government’s civilization and removal campaign but did not restore the tribe’s title to its reservation. Nevertheless, the court’s endorsement of the Mille Lacs leadership’s position affirmed a view of events that non-Indians ultimately found impossible to ignore. As the chiefs pressed their case, they encouraged other Native groups, along with reformers and sympathetic legislators across the country, to follow a similar course. (In fact between 1881 and World War II nearly two hundred petitions were filed before the U.S. Court of Claims.74) Over time this widespread resistance undermined the government’s smug assumption that all Indians would obey its orders and conform to American-style “civilization.”

  In the last decades of the nineteenth century, as settlers across the United States surrounded and invaded the Indians’ homelands, Native people like the Ojibwes at Mille Lacs grew comfortable defending their territories by reaching out to sympathetic reformers and seeking hearings before an array of governmental institutions. As this process unfolded, tribal leaders used those institutions—Congress, the federal courts, or the Indian Office itself—as forums where they could air their grievances and undermine the government’s authoritarian “civilization” policies. In the years after 1900, rigid bureaucrats like Carl Schurz and James McLaughlin and ambitious local politicians like Knute Nelson and Henry Rice learned that it was ultimately impossible to orchestrate the lives of Indian people. At the same time, leaders of bands and tribes discovered that tenacious political resistance was not necessarily futile. The survival and ultimate revival of the Mille Lacs community demonstrated that the struggles of activists like Shobaushkung, Monzomaunay, Wadena, and Meegeesee would have a tangible impact on the Native—and the American—future.75

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE GOOD CITIZENSHIP GUN

  Thomas Sloan, Omaha

  In the spring of 1911, as the Court of Claims prepared to announce its decision in the Mille Lacs claims case and confrontations between Minnesota Indians and local policemen were attracting the attention of the press, a small group of activists gathered in Columbus, Ohio, to plan a national reform organization whose membership would be limited to Native Americans. A steering committee made up of the physicians Carlos Montezuma and Charles Eastman, the lawyer Thomas Sloan, the popular author Laura Cornelius, the actor and performer Henry Standing Bear, and Charles Dagenett, the highest-ranking Native American in the Indian Office, envisioned the Society of American Indians (SAI) as an organization where educated leaders could address the English-speaking public about indigenous issues.

  Like the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP had met for the first time two years earlier) and other Progressive Era reformers, the founders of the SAI believed that securing U.S. citizenship for all Indians would empower their members to become forceful actors in the nation’s democracy, for in 1911 only those Indians who had received individual land allotments under the Dawes Severalty Act were U.S. citizens. The new organization declared it had “no secret scheme to make money, to get legal cases and . . . to press claims.” Instead, “The open plan is to develop race leaders, to give hope, to inspire, to lead outward and upward. . . . We ask every Indian to speak, to voice his wrongs, to tell of injustice. . . .” 1

  Soon after its initial meeting, the society steering committee shared its plans with the man who in 1911 was undoubtedly the most prominent American Indian advocate in the United States, Richard Henry Pratt, the former army officer who had founded the Carlisle Industrial Training School in 1879. As the nation’s largest and best-known off-reservation boarding school, Carlisle symbolized the government’s commitment to Indian uplift and educational advancement. Though Pratt’s rigid program of cultural transformation would trouble modern multicultural sensibilities, his commitment to racial equality was unbending.2 Removed from office by political enemies in 1904, Pratt was respected by the Native activists on the society’s organizing committee for his integrity and outspoken contempt for Indian Office bureaucrats. Two members of the committee, Standing Bear and Dagenett, were Carlisle alumni, and two others, Eastman and Montezuma, were former school employees.3 Sloan and Cornelius, who had been graduated from other similar schools, had become Pratt’s correspondents in the years following his exile from government service.

 
The organizing committee wrote Pratt in hopes that he would publicly encourage their efforts, and they were not disappointed.4 “Twenty-six years ago when the discussion was hot about lands-in-severalty for the Indians,” the former headmaster replied, “the constant assertion” was that assigning Indians to individual plots of land “would make them citizens. This has been pretty much a fallacy. . . . To reach good citizenship is a long journey,” Pratt observed. The new society should therefore “do no less than demand of the government of the United States the broadest and fullest training for that position.” 5 He added, “Your good citizenship gun is the biggest and best you could have secured.” 6

  The arresting image of a “good citizenship gun” signals the serious purpose of the new organization. The planning committee believed that focusing on the extension of American citizenship to all Native people would not only place them on an equal footing with the rest of society but would also empower Indians seeking to counter the Indian Office’s authoritarian bureaucracy. Unlike European immigrants, who acquired U.S. citizenship simply by renouncing their home countries and taking up a new English-speaking identity, the men and women who gathered for the SAI’s first convention believed their community had been swallowed up by the United States. While many remained intensely loyal to their tribes, the group acknowledged that Native Americans now constituted an invisible minority in a modern, continental nation.

  “Justice” had always been a problem for Indians in the United States, the society’s leaders declared in one of its earliest publications, but the Indian had “a greater problem, which when he solves it, will solve every other problem. It is that of becoming a contributing, producing element, independent and self-sustaining. . . .”7 Unlike William Potter Ross, who had sought an autonomous independence for the Cherokee tribe, the founders of the Society of American Indians viewed the active engagement of individual citizens as the most effective means of carving out an “independent and self-sustaining” existence in the United States.

  In 1911 most Americans assumed that once Indians became independent and self-sustaining, they would cease being Indians. The founders of the SAI disagreed. They knew from their own lives that a “contributing, producing” American citizen could also be part of an “independent and self-sustaining” minority community.8 The group’s first president, the Omaha attorney Thomas Sloan, summarized this perspective when he wrote during the SAI’s founding year that the only proper response to the exploitation of Indians was a determination that Native people should “hammer hard” at their enemies. “Nothing can ever be done as long as we politely say that everything is all right,” he declared.9 Citizenship would place a political “hammer” in their hands.

  As they argued for their right to campaign against exploitation, Sloan and his colleagues were participating in a broad, twentieth-century movement that was redefining the relationship between individuals and the American state. Viewed increasingly in the late nineteenth century as an institution capable of setting and implementing a collective agenda, the American nation was increasingly expected to deliver tangible benefits to its citizens: expansion into the West, prosperous industries, national standards for immigration, and, most ambitious, a uniform set of legal rights. While the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) had declared that all people “born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States,” Congress and the courts in the late nineteenth century had retreated from enforcing those rights or spelling out exactly what they might be. Nevertheless, by the turn of the new century a steadily proliferating list of interest groups and lobbyists was seeking to define the meaning of U.S. citizenship in various arenas. The founding of the Society of American Indians was an example of this process at work, as was the organization of the American Federation of Labor (1886), the NAACP, the Chamber of Commerce (1912), and the American Farm Bureau Federation (1919).10

  Because the administration of Indian people and their territories was primarily a federal responsibility, the SAI’s founders aimed their good citizenship gun at the Indian Office. From the perspective of the older members of the group—Montezuma, Eastman, and Sloan—the controls placed on individual Indians by reservation bureaucrats was demeaning and intolerable. Not only had they seen their independent tribal governments relentlessly attacked and dismembered, but critics of expansion (such as Sarah Winnemucca or even the leaders at Mille Lacs) had been ignored by public officials and white reformers, who urged the Indians to follow orders and remain silent. The moment had arrived, Thomas Sloan and his colleagues believed, for Indians to enter the political arena and wield the power of American citizenship.11

  A NEW GENERATION OF ACTIVISTS

  The founders of the Society of American Indians represented a remarkable generation of Native activists. Fluent in English and confident of their relationship with non-Indian reformers and educators, these men and women were prepared to “hammer” the authorities with their complaints. Thomas Sloan was among the most outspoken. Like most of the organizing committee, he had been born in the era of the Civil War, when his Omaha kinsmen still followed the ancient traditions of hunting and gardening that enabled them to exist apart from the Americans’ industrial economy. Like them as well, Sloan witnessed the immense population shift that took place in the wake of the sectional conflict, burying Native communities beneath an avalanche of foreign immigration and internal migration that transformed the public’s view of Indian affairs.

  As military threats from Indians receded, tribes gradually became objects of nostalgia and pity. The band chiefs at Mille Lacs had benefited from this shifting viewpoint, as did other activists in recently “settled” states across the nation. Modern Native societies receded from public view, and in their place arose literary and artistic images, theatrical presentations, and cartoon caricatures. By World War I nearly all non-Indian Americans—from the Boy Scouts to the happy customers at Buffalo Bill’s popular Wild West Show—had learned about Native people from actors and storybooks. Sloan and his colleagues understood that in the age of Indian-head nickels (first distributed in 1913) and James Earle Fraser’s iconic statue End of the Trail (unveiled at the San Francisco World’s Fair in 1915), the public would require extensive education if it were to grasp the difficulties Native people now faced in the United States.

  Partial citizenship had been offered to Native people long before Sloan and his colleagues took up the cause. A century earlier many states had proffered citizenship to Indians who agreed to abandon their tribes and settle on individually owned plots of land. James McDonald and other removal-era leaders had found this offer intriguing, but the few who accepted it quickly learned that their new status had little meaning when it required them to give up federal protections for their treaties and lifeways. In Mississippi, for example, Choctaws like James McDonald who refused to head west detached themselves from their tribes and immediately were subjected to taxation schemes and economic pressures that rapidly separated them from their property. Those who tried to fight back were hampered by discriminatory state laws and the failure of federal officials to intervene on their behalf. Even when the Indian Office was willing to offer its assistance to individual Indians, it had little legal basis for action. In California, for example, Indians subjected to arbitrary vagrancy laws, which relegated impoverished individuals to extended periods of servitude, were legally imprisoned and routinely exploited while federal officials sat idly by.

  The Fourteenth Amendment’s promise in 1868 to enforce “equal protection under the law” against the actions of state governments gave Indians some hope that as citizens of the United States they could call on federal officials or the courts for protection. Suddenly Natives, like African Americans, could imagine responding to racial discrimination by appealing to the authorities in Washington, D.C. While most tribal people preferred to remain within their traditional communities, the white reformers who had championed Reconstruction Era civil rights legislation increasi
ngly suggested that citizenship rights could offer vital protection to American Indians. Despite the failure of national citizenship to protect African Americans from the systematic disfranchisement and the onset of Jim Crow laws in the 1890s, Indians, particularly young educated people like the founders of the SAI, believed this new legal status could enable them to live outside the control of the Indian Office and battle against hostile assaults from white neighbors.12

  Because they came of age in the postwar era, Sloan and his society colleagues were prepared as no other Native generation before them had been to imagine a future lived outside the confines of a reservation. Montezuma, for example, a Yavapai from Arizona, had been educated in Illinois, graduating from the state’s university in 1886 and the Chicago Medical College in 1889. Eastman had been taken from his relatives in Canada and enrolled in a Dakota Territory mission, then sent east to college and on to Boston University Medical School, from which he graduated in 1890. He never stopped identifying himself as Sioux. The same was true of Cornelius, educated at an Anglican boarding school, as well as Dagenett and Standing Bear, who had been taken to Carlisle from their homes west of the Mississippi. Nearly every tribe counted similar students among their members—individuals who had endured years of separation from their families but who continued to think of themselves as American Indians.

  Because most of them had been separated from their tribes, the society’s organizers were also aware of the cruel bargain most Americans imagined when they contemplated extending citizenship to Indians. Missionaries, schoolteachers, and reformers alike insisted that those who accepted membership in the American political community should forget their pasts while they shifted their allegiance to the United States. By doing so, these new Indian citizens were invited to serve as role models for others. On the surface at least, the members of the organizing committee appeared to have accepted this trade-off. Eastman, Montezuma, and Sloan, dressed in high-collared shirts and dark suits and married to white women, had settled far away from their tribal homelands. Eastman and his wife, a former reservation schoolteacher, lived in Amherst, Massachusetts. Montezuma married a European immigrant and settled on the South Side of Chicago.