This Indian Country

by Frederick Hoxie

  By the end of the decade Sloan had become a prominent figure in the world of Indian law and policy. When he appeared before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in 1919, he introduced himself as a lawyer who practiced not only in the federal courts but also “before the Interior Department. I am a member of the Omaha tribe of Indians,” he told the legislators, “and make a specialty of Indian work.”65 This specialty involved representing a number of tribes, either as attorney or informal adviser, and traveling regularly on their behalf. He reported meeting with the Sioux Black Hills Council in South Dakota, the Grand Council of the Chippewa Indian Tribe of Minnesota, and the leaders of the Osage tribe.66 Throughout these encounters Sloan held firmly to the idea that collusion between the Indian Office and powerful non-Indian business interests was the principal reason why white officials insisted on defining Native people as “dependent” and “backward.” “My idea of the situation is this,” he told the Senate committee after a trip to a western reservation, “it seemed to me that [the Indians’] rights were made subservient to the cattlemen. . . . That instead of the tribes being the dominant owners of the soil and having the rights there, they were the fellows who were least considered, and through that treatment . . . they had become dependents.”67 “The grafter could not succeed in his graft,” he declared in 1920, “if the Indian Bureau did not make it possible.”68

  By the end of World War I, Sloan and Montezuma were no longer isolated voices. Montezuma established his own network of supporters through Wassaja, a monthly newsletter he established in 1916 that carried the dramatic subhead “Let My People Go.” His attacks on the Indian Office and on Arthur Parker’s leadership of the Society of American Indians intensified during World War I, when the Chicago physician declared that Indians should not answer the military draft until they all were declared citizens. Eight months into the war, in December 1917, Montezuma announced the formation of a new organization, the League for the Extension of Democracy to the American Indians. Endorsed by a group that included Sloan, Charles Eastman, and Frank Beaulieu, son of the late Gus Beaulieu, the League declared its “chief aim” to be “the total abolition of the Indian Bureau as at present constituted.” Adopting the language of patriotic groups that were supporting the war, Montezuma declared that he expected all Americans to support him. The elimination of the Indian Office, he wrote, should appeal to “staunch Americans, lovers of liberty and haters of Prussian methods of government. . . .”69 As Montezuma intensified his attacks, the SAI grew less cautious. Arthur Parker stepped down as the editor of the group’s magazine in 1918. He was replaced by the popular author Gertrude Bonnin, Montezuma’s former fiancée, who, writing under the name Zitkala Sa, had published fiery critiques of government and missionary paternalism. Bonnin organized that year’s annual meeting in Pierre, South Dakota, and invited Montezuma to address the gathering. Montezuma took the stage to deliver an address entitled “Abolish the Indian Bureau,” and the assembly adopted resolutions endorsing citizenship and declaring that the Indian Office “was never intended to be a permanent part of the Interior Department.”70

  The idealism unleashed by the Allied victory in Europe reenergized Sloan’s and Montezuma’s attacks. Government paternalism represents “another Kaiser in America,” the Yavapai physician wrote in November 1918; “we have done away with one, let the people of the United States do the same with the Indian Bureau.”71 Despite his opposition to the draft, Montezuma saw that Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic framing of the conflict as a battle for democracy provided him an opening. He proposed including American Indians at the Paris Peace Conference. “Why? Because the Indians are a nation . . . [and] have never received justice from the United States. . . . You may speak about the abuses and mistreatments received by the Belgians, the Bohemians, Poles, Serbians, and other nations of the old country,” he added; “their griefs [sic] . . . are no comparison to the treatment of the Indians.”72 Gertrude Bonnin agreed, writing a few months later in the society magazine that “the eyes of the world are upon . . . Paris. . . . Little peoples are to be granted the right of self determination.” Bonnin noted that labor organizations, women’s groups, African Americans, and the Irish all were to be represented at Versailles, but no American Indian. “Who shall represent his cause at the World’s Peace Conference? The American Indian too made the supreme sacrifice for liberty’s sake. He loves democratic ideals. What shall the world democracy mean to his race?” 73 Writing in the same issue, Charles Eastman, the society’s new president, repeated the theme: “How can our nation pose as the champion of the ‘little peoples’ until it has been fair to its own?”74

  The American Indians’ impressive sacrifices during the war only added to the activists’ argument. More than ten thousand Indians had served in uniform, most in integrated units. Choctaw code talkers won praise for their ability to maintain electronic contact between units on the battlefield while Sioux scouts were celebrated for their daring and bravery. Indian leaders supported bond drives and Red Cross campaigns, winning praise from both the Indian Office and their white neighbors. When the SAI gathered for its annual meeting in Minneapolis in October 1919, it seemed poised for a change in direction. Sloan and Montezuma were present, as were Eastman, Bonnin, Thomas Bishop, the leader of the Northwest Indian Organization, and a number of Ojibwe tribal members clamoring for greater control over their reservation resources. Also present were several of the men who had supported the League for the Extension of Democracy in the pages of Wassaja two years earlier: Theodore Beaulieu, the Reverend Philip Gordon, and John Carl. Carl, a lawyer, had also been present a decade earlier at the founding of the short-lived Indian Memorial Association.

  According to an account later published in Wassaja, Sloan galvanized the Minneapolis meeting when he responded to a proposal from the floor that citizenship should be extended to only such “qualified” Indians as veterans or graduates of boarding schools. “The Indian is a native of this country,” the attorney thundered, “and it is a universal rule of civilization that a person shall be a citizen of the country of which he is a native.” Sloan acknowledged the sacrifice of Indian veterans but added, “The parents who furnished Indian boys for soldiers should be entitled to citizenship as well as their boys.” Returning to a theme he had repeated before judges and congressmen for more than a decade, Sloan shouted, “The backward subject Indian needs citizenship more than the advanced Indian. He is the one who needs the protection of the laws of the country as much against dishonest or careless supervision as against the grafter who is permitted to assail his rights.” After years on the fringes of the society’s activities, Sloan seemed to be speaking for the entire membership as he ended on an idealistic Wilsonian theme: “It is time that the weak nations at home should receive some just consideration. . . . Let us apply the justice we are carrying to the weak nations abroad to the weak nations at home.” According to Wassaja, “It was a speech never to be forgotten.” When the balloting for president began, Sloan was elected with an overwhelming majority.75

  THE LIMITS OF THE GOOD CITIZENSHIP GUN

  Sloan entered office with a rush of enthusiasm. As Montezuma’s newsletter exclaimed, “If there was ever a man who stood up for the Indian, it was Tommy Sloan.” Referring indirectly to Sloan’s light skin and gray hair, Montezuma added, “He has been rolled over, tested and found to be true to his race. Others would have given up in sticking to the Indians, but Tommy stuck.”76 Over his first months in office the new president redesigned the society’s magazine in hopes that it would appeal to a wider audience and generate much-needed income. He also reached out to his contacts across the country. Richard Pratt was one of these who welcomed Sloan’s election. “The large opportunities that come to you to aid the cause of the Indians,” he wrote, “are now in abler hands than ever before.”77 And returning to the tactics he had proposed a decade earlier, Sloan began welcoming tribal delegations to Washington and orchestrating strategic meetings with government leaders. �
��I have taken a great many delegations to call on the President in the past two years,” he wrote the secretary of the interior in 1923, “Indians from every part of the country.” As he had in 1912, Sloan insisted that these encounters should produce more than pious expressions of sympathy. “The policies and treatment of Indians . . . must be changed by positive and prompt action,” he continued. “If not, the words and actions of the President will be lost.”78

  Within months of Thomas Sloan’s election, it became obvious that Montezuma’s excitement and Pratt’s optimism would be short-lived. The society’s magazine claimed that the new president’s “two hundred and twenty odd pounds of muscle, brain and energy seem tireless,” but Sloan himself complained that Cato Sells, the commissioner of Indian affairs, and his chief deputy, Edgar Meritt, were “slandering” him with the Indian affairs committees of Congress. The relentless hostility of these outgoing Wilson appointees (and the Republicans’ bright prospects for the coming election) may in turn have influenced Sloan’s decision to call on the GOP’s presidential candidate, Warren G. Harding, in the summer of 1920 and pledge his support. “I hope to arrange for the activity of Indians in those localities where their votes may be of effect,” Sloan reported to Richard Pratt at the end of June, noting that Indians might well cast the deciding votes in Minnesota and Montana. It was time for politicians to look beyond their tribes, he added, and “stand for the Indians.”79 His blatant bid for political influence angered, and probably frightened, Sells and Meritt and reignited the resentment and internal feuding that had swirled around Sloan’s tactics in the first months of the organization’s existence. Sloan’s old enemies were quick to renew their attacks on him. Arthur Parker resigned from the group’s executive committee, while Charles Carter, a Choctaw and a Democratic congressman from Oklahoma, called Sloan’s action “disgraceful.” The educator Henry Roe Cloud suspended his membership to protest the actions of Sloan and other “extremists,” while the former secretary-treasurer Gertrude Bonnin began circulating a petition attacking the new leadership.80

  The society never recovered. Its 1920 conference, held in St. Louis, the city of Sloan’s birth, was poorly attended and rancorous. The president was reelected, but he and the other leaders reported disappointing sales for their glossy new American Indian Magazine, and the gathering revealed continuing divisions over federal restrictions on peyote use and the organization’s position regarding political endorsements. With declining membership and no white philanthropist or reform group coming forward to subsidize it or to support a redesign of its magazine, the society’s budget problems multiplied. A year later only eight members appeared at an informal gathering in Detroit. The society held its final conference in Chicago in 1922. This meeting was not only poorly attended but obscured by a popular Indian encampment held in a forest preserve near the city. Hovering over the gathering as well was the absent Carlos Montezuma, afflicted with tuberculosis and living among his Yavapai relatives in Arizona. Montezuma died a few months after the Chicago gathering; the society never met again.81

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  THOMAS SLOAN HAD hoped that his support for Harding would win him the nomination to be commissioner of Indian affairs when the Republicans returned to power in 1921. Both he and his fellow attorney Dennison Wheelock of Wisconsin campaigned actively for the position (presumably so they could better abolish it), but they had little support beyond a few sympathetic congressmen and a narrow group of loyalists like Montezuma and Richard Pratt.82 The two must have felt particularly chastened when Harding nominated South Dakota congressman Charles H. Burke, a former real estate developer and party loyalist who staunchly supported the Indian Office’s paternalistic approach of “sympathy, patience and humanity.” Burke claimed that paternalism had actually been a successful theme in both Republican and Democratic administrations. After all, he noted, the government had encountered “no hostile Indian uprisings such as marked . . . previous decades for three centuries.” Burke could barely contain his contempt for the educated activists who had challenged the government’s definitions of civilization. He preferred to focus on the Indian’s “benighted” and “degraded” culture, whose existence provided perpetual justification for the government’s high-handed actions.83

  The intransigence of the national bureaucracy was revealed again to Sloan in 1923, when, following the resignation of Albert B. Fall as the secretary of the interior, disgraced by the Teapot Dome scandal, the administration invited a National Advisory Committee of One Hundred to gather in Washington for an “appraisal of national Indian policy.” Announced in May, the list of invitees included Sloan and Wheelock and an array of their SAI rivals: Arthur Parker, Sherman Coolidge, and Henry Roe Cloud. The vast majority of the group, however, consisted of non-Indian experts: anthropologists, such as the Smithsonian’s Frederick Hodge and the American Museum of Natural History curator Clark Wissler; reformers, including ninety-year-old Amelia Stone Quinton and the Indian Rights Association founder Herbert Welsh; the retired generals Nelson Miles, John J. Pershing, and Hugh Scott; and the prominent university presidents Nicholas Murray Butler (Columbia) and David Starr Jordan (Stanford). Among the other members of this diverse assembly were the popular writers Mary Roberts Rinehart and George Wharton James and the publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.84

  Sixty-six committee members gathered in Washington the following December to deliberate. Unfortunately for Sloan, the group elected Arthur Parker to chair the meeting, ensuring that the committee’s pronouncements would be vague and conciliatory.85 Among the fifteen resolutions adopted at the meeting were declarations of sympathy for the work of the Indian Office (“our benevolent desires have not been attained”), support for missionaries seeking to “bring religion into the thought and life of the Indians,” and appreciation for the Harding administration’s “great service in promoting and protecting the interests of the Indians. . . .” The group endorsed opening the Court of Claims to all tribes but did not mention Indian citizenship or suggest the need for a significant change in government policy.86

  Sloan was disgusted. He wrote politely but pointedly to the secretary of the interior that “a group that seemed to have had prearranged . . . policies dominated the floor . . . using most of the time following out their program.” The attorney was more direct when reporting to his old mentor Richard Pratt. Sloan declared that the Committee of One Hundred demonstrated clearly “how small and rotten the Indian Bureau may be.” He charged that officials in the Interior Department had invited their allies to a preconference planning session and that Parker was “the Bureau’s choice” to be chair: “He was a boob and every reference to the meeting marks him as incompetent at least.” Sloan noted that all his own proposals “were seconded by Indians” but that none had been adopted. The gathering was “a great chance to expose the system,” he wrote, but the possibilities had evaporated. “Hope you may see some changes in Indian affairs soon,” he told Pratt, then added: “Just how it will come about, I do not know.”87

  Other critics of the Indian Office agreed with Sloan’s negative assessment. The outspoken liberal reformer Oswald Garrison Villard of the Nation called Arthur Parker “the most incompetent and bemuddling chairman who ever presided over any such gathering,” but he saved his strongest language for William Jennings Bryan, the three-time presidential candidate who in retirement had become “a professional religious zealot.” Villard reported that the former secretary of state had hogged the spotlight at the committee meeting, demonstrating his desire “to shove the Christian religion down the throats of every Indian.”88

  The social worker John Collier was also present at the Washington meeting. The future New Deal commissioner of Indian affairs had been named to the Committee of One Hundred in the wake of his highly publicized attack on an administration-sanctioned scheme to deprive Pueblo Indians of their New Mexico lands. Like Sloan and Villard, he saw the heavy hand of the Indian Office throughout the proceedi
ngs. “It was amusing,” Collier reported, “to watch how, as the meeting progressed, those who stood for the continuance of the existing order in Indian affairs gradually concentrated at the right of the hall, and the group standing for a new order concentrated to the left. . . . At the end,” he noted, “the superb [Catholic] Bishop Lawler of South Dakota, was sitting with Thomas Sloane [sic] and Oswald Villard . . . plotting the means to circumvent the chairman, a reactionary.”89

  “There is so much to do that it seems hard to select the right move,” Sloan wrote to Pratt in the wake of the Washington meeting. Nevertheless, he remained defiant—“there is no doubt I can do something,” he added—but the optimistic spirit of the good citizenship gun exchange from a dozen years earlier had disappeared.90 The society had disintegrated. Montezuma was gone, and other old allies were slipping away. Charles Eastman, now separated from his wife and living much of the year in a cabin near Lake Huron, had retreated from most public activity. Laura Cornelius Kellogg (she married Orrin J. Kellogg in 1912) was now focusing most of her energies on a campaign to reunite the widely dispersed members of the eighteenth-century Iroquois Confederacy. Other society founders, such as Dagenett and Standing Bear, had either retired or disappeared from the scene. The American public seemed more interested in the imaginary Indians favored by the Boy Scouts and summer camps than in real people and their troubling complaints.91