It would be foolish to claim that in 2000 the enemies of tribal sovereignty had been banished from the United States or that faith in Indian backwardness had been eradicated. It would be incorrect also to assume that all was well in Indian America. Anti-Indian groups calling for the abrogation of treaties and the abolition of reservations continued to function, particularly among non-Indians living near tribes that were enforcing their treaty rights to fish, water, and other resources. Problems caused by poverty, poor health care, inadequate housing, and shoddy schools continued to afflict Native communities more frequently than most other groups. The socioeconomic gaps separating Indians and other Americans, while narrowing, certainly remained. Dispossession inflicted deep and enduring wounds on the indigenous people who survived what the historian Francis Jennings called the invasion of America, and the consequences of that invasion for Indians and non-Indians alike remain. Scars produced by those wounds remain as well. Still, the place Native Americans occupied in 2000—both in major party platforms and within the United States itself—tell us that profound changes had taken place since the time of the nation’s founding.
According to the 2000 federal census, American Indians lived in every county in the United States. More than half their number made their homes in cities, and all exercised the constitutional rights of American citizens. While Indian tribes operate autonomously in many respects—policing their highways, regulating business life, and operating schools, colleges, and social services—these very activities bring them into intimate contact with their non-Native neighbors. Successful gaming operations employ thousands of people, the majority of them not tribal members. Police departments rely on cooperative agreements with authorities in surrounding counties in order to function efficiently. Tribal schools are effective in large part because they educate children in accordance with state and national curriculum standards. Tribal colleges earn accreditation from the same bodies that certify the quality of educational institutions operated by states and local governments.
In these ways, by 2000 the activists had carried the day. The United States had become an Indian country. Tribes and Native culture were no longer external to the United States. “They” were now “our” neighbors, employers, customers, and fellow citizens. It was no longer possible to define Native Americans, as the Supreme Court had less than a century earlier, as people who were “simple, uninformed, and inferior. . . .”3
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TODAY ACTIVISTS continue to animate discussions of the Indian future, but the cast of characters has expanded to include environmentalists, corporate leaders, physicians, bankers, actors, and astronauts. The community of activists is large and diverse, with Native women forming an ever-growing portion of the whole, but it continues to be united in its support for treaty rights, tribal autonomy, and the rights of American Indian citizens to live life as they choose. These goals remain important despite the fact that the nation’s Native and non-Native populations have become increasingly intertwined. Tribes with significant business operations and groups that control water and other vital resources routinely collaborate with partners, investors, and local governments. Native and non-Native communities frequently fall into contentious disputes, but the resolution of these conflicts is more likely to come in settlements reached in face-to-face negotiation than in a judge’s decision announced after prolonged and expensive litigation. Even universities, often the most hidebound and inflexible of institutions, have incorporated dozens of interdisciplinary programs in American Indian studies into their curriculums, moving far beyond the tentative beachheads established by Vine Deloria, Jr., and his pioneering colleagues a generation ago.
The fact that Indian families and communities have scattered across the American landscape and that Native people appear regularly in the nation’s party platforms, voting booths, and courts does not adequately measure the significance of the transformation produced by the activists profiled in this book. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, Indian people relentlessly drew upon the American government’s political ideas and institutions in order to establish themselves as communities deserving protection from arbitrary power. These activists cared little about gaining entry to the American cultural mainstream; their campaign was for something other than assimilation into the society pressing on their borders.
Instead, they sought legal visibility and human recognition. James McDonald, for example, believed that once federal authorities grasped the Choctaw’s legal claims and basic humanity, relations between his tribe and the United States could be managed through negotiation and a common adherence to the rule of law. William Potter Ross pressed for recognition of his tribe’s national institutions and civilized behavior and wondered aloud why a powerful continental power like the United States could not accept a loyal but autonomous political community within its borders. In a similar vein, Sarah Winnemucca demanded to know why an idealistic, religious people could not recognize the wrongs they had inflicted on Native people like her and the members of her family while they pursued their national destiny in the American West.
The Indian activists’ struggle to win recognition from federal authorities accelerated in the twentieth century as their numbers and resources grew. Benefiting in unexpected ways from the American education that had often been forced upon them, community leaders found new tools in the legal and political arenas and new allies among officials of other tribes and sympathetic non-Indians. By the end of World War II a group of sophisticated leaders had emerged to solidify this support for tribal autonomy and to insist on the human rights of Indian citizens who deserved to be allowed to live in communities of their own choosing. The National Congress of American Indians was only the most prominent of many Native groups that honed and promoted this message. They insisted that the federal government was obligated to honor treaty commitments, no matter how long those agreements had been neglected or ignored, and that tribal leaders were legitimate representatives of governments who had the right to participate fully in all policy decisions affecting them. Undergirding these specific claims was the explicit demand that Indian people be allowed to live as freely as other Americans and to organize their own communities without interference from missionaries, reformers, or federal officials.
But even as their cause was finding success, Indian activists reminded both their communities and the decision makers in Congress and the Indian Office that their goals could not be contained by a simple legislative agenda or a single set of political talking points. An intellectual like Vine Deloria, Jr., could point out that despite the hundreds of legitimate local complaints they brought to legislatures, courts, and the American public, their ultimate goal was far larger and more complex than any individual dispute. They should not seek one victory, he argued—citizenship, compensation for unlawful seizures, or the right to organize tribal governments—but all of them and more. Indians had insisted from the start that U.S. leaders recognize that their “empire for liberty” had taken root on Native soil and that the new country they celebrated every Fourth of July also encompassed and contained an enduring set of indigenous communities that deserved recognition as a distinguishing feature of the American nation. As Deloria so powerfully reminded his students and readers, the presence of Indian people and the legacy of their dispossession compelled Americans to reimagine themselves by developing a reverence for place and a deeper relationship with other living beings on the planet. The continent’s unique history, he argued, should inspire a unique cultural and political identity. America was not simply the headquarters of a successful commercial enterprise; it could also be the seat of an exemplary society.
Almost from the start, Indian activists had wanted American officials and legislators—and all their citizens—to appreciate that the nation could represent much more than a beautiful territory that had been wrested from the grasp of its original inhabitants. By recognizing and defending the rights of Native people to occupy and mai
ntain their own homelands within the national landscape, American leaders could finally embrace the humanity of Native people and the undeniable truth that Indians did not exist “out there” or “back then,” but instead, that they were, and had always been, fellow travelers on the American journey. Discovering the legacy of American Indian activism, then, opens a doorway to the discovery of a new place: this Indian country.
Mohawk leader Joseph Brant, painted in London in 1776 by one of the city’s leading portrait artists, George Romney.
The site of Fort Niagara, where numerous wartime conferences between British and Native military leaders took place. It was at Fort Niagara that Joseph Brant first denounced the borders granted to the United States in the Paris Peace Accords.
An engraving memorializing Spain’s 1781 victory at Pensacola, Florida, over a combined British/Native force that included Alexander McGillivray and a group of Creek warriors.
Benjamin Franklin with the coonskin cap he wore while a diplomat in Paris in an effort to present himself to the French as a simple, rustic American.
Pushmataha, the Choctaw leader who fought with Andrew Jackson against the British in the War of 1812, negotiated for his tribe at Doaks Stand and headed a tribal delegation to Washington, D.C., in 1824. Pushmataha’s sudden death during that journey propelled lawyer James McDonald into the leadership of the delegation.
Peter Pitchlynn, the son of a Scottish trader and a Choctaw woman and a close friend of James McDonald. Pitchlynn later emigrated to Indian Territory with his tribe and became its principal chief.
Chiefs of the Creek Nation and a Georgia Squatter, drawn from life with a camera lucida by Basil Hall during his tour of North America in 1827–28. Using a series of mirrors, the camera lucida allowed artists to trace a living image directly onto a drawing surface.
William Potter Ross (Cherokee) in an engraving made in the 1870s.
Typesetters at work in the offices of The Cherokee Advocate newspaper, Tahlequah, Indian Territory, c. 1880. William Potter Ross was an early editor of the tribal newspaper.
Delegates to an intertribal conference at Okmulgee, Creek Nation, Indian Territory in the 1870s. William Potter Ross presided over the first of these intertribal conferences in 1870.
Sarah Winnemucca (Paiute) in the Victorian attire she used for her formal appearances.
Sarah Winnemucca in the “Indian costume” she used when speaking about Paiute culture.
As a U.S. military officer and the first Native Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Ely Parker (Seneca) negotiated with Cherokee leaders (including William Potter Ross) in 1865 and corresponded with Sarah Winnemucca. After leaving Washington, he held an obscure post in the New York Police Department and grew disillusioned with the government’s Indian policy.
An Ojibwe village at Mille Lacs Lake, Minnesota, 1885.
Mille Lacs Ojibwe tribal delegation, Washington, D.C., 1899. The tribe’s unofficial lawyer, Gus Beaulieu, is on the right in the rear. Leaders in the first row are (left to right), O gee tub, Wahweyaycumig, Aindusogeeshig, and Nay tah waushence.
Leaders of the Mille Lacs resistance, c. 1910. Left to right: Wadena, Reverend Frank Paquette, Meegeesee.
Thomas Sloan (Omaha) at his desk in Washington, D. C., 1920.
Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai) and his wife, Marie, c. 1920.
Masthead of the first issue of Carlos Montezuma’s reform magazine, Wassaja, 1916.
Henry Sockebasin (Pasmaquoddy) on the cover of the Fall 1918 issue of The American Indian Magazine. Twelve thousand Native Americans served in uniform during World War I.
Alice Jemison (Seneca), c. 1930.
D’Arcy McNickle (Salish) during his early years at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Robert Yellowtail (Crow), left, and Richard Sanderville (Blackfeet), 1930s.
National Congress of American Indian leaders, 1950s. D’Arcy McNickle, rear left. Front row (left to right) Helen Peterson (Sioux), Joe Garry (Coeur d’Alene), Ruth Bronson (Cherokee).
D’Arcy McNickle and Navajo elder, c. 1960.
John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Michigan Governor G. Mennen Williams greet NCAI leader Frank George (Nez Perce) in Hyannisport, Massachusetts, August 1960.
Robert F. Kennedy and Taos leaders, New York City, 1966.
Vine Deloria, Jr. (Sioux), 2005.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began more than a decade ago as an informal lecture at the University of Illinois and it has taken shape in conversation with the people in Champaign/Urbana who in the years since have been my students and valued colleagues. Chief among the latter are the three department chairs who have nurtured and defended our special culture and values over the past decade: James Barrett, Peter Fritzsche, and Antoinette Burton. Two early chapters benefited from the extraordinary barrage of advice and criticism that comes to anyone presenting his or her work to the department’s History Workshop, and nearly every other later one received a separate, careful reading from one or more of the following Illinois colleagues: James Barrett, Antoinette Burton, Tony Clark, Matthew Gilbert, Dan Hamilton, LeAnne Howe, Harry Liebersohn, and Robert Parker. To that list must be added Robert Warrior, who arrived on campus to direct the Program in American Indian Studies just as my manuscript was in need of the extra scrutiny and advice that he provided.
As I struggled to select the subjects for each chapter and to frame the project’s argument, I received valuable feedback from colleagues at institutions where I was invited to speak or participate in ongoing seminars. These included Joel Beinen and Richard White at Stanford University; Linda Kerber at the University of Iowa; Jean O’Brien, Brenda Child, and David Wilkins at the University of Minnesota; the late David Weber at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University; Phil Deloria and Gregory Evans Dowd at the University of Michigan; and former Illinois Chancellor Richard Herman, who invited me to deliver the Chancellor’s Center for Advanced Study Special Lecture in 2007.
While ideas are cheap, turning them into a book like this has required a substantial investment of research support that enabled me to travel to distant libraries and archives and to enjoy extended periods of uninterrupted research and writing. Early support came from a Mellon Foundation Humanities Fellowship. In November 2005 I was privileged to receive a scholarly residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in northern Italy. The month of quiet isolation at Bellagio provided crucial time not only to think, organize material, and begin writing but also to imagine a project worthy of the extraordinary community that shared the time there with me. This challenging and stimulating interdisciplinary group included Darius and Cathy Brubeck, Tom De Wall, Honor Moore, Raul and Elizabeth Pangalangan, David Rousseve, Ellen Spiro, Sandy Levinson, Sushma Joshi, and the center’s gracious director, Pilar Palacio. A faculty fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities during the 2007–08 academic year provided precious months during which I was able to write a substantial portion of the book, and a semester’s release from teaching made possible by my university’s Center for Advanced Study in 2009 allowed me to complete a draft of the entire manuscript.
Thanks to research support provided by the University of Illinois, I was also able to enlist several graduate students to assemble documents and other research materials necessary for so wide-ranging a book project. These included Michael Sherfy, Troy Smith, Jennifer Guiliano, Brian Ingrassia, and Michael Hughes. I am grateful for their hard work and steady support. The project also benefited from the extraordinary generosity of librarians and archivists in Champaign/Urbana (particularly the university’s history librarian, Mary Stuart) and at my second scholarly home, Chicago’s Newberry Library. The staff at the latter institution was particularly accommodating to a former employee. I am grateful for the support provided by David Spadafora, president and librarian; James Grossman, former vice president for research and
education; Diane Dillon of the Office of Research and Education; Robert Karrow, curator of special collections; and the dozens of reading room assistants and reference specialists who guided me as I assembled this story. Most important among those is John Aubrey, Ayer librarian, who has been a valued colleague and guide for more than three decades. I am also grateful to the archivists and librarians who accommodated me during visits to the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). Jennifer O’Neil, archivist at the NMAI, was particularly helpful during my exploration of the papers of the National Congress of American Indians. I also appreciate the efforts of Maeve Herbert Glass who generously volunteered to locate images for me in the Princeton University Library. Finally, my discussion of the Ojibwe community at Mille Lacs and its heroic efforts in the U.S. Court of Claims was helped immensely by the access to primary documents related to the era and the case provided to me by the tribe’s attorney, Marc D. Slonim, of Ziontz, Chestnut, Varnell, Berley and Slonim of Seattle, Washington.
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