This Indian Country

by Frederick Hoxie

  19. Ibid.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Decisions of the Department of the Interior and General Land Office in Cases Relating to the Public Lands, v. XIII (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1892), 234. Secretary Noble’s decision was later challenged by the Northern Pacific Railroad (which would have gained a right-of-way had Mille Lacs been deemed a reservation), but the matter was ultimately settled by a special resolution passed at the behest of the Minnesota congressional delegation. See 28 Stat 576. It is interesting as well that Nathan Richardson, the Mille Lacs band’s local defender, was a former business partner of Henry Rice’s. Richardson fell silent on the Mille Lacs land dispute after he registered his initial protests. See Warner, A Big Hearted Paleface Man, 29.

  22. Henry Rice to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, February 19, 1891, LROIA 7049-1891.

  23. Darwin Hall to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, October 24, 1891, LROIA 38714-1891.

  24. Waweacomsek et al. to The Great Father, October 10, 1894, LROIA 48382-1894. The letter was reprinted in the Princeton (Minn.) Union, December 6, 1894. Richardson wrote separately to the president endorsing the petition but not claiming to have written it. Nathan Richardson to Grover Cleveland, December 21, 1894, LROIA 50831-1894.

  25. Gus Beaulieu to Secretary of Interior, March 5, 1895, LROIA 10795-1895.

  26. Mille Lacs Chiefs to Grover Cleveland, June 9, 1895, LROIA 28660-1895.

  27. James M. McClurken, “The 1837 Treaty of St. Peters Preserving the Rights of the Mille Lacs Ojibwa to Hunt, Fish and Gather: The Effect of Treaties and Agreements Since 1855,” in Fish in the Lakes, Wild Rice and Game in Abundance: Testimony on Behalf of Mille Lacs Ojibwe Hunting and Fishing Rights, ed. James M. McClurken (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000), 416.

  28. Princeton Union, July 1, 1897.

  29. Commissioner of Indian Affairs to Secretary Interior, March 17, 1898. Records Group 233, House of Representatives, 57th Congress, HR55A-F15.4, National Archives.

  30. Joint Resolution 40, 55th Congress, 2nd Session. 30 U.S. Stat. 745.

  31. Gus Beaulieu to Secretary of Interior, March 3, 1898, LROIA, 11122-1898. Bliss’s statement is in Senate Report 1007, 55th Congress, 2nd Session, 4.

  32. Senate Document 446, “Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians,” 5th Congress, 1st Session, June 7, 1900, Serial 3878, 2, 3. On Beaulieu’s lobbying of Nelson, see Princeton Union, March 8, 15, 1900.

  33. James McLaughlin to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, September 10, 1902, CF-White Earth 46578-09, 175.2, Part 2, Records Group 75, National Archives.

  34. “Contest, Homestead Entry, Indian Occupation, Ma-Gee-See v. Johnson,” July 5, 1900, LROIA 40374-1901.

  35. Chief Negwenaby to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, May 27, 1901, LROIA 28575-1901; GoGee to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, June 6, 1901, LROIA 30901-1901; D. H. Robbins to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, June 7, 1901, LROIA 31221-1901; Samuel Brosius, “The Urgent Case of the Mille Lacs Indians” (Philadelphia: Indian Rights Association, October 1901), 1.

  36. Samuel Brosius to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, November 8, 1901, LROIA 63359-1901.

  37. House Report 1784, 57th Congress, 1st Session, “Mille Lacs Chippewa Indians of Minnesota.”

  38. “Proceedings of Mille Lacs Council, August 30, 1902,” 3, enclosed with Commissioner of Indian Affairs to Secretary of Interior, n.d., LROIA, CCF White Earth, 46578-1909, 175.2, Part 1. McLaughlin’s comments are surprising, coming from a veteran Indian Office official who spent his career moving “around the country” working “for other people.”

  39. Ibid., 29, 31.

  40. Ibid. Aindusogeeshig added later, “I have visited Washington five different times. . . . I don’t think we have done anything else but work for the Indians, to secure for them the right to have land allotted to them here.” Ibid., 59.

  41. Ibid., 44, 46, 49, 51.

  42. Ibid., 65, 66. See also “Agreement Between the U.S. and Mille Lacs Indians,” August 30, 1902; and “Council Proceedings of Mille Lacs Indians, August 30, 1902,” both enclosed with LROIA, CCF White Earth, 46578-1909, Part 1.

  43. Simon Michelet to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, June 1, 1904, LROIA 37014-1904; and C. F. Hauke to Daniel B. Henderson, April 4, 1913, LROIA, CCF White Earth, Land Records-Mille Lacs Removals.

  44. See W. Roger Buffalohead, Against the Tide of American History: The Story of the Mille Lacs Anishinabe (Cass Lake: Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, 1985), 68. A report to the agent at White Earth in 1909 reported “about nine Indian villages” on the reservation, “in all about three hundred Indians.” See D. F. Porter to John R. Howard, December 4, 1908, LROIA, CCF-White Earth 74787-08.

  45. Nineteenth-century treaties frequently settled grievances against the tribes by directing part of the promised funds to settle the tribes (largely unaudited) debts to local traders and business partners.

  46. See H. D. Rosenthal, Their Day in Court: A History of the Indian Claims Commission (New York: Garland, 1990), 100–12. Congress wanted to bar Confederate-sympathizing tribes from bringing their complaints to court. Rosenthal also argues that Congress feared that the courts would be swamped with complaints from tribes. Ironically, as Congress closed the court to Indians, it was opened to whites who claimed they had suffered from “depredations” inflicted by Native violence. By 1890 nearly eight thousand “depredation claims” had been filed with the Indian Office in preparation for court hearings. See Prucha, The Great Father, 720.

  47. Article Twelve, Treaty with the Choctaw and Chickasaw, 1855, 11 Stat. 611. For an overview of the Choctaw claim, see Clara Sue Kidwell, The Choctaws in Oklahoma: From Tribe to Nation, 1855–1970 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 121–36.

  48. Kidwell traces these “Byzantine” disputes in ibid.

  49. See Rosenthal, Their Day in Court, 24. For a listing of tribal claims adjudicated before the court, see appendix I.

  50. Perhaps the most famous example from the first twenty years of the twentieth century involved the Sioux and the Black Hills. Significantly, the movement to bring this claim began in the 1890s, just after the Choctaws had won their case. The historian Jeffery Ostler notes that more than one hundred meetings that were focused on winning compensation for the loss of the tribe’s sacred land took place on the various Sioux reservations during that decade. See Ostler, The Lakotas and the Black Hills (New York: Viking, 2010), 128–29.

  51. Quoted in Otoe and Missouria Tribes of Indians v. U.S. 52 Ct. Cls. 424, 428.

  52. See Rosenthal, Their Day in Court, appendix I. The jurisdictional acts authorizing each suit are quoted in each decision.

  53. After World War I Henderson also represented tribes in the Pacific Northwest. See Coos (or Kowes) Bay, Lower Umpqua (Kalawatset) & Sinslaw Indian Tribes v. United States, 306 U.S. 653; United States v. Klamath & Moadoc Tribes, 304 U.S. 119.

  54. 35 U.S. Statutes 619. The Mille Lacs complaint is in Docket 30447, Record Group 205, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (hereafter Docket 30447).

  55. On Wahweyaycumig’s removal, see J. Adam Bede to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, May 23, 1904, LROIA 34762-1904 (Bede reports only “one chief and a family of seven” had moved to White Earth). On complaint against Beaulieu, see Steward and Brewer (attorneys representing Meegeesee and others at Mille Lacs) to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, March 8, 1905, LROIA 19255-1905.

  56. Chauncey E. Richardson, “In the matter of the services of attorneys . . .” October 17, 1916, U.S. Court of Claims, Docket 30447, Box 5144, Records Group 123, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Beaulieu confirmed this activity in a separate deposition, “Affidavit of Gus H. Beaulieu,” November, 1916, Claims Docket 30447, Box 2151, RG 123. NA.

  57. See “Son of State’s First Senator Dies,” St. Paul Dispatch, December 22, 1944, 3. The third principal in the firm, Frederick D. Price, was the son of the f
ormer senator Henry Rice. I am grateful to the historian Bruce White for closing the circle on this small mystery by locating Frederick Rice’s obituary for me.

  58. Chauncey Richardson, “In the matter of the services of attorneys . . .” 4, quoting a letter dated November 25, 1908. For “my lawyer” comment, see Beaulieu to J. R. Howard, July 9, 1909, LROIA, CCF-White Earth 58921-09, 150.

  59. See “Minutes of a Council of the Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians, Held at Elbow Lake on the White Earth Reservation,” December 15, 1908; “Minutes of a Council of the Non-removal Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians, Held at Onamia . . .” January 23, 1909; “Memorandum of Agreement . . . 8th day of February, 1909 . . .” All included with Docket 30447, Box 123, Record Group 123, NA.

  60. James Garfield to the President, February 15, 1909, LROIA, CCF-White Earth 11208-1909, 308.1.

  61. See affidavit, “Mr. Houghton’s Work,” November 2, 1916, in Docket 30447, Box 2152, RG 123. Clapp had been involved in White Earth land disputes at least since 1907 and had often worked alongside Gus Beaulieu. For Clapp at White Earth, see Harvey S. Clapp to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, April 9, 1907, LROIA, CCF- White Earth 81251-07, 150.

  62. Deposition of Naygwonaybe, August 4, 1909, Docket 30447, RG123.

  63. See Chauncey Richardson to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, August 25, 1909; LROIA, CCF-White Earth 69493-09, 123; and Chief Clerk to C. E. Richardson, September 1909, LROIA, CCF White Earth 69493-09, 123.

  64. J. Adam Bede to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, February 28, 1908; Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs to Bede, March 3, 1908. Both letters filed as LROIA, CCF-White Earth 14465-08, 123.

  65. Darwin Hall to J. R. Howard, September 13, 1910, LROIA, CCF-White Earth 68171-10, 175.2. Hall also reported in November that the band had held “their ‘Grand Medicine’ ceremonies” at Mille Lacs; adding “it occupies their entire attention and thought. . . .” Hall to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, November 1, 1910, LROIA, CCF-White Earth 88006-10, 032.

  66. State of Minnesota, County of Mille Lacs, Seventh Judicial District, “Mille Lacs Investment and Improvement Company, a Corporation vs. Chief Wadena, John Pewash, John Schwab, et al.,” Civil Case 2248, Minnesota Historical Society. The case file includes the complaint, the defendants’ response, a report on the court’s decision, and the order to the sheriff.

  67. Princeton Union, May 11, 1911.

  68. This added detail was not included in the local press but is a part of the description in the tribe’s history. Buffalohead, Against the Tide of History, 73.

  69. Princeton Union, May 11, 1911.

  70. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians v. United States, 46 Ct. Cls. 464. A loyal Republican and close friend of Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon’s, Booth also presided over the claims case brought by the deposed Hawaiian monarch Liliuokalani in 1910. He later was named chief judge of the court. See Neil Thomas Proto, The Rights of My People: Liliuokalani’s Enduring Battle with the United States, 1893–1917 (New York: Algora, 2009), 4, 165–66.

  71. Ibid., 461, 475, 478.

  72. The tortured history of the Mille Lacs case following the band’s initial victory is described in the affidavit filed by Frederick Houghton, titled “Mr. Houghton’s Work,” dated November 2, 1916, with Docket 30447, Box 2152, RG 123, National Archives.

  73. Buffalohead, Against the Tide of History, 76; see also 72–75. For a summary of events following the band’s victory in the Court of Claims, see James McClurken, “The Effects of Treaties and Agreements Since 1855,” in Fish in the Lakes, Wild Rice and Game in Abundance, 439–41.

  74. See Prucha, The Great Father, 1018.

  75. In 1946 Congress established the Indian Claims Commission, which operated until 1978. The commission received 370 petitions from 176 tribes and ultimately awarded $657 million to plaintiffs. When the commission ceased operation in 1978, its caseload was transferred to the U.S. Court of Claims. See Prucha, The Great Father, 1021; and Paul Rosier, Serving Their Country: American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 312.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1. Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians, v. 1, n. 1 (1913), 3, 7.

  2. The commissioner of Indian affairs who was in office when Thomas Sloan graduated from a government boarding school voiced the rationale for this educational program. “The logic of events demands the absorption of the Indians into our national life,” Thomas Jefferson Morgan wrote in 1889. “Each Indian must be treated like a man, be allowed a man’s rights and privileges, and be held to the performance of a man’s obligations.” For more on this philosophy of inclusion, see Frederick Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 1–39. Morgan was quoted in Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 179.

  3. Montezuma had worked as the school’s physician from July 1893 to January 1896, and Eastman had served as a recruiter and outing agent (an official who placed students with white families during school vacations) from November 1899 to September 1900. During Eastman’s time at Carlisle, his wife, Elaine Goodale Eastman, edited the school’s newspaper, the Red Man. See Raymond Wilson, Ohiyesa: Charles Eastman, Santee Sioux (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 1983, 105–06; and Peter Iverson, Carlos Montezuma and the Changing World of American Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), 25. For more on Eastman and Pratt, see David J. Carlson, Sovereign Selves: American Indian Autobiography and the Law (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 147, 150–51.

  4. Thomas Sloan, Henry Standing Bear, Charles Eastman, Laura Cornelius, Carlos Montezuma, and Charles Dagenett to Richard Pratt, April 4, 1911, Society of American Indian Papers (hereafter SAI Papers).

  5. Richard Pratt to Carlos Montezuma, April 14, 1911, Papers of Carlos Montezuma, Scholarly Resources Edition (hereafter PCMSR).

  6. Richard Pratt to Thomas Sloan, Henry Standing Bear, Charles Eastman, Laura Cornelius, Carlos Montezuma, Charles Dagenett, April 13, 1911, PCMSR.

  7. Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians, v. 1, n. 1 (1913), 6. Emphasis in original.

  8. The idea that Indians could be citizens and still serve their communities was a basic assumption among the new organization’s founders. For an overview of this point of view based largely on literary sources, see Joel Pfister, Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004) and Lucy Maddox, Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race and Reform (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).

  9. Thomas Sloan to Arthur Parker, October 31, 1911, SAI Papers.

  10. For a summary of the era’s debates over national citizenship, see Heather Cox Richardson, “North and West of Reconstruction: Studies in Political Economy,” in Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States, ed. Thomas J. Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 66–90. The impact of the Civil War on conceptions of the American nation-state are outlined in Morton Keller, Affairs of State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977) and Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1966).

  11. While this narrative avoids political labels that often flatten the differences among actors, it has benefited from the analysis of the citizenship issue by the political scientist Kevin Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Post-colonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 97, 102–7, 120. While Bruyneel does not mention Thomas Sloan, the Omaha lawyer seems to fit his view that “indigenous people who engaged the debate over U.S. citizenship sought . . . to redefine the boundary location of indigenous political identity. . . .” (97).

  12. Indian activists were optimistic about citizenship despite the Supreme Court’s
decision in Elk v. Wilkins that declared they were not eligible for protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. See 112 U.S. 94.

  13. See Sloan v. U.S., 95 F 193, July 1, 1899, 194.

  14. Sloan’s birth in St. Louis is mentioned in an undated newspaper clipping, probably from 1921, included with a collection of his writings in PCMSR, Reel 5. Sloan first lived on the Nemaha Reservation in southeastern Nebraska, a federal reservation available to homesteaders from the Omaha, Iowa, and Otoe tribes. Nemaha was established under terms of a treaty negotiated by William Clark with a group of Missouri tribes. See 7 Stat. 328. Sloan’s ancestry is described in the circuit court decision in Sloan v. United States (1899). See 95 F. 193. Margaret (born 1820) and Thomas (born 1863) Sloan are listed in the 1891 Omaha Tribal Census. See M595, Indian Census Rolls, 1885–1940, Reel 32. Sloan and his grandmother moved to the Omaha reserve north of the city of Omaha in 1880, when the future lawyer was seventeen. An exhaustive congressional hearing on the claims of Michael Barada’s descendants to membership in the Omaha tribe in 1930 includes an affidavit from Sloan (then living in San Diego) and an elaborate family tree that indicated that Sloan (who had long been accepted as a tribal member) had no children. See “Enrollment of Certain Persons with the Omaha Tribe of Indians,” Hearings Before the Committee on Indian Affairs, House of Representatives on H.R. 10457, 7st Congress, 3rd Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1931). Sloan’s affidavit is at 54–55.

  15. Sloan’s early career as a herder is described in Joan T. Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 315, 317. The “troublemaker” reference is in Sloan’s testimony on S.2755 before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, February 27, 1934, 132; his recounting of his imprisonment is in a hearing on “Indian Conditions and Affairs on H.R. 7781,” February 11, 1935, 528. These years are also described in a profile published in the Society of American Indians magazine in 1920: Leicester Knickerbacker Davis, “Thomas L. Sloan—American Indian,” American Indian Magazine, v. 7, n. 4 (August 1920), 39–40.