Between Civilization and Savagery: How Reconstruction Era Federal Indian Policy Led to the Indian Wars

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-188
Author(s):  
Boyd Cothran
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Indian Policy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Reservations ◽  
Federal Indian Policy ◽  
Indian Wars ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
Moral Necessity

Abstract This article considers the event of a single year, 1873, to explain how President Ulysses S. Grant’s federal Indian policy led to the Indian wars of the late nineteenth century. Some historians have argued that Grant’s so-called Peace Policy failed due to systemic mismanagement and corruption; others have suggested it was due to administrative incompetence or ambivalence, while still others have accused the administration of cynicism in its approach to Indigenous affairs. This article argues that the Peace Policy reflected the unresolved tensions inherent in the era’s zeitgeist and that it failed to usher in a lasting peace because it did not account for the enmeshed reality of life in the American West where the boundaries and borders between Indian reservations and settler communities were entangled to say the least. The article begins with a detailed consideration of the Grant administration’s Indian policy as articulated by Francis Amasa Walker in the winter of 1872–73. Largely overlooked by historians of post–Civil War Indian policy, Walker was an influential thinker in his day whose policy recommendations emphasized the moral necessity of proprietary individualism and racial segregation on isolated reservations. The article then turns to the unfolding drama of the Modoc War (1872–73) to explore why the federal government abandoned the project of peacefully incorporating Indigenous people into the body politic, leading to a harsher and more militant approach to Indian affairs. By focusing on the nexus of ideas and events as they played out at this critical historical juncture, this article argues that the Modoc War was the precipitating event that marked the end of Grant’s so-called Peace Policy and the resumption of the Indian wars in the decades following the Civil War.

“More Conscience Than Force”: U.S. Indian Inspector William Vandever, Grant's Peace Policy, and Protestant Whiteness

2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-196
Author(s):  
Douglas Firth Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Middle Level ◽  
Indian Policy ◽  
Religious Perspective ◽  
Indian Reservations ◽  
Federal Indian Policy ◽  
Federal Bureaucracy ◽  
White American ◽  
Indian Affairs

William Vandever (1817–1893) served as a U.S. Indian inspector from 1873 until early 1878. A lawyer by profession, Vandever had been a Republican congressman from Iowa and a Civil War officer. (Later, he would return to Congress, representing California.). While serving with the Indian Office, he became a critic of the militarization of federal Indian policy, so much so as to be reprimanded and not reappointed. His experience enables a reconsideration of President U.S. Grant's peace policy in at least two areas. First, as one of a new group of Office of Indian Affairs officials, Vandever provides a view of federal Indian policy from the middle level of the federal bureaucracy during the 1870s. His case especially illustrates his bureau's attempts to centralize civilian management of Indian reservations. Second, Vandever's policy criticisms, though they assumed white American “civilization” as normative, more immediately arose from his religious perspective. Although he lost his post, Vandever serves to highlight the privileged role of white Protestantism during Grant's peace policy. He exemplified a set of racialized religious sensibilities that were important at the time and that could be termed Protestant whiteness.

Reproduction on the Reservation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brianna Theobald
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Women ◽  
Indian Policy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Reproductive Politics ◽  
Foster Care System ◽  
Indian Reservations ◽  
Federal Indian Policy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Tribal Nation ◽  
Activist Groups

This pathbreaking book documents the transformation of reproductive practices and politics on Indian reservations from the late nineteenth century to the present, integrating a localized history of childbearing, motherhood, and activism on the Crow Reservation in Montana with an analysis of trends affecting Indigenous women more broadly. As Brianna Theobald illustrates, the federal government and local authorities have long sought to control Indigenous families and women's reproduction, using tactics such as coercive sterilization and removal of Indigenous children into the white foster care system. But Theobald examines women's resistance, showing how they have worked within families, tribal networks, and activist groups to confront these issues. Blending local and intimate family histories with the histories of broader movements such as WARN (Women of All Red Nations), Theobald links the federal government's intrusion into Indigenous women's reproductive and familial decisions to the wider history of eugenics and the reproductive rights movement. She argues convincingly that colonial politics have always been--and remain--reproductive politics. By looking deeply at one tribal nation over more than a century, Theobald offers an especially rich analysis of how Indigenous women experienced pregnancy and motherhood under evolving federal Indian policy. At the heart of this history are the Crow women who displayed creativity and fortitude in struggling for reproductive self-determination.

The Poetics of American Civil War Sacrifice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall Fuller
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Sacrifice

The nature and meaning of sacrifice were fiercely contested in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Historians have documented a long struggle by veterans to ensure the continuing remembrance of their sacrifice. At the same time, American politicians tended to demur from acknowledging these sacrifices, as doing so would reopen the rift that had prompted war in the first place. This chapter probes the work of three Civil War poets—Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—to uncover the meaning of sacrifice during and after the war. Dickinson’s verses about psychic pain and dislocation are increasingly understood as simultaneous expositions of the personal and political: Melville’s knotty, multi-perspectival poems about the war, Battle-Pieces, question the ideological freight of sacrifice, and Whitman sought to honour the sacrifice of soldiers through a poetics he hoped would heal the body politic. Ultimately only Whitman’s consolatory poetry would find a postwar audience.

4. From artifact to intellectual

2018 ◽  
pp. 51-67
Author(s):  
Sean Teuton
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Indian Policy ◽  
Indian Removal ◽  
Verbal Art ◽  
Federal Indian Policy ◽  
Indian Wars ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Indigenous Lands

‘From artifact to intellectual’ describes the nineteenth-century Indian Wars and the numerous Native American autobiographies that provide a glimpse into indigenous patterns of living, ways of knowing, and verbal art. These autobiographies also deliver a powerful counter-narrative of US entitlement to indigenous lands during Indian removal. In an era of reform, from around 1890 to 1934, Native and non-Native activists sought legislation to “uplift” the Indian, though reformers’ goals often conflicted. Natives and whites actively collaborated through the Society of American Indians (SAI) to influence federal Indian policy. The SAI helped save Native American writers for the twentieth century, scattering the cultural seeds for later Native literary flourishing.

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