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

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.

Native Acts, Immigrant Acts: Citizenship, Naturalization, and the Performance of Civic Identity during the Progressive Era

This article reveals the complicity of immigration restriction laws and federal Indian policy with organized Americanization in legislating an imagined, desirable “new American” at the beginning of the twentieth century, when resurgent nationalism threatened to restrict undesirable immigrants as it also sought to assimilate Indigenous people into a mass of Americanism. While the immigrant has figured in the U.S. national imaginary as someone who desires America, the American Indian was not desired to enter into political membership—although Native land was desired, and subsequently taken by settlers through strategies of dispossession written into federal Indian law. This essay argues that the Indian—read as an imagined category with little connection to the lives of Native people—occupies an anomalous position in the legal history of naturalization, finalized with the passing of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, at the same time that racist immigration restriction quotas also limited the entrance of new immigrants into the United States through the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. For Native people, Americanization and the imposition of citizenship were extensions of colonialism, adding one civic status over another—domestic dependent, ward, or U.S. citizen. For new immigrants hailing from southern and eastern Europe, forced by economic and cultural constraints to relocate to the United States, in contrast to their Anglo-Saxon or Nordic settler predecessors, Americanization meant a renunciation of political allegiance to other sovereigns, the acquisition of English, and civic education for citizenship. This essay challenges the myth of America as a “nation of immigrants,” and the settler colonial nation-state's ongoing infatuation with its colonial project as it continues to erase Indigenous presence and sovereignty.

Reproduction on the Reservation

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.

Consumption as Assimilation: New York Times Reporting on Native American Art and Commodities, 1950–1970

The appropriation of Indigenous cultures has sparked multiple controversies in the United States over the past decade. This phenomenon is not new, however. This article examines New York Times reporting on Native American art and commodities to demonstrate how trends in consuming “Indian” products contributed to the assimilationist federal Indian policy of termination, between 1950 and 1970. In this period the consumption of items perceived as “Indian” shifted from an elite art collectors’ activity to a widespread fashion trend. Nevertheless, Times reporting shows that throughout this era shopping for “Indian” items subsumed Indigenous cultures into the imagined unity of a national American identity.

4. From artifact to intellectual

‘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.

Domestic Fronts in the Era of 1812

In 1811, while working as U.S. Indian Agent to the Choctaw nation, a white man named Silas Dinsmoor took guardianship of a ten- or eleven-year-old Choctaw boy named James McDonald. By examining the federal career and household arrangements of this government official and their convergence with the lives of James and his mother Molly McDonald, this essay highlights the central role that race, slavery, and kinship played in both imposing and resisting U.S. imperial rule. It begins by revisiting federal Indian policy and discourses concerning Indian “civilization” to consider the racialized and gendered kinship structures that supported U.S. territorial expansion. It then looks at how Dinsmoor specifically drew upon these same familial arrangements to push for U.S. settlement in the Choctaw nation on both a grand and intimate scale. Dinsmoor was initially invested in federal Indian policies and programs aimed at assimilating Choctaw people and their lands into the U.S. plantation economy by encouraging them to adopt U.S. kinship structures. However, in light of Choctaw responses to his controversial presence in their homelands, the Indian Agent became disillusioned with his work. Presented with an opportunity to “settle” Choctaw lands by establishing a plantation household of his own, Dinsmoor recalibrated his ambitions. Instead of trying to impose U.S. familial values on Choctaw people writ large, he began to acquire Choctaw lands for his own family’s gain, shoring up his claims to Choctaw lands and his sense of spatial mastery through the containment of black and Indian bodies within the space of his own “private” patriarchal household. The essay briefly concludes with the unexpected consequences of Dinsmoor’s actions. When Dinsmoor incorporated a Choctaw youth into his plantation home, he inadvertently supported Molly McDonald’s efforts to use both her son and racial slavery to bolster her own influence on lands coveted by the United States. In the end, Silas Dinsmoor and Molly McDonald’s actions reveal the yawning gap between imperial agendas and colonial realities as Native people found new ways to maintain control over their homelands.