Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880–1930
Abstract
In the United States of America today, debates among, between, and within Indian nations continue to focus on how to determine and define the boundaries of Indian ethnic identity and tribal citizenship. From the 1880s and into the 1930s, many Native people participated in similar debates as they confronted white cultural expectations regarding what it meant to be an Indian in modern American society. Using close readings of texts, images, and public performances, this book examines the literary output of four influential American Indian intellectuals who challenged long-held conceptions of Indian identity at the turn of the twentieth century. Kiara M. Vigil traces how the narrative discourses created by these figures spurred wider discussions about citizenship, race, and modernity in the United States. Vigil demonstrates how these figures deployed aspects of Native American cultural practice to authenticate their status both as indigenous peoples and as citizens of the United States.
Lynn Riggs was born a citizen of the Cherokee Nation in 1899 and became a citizen of the US by a special act of Congress in 1901. Once he left the Indian Territory of his childhood and the young state of Oklahoma, he established a network of friends and collaborators in the arts in places such as Santa Fe, Hollywood, Provincetown, and New York City. Riggs found the most satisfying experience of belonging within this community of artists, in which he practiced and later theorized a kind of aspirational citizenship: the people in his built community supported each other personally, professionally, and financially and collaborated on works of art. Riggs’s life as a gay Cherokee dramatist provides a compelling and, for the period, an anomalous answer to an enduring question in Native American and Indigenous Studies: How does an Indigenous person respond when statehood and US citizenship erase (or aspire to erase) belonging in a tribal nation, enforce the denial of one’s Indigeneity, and require Native people (among others) to endure various forms of exclusion (e.g., segregation, isolation on reservations, suppression of voting rights, racial violence)?
In 1893, Simon Pokagon, a leader of the “unremoved” Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, published a birchbark pamphlet titled The Red Man’s Rebuke. This story condemned settlers for dispossessing Native peoples of their lands and removing them west of the Mississippi River in service of their “civilization.” Pokagon’s Rebuke remains one of the most cited texts in Native American history. But what happened to Pokagon’s message after the Chicago World’s Fair? This paper analyzes five Potawatomi Removal stories told at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that Midwestern settlers found their answer to “the Indian side” of the Removal question by telling the “Potawatomi” perspective of local history; featuring “authentic” representations of Native peoples in their stories and as witnesses to their efforts; perpetuating a myth that all the Potawatomi had been removed; condemning the actions of their “dishonorable and dishonest” forefathers; and publicly acknowledging that they were occupying stolen land. By claiming that the sons of the present were not the forefathers of the past, non-Indians were settling the story of Potawatomi Removal. In the process, they gave their community and their region a past that was simultaneously romantic and tragic, positioning themselves as its inheritors and interpreters.
The turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century marked a time of intensified data collection in the United States focused especially on childhood. This article explores how two children’s narratives, Francis La Flesche’s The Middle Five (1900) and Francis Rolt-Wheeler’s The Boy with the U.S. Census (1911), reflect and respond to this conjunction of boyhood, settler colonialism, and official surveillance. Read together, these texts provide a window into the ways that data collection mediated between the everyday lives of children and the bureaucratic machinations of US colonial governance, marking those data as a site at which governance could be asserted or contested. The colonizing discourse with which these texts engage treats numeracy (rather than the more common literacy) as the threshold for citizenship and reduces Indigenous people, in particular, to the passive objects of measurement and administration. More surprisingly, though, these books also display the role that children’s literature played in placing children themselves in a relationship with numerical data collection, either as enthusiastic and active participants or wary counteragents. While Rolt-Wheeler portrays bureaucracy as an imperialist adventure in which white boys should joyfully partake, La Flesche offers a portrayal of the harm that this incessantly quantitative thinking did to Native children, but he also adds a nuanced critique of the epistemologies underlying such thinking.
Indigenous conservation through patrimonialization is the product of political and legal decisions made by a non-indigenous agent: the liberal state, using the law to retain a form of bios. We propose that patrimonialization is the device by which liberal states have processed and integrated indigenous claims into a form of bios ultimately designed to safeguard state legal structures. We argue that, to uphold the rule of law in contexts of struggle and resistance that challenge the very understanding of the law, states respond by wielding the law in the form of the rule by law, that is, pushing the law to the limit to give normative content to the criteria by which the state conducts its affairs, without straying from the individual rights framework. We hold that the rule by law is an operation that defines the patrimonialization of indigenous peoples. It increases their visibility while imposing limits on political action to keep them from becoming sui juris subjects capable of breaching the distinction between zoe and bios. In this article, we try to understand the political–ideological intent of these decisions, the intentions beyond the letter of the law of patrimonialized peoples.
Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (1876–1938), better known by the Lakota name Zitkala-Ša, wrote works deeply informed by her youth on the Yankton Sioux agency, her time as a student and instructor in Indian boarding schools, and her subsequent political activism. This essay considers how Zitkala-Ša probes the deadliness of US Indian policy during the assimilation period through what critic Michele Burnham calls an “indigenous gothic.” Zitkala-Ša’s works appeal to a non-Native audience’s desire for the local, picturesque, and marginal, but express resistance through eruptions of violence, hauntings, and terror. Building on a deep reservoir of Sioux cultural practice, as well as a faith in intergenerational care, Zitkala-Ša’s indigenous Gothicism counters at once settler colonialism and regionalism’s consumerist ethos.
In 1984, Chandra Mohanty had challenged Western feminists to attend to historically specific differences between themselves and “Third World Women.” She asserted that “Sisterhood cannot be assumed on the basis of gender; it must be forged in concrete historical and political practice and analysis.” The first scholarly histories of the national Woman's Christian Temperance Union established its centrality to politics in the Gilded Age and Progressive era and its significance as a seedbed for other social movements. Extending the chronology of women's activism to the New Deal illuminates connections to the late‐nineteenth‐century developments and to later movements. Movement historians have examined how activists marshalled and challenged cultural representations as a strategic part of their efforts. Locating women's activism in specific community settings enables historians to compare and connect their initiatives across institutions, neighborhoods, regions, movements, and nations.
This article reconstructs the American career of the Manila-born author Ramon Reyes Lala. Lala became a naturalized United States citizen shortly before the War of 1898 garnered public interest in the history and geography of the Philippines. He capitalized on this interest by fashioning himself into an Oxford-educated nationalist exiled in the United States for his anti-Spanish activism, all the while hiding a South Asian background. Lala's spirited defense of American annexation and war earned him the political patronage of the Republican Party. Yet though Lala offered himself as a ‘model’ Philippine-American citizen, his patrons offered Lala as evidence of U.S. benevolence and Philippine civilization potential shorn of citizenship. His embodied contradictions, then, extended to his position as a producer of colonial knowledge, a racialized commodity, and a representative Filipino in the United States when many in the archipelago would not recognize him as such. Lala's advocacy for American Empire, I contend, reflected an understanding of nationality born of diasporic merchant communities, while his precarious success in the middle-class economy of print and public speaking depended on his deft maneuvering between modalities of power hardening in terms of race. His career speaks more broadly to the entwined and contradictory processes of commerce, race formation, and colonial knowledge production.
In recent years, a growing body of political science scholarship has shown how territorial expansion and Indigenous dispossession profoundly shaped American democratic ideas and institutions. However, scant attention has been paid to Indigenous thinkers and activists who have reshaped the colonial and imperial facets of democracy. I reconstruct the writings of the Oneida thinker and activist Laura Cornelius Kellogg (1880–1947). I contend that Kellogg offers a political theory of “decolonial-democracy,” which challenged settler-imperial domination by bringing together a project of Indigenous self-determination with reimagined democratic narratives, values, and institutions. The first and second sections place Kellogg in pan-Indigenous debates within the Society of American Indians and among non-Indigenous Progressive reformers, in order to show how she brings together a pan-Indigenous and social-democratic critique of American democracy. The third section interprets her landmark 1920 pamphlet Our Democracy and the American Indian as a counter-narrative of the American founding read through the disavowed influence of the Haudenosaunee confederacy, a return to which she casts as a basis for democratic and Indigenous renewal. The final section outlines her vision of Indigenous self-government as “Indian communism” in the form of her “Lolomi Plan.” In sum, I trace a counter-politics envisioning a form of relational self-determination within a confederated, multinational political order, as well as the difficulty of bringing decolonization together with democracy in practice.
The Alaska Native Brotherhood (ANB) (est. 1912) is one of the oldest Indigenous rights groups in the United States. Although critics have accused the ANB of endorsing assimilationist policies in its early years, recent scholarship has re-evaluated the strategies of the ANB to advance Tlingit and Haida governance at the same time that they pursued a strategic commitment to the settler state. Contributing to this re-appraisal of the early ANB, this article examines photographic documentation of the use of the American flag in ANB Halls from the period 1914–1945. I argue that the pairing of the American flag with Indigenous imagery in ANB Halls communicated the ANB’s commitment to U.S. citizenship and to Tlingit and Haida sovereignty.
During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, American Indians endured wrenching losses and demoralizing consequences of subordination to the United States. In general histories of the period, coverage of Indians has focused on that experience of subordination, particularly on federal programs to eradicate Indian cultures and the futile armed resistance of a few western tribes. Recent Indian-centered research expands and complicates that declension story by showing how Indians defied expectations that they would disappear as distinct peoples. Indians did not vanish or wholly assimilate because federal policies preserved a special legal status for them, because Indians had considerable significance in national discourse about the meanings of "American," and because Indians devised ways of adapting to Euro-American hegemony and modernity without forfeiting Indianness. While some scholarship emphasizes exceptional aspects of Indians' history, other work shows that Indians' history intersected with or paralleled non-Indian experiences in many ways.
A history of the complex relationship between a school and a people Dartmouth College began life as an Indian school, a pretense that has since been abandoned. Still, the institution has a unique, if complicated, relationship with Native Americans and their history. Beginning with Samson Occom's role as the first "development officer" of the college, Colin G. Calloway tells the entire, complex story of Dartmouth's historical and ongoing relationship with Native Americans. Calloway recounts the struggles and achievements of Indian attendees and the history of Dartmouth alumni's involvements with American Indian affairs. He also covers more recent developments, such as the mascot controversies, the emergence of an active Native American student organization, and the partial fulfillment of a promise deferred. This is a fascinating picture of an elite American institution and its troubled relationship-at times compassionate, at times conflicted-with Indians and Native American culture.
From the earliest moments of European contact, Native Americans have played a pivotal role in the Atlantic experience, yet they often have been relegated to the margins of the region's historical record. The Red Atlantic, Jace Weaver's sweeping and highly readable survey of history and literature, synthesizes scholarship to place indigenous people of the Americas at the center of our understanding of the Atlantic world. Weaver illuminates their willing and unwilling travels through the region, revealing how they changed the course of world history. Indigenous Americans, Weaver shows, crossed the Atlantic as royal dignitaries, diplomats, slaves, laborers, soldiers, performers, and tourists. And they carried resources and knowledge that shaped world civilization--from chocolate, tobacco, and potatoes to terrace farming and suspension bridges. Weaver makes clear that indigenous travelers were cosmopolitan agents of international change whose engagement with other societies gave them the tools to advocate for their own sovereignty even as it was challenged by colonialism.
In 1913 Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala Ša, 1876-1938) collaborated with local Duchesne, Utah, music teacher William F. Hanson to produce and stage a spectacle that combined the musical style of operetta, a melodramatic love triangle, and traditional Plains Indian ritual. In regional performances, The Sun Dance Opera provided a stage for Bonnin and other Native American singers and dancers to participate in rituals whose practice was forbidden by the United States government. Twenty-five years later, just months after Bonnin's death in 1938, the opera was selected and presented by the New York Opera Guild as opera of the year.
The composition of the opera presents the challenges of forging distinct and disparate cultures by harmonizing traditional Native melodies and perspectives into the pinnacle of artistic expression in western civilization: grand opera. Opera, literally the plural of opus or "works" of artistic expression, provides a holistic context that represents varied and complex manifestations of culture. Visual presentation and costuming, singing, dancing, storytelling, and even incorporation of a trickster- like heyoka depict aspects of Plains culture in The Sun Dance Opera. At the same time, an orchestral accompaniment and dramatic plot infuse elements of western civilization. As a classically trained musician, Bonnin used her skills to affirm her Sioux cultural identity and to engage the conventions of popular culture.1 Hanson used his fondness for Indian peoples and his association with them in what critics would now recognize as an artistic colonialism. The result is an uneasy duet of two cultures.
Gertrude Simmons Bonnin had emerged from an obscure, reservation childhood, through the Indian boarding school system, to become a public figure. She compiled and published a book of traditional stories, Old Indian Legends.2 She also had written compelling articles about her childhood and life experiences for Harper's Weekly and the Atlantic Monthly. She compiled and published those stories in 1921 in American Indian Stories.3 In 1902 when she married Raymond Bonnin, also a Yankton Sioux, she temporarily abandoned her public career. Although she would later emerge in the national arena of pan-Indian politics, her years in Utah (ca. 1904-16) were spent in relative obscurity. The local attention given The Sun Dance Opera reintroduced Gertrude to the popular stage.
A challenge in studying the opera is the lack of Gertrude's own voice while William F. Hanson's participation is well documented. The whole score is archived at Brigham Young University where Hanson (1887-1969) had a lengthy career as a professor of music education. Fifty-four years after the debut of the opera, Hanson published a memoir that loosely recounted an Indian history in Utah, his association with Gertrude and her husband, Raymond, and the composing and staging of the opera.4 However, Gertrude left no documentation of her involvement with Hanson and the performances. During this period, even her regular letters to the Catholic Indian Missions have no mention of the opera.5 Likewise, her diaries of the last years of her life focus on her family and her political concerns and do not mention the N ew York restaging of the opera.
This paper explores the Library of the Royal Empire Society from its foundation in 1868 to the mid-twentieth century. It begins by considering the production of imaginative geographies of the British Empire not only by the materials in the collection but also by practices and technologies of assembling, classifying, cataloguing and display which went on in the Library. The architecture, spaces and experience of being in the Library are considered as integral to these imaginative geographies and the role performed by the collection. The second part of the paper considers the ways in which the Library was imagined as a centre of calculation for imperial, economic and geopolitical concerns and some theoretical and methodological issues involved in understanding how and by whom the Library was used. The Royal Empire Society Library offers an insight into the interplay between imperialism and wider concerns about knowledge, vision, order and control, as well as highlighting the importance of recognising the specificity of different types of knowledge space.
Opposing narratives of Alexander Posey's death quickly set the ambivalent tone of his legacy. In short, his drowning in his beloved Oktahutche ("Sand Creek"), or North Canadian, river at the age of thirty-five has been seen either as a type of return to a part of the natural world with which he had a close affinity or as a just punishment for his work for the Dawes Commission and his speculation in the sale of Indian land allotments.1 Posey's friends, family, and supporters "romanticized [Posey] as a literary artist snatched from life before he had achieved the greatness he was destined for" (Littlefield, Alex Posey 5). Others believed—and some continue to believe—it was no accident that he drowned in the Oktahutche, the home of Tie-Snake, a member of the Creek underworld associated with chaos and known to lure people to drowning (see Womack, Red on Red, 133). Both interpretations of Posey's life and death have some basis in truth. However, like most absolute and oppositional views, each fails to fully capture the complexity of Posey and his ever-evolving vision for his people's future. Although Posey considered himself a progressive, due to his belief that the Creeks' best means of survival was appropriating aspects of Euroamerican culture for their own ends, his Fus Fixico letters (fictionalized letters to the editor written in Creek-English dialect, published in epistolary installments between 1902 and 1908 in Indian Territory newspapers) illustrate that he was, in fact, highly critical of U.S. Indian policy and sympathetic to the arguments of conservative Creeks who advocated resistance to allotment and maintenance of traditional Creek social and political systems.
The complexity and evolution of Posey's political thought can be discerned through a historicized consideration of an aspect of the Fus Fixico letters that has not yet received sustained scholarly attention: the letters' brief but significant references to the plans of some members of the conservative Creek faction, the Snakes (and other conservative groups in Indian Territory, such as the Cherokee Kee-too-wahs), to emigrate to Mexico, where they hoped to secure lands and live free of the U.S. government's paternalistic policies.2 These groups aimed to escape the forced transition from communal to private land ownership and the dissolution of their tribal governments (as mandated by the 1898 Curtis Act and carried out by the Dawes Commission), as well as the incorporation of Indian Territory (along with Oklahoma Territory) into the state of Oklahoma.3 Initially, Posey dismissed the plan as far-fetched and unrealistic, but he finally endorsed emigration based on his contention that staunch Creek traditionalists could not survive in what was to become Oklahoma. His evolving views of emigration to Mexico correspond to his growing understanding of the increasing difficulty of life in the Creek Nation for conservative Creeks who opposed the changes sweeping Indian Territory at the turn of the twentieth century. Further, his ultimate endorsement of emigration for staunch traditionalists exemplifies his contention that only certain Creeks—namely those who embraced allotment and participation in U.S. social and political systems—could survive within the United States.
In this article I first introduce my critical approach to Posey's life and work in conjunction with an overview of the Fus Fixico letters, as situated in their historical and cultural context. I position my argument in relation to the ideological framework outlined by Creek/Cherokee writer and theorist, Craig Womack (one of the most significant Posey scholars), and throughout the article I draw upon the groundbreaking historical and archival research of Daniel Littlefield. Following an introduction to the letters and an outline of my central arguments, I analyze Posey's conception of transformation, as it manifests in the Fus Fixico letters, as an alternative to both traditionalist resistance and the assimilationist view that full participation in U.S. society requires the wholesale abandonment of American Indian cultural norms. I follow this discussion with an exploration of the letters' references to emigration plans vis-à-vis Posey's vision for transformation. Finally, by way of conclusion, I offer some thoughts about the implications of Creek...
Malea Powell has argued that Charles Alexander Eastman “imagined new possibilities for Native resistance and survival in the face of violent assimilation strategies” (404–5). To Eastman, Natives had little choice but to acculturate to white society if they were going to resist white domination and survive. But gaining full equality in U.S. society proved difficult in the Progressive Era, given continued white paternalistic regard for Native peoples, as well as enduring negative white stereotypes of Natives, particularly the notion that they were racially childlike, boyish savages incapable of measuring up to the standards of racially superior, “manly” civilized white men. Although scholars have noted the role of gendered discourse in Eastman’s writings, it deserves much more critical attention, for it is an essential site of his resistance to white domination. Eastman fully recognized that Natives had to overcome white racist ideologies that circumscribed their manhood if they were to gain full equality in U.S. society. In his From the Deep Woods to Civilization, Eastman challenges this racism by negotiating the values of white middle- and upper-middle-class manhood, as well as stereotypes of Native manhood. Drawing equivalences between Santee and middle- and upper-middle-class white manhood, Eastman illustrates that Santee—and by extension all Native males—are intrinsically equal to white males in their manly attributes and thus capable of full and equal U.S. citizenship.
Eastman was a firm advocate of the goals of the Dawes Act (1887), the purpose of which was to transform Native males as rapidly as possible from their supposed savage state into self-made, individual citizens by making them agrarian farmers. In his analysis of Eastman’s Indian Boyhood (1902), David Carlson writes:
Eastman’s primary intent [. . .] does not seem to have been to challenge the dominant Western paradigm of the individual self. Rather, he foregrounds the teleology of allotment law, rooted in Euro-American emphasis on growing out of boyish “savagery” into a more “mature,” civilized form of identity.
Eastman, in fact, often used Darwinist discourse to describe this process, but Drew Lopenzina argues that Eastman’s “unstudied usage of such idiomatic speech was more of a linguistic shortcoming than a hardened conviction that the Indian stood below the white man on some imaginary genetic ladder” (737), a claim that is underscored by Eastman’s desire to prove that Native men were, in fact, equally manly to white men. Eastman believed that the Dawes Act was generally unsuccessful because most whites could not shake the deeply held racist assumptions perpetuated by many anthropologists that Natives were somehow biologically behind whites on a progressive evolutionary paradigm, making the goals of the act incommensurate with biological reality (Carlson 613). Carlson argues that in Indian Boyhood Eastman challenges evolutionary anthropological assumptions by employing the legal discourse of allotment, which was predicated on the assumption that Natives could, in fact, assimilate into white society. According to Carlson, by adhering rhetorically to legal rather than evolutionary anthropological discourse, Eastman stood a better chance of arguing for Native equality because he was able to elide the racism of so-called biology (613–14). By the time Deep Woods was published, anthropology had begun to undergo a radical change under the influence of Franz Boas, who challenged the progressive evolutionary paradigm by advocating a culturally relativist anthropological model, a change that influenced Eastman’s own writing as reflected in Deep Woods (Allred 118–19). Certainly Eastman rejects the evolutionary model that created racial hierarchies, but he does so by confronting this evolutionary model directly, not by eliding it as he did in Indian Boyhood with legal discourse. In turn, Eastman works to find similarities between Santee and Euro-American culture in order to “envision himself as a member of [Euro-American] society” (Allred 120), which is reflected in the ways he draws equivalences between Santee and white manhood.
Eastman’s comparison of Santee manhood to white manhood poses theoretical challenges for scholars, however. The masculine values by which Eastman defines Santee manhood are eerily similar to those defined by white middle- and upper-middle-class men of the Progressive Era. As Erik Peterson argues, Eastman saw continuities between the two cultures. Peterson, quoting...