In Module 6, we discussed violent interactions between Native nations on the Great Plains and the US military. Native people posed a threat to American expansion into the West. Their claims to land and military power disrupted the establishment of railroad lines and homesteads.
A combination of military force, federal policy, and drastic changes to the environment forced Native people to adapt to a new way of life on reservations. There, they faced difficult choices in the face of ongoing American colonization. This module will focus on the policies which undergirded colonization and Native peoples' resistance to those policies.
Two questions will guide this module blog post:
In the late nineteenth century, how did popular and political understandings of the “Indian problem” change?
What were the goals behind allotment and assimilation policies?
Let's get started!
Part I: "Extermination" vs. "Domestication"
The title of Part I of this module refers to the dichotomous ways in which non-Natives discussed the solution to the so-called “Indian problem.” Those two terms come from a 1851 article published in a California newspaper.
In mid-nineteenth-century California, relationships between Native people and settlers were extremely violent. The state of California authorized militias to carry out “expeditions against the Indians,” and as a result, vigilantes murdered thousands of Native people. California’s Native population was reduced from 150,000 in 1848 to 30,000 in 1860.
Although California was admitted to the Union as a free state in 1850, the state legislature passed a law that same year which facilitated removing Native people from their lands and indenturing Native children and adults to white settlers.
Under the “Act for the Government and Protection of Indians,” if a Native person was convicted of a crime, any white person could pay the bond. In return, the Native person was “compelled to work until his fine was discharged or cancelled.” Minor children could legally be indentured until adulthood.
Native people were not legally able to testify against whites in court, and there was no place for them to legally appeal any decisions made about them or their land.
Under the act, Justices of the Peace were to “instruct the Indians in their neighborhood in the laws which related to them.” Any tribes who refused to obey the laws could be “reasonably chastised.” This term was used as a basis for funding militias to forcibly drive Native people from the land.
If you're interested, check out this article by historian Stacey Smith on the relationship between slavery and California's legislation "governing" Natives.
Word Cloud #1:
What do you think California lawmakers' goals were in passing the Act for the Governance and Protection of Indians? Enter your thoughts in the word cloud below, or access it here.
In an 1851 issue of the Daily Alta California, federal treaty commissioners published an address to the people of California:
“As there is now no further west to which they can be removed, the General Government and the people of California appear to have left but one alternative in relation to these remnants of once numerous and powerful tribes: extermination or domestication. As the latter includes all proper measures for their protection and gradual improvement, and secures to the people of the State an element greatly needed in the development of its resources, i.e. cheap labor—it is the one which we deem the part of wisdom to adopt.” [1]
This statement reveals two themes which characterized the United States’ relationship with Native people in the latter half of the nineteenth century:
The choice of “extermination” or “domestication” was partially based on perceived geographical limitations. There was “no further west” that Native people could be removed. In his essay assigned for Module 6, Frederick Jackson Turner espoused the idea that the “frontier,” an open space for American expansion, was part of what made Americans “American.” If there was no “frontier” left, how were Americans going to expand? And, what would they do with the Native people they could no longer push westward?
Extermination meant death. What was “domestication”? Essentially, domestication meant the death of Native political structures, cultural autonomy, tribal sovereignty, and claims to land. In the 1851 Alta California piece, the authors were explicit—domestication meant incorporating Native people into the United States, as a cheap labor force.
Ghost Dance
Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Native people continued to resist US expansion through both military measures and spiritual measures. At the end of the 1880s, a religious movement known as the Ghost Dance swept through the Plains. It originated in Nevada with a Paiute preacher named Wovoka. He promised a return of the old ways and a reunion of practitioners with their departed ancestors if they abstained from alcohol, lived in peace, and followed ritual practices, including a specific dance known as the Ghost Dance.
A “return of the old ways” also meant that there would no longer be any white men. Lakotas sent messengers by train to hear Wovoka’s message. They embraced it as a religious response to the harsh conditions they experienced on the reservations. [2]
Ghost Dancers hoped to restore their world by dancing. The movement itself was peaceful. However, non-Natives became alarmed by reports of warriors performing a strange new dance which would supposedly result in the disappearance of whites.
Government agents working with the Lakota began to see the dance as a preparation for an uprising. They sent increasingly intense warnings to Washington, expressing fears of an impending war with the Lakota.
President Benjamin Harrison mobilized troops and ordered them onto the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations in South Dakota.
Poll #1:
In Module 6, we discussed the Sun Dance and its role in preparing Lakota warriors for the Battle of Little Bighorn. Here we can see military forces being mobilized in response to the Ghost Dance.
Which method of Native resistance do you think posed a greater threat to American authority on the Plains? Religious practices like the Ghost Dance and Sun Dance? or armed resistance like that of the Comanches, Dog Soldiers, and Lakotas? Answer the poll below, or access it here.
Wounded Knee Massacre
In late December 1890, the Seventh Cavalry—the same unit who had been defeated by Lakotas at Little Bighorn fourteen years earlier—intercepted a band of about 350 Lakotas at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota.
The Lakotas, led by Chief Spotted Elk (also known as Big Foot) were making their way to the Pine Ridge Reservation for safe haven. Just two weeks earlier, Sitting Bull had been killed on the Standing Rock Reservation as he was being arrested.
Sitting Bull’s arrest had been ordered by the Indian agent because the agent wrongly believed that Sitting Bull was the driving force behind the Ghost Dance. During the course of his arrest, there was a gunfight and he was killed.
Thus, the Seventh Cavalry had been dispatched because of non-Native fears about the Ghost Dance. They surrounded the Lakotas and confiscated their weapons. A shot was fired, causing chaos. Native men tried to retrieve their weapons as soldiers opened fire on the encampment.
The US soldiers massacred between two and three hundred men, women, and children. Many of the wounded were left to die in subzero temperatures.
The Oglala Lakota holy man, Black Elk, later reflected on the events. He was a young man at the time of the massacre. In the book, Black Elk Speaks, author John Neihardt recounts his interviews with Black Elk.
One chilling quote from the book: “When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there.” [3]
However, as you read in the JSTOR Daily article for Module 6, it wasn't Black Elk, but Neihardt who wrote this particular quote!
The War Department’s rendition of the Wounded Knee Massacre was that “treacherous” and “fanatical” Ghost Dancers had attacked unsuspecting troops. They disavowed any responsibility for the deaths of women and children.
The War Department bestowed twenty medals of honor onto the Seventh Cavalry. They also erected a monument in 1893 at Fort Riley, Kansas, in memory of the soldiers killed at Wounded Knee.
However, Lakota people did not view the massacre in the same way. After the massacre, word of the killings spread through the Lakota reservations and other Plains groups. In January 1891—a month after the massacre—a missionary among the Santee Dakotas in eastern Nebraska wrote to the Secretary of War, “The fact that at the recent engagement at Wounded Knee a number were killed has deeply affected all the tribes, as they consider the killing of women and children an unpardonable offense.”
Government officials arranged for a delegation of Lakotas to express their grievances in Washington, DC. Delegates met with the Secretary of the Interior and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. They emphasized that the women killed by the soldiers were unarmed, contradicting the Seventh Cavalry’s account that the women had fired on them first. They also reported that the cavalrymen had yelled, “Remember Custer!” as they fired. The Commissioner promised to do what he could, but the Seventh Cavalry was publicly exonerated before he took any action. However, newspapers and books widely reproduced the Lakota account of the massacre. [4]
In the late 1890s, Joseph Horn Cloud and Dewey Beard (pictured below with Daniel White Lance) had filed two claims demanding compensation for the losses incurred by their families as a result of the massacre.
Wounded Knee was seen as the last of the "Indian Wars." At the end of the nineteenth century, there was a turning point from a war against Native people to a war against Native cultures, values, families, languages, and political structures.
The “Indian problem” was the subject of much debate and attention nation-wide. Between 1860 and 1900, the New York Times published almost 1,000 editorials relating to Native Americans. Those who believed that the United States needed to stop the violent actions against Native people and instead extend to them the “blessings of civilization” began to organize and their efforts led
to major changes in policy.
For example, Helen Hunt Jackson published A Century of Dishonor in 1881, where she described “a shameful record of broken treaties and unfulfilled promises.” In 1882, the Indian Rights Association was formed. The organization was made up primarily of non-Indians who pledged to protect the rights and interests of Native people.
The Indian Rights Association and other organizations like it were known as the “Friends of the Indian.” They shared a commitment to “save” Native people by assimilating them. This sentiment is most famously captured in this quote by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Institute, a boarding school for Native children: “Kill the Indian and save the man.” [5]
Part II: Allotment
In Part II, we’ll examine how the philosophy of “Kill the Indian, save the man” was integrated into federal policy. What steps did the US government take to “domesticate” Native people into the American polity?
General Allotment Act (Dawes Act) of 1887
The Dawes Act established a pathway for the legal, economic, and social integration of Native people into the United States. The act proposed actions to hasten assimilation, mainly through plans for Native land administration, education, and methods for Native people to obtain American citizenship.
The most significant aspect of the Dawes act was the allotment of tribal land. When the President deemed a tribe to be “ready,” their reservation could be split into individual “allotments” or homesteads. These allotments would be exempt from taxation and ineligible for sale for 25 years.
After the period of 25 years—under which time the Native person would presumably create a self-sufficient farm on his or her allotment—the trust restriction would be lifted, and the allottee would become the owner of the land in fee.
What was the goal of allotment? This quote from the governmental agent for the Yankton Sioux depicts the general ideology behind the policy:
Agent for Yankton Sioux, 1877: “As long as Indians live in villages they will retain many of their old and injurious habits. Frequent feasts, community in food, heathen ceremonies and dances, constant visiting—these will continue as the people live together in close neighborhoods and villages…I trust that before another year is ended they will generally be located upon individual lands or farms. From that date will begin their real and permanent progress.” [6]
In the quote above, we can see how allotting land was understood as a way to solve all of the other issues governmental agents were having with Native people: for example, if Natives were not living close together, it would be harder for them to practice non-Christian religious ceremonies, like the Sun Dance and Ghost Dance. All of these “problems” cited by the Indian agent in the quote were viewed as things that could prevent Native people from being “efficient” and “industrious,” and would impeded their ability to utilize land in the way American officials saw fit.
Governmental officials reasoned that if allotments were protected by the government for 25 years, Native allottees could become self-self-sufficient members of the American citizenry.
Any “surplus” land leftover after reservations had been allotted could then be sold off to white settlers.
As a result of allotment, two-thirds of all Native lands held in 1887 (87 million acres) were lost to whites by 1934.
Allotment changed the landscape of the reservation. In the map below of the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, notice how there are white squares interspersed with yellow. This phenomenon, known as “checkerboarding” occurred when parcels of land passed out of the hands of Native people and into the hands of American settlers.
Allotment required the cataloguing and segmenting of both land and Native families. Before members of the Dawes Commission could divide up tribal property and make sure each family unit had their own allotment, they had to determine who was enrolled in the tribe under question, and who belonged to which family.
Thus, in the process of allotment, government agents also attempted to officially define and designate who tribal members were. That meant interviewing (or interrogating) people to determine family relationships, recording names in ledger books, and assigning deeds to those names. However, this was by no means a simple process. The creation of the tribal membership rolls entangled the federal government in racial politics and provoked controversies over the rights of the tribes to determine their own criteria for membership. [7]
The prevailing assumption among American agents was that “proper” family units consisted of a male head of household, female homemaker, and children. Commissioners tried to make Native families fit into existing structures of property law. Because the documentation of maternity and paternity is essential for the inheritance and sale of land under American property law, agents tried very hard to determine the biological relationships of Indian families.
Historian Rose Stremlau writes in Sustaining the Cherokee Family that these processes impacted Native kinship structures. For example, while Indian agents assumed that relationships among spouses were of primary importance to Cherokees over the relationships between other family members, many Cherokees married and separated before or during or after allotment. More stable relationships included those between grandmothers and grandchildren; and those between adult siblings.
The Dawes Commission also separated young unmarried men onto their own allotments, acting under the assumption that they would start their own family units and assume the position of head of household. However, young Cherokee men often lived with their parents well into adulthood. The age of 21 marked “maturity” in American law and custom, but not among Cherokees, who used behavior rather than age as a a marker of maturity. Therefore, the US government attempted to impose a system of family structure and land ownership that undermined existing Cherokee families. [8]
Allotting agents were also charged with portioning out square plots of land on the reservation. The idea was to transform the land into identically sized and shaped parcels, with mathematical boundaries, which could be bought and sold by individual owners. This would involve moving or rearranging existing boundaries.
Alice Fletcher, the allotting agent for the Nez Perce, wrote, “It would be impossible to give them their land as they now occupy it and to describe the tracts according to any subdivision in the legal survey. The fields cross the lines in every direction, frequently circling in and out of different lots. I have talked with a few of the more intelligent and they admit the necessity of “straightening out their land” but there will be bitter opposition from others.” [9]
Fletcher and other agents were often so intent on creating a grid-like, rational division of land for individual plots that they ignored the physical characteristics of the land itself. Not all land could be plowed, planted, irrigated, or harvested in the same way. Existing farms and structures did not easily fit into 160-acre plots, because the fields’ boundaries were determined by geographical characteristics—rocky river banks, or steep foothills, or other land similarly unsuitable for farming.
Poll #2:
The allotment process required the division and cataloguing of two things: land and family units. In your opinion, which one represented a greater threat to Native cultures and societies? The allotment of tribal land? or the cataloguing of family units? Answer the question below, or access the poll here.
Allotment and Citizenship
The US offered citizenship to Native people in return for receiving allotments. In order to receive citizenship, Native people had to utilize their allotted property in a way the US deemed to be acceptable and “civilized.” The Dawes Act stated:
“That every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States who has voluntarily taken up within said limits his residence, separate and apart from any tribe of Indians therein, and has adopted the habits of civilized life is hereby declared to be a citizen of the United States, and is entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities of such citizens, whether said Indian has been or not, by birth or otherwise, a member of any tribe of Indians within the territorial limits of the United States, without in any manner impairing or otherwise affecting the rights of any such Indian to tribal or other property.”
They key phrase in this provision of the act was “adopted the habits of civilized life.” What did it mean to adopt a “civilized” life? We can find some answers to this question in the following ceremony conducted when Native people accepted American citizenship:
"Citizenship Ceremony"
For men: (Read name)______(white name). What was your Indian name? (Gives name.)_______(Indian name). I hand you a bow and an arrow. Take this bow and shoot the arrow. (He shoots.)
_______(Indian name). You have shot your last arrow. That means that you are no longer to live the life of an Indian. You are from this day forward to live the life of the white man. But you may keep that arrow, it will be to you a symbol of your noble race and of the pride you feel that you come from the first of all Americans.
________(White name). Take in your hand this plow. (He takes the handles of the plow.)
This act means that you have chosen to live the life of the white man—and the white man lives by work. From the earth we all must get our living, and the earth will not yield unless man pours upon it the sweat of his brow. Only by work do we gain a right to the land or to the enjoyment of life…
For women: (white name). Take in your hand this work bag and purse. (She takes the work bag and purse.)
This means that you have chosen the life of the white woman—and the white woman loves her home. The family and the home are the foundation of our civilization. Upon the character and industry of the mother and the home maker largely depends the future of our Nation. The purse will always say to you that the money you gain from your labor must be wisely kept. The wise woman saves her money, so that when the sun does not smile and the grass does not grow, she and her children will not starve…
Word Cloud #2:
According to this ceremony, what are the characteristics of American citizenship? Answer in the word cloud below or access it here. In the annotations and/or comments, expand on what you think about the symbolism used in this ceremony.
Part III: Assimilation Policies
In Part III, we’ll continue to examine policies designed to assimilate Native people. Namely, how did education of Native children serve the larger goals of the US government and reformers who wanted to “Kill the Indian, save the man?”
Indian Boarding Schools
Education was a significant method utilized by the US to get Native people “ready” for American citizenship. Native people were educated through a system of day schools (located on reservations) and boarding schools (located off reservations, usually far away from their families).
The racial attitudes surrounding Natives were different from those surrounding African Americans. The “one-drop rule” assumed that one black ancestor in someone’s past would make them black. Indians, on the other hand, could supposedly be transformed into civilized members of American society—essentially, they could be “whitened.”
Richard Henry Pratt, who founded one of the most infamous Indian boarding schools, the Carlisle Institute, argued that educating Native children could remove the “traditional” ways of life and replace them with “modern” ones.
In 1889, Pratt stated: “I say that if we take a dozen young Indians and place one in each American family, taking those so young they have not learned to talk, and train them up as children of those families, I defy you to find any Indian in them when they are grown…Color amounts to nothing. The fact that they are born Indians does not amount to anything.”
We can see this kind of thought process in a very stark way in the photographs above. “Before and after” photographs like these would be printed in Carlisle’s newsletter as a way of drumming up support and funding for the school’s mission. Tom Torlino, the Navajo student pictured below, actually looks “whiter” after four years at Carlisle.
Word Cloud #3:
Just a simple question for this word cloud--there are absolutely no wrong answers. Look at the before/after photographs of Tom Torlino and enter anything you notice and/or anything you wonder about the images. Enter your response in the word cloud below, or access it here.
However, although Native students could be “whitened” in their habits and behavior, by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many reformers also embraced a view rooted in scientific racism.
Certain “races” were deemed to be genetically inferior to others. Thus, although assimilation was still the goal, reformers and government agents argued that Indian education should be designed to just fit Indians, “inferior peoples,” to their appropriately subordinate role in society.
To accomplish this, many boarding schools implemented programs of “industrial training” and apprenticeships: boys would be trained as manual laborers (usually agricultural), and girls as domestics. Apprenticeships essentially meant that young girls or boys would work with white families. By working in subordinate positions, they were viewed as being productive members of society (integrated to an extent, in the lowest, most marginalized positions).
Indeed, Native children received messages about the importance of domestic labor to “civilized” American identity at boarding schools. For example, on the anniversary of the Dawes Act, which instructors called “Emancipation Day,” performances were held at the Hampton Institute in Virginia where students performed home-building and home-making activities.
Girls acted out the motions of washing, singing the “Laundresses’ Song”:
“When our work is done,
They’ll be clean and smooth and white.
A civilizing power is the laundress with her tub;
We are cleaning more than clothes, as we rub, rub, rub.” [10]
In these lyrics and the “before and after” photos like the ones above, we can clearly see the mission of boarding schools and assimilation programs—Native people were literally “rubbing” away traces of Native “dirtiness” and revealing civilized “whiteness.”
Violence and Boarding Schools
Boarding schools were a violent method of assimilation. Often, children in boarding schools were there because their parents had been coerced or tricked into sending them.
Ho-Chunk author and artist Angel DeCora explained how she was taken from her reservation school to the Hampton Institute in Virginia: “I had been entered in the Reservation school but a few days when a strange white man appeared there. He asked me through an interpreter if I would like to ride in a steam car. I had never seen one, and six of the other children seemed enthusiastic about it and they were going to try, so I decided to join them, too. The next morning at sunrise we were piled into a wagon and driven to the nearest railroad station, thirty miles away. We did get the promised ride. We road three days and three nights until we reached Hampton, VA. My parents found it out, but too late.”
Many stories survive of the traumatic experiences of Indian boarding schools. Zitkala-Sa’s “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” assigned for this module, describes some of her experiences.
In the process of removing Native culture, students had to adopt Americanized dress, eat American food, speak English, and cut their hair. Zitkala-Sa did not want to have her hair cut. She describes the experience:
“I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly. In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair. I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids.Then I lost my spirit. Now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.”
As we can see from Zitkala-Sa’s passage, the actual experience of assimilation was more than just changing the way one dressed or styled their hair. It was often a traumatic experience that represented the forceful domination of Indian children, who had been separated from their families and taught that everything they believed in had to be changed.
As a student, Zitkala Sa excelled. She ended up teaching at the Carlisle Institute in 1897, remaining there for two years before leaving for Boston to pursue a literary and music career. After her experience teaching at Carlisle, she began to publish her autobiographical essays.
In those essays, she critiqued the entire narrative of Carlisle’s efforts to “transform” Native people from savages to civilized, and the idea that it was Indian education that provided opportunities and instilled good character in Native people.
In a letter to Carlos Montezuma, an Apache physician and activist (and her then-fiancé), she wrote:
“I resent Carlisle’s talking of you as it does. Its talk-boast of you as a savage Apache and now an honorable physician in Chicago—the result of Education! I guess if the character was not in you, savage or otherwise, Education could not make you the man you are today. Education has developed possibilities in me—were they not there, no school could put them in!”
In her writings, she worked to breaks down the dichotomy of “savage” Native students and “civilized” white teachers, which is especially clear in the passage about her hair being cut. In that account, it is clear that it is the white teachers who are acting savagely, forcing her to lose her spirit. [11]
Zitkala-Sa used her autobiographical essays to counter the claim that she was an example of a “success story” of the Indian education system. She drew upon her own sense of self-doubt and the way she was estranged from her family members after attending boarding schools.
She claimed that education did not elevate her to a higher status, it distanced her from the life she had known and made it impossible for her to live among her own people.
In “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” she wrote of the middle space she occupied between a “white world” and a “Native world,” once she returned from school to her reservation: “After my first three years of school, I roamed again in the Western country through four strange summers. During this time I seemed to hang in the heart of chaos, beyond the touch or voice of human aid…My mother had never gone inside of a schoolhouse, and so she was not capable of comforting her daughter who could read and write. Even nature seemed to have no place for me. I was neither a wee girl nor a tall one; neither a wild Indian nor a tame one.”
While the master narrative of educators at Indian boarding schools was that Native people had to leave their tribes to become educated as individuals, Zitkala Sa argued that it was exactly this kind of education which put real constraints on her freedom and attempted to erase her individual nature.
Reform
“Friends of the Indian” groups like the Indian Rights Association promoted the assimilation of Native people into American society, thinking of their efforts as the “elevation” of Native people to the status of US citizens.
Although we can now recognize the violence inherent in these types of assimilation efforts, reformers viewed assimilation as the best way to lift Native people out of poverty and save them from death and disease.
Poverty and disease were problems for Native people. However, in their efforts to combat these issues, many reformers and state agents adopted policies that were geared towards adjusting individual Native attitudes and behavior—rather than recognizing the role of colonialism in creating the problems they were trying to solve.
By the end of the nineteenth century, many reformers argued that full citizenship was not right for Native people. Rather, they argued that Natives weren’t “civilizing” rapidly enough, and were still being taken advantage of by non-Indians who were interested in Native land.
Thus, reformers argued that increased federal guardianship over Indians was more ideal—the government had a responsibility to protect Native people.
The end of the 19th century saw a significant shift in the way that the government thought about Native people. In 1871, Congress decided that the US would make no more treaties with Native nations. Tribes would no longer be considered independent political entities, worthy of treaties. However, existing treaties would be honored.
What was the future for Native people in the US? How would they “fit” into the American polity? How would Native nations retain their sovereignty and culture in the face of assimilation and land loss?
Poll #3:
Think about the two major policies we’ve covered in this module: land allotment and boarding schools. In your opinion, which had the greatest impact on Native people in the late nineteenth century? Answer the poll below, or submit your answer here.
Conclusion
After violent conflict on the Plains began to receive more negative attention, reformers and politicians began to advocate for a plan to assimilate Native people into American society, with the goal of eradicating Native cultures and ways of life.
Allotment and assimilation policies were meant to transform Native ways of life into American ways of life, including the ownership of individual property plots, nuclear family units, and adopting “civilized” habits.
Citations
[1] Quoted in Colin G. Calloway, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History 5th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2016), 318.
[2] See Gregory E. Smoak, Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
[3] John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Books: 2014), 169.
[4] David W. Grua, "In Memory of the Chief Big Foot Massacre: The Wounded Knee Survivors and the Politics of Memory," Western Historical Quarterly 46, no. 1 (Spring 2015), 34.
[5] Quoted in Colin G. Calloway, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History 5th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2016), 379.
[6] Quoted in D.S. Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands, ed. Francis Paul Prucha (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973).
[7] See David A. Chang, The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Land Ownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
[8] Rose Stremlau, Sustaining the Cherokee Family: Kinship and the Allotment of an Indigenous Nation (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 137.
[9] Nicole Tonkovich, The Allotment Plot: Alice Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, and Nez Perce Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 111.
[10] Jane Simonsen, "Object Lessons: Domesticity and Display in Native American Assimilation," American Studies 43, no. 1 (Spring 2002), 89.
[11] See Jessica Enoch, "Resisting the Script of Education: Zitkala Sa and the Carlisle Indian School," College English 65, no. 2 (November 2002): 117-141.
In your opinion, which had the greatest impact on Native people in the late nineteenth century?
Many tribes have been broken up because their children had to go to boarding schools. This had a great impact on Native people in the late nineteenth century.
Through schools and other assimilation practices. Natives felt a large cultural impact and changes. From being separated by families, land, and identity. All to strip them of their culture and traditions it served to weaken them emotionally in some aspects. Along with not being respected or treated equally, this wouldn't serve the purpose of true assimilation. Suffering at the ends of being alienated from their peoples, and discriminated against by the norms of society in America. Where they are somewhere in the middle and struggling with all these changes.
In your opinion, which had the greatest impact on Native people in the late nineteenth century? In my opinion, boarding schools had the greatest impact on Native people in the late nineteenth century. Many boarding school were strict and threatening in a harmful way. Many children were tricked into being sent off to boarding school. Many of these Native children had to adapt to the American culture and cut their hair. They were separated from their families and left with a traumatizing experience.
A few themes I noticed in the responses to this module blog post: many of you highlighted the importance of work/labor to the definition of American citizenship. As we've seen in previous modules, the "work ethic" associated with the idea of the "self-made man" was really ingrained in American political and economic ideologies at the turn of the twentieth century. This idea was applied to Native people through things like the citizenship ceremony quoted in the post. We can also see it in allotment policies, as Whitney noted in her comment, and in boarding schools, where Native children were taught domestic and manual labor skills.
Evan's question of why so much violence resonated with me. I think it is important…
What are the characteristics of American citizenship? Expand on what you think about the symbolism used in this ceremony.
Once people become Americans, they would receive their rights. For example, labor. They would need a job to earn for their living and family.