INDIANS

One of the key concepts associated with American Indians in the period 1870–1920 was "absorption." Hypothetically, once it became clear that Indians had not and probably would not actually disappear, it was the objective of philanthropists and the government alike that Indians be "absorbed" into the United States as individuals; the fact that their land would be "absorbed" into the United States went without saying. Though there are deep complexities underlying this one word, there are two significant points with which to begin a discussion. First, the hypothetical absorption of native peoples into U.S. society, no matter how well-intentioned some of the idea's advocates may have been, merely masks the systematic destruction of tribal governments, through which native land would be made U.S. land. The idea of Indians' absorption signifies the political erasure of Indian nations. Second, native people by and large did not wish to be "absorbed." Native people acquired modern things and practices, some became Christians, some farmers; they struggled with all of the problems of rapid change that U.S. imperialism and modernity brought, but they did not wish to forget who they were or where they came from. Most important, they did not wish to surrender their autonomy, their governments, and their land. Borrowing fromAfrican American studies, historians have described this period of time as the "nadir" for native peoples in the United States, the time when they were at their weakest and when U.S. society and the U.S. government were at their most ruthless in oppressing them. While it was a low point, the period also saw the groundwork laid for the twentieth-century political and cultural resurgence of native peoples in the United States. Native people never were successfully "absorbed."

BEGINNINGS

In North America but especially in the United States, the conflict with native peoples over land was construed as a grand conflict on world-historical terms between the living embodiment of savagery (Indians) and the pinnacle of civilization (white, Protestant Americans). The United States, Americans believed, was the most morally and politically developed nation in human history. Furthermore, Providence—God Himself—had ordained the conflict between savagery and civilization, which therefore could not have any other result than the triumph of Euro-American, Protestant, and by the late nineteenth century, capitalist, civilization.

Because European nations could not claim military supremacy in North America and also competed with one another for native alliance and land, they made treaties with Indian nations for trade, alliance, and land purchase. Treaties are contracts between nations, and legitimate contracts cannot be made with inferiors or incompetents; Europeans recognized native political autonomy, control of land, and government in the treaties. It is a remarkable fact of European imperialism in North America that people who regarded themselves as the pinnacle of human civilization made so many binding legal agreements with people whom they regarded as the model of the most primitive human society, whom they held to be inherently incapable of reason and moral behavior. This did not occur because of Europeans' moral superiority or goodwill, however; circumstances required it. In the nineteenth-century United States, while treaties with Indian nations were coerced and manipulated in every conceivable way in practice, these treaties still carried with them notions of not only the U.S. government's founding principles but also, particularly in the later nineteenth century, the government's moral responsibility as the most advanced and benevolent society toward its inferiors.

At the same time that they continued to make treaties with Indian nations, Europeans also began to define property and government in such a way so as to exclude native people from ever having a legitimate claim to either. Thus at virtually the same moment that they were forced to recognize the legitimacy of Indian nations on the one hand, Europeans attempted to define Indian nations out of existence theoretically on the other. By the late seventeenth century the English philosopher John Locke provided such a theory. Drawing on earlier justifications for colonizing distant lands, Locke argued that one had to engage in commercial agriculture on land to establish it as property and therefore lay a legitimate claim to it. Furthermore, Locke maintained, this particular kind of property was the origin of government itself, which existed to protect property so defined. The Indians of North America did not form governments; rather, they were "pre-political" because, Locke insisted, they were the earliest form of human society, savages who subsisted on the "spontaneous productions of Nature" rather than engaging in labor to produce a surplus for the market. Indians did not engage in agriculture as Europeans defined it; therefore they didn't have the capacity to form governments; therefore they had no real claim to the land.

This definition of property and government provides a structure for thinking about both native peoples' past and their possible future. Because native peoples were positioned as the origin of human society, in theory savages could be made civilized and therefore citizens if they were made Christians (the only true form of religious belief according to Europeans) and agriculturalists on the European commercial model. According to Europeans, the only civilized society, the only real government, was European government. The idea that Indians could be civilized and still be Indians and form their own separate national governments was inconceivable in this line of thought. Behind the narrative of the hypothetical civilization of Indians so prevalent in the late-nineteenth-century United States is the fact that Europeans sought to destroy native political entities in order to incorporate native land. Indians' hypothetical incorporation was not a form of democratic inclusion, no matter how well meaning its advocates sometimes professed themselves; it was, rather, a justification for their political erasure and the incorporation of their land under U.S. jurisdiction.

DETRIBALIZATION

In the post–Civil War period, contrary to the prevailing idea earlier in the century, Euro-Americans found that Indians were not dying out naturally, at least not as quickly as it had been supposed they would, and Euro-Americans felt that something had to be done about the "Indian problem" that mystifyingly persisted into the modern age. The solution was to detribalize native people and, as has been noted, to "absorb" them into civilized society. The U.S. government pursued detribalization through various means. It first sought to confine native peoples to reservations through treaty agreements whereby they would sell most of their land

INDIAN TERRITORY

Early in the nineteenth century, whites argued that Indians had to be "removed" from the eastern United States—for their own good—where they could live beyond white contact and be worked on by missionaries. In the 1820s, the area west of the newly admitted states of Arkansas and Missouri and east of Mexican territory was designated Indian territory. During and after the 1830s, many other eastern, northern, and midwestern tribes, or portions of tribes, were "removed" to the territory. This was in addition to tribes that historically lived in the territory, such as the Kiowas, and tribes that had been pushed west over a number of years, such as the Osages.

The first groups to removed to Indian territory were the Five Civilized Tribes of the southeastern United States—the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles. While small groups voluntarily moved west in the 1810s, most were forced to go to the territory in the 1830s. Though there were varying degrees of acculturation to Euro-American practices both among and within the tribes, many tribal leaders, particularly among the Cherokees, argued that their tribes had become "civilized" by converting to Christianity, seeking education, and encouraging farming. They did not desire to become citizens of the United States, however; on the contrary, the fact that they were civilized demonstrated that the sovereignty of the Indian nations should be inviolate. In light of this fundamental argument, what the U.S. government did to the Five Civilized Tribes in the nineteenth century puts the lie to the sanguine visions of Indian citizenship in the United States offered up by reformers.

After removal to Indian Territory, the Five Tribes reestablished their governments and legal systems, as well as printing presses and schools, providing a foundation for literacy not only in English but also in tribal languages. In addition to mission schools, the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Creeks had all established extensive public educational systems, including, among the Cherokees, college-level institutions for men and women, by the 1840s.

After Five Tribes governments supported the Confederacy during the Civil War (the Confederacy promised to recognize their soveriegnty, and some tribal people were slave-owners), the United States renegotiated its prewar treaties with the tribes as punishment. The tribes were forced to give up territory to the U.S. government, ostensibly for the resettlement of other tribes, and for the building of two railroad lines through the territory. Between 1866 and 1885, numerous reservations were created in the ceded lands of Indian territory, including those for the Cheyennes and Arapahos; Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches; Wichitas and Caddos; Potawatomis and Shawnees; Kickapoos, Iowas, Sauks and Foxes; Pawnees, Otoes and Missouris; Poncas, Tonkawas, Kaws, Osages, Peorias, Wyandots, Eastern Shawnees, Modocs, and Ottawas.

It was not until the later nineteenth century that representatives of railroad, business, and land interests were able to secure enough political support to begin the disintegration of the Five Tribes in earnest. Because of tribal leaders' resistance, the Five Tribes and the Osages were exempted from the 1887 allotment act. In 1889, however, the United States established a federal court at Muskcogee, Indian territory, a blatant extension of U.S. authority. In April 1889 a 2 million acre tract of Cherokee land was opened up to white settlement, which began with a famous land rush. Fifty thousand settlers staked claims on one day. In 1890 the United States organized the Oklahoma territory, which consisted of the land opened to white settlement and most of the reservations. In 1893 the Dawes Commission convened to acquire Indians' "consent" for the allotment of the Osage Territory and the Five Tribes; in 1898 the Curtis Act provided for that allotment. In 1905 leaders of the Five Tribes held a convention in order to write a constitution for a native-run state called Sequoyah to be admitted to the Union; Congress rejected it. In 1907 after the divestment of land from Native Americans, the state of Oklahoma was admitted to the Union, and Native people within its boundaries were made citizens. In Oklahoma, the United States succeeded—for a time—in politically evaporating the Five Civilized Tribes.

to the United States. After establishing reservations, the government sought to distribute parcels of land to individuals, thereby undermining tribal forms of government that were based on communally held land. Acts of fraud and corruption associated with the allotment process further eroded the tribal land base. The government sent Christian missionaries to native people; extended federal jurisdiction over "major crimes" (murder, manslaughter, rape, assault with intent to kill, arson, burglary, and larceny) in Indian country through the Major Crimes Act of 1885; criminalized and sought to destroy native culture; and forced native children to attend federal and mission schools, including boarding schools.

In the late 1860s and early 1870s President Ulysses S. Grant instituted a "peace policy" that officially positioned Indians as "wards" of the government who needed the federal government's help and protection. In 1869 Grant established a Board of Indian Commissioners, a group of unpaid philanthropists, to oversee the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was infamous for its corruption. He also appointed General Ely S. Parker, a Seneca and a member of his staff during the Civil War, as the first native commissioner of Indian Affairs. Parker was later hounded out of government service on charges of malfeasance that were later proved false. Grant invited church leaders to nominate Indian agents, school superintendents, and teachers, which effectively put reservations under the control of churches. This policy lasted until 1882. The Indian agents served to further undermine native forms of government and the authority of tribal leaders, as they distributed rations, goods, and lands at their discretion. Indian police forces, loyal to the agent, began to be established on reservations in the late 1870s; this had the same effect of undermining tribal governance.

In 1871 Congress ended the treaty system by establishing that any agreement with Indian tribes had to be accepted by both houses of Congress rather than just by the Senate, as is the case with treaties. Historians have pointed out, at that time and since, that the government continued to make agreements with Indian nations that required at least the appearance of their consent—not quite denying native autonomy even then. In the later part of the nineteenth century the Supreme Court held that Congress had unilateral authority over Indian people, first in United States v. Kagama (1886), which upheld the Major Crimes Act, and then in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903), in which the Court held that not only did Congress have unlimited plenary power over Indian nations but also that it had always had that power. This is called the "plenary power doctrine."

Federal Indian policy was to a great extent driven by the arguments and energies of white reformers. Helen Hunt Jackson's (1830–1885) A Century of Dishonor (1881), an extensive account of white perfidy with respect to native peoples, argued that Indians could and indeed desired to become civilized and therefore U.S. citizens. She and her supporters argued that, while the treaties should be honored, they really should not have been made in the first place, because Indians in their primitive state were not capable of forming true governments. Still, Jackson and other reformers believed that the United States should honor treaties because it was a Christian nation that should not break its promises to an inferior and defeated race, and, furthermore, that it should assiduously work to raise up that defeated race to civilization and "absorption." Like other reform groups, the highly influential Indian Rights Association was founded in 1882 by Herbert Welsh and Henry Pancoast to advocate, its members insisted, for Indian equality. Like other reformers, they argued that Indians should be completely absorbed into U.S. society as Christians, farmers, and individual property owners. Their advocacy—they even had a lobbyist in Washington, D.C.—was a principal factor in the establishment of boarding schools and the passage of the Dawes or General Allotment Act (1887), the most infamous piece of legislation directed at native people during the period.

Known as the Dawes Allotment Act for its main architect, Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes, a longtime "friend of the Indian," the legislation provided for the distribution of plots of land to individual Indians, with the "surplus" opened up to white settlement. Indians who, after a twenty-five-year-long trust period, could prove that they had become "civilized" would then be granted fee-simple title to their land and U.S. citizenship. Between 1887 and 1917 native land holdings in the West shrank from 138 million acres to 48 million. After 1907 the secretary of the interior was given authority to bypass the twenty-five-year trust period and issue title to land to individual Indians; afterward, 60 percent of Indians given such patents lost their land.

As the Bureau of Indian Affairs extended its programs and native people grew weaker, its bureaucracy and budget grew, almost doubling in size between 1881 and 1897. The first government residential boarding school was founded by Captain Richard Henry Pratt at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879; Pratt is infamous for remarking that his objective was to "kill the Indian to save the man." The schools followed the same pattern: their purpose was to divest native children of their language, culture, and practices, turn them into Christians and farmers or laborers, and thereby make them "civilized." In the case of native people, this meant preparation for a life of lower-class labor; the boys received vocational training and the girls were trained in the "domestic arts." Intellectual achievement was deemed beyond the capacity of native children. The schools gathered children of many tribes together; by the end of the nineteenth century there were twenty-five schools in fifteen states with a total enrollment of twenty thousand students, mainly in the West.

INDIANS AND U.S. CULTURE

The symbolic absorption of Indians in U.S. culture enacts the political absorption of native land, telling over and over again the story of the triumph of civilization over savagery, the destiny of the nation that God ordained, and the participation of every American in that triumph. At bottom of every one of these manifestations is the necessity of justifying white occupation of native land, of explaining it and making it right. It is often remarked that there are savages and noble savages, and if the bad Indians are the usual conglomeration of inferiority and evil, the good Indians are at least good, even if they are all too happy to recede gracefully when their appointed time comes. The sympathy so common in representations of Indians is another manifestation of absorption. While the reformers wanted to absorb Indians and their land by making them like whites, at least on the surface, primitivists and nationalists who idealized Indians as the antidote to modernity on the one hand and the location of authentic American identity on the other absorbed Indians by idealizing them and locking them in an abstract past that never really existed. Such abstract representations reiterate the naturalness of Indians' disappearance and reestablish white Americans' benevolence.

SCIENCE AND INDIANS

John Wesley Powell, the founder in 1879 of the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), sought to discover the laws of social evolution by studying primitive Indians, arguing that such study provided important information for government policymakers. Early anthropologists at the BAE included Frank Hamilton Cushing, who wrote Zuñi Fetiches (1883), A Study of PuebloPottery (1886), and Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths (1896). Cushing was fond of dressing himself as a Zuni Indian; he also published articles on Indian topics in popular magazines of the time. James Mooney was a young newspaperman before he joined the BAE in 1885; he published The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee (1891), The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (1893), The Siouan Tribes of the East (1894), Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians (1898), and The Cheyenne Indians (1907). One notable anthropologist not affiliated with the BAE was Daniel Garrison Brinton, who in 1884 became professor of ethnology and archeology at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Brinton published many papers and books, including American Hero Myths (1882) and Aboriginal American Authors and Their Productions (1882). He also edited a series of works in what he called the Library of Aboriginal American Literature, including The Maya Chronicles (1882), The roquois Book of Rites (1883), and A Migration Legend of the Creek Indians (1884). Brinton's were some of the earliest anthropological works to designate the existence of a native "literature" (and to represent it in a particular way) and then to treat it as worthy of scholarly study.

By the end of the century anthropologists moved from the government and natural history museums to new university anthropology departments. Franz Boas, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University from 1896 to 1936, led this movement. He was a practitioner of "salvage anthropology": by the late nineteenth century anthropologists believed that they were in a race against time to find and document the primitive cultures rapidly being irrevocably changed by the spread of modernity—and only primitive cultures untouched by modernity were truly authentic and therefore to be studied. In one infamous instance, anthropologists kept a native man they considered the "last of his race" in a museum as a living exhibit for several years until the man died. In 1911 Ishi, a Yaqui about fifty years old, emerged from the California wilderness, where he and his remnant tribe had been avoiding whites since the settlers' genocidal slaughter of California Indians in the 1850s. Two anthropologists, Alfred Kroeber and Thomas Waterman, brought Ishi to the University of California at Berkeley, where he lived in the university's museum while Kroeber and Waterman studied him. He died of tuberculosis in 1916.

POPULAR REPRESENTATION

One of the inescapable stock figures of Indians at this time was what has come to be called the "Vanishing American," which is essentially any representation of an Indian or Indians in which the underlying theme is their approaching, inevitable disappearance. Perhaps the best-known producer of such images, certainly today if not at the time, was the photographer and amateur ethnologist Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952). From 1907 to 1930 Curtis wrote a twenty-volume history called The North American Indian; each volume was accompanied by a folio of sepia-tinted plates, the most famous of which was published in 1904 and called "The Vanishing Race," showing a group of Navajos walking single-file into the distance, literally fading away. This was the first picture in the first volume of the series; observing that this picture "expresses so much of the thought that inspired" the project, Curtis wrote in the image's caption that what "this picture is meant to convey is that the Indians as a race, already shorn in their tribal strength and stripped of their primitive dress, are passing into the darkness of an unknown future" (n.p.). Joseph K. Dixon's book The Vanishing Race appeared in 1913, illustrated with portraits of warriors and other Indians drifting off into the sunset. The most famous representation of the Vanishing American is probably James Earl Fraser's monumental sculpture The End of the Trail, showing a defeated warrior slumped over his equally defeated horse, which was first exhibited in 1915 at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. It was immediately popular and reproduced as bookends, ashtrays, postcards, advertisements, paperweights, trinkets, prints, and on china and silverware.

Popular writers on Indians often associated themselves with the West and outdoor life. George Bird Grinnell (1849–1938) was a prolific writer of such material, publishing Indian-themed material in leading periodicals; books of "Indian stories," including Blackfoot Lodge Tales (1892), Blackfeet Indian Stories (1913), and By Cheyenne Campfires (1926); and historical works such as The Fighting Cheyennes (1915) and The Cheyenne Indians, Their History and Way of Life (1923). Frank Bird Linderman (1869–1938) published Indian Why Stories: Sparks from War Eagle's Lodgefire (1915) and then Indian Old-Man Stories: More Sparks from War Eagle's Lodgefire (1920). Indian Why Stories was printed for schools in 1918 as Indian Lodge-Fire Stories. Hamlin Garland (1860–1940) published The Book of the American Indian in 1923, with illustrations by Frederic Remington, but it consisted of stories that he had published in periodicals between 1890 and 1905. In addition to Remington, Charles M. Russell was another of the "cowboy artists" who made extensive use of Indian themes, vanishing and otherwise, in his work, which often appeared in the periodicals of the day.

Living native people were subject to the enactment of their own supposed primitivism and authenticity. Along with representatives of other "primitive" cultures around the world, native people were regular features of world's fairs—as at Chicago in 1893 and St. Louis in 1904—in living anthropological exhibits in which paying visitors could wander around their encampments and observe them living authentically. Wild West shows were also immensely popular. The originator of the form, William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody (1846–1917) put together his first Wild West extravaganza in Omaha in 1883, touring the eastern United States and eventually Europe to wide popular acclaim. Performances included trick shooting, horse races, cowboy rope tricks, and set pieces like an Indian attack on a settler cabin or on the Deadwood stagecoach or a "reenactment" of Custer's Last Stand. Cody insisted that the Wild West—he never allowed the word "show" to appear—was utterly authentic. He traveled to reservations to recruit performers; given the conditions on reservations at the time, some native people were happy to go with Cody. Sitting Bull himself spent part of 1885 on tour with the Wild West. After the Wounded Knee massacre, several of the imprisoned leaders of the Ghost Dance movement toured Europe with Cody on the suggestion of the commanding general of the army, Nelson Miles. Like American military and political leaders before him, Miles argued that exposure to the grandeur of the "white race" would cause Indians to return to the reservations chastened and complacent. Wild West shows continued to tour until the 1930s.

NATIVE WRITING AND THE "NADIR"

Aside from Indian Territory, where a substantial native readership existed for native writing, most native writers wrote for white audiences. In this situation, the fantasy world to which Buffalo Bill contributed so much was the world in which native writers and political leaders had to operate. No matter what the topic of discussion, nearly every native person who stood before a white audience in any capacity was expected to appear suitably attired as whites' idea of what an "Indian" should look like. Intellectually Indians were in many respects flying in the face of their audience's expectations. Following the arguments of native writers earlier in the nineteenth century, they believed that Indians could be farmers and Christians and therefore civilized but could continue to live in autonomous and modern Indian nations. When at the end of the century there appeared to be no stopping the U.S. government in its efforts to erase native political society, many native leaders argued for U.S. citizenship. But U.S. citizenship was never the desire of the majority of native people, and for those leaders who advocated it in the period, it represented the only means left of establishing some measure of recognition. At the same time, most who argued for U.S. citizenship did not advocate the abandonment of tribal heritage. While the Society of American Indians was founded in 1911 by "progressive" native leaders—such as Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux), Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai), and Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Sioux)—to advocate for U.S. citizenship, the organization was also highly critical of white paternalism and sought to celebrate rather than denigrate the tribal past.

Anthropology was one the few areas in which native scholars could be recognized, at least to some degree, for their expertise. J. N. B. Hewitt, a Tuscarora, was a farmer, newspaper correspondent, and proprietor of a night school for men when he received funding from the Bureau of Ethnology in 1880 to study Iroquois languages and stories; in 1886 he joined the bureau to complete work on a Tuscarora-English dictionary. Hewitt transcribed Iroquois languages and ceremonies, but he left most of his work in manuscript. Francis La Flesche, an Omaha, also worked for the BAE and the Smithsonian Institution. He was trained by and collaborated with Alice Cunningham Fletcher, a philanthropist turned anthropologist, beginning in the early 1880s, working with her on The Omaha Tribe (1911). La Flesche also published an account of his experiences at mission school called The Middle Five (1900). Franz Boas encouraged Arthur C. Parker (1881–1955), a Seneca and the grandnephew of Ely S. Parker, to study anthropology at Columbia, but Parker instead concentrated on archaeology, becoming affiliated with the New York State Museum. Parker wrote over 250 articles, mainly on Indian topics, and several books for children. He was also a founder of the Society of American Indians and editor of its journal, American Indian Magazine. Other early native anthropologists included Jesse Cornplanter (Seneca), who published Iroquois Indian Games and Dances in 1913; James R. Murie (Pawnee), who published Pawnee Indian Societies in 1914 and, with Clark Wissler, Ceremonies of the Pawnee in 1921; and William Jones (Fox), the first native university-trained anthropologist. When he could not secure funding to support his research on the Ojibwas, Jones traveled to the Philippines to study indigenous people. He was killed there by Llongot people in 1907.

Reform writers included Sarah Winnemucca (Paiute, 1844?–1891) and Susette La Flesche (Omaha, 1854–1903), the older sister of Francis La Flesche (they also had a sister, Susan, who was the first native woman physician). The daughter of a Paiute leader, Winnemucca was educated for a time in a convent and became a teacher and interpreter for the U.S. Army. Her Life among the Paiutes (1883) is the first history and autobiography written by a native woman. She lectured extensively on Indian affairs in San Francisco, Nevada, and then the East Coast, where she supported allotment and spoke in the homes of distinguished supporters like Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Greenleaf Whittier. She wrote her book while on tour and sold it at lectures. After counterattacks from government bureaucrats, Winnemucca returned to Nevada, where she lectured and established a school for Paiute children; she died in Idaho after the school closed in 1887.

The daughter of a chief who advocated adaptation to Euro-American ways, Susette La Flesche was educated at mission and boarding schools; she became involved in politics and writing at a significant moment in the Indian reform movement. In 1879, after the Poncas (who lived near the Omahas in Nebraska) were removed against their will to Indian Territory, Standing Bear, their chief, led a group back to their ancestral land. The U.S. Army arrested Standing Bear and others and they were put on trial. The court in Nebraska then declared them legally "persons" and set them free, after which Standing Bear lectured to wide acclaim in East Coast cities on the abuses of the government, on a tour organized by Thomas Tibbles, editor of the Omaha Daily Herald. La Flesche gave lectures on the tour as well and testified with Standing Bear before the U.S. Senate. She and Tibbles eventually married, and La Flesche began writing columns for the Omaha World Herald and The Independent. She also wrote short stories illustrating traditional native beliefs for the children's magazines St. Nicholas and Wide Awake.

Among northern and eastern tribes, Andrew J. Blackbird (Ottawa) published History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan: A Grammar of Their Language and Personal and Family History in 1887 and Elias Johnson (Tuscarora) published Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations in 1881. Like Winnemucca's Life among the Paiutes, these books incorporate traditional and contemporary history, ethnographic information, and elements of the author's autobiography in narratives that are generally supportive of modernization but that celebrate tribal history and culture. In contrast to Blackbird and Johnson, Simon Pokagon (Potawatomi, 1830–1899) was a celebrity among whites as an advocate for Indian causes. He published several booklets on birchbark—Red Man's Greeting (1893), The Pottawatamie Book of Genesis—Legends of the Creation of Man (1901), and Algonquin Legends of South Haven (n.d.)—as well as essays on Potawatomi culture and history. His authorship of the novel Queen of the Woods (1899) is currently questioned. A Vanishing Indian narrative with Pokagon himself as the central figure, the story concerns an Indian who becomes civilized, rejects civilization, then becomes a drunk, after which the novel becomes a temperance tract. There is a strong argument that this novel was written by the wife of his lawyer and publicist, Cyrus Engle. The novel does, however, incorporate Potawatomi words in the story and concludes with an essay on the Algonquin language.

E. Pauline Johnson (Mohawk, 1861–1913) appeared before white audiences in a stylized Indian costume only for half of her performance; in the other half she wore an evening gown. The daughter of George Henry Martin Johnson, a Mohawk chief, and Emily Susanna Howells, a cousin of the author and editor William Dean Howells, Johnson grew up on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario. She began performing her poetry in 1892, becoming well known in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States; she published her first book of poetry, The White Wampum, in 1895. A second volume, Canadian Born, appeared in 1903; Johnson then began contributing articles on Indian topics to a variety of periodicals. After retiring from performing she moved to Vancouver, where she published her versions of stories told her by the Squamish chief Joe Capilano in Legends of Vancouver (1911). Her poems were collected in Flint and Feather (1912), and, after her death in 1913, two collections of her short pieces were published: The Shagganappi, consisting of stories originally published in Boy's World, and The Moccasin-Maker, stories about both native and non-native women.

Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, 1876–1938) was born in South Dakota and attended mission school and Earlham College in Indiana, where she won some renown in oratory. After working at Carlisle Indian Industrial School for a year, an experience she writes about in "An Indian Teacher among the Indians," she left to attend music school (she was a violinist) in Boston but later had to leave because of ill health. Between 1900 and 1904 she published autobiographical articles and versions of traditional stories in periodicals such as Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and Everybody's Magazine. Frederic Remington provided illustrations for some of her articles. In 1901 she published Old Indian Legends (1901), a collection of traditional Sioux trickster stories about Iktomi, with illustrations by Angel DeCora (Ho-Chunk), who was also a teacher at Carlisle. Her articles were collected and published as American Indian Stories in 1921. After 1904, Bonnin turned her attention to lecturing, teaching, and community work on behalf of native causes, although while living in Utah, she collaborated with William Hanson, a professor at Brigham Young University, on The Sun Dance Opera, which incorporated traditional native music. She remained involved in the Society of American Indians until its demise, serving as the editor of American Indian Magazine in 1918 and 1919. In 1926, together with her husband, she founded the National Congress of American Indians, an intertribal organization that remains active today.

Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa, 1858–1939) was brought up by his traditional relatives after his father apparently died as a result of the 1862 Dakota war in Minnesota. Years later, however, he found that his father had not only survived, he had become a Christian and advocate of modernization, and when Eastman returned to his father at age fifteen he also acquired his father's outlook on life. Educated at mission school in North Dakota, Santee Normal Training School, Beloit College, Knox College, Kimball Union Academy, Dartmouth College, and Boston University, he became the first native man to become a medical doctor—although he was never able to make a living at it. While he was a government physician at Pine Ridge Agency, Eastman witnessed the effects of the Ghost Dance and the massacre at Wounded Knee; he met his wife, the supervisor of education Elaine Goodale Eastman, and left in 1893, disgusted with the corruption of the Indian Service. He thereafter worked for the Young Men's Christian Association, spent a brief period at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and in 1903, with the help of Hamlin Garland, got a job with the Indian Service assigning Christian names to Sioux people, which was supposed to help keep them from being swindled. He collected Ojibwa artifacts for the University of Pennsylvania museum, became involved in the Boy Scouts, and with his wife operated a summer camp for children. By the time he helped to found the Society for American Indians, Eastman had become a public figure, lecturing on Indian affairs, advocating reform of the Indian Service and civilization for native people.

Eastman is probably the most prolific native writer of the period. His earliest published works were mainly autobiographical and directed at juvenile audiences, emphasizing the closeness of Indians to nature and characterizing primitive Indian life as a model for American children, both of them familiar primitivist themes. Indian Boyhood (1902), his first book, collected articles previously published in St. Nicholas, a children's magazine. He next published three books of traditional stories, including Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904) that were, like Zitkala-Ša's Iktomi stories, retellings of traditional stories in an idealized, folkloric manner. Another collection of folk-tales was published as Wigwam Evenings in 1909. His work became more explicitly addressed to adults in The Soul of the Indian (1911), in which he describes his own version of Sioux spirituality that incorporates many Christian elements. He next published Indian Scout Talks (1914), which addressed the "Indian lore" aspects of youth organizations, a topic on which he published many articles in the period. Eastman's best work is probably From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916). In this book, Eastman tells the story of his experiences with the civilized world, recounting his education, the massacre at Wounded Knee, his efforts on behalf of Indian reform, and his eventual disillusionment with white society.

See alsoAmerican Indian Stories; Assimilation; Battle of the Little Bighorn; Ethnology; Folklore and Oral Traditions; Ramona; Wounded Knee

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Callahan, S. Alice. Wynema: A Child of the Forest. 1891. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

Eastman, Charles A. From the Deep Woods to Civilization. 1916. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977.

Grayson, G. W. A Creek Warrior for the Confederacy: The Autobiography of Chief G. W. Grayson. Edited and with an introduction by W. David Baird. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.

Hopkins, Sarah Winnemucca. Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims. 1883. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1994.

Johnson, E. Pauline. The Moccasin Maker. 1913. Edited and introduced by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.

La Flesche, Francis. The Middle Five. 1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978.

Littlefield, Daniel F., Jr., and James W. Parins, eds. Native American Writing in the Southeast: An Anthology, 1875–1935. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

Posey, Alexander. Chinnubbie and the Owl: Muscogee (Creek) Stories, Orations, and Oral Traditions. Edited by Matthew Wynn Sivils. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Posey, Alexander. The Fus Fixico Letters of Alexander Posey. Edited by Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. and Carol A. Petty Hunter. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.

Zitkala-Ša. American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings. Edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Secondary Works

Child, Brenda J. Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

Deloria, Philip J. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.

Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998.

Deloria, Vine, Jr. Singing for a Spirit: A Portrait of the Dakota Sioux. Santa Fe, N.M.: Clear Light, 2000.

Dippie, Brian W. The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991.

Harring, Sidney J. Crow Dog's Case: American Indian Sovereignty, Tribal Law, and United States Law in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Hoxie, Frederick E. A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Hoxie, Frederick E., ed. Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001.

Kilcup, Karen L. Native American Women's Writing c. 1800–1924. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000.

Krech, Shepard, III, and Barbara A. Hail, eds. Collecting Native America, 1870–1960. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999.

Maddox, Lucy. Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005.

Mihesuah, Devon A. Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary 1851–1909. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Moses, L. G. Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883–1933. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

Ostler, Jeffrey. The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Patterson, Michelle Wick. "'Real' Indian Songs: The Society of American Indians and the Use of Native American Culture as a Means of Reform." American Indian Quarterly 26, no. 1 (winter 2002): 44–66.

Senier, Siobhan. Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001.

Tully, James. "Rediscovering America: The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights." In his An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts, pp. 137–176. London: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Viola, Herman J. Diplomats in Buckskins: A History of Indian Delegations in Washington City. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981.

Welch, James. The Heartsong of Charging Elk. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.

Wilkins, David E. American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997.

Maureen Konkle