An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (25 page)

During the final phase of military conquest of the continent, surviving Indigenous refugees were deposited in Indian Territory, piled on top of each other in smaller and smaller reservations. In 1883, the first of several conferences were held in Mohonk, New York, of a group of influential and wealthy advocates of the “manifest destiny” policy. These self-styled “friends of the Indians” developed a policy of assimilation soon formulated into an act of Congress written by one of their members, Senator Henry Dawes: the General Allotment Act of 1887. Arguing for allotment of collectively held Indigenous lands, Dawes said: “The defect of the [reservation] system was apparent.
It is [socialist] Henry George's system and under that there is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbors. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization. Till this people will consent to give up their lands, and divide among their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates they will not make much more progress.” Although allotment did not create the desired selfishness, it did reduce the overall Indigenous land base by half and furthered both Indigenous impoverishment and US control. In 1889, a part of Indian Territory the federal government called the Unassigned Lands, left over after allotment, was opened to settler homesteading, triggering the “Oklahoma Run.”

Oil had been discovered in Indian Territory, but the Dawes Allotment Act could not be applied to the five Indigenous nations removed from the South, because their territories were not technically reservations, rather sovereign nations. In contradiction to the terms of the removal treaties, Congress passed the Curtis Act in 1898, which unilaterally deposed the sovereignty of those nations and mandated allotment of their lands. Indigenous territories were larger than the sum of 160-acre allotments, so the remaining land after distribution was declared surplus and opened to homesteading.

Allotment did not proceed in Indian Territory without fierce resistance. Cherokee traditionalist Redbird Smith rallied his brethren to revive the Keetoowah secret society. Besides direct action, they also sent lawyers to argue before Congress. When they were overridden, they formed a community in the Cookson Hills, refusing to participate in privatization. Similarly, the Muskogee Creeks resisted, led by Chitto Harjo, who was lovingly nicknamed Crazy Snake. He led in the founding of an alternate government, with its capital a settlement they called Hickory Ground. More than five thousand Muskogees were involved. Captured and jailed, when freed Harjo led his people into the woods and carried on the fight for another decade. He was shot by federal troops in 1912, but the legacy of the Crazy Snake resistance remains a strong force in eastern Oklahoma. Muskogee historian Donald Fixico describes a contemporary enclave: “There is a small Creek town in Oklahoma which lies within the Creek Nation. The name of this town is Thlopthlocco. Thlopthlocco is a small independent community which operates almost
independently. They are not very much dependent on the federal government, nor are they dependent on the Creek Nation. So they're kind of a renegade group.”
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In 1907, Indian Territory was dissolved and the state of Oklahoma entered the Union. Under the Dawes and Curtis Acts, privatization of Indigenous territories was imposed on half of all federal reservations, with a loss of three-fourths of the Indigenous land base that still existed after decades of army attacks and wanton land grabs. Allotment continued until 1934, when it was halted by the Indian Reorganization Act, but the land taken was never restored and its former owners were never compensated for their losses, leaving all the Indigenous people of Oklahoma (except the Osage Nation) without effective collective territories and many families with no land at all.
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The Hopi Nation resisted allotment with partial success. In 1894, they petitioned the federal government with a letter signed by every leader and chief of the Hopi villages:

To the Washington Chiefs:

During the last two years strangers have looked over our land with spy-glasses and made marks upon it, and we know but little of what it means. As we believe that you have no wish to disturb our Possessions we want to tell you something about this Hopi land.

None of us were asked that it should be measured into separate lots, and given to individuals for they would cause confusion.

The family, the dwelling house and the field are inseparable, because the woman is the heart of these, and they rest with her. Among us the family traces its kin from the mother, hence all its possessions are hers. The man builds the house but the woman is the owner, because she repairs and preserves it; the man cultivates the field, but he renders its harvest into the woman's keeping, because upon her it rests to prepare the food, and the surplus of stores for barter depends upon her thrift.

A man plants the fields of his wife, and the fields assigned
to the children she bears, and informally he calls them his, although in fact they are not. Even of the field which he inherits from his mother, its harvests he may dispose of at will, but the field itself he may not.
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The petition continues, explaining the matriarchal communal society and why dividing it up for private ownership would be unthinkable. Washington authorities never replied and the government continued to carve up the lands, finally giving up because of Hopi resistance. In the heart of New Mexico, the nineteen Indigenous city-states of the Pueblo Indians organized resistance under US occupation using the legal system as a means of survival, as they had under Spanish colonialism and in their relationship with the republic of Mexico. In the decades after they had lost their autonomous political status under Mexico and were counted as former Mexican citizens under US law, both Hispanos and Anglo squatters encroached upon the Pueblos' ancestral lands. The only avenue for the Pueblos was to use the US court of private land claims. The following report reflects their status in the eyes of the Anglo-American judiciary:

Occasionally the court room at Santa Fe would be enlivened by a squad of Indians who had journeyed thither from their distant Pueblos as witnesses for their grant. These delegations were usually headed by the governor of their tribe, who exhibited great pride in striding up to the witness stand and being sworn on the holy cross; wearing a badge on his breast, a broad red sash round his waist, and clad in a white shirt, the full tail of which hung about his Antarctic zone like the skirt of a ballet dancer, and underneath which depended his baggy white muslin trousers, a la Chinese washee-washee. The grave and imperturbable bow which the governor gave to the judges on the bench, in recognition of their equality with himself as official dignitaries, arrayed in that grotesque fashion, was enough to evoke a hilarious bray from a dead burro.
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Without redress for their collective land rights under the claims
court, the Pueblos had no choice but to seek federal Indian trust status. After they lost in their first attempt, finally in 1913 the US Supreme Court reversed the earlier decision and declared the Pueblos wards of the federal government with protected trust status, stating: “They are essentially a simple, uninformed, inferior people.”
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At the beginning of the twentieth century, sculptor James Earle Fraser unveiled the monumental and iconic sculpture
The End of the Trail
, which he had created exclusively for the triumphal 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, California. The image of the near naked, exhausted, dying Indian mounted on his equally exhausted horse proclaimed the final solution, the elimination of the Indigenous peoples of the continent. The following year, Ishi, the California Yani who had been held captive for five years by anthropologists who studied him, died and was proclaimed “the last Indian.” Dozens of other popular images of “the vanishing Indian” were displayed during this period. The film industry soon kicked in, and Indians were killed over and over on screens viewed by millions of children, including Indian girls and boys.

With utter military triumph on the continent, the United States then set out to dominate the world, but the Indigenous peoples remained and persisted as the “American Century” proceeded.

NINE

There is one feature in the expansion of the peoples of white, or European, blood during the past four centuries which should never be lost sight of, especially by those who denounce such expansion on moral grounds. On the whole, the movement has been fraught with lasting benefit to most of the peoples already dwelling in the lands over which the expansion took place
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—Theodore Roosevelt, “The Expansion of the White Races,” 1909

I did not know then how much was ended. 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. It was a beautiful dream … the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead
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—Black Elk, 1930, on the massacre at Wounded Knee

Although US imperialism abroad might seem at first to fall outside the scope of this book, it's important to recognize that the same methods and strategies that were employed with the Indigenous peoples on the continent were mirrored abroad. While the Indigenous Americans were being brutally colonized, eliminated, relocated, and killed, the United States from its beginning was also pursuing overseas dominance. Between 1798 and 1827, the United States intervened militarily twenty-three times from Cuba to Tripoli (Libya) to Greece. There were seventy-one overseas interventions between
1831 and 1896, on all continents, and the United States dominated most of Latin America economically, some countries militarily. The forty interventions and occupations between 1898 and 1919 were conducted with even more military heft but using the same methods and sometimes the same personnel.

US colonies established during 1898–1919 include Hawai‘i (formerly called the Sandwich Islands), Alaska, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, the Marshall Islands, and Northern Mariana. Most of these, and dozens more islands depopulated in the Pacific and Indian Oceans and the Caribbean for military bases and bomb testing, remain colonies (called “territories” and “common-wealths”) in the twenty-first century.
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One of the first outspoken proponents of transoceanic imperialism was former abolitionist William H. Seward who was Lincoln's secretary of state and who considered it the destiny of the United States to dominate the Pacific Ocean. Seward did everything possible to fulfill that perceived destiny, including arranging the purchase of Alaska in 1867. In early 1874, the United States began military control of Hawai‘i, and in 1898 it annexed the islands after overthrowing the Hawai‘ian queen, Liliuokalani. Following post–World War II ascendancy to statehood, Indigenous Hawai‘ians and Alaskan Natives were brought under similar US colonial rule as Native Americans.
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Overseas ventures gained increasingly exuberant public support in the late nineteenth century. In the best-selling book
Our Country
(1885) the Reverend Josiah Strong of the American Home Missionary Society argued that the United States had inherited the mantle of Anglo-Saxonism and, as a superior race, had a divine responsibility to control the world. By 1914 there were six thousand US Protestant missionaries in China and thousands of others in every other part of the non-European world, and they remained, as from the early seventeenth century, ensconced in Native American communities.

The United States built the naval “Great White Fleet” and expanded
the army from twenty-five thousand to nearly three hundred thousand men by the time it invaded and occupied Cuba, undermining the ongoing independence movement against Spain there. While US troops were headed to Havana Harbor in 1898, Admiral George Dewey led the US Navy to intervene in the Philippines—purportedly to assist a force of thirty thousand indigenous Filipino rebels who had won and declared their independence from Spain. Dewey referred to the Filipinos as “the Indians” and vowed to “enter the city [Manila] and keep the Indians out.”
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It took the United States three more years to crush the Filipino “Indian” resistance to US occupation, the army using counterinsurgency techniques practiced against the Indigenous nations of the North American continent, including new forms of torture such as water-boarding, and under many of the same army commanders. Twenty-six of the thirty US generals in the Philippines had been officers in the “Indian wars.”
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Major General Nelson A. Miles, who had commanded the army in campaigns against Indigenous peoples, was put in general command of the army in the Philippines war.

The continuity between invading and occupying sovereign Indigenous nations in order to achieve continental control in North America and employing the same tactics overseas to achieve global control is key to understanding the future of the United States in the world. The military provided that continuity. As a colonel in the 1870s, Nelson Miles had been in charge of pursuing every last Sioux and herding them onto reservations guarded by troops or recently trained Indian police. The reservations were not safe havens for the incarcerated. Struck By the Ree told of multiple horrors of daily life on the Yankton Sioux Reservation, which was not out of the ordinary:

Another time when General Sully came up he passed through the middle of our field, turned all his cattle and stock into our corn and destroyed the whole of it.… The soldiers set fire to the prairie and burnt up four of our lodges and all there was in them.… The soldiers are very drunken and come to our place—they have arms and guns; they run after our women and fire into our houses and lodges; one soldier came along
and wanted one of our young men to drink, but he would not, and turned to go away, and the soldier shot at him. Before the soldiers came along we had good health; but once the soldiers come along they go to my squaws and want to sleep with them, and the squaws being hungry will sleep with them in order to get something to eat, and will get a bad disease, and then the squaws turn to their husbands and give them the bad disease.
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