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Summary
Early reservations were large and comprised Indigenous hunting grounds.
However, this changed in the 1870s when Indigenous tribes were forced onto
smaller, controlled spaces.
By the 1880s, a movement emerged to ‘help’ Indigenous people by forcing them to assimilate. This included banning traditional practices and establishing schools to indoctrinate Indigenous children into European ways, including cutting their hair and wearing uniforms. The Dawes Act divided communal lands, forcing individuals to prove themselves as Christian farmers before allowing them to manage their own land.
At the time, many reports claimed these reforms were successful, with Indigenous communities supposedly becoming more ‘civilized’. However, it seems likely that these accounts were exaggerated to serve the interests of those administering the policies. In 1928, the Meriam Report revealed that conditions on reservations were actually horrific, with malnourishment, bad health, and failing schools.
By the 1970s, historians were portraying Indigenous people as victims of a grave
injustice. However, modern historians prefer to emphasize Indigenous agency and resilience.
Many tribes resisted or adapted to the pressures they faced.
- The government tried to force them to abandon their
communities and live individually, but they found ways round this – eg by
farming only part of their land and using the rest communally.
- The government wanted to disempower Indigenous leaders, but they found ways to influence decisions, working as judges and police, and
negotiating with the Agency.
- Economically, many tribes resisted being forced into farming – eg the Makah continued their traditional whale and seal hunting despite government opposition.
Others adapted by working in nearby towns and marketing traditional crafts.
- They also held on to their culture and religion, sometimes merging it
with Christianity or, like the Umatilla, using the 4th July to perform their
spiritual dances.
- Educationally, Boarding Schools pushed assimilation, but many children
returned to their tribes, becoming influential leaders and activists.
These stories highlight that while the Indigenous
population was subjected to oppression, discrimination and predation, they
did not meet their predicament as the hapless victims, but often found ways
to hold on to their identity.
What was Indigenous life like on the reservations?
The first official reservation in North America was founded by the British in 1756, when 200 Lenni Lenape were relocated to a 13 sq.km site in New Jersey.
The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was essentially a vast reservation, to part of
which the Indian Removal Act banished the five tribes.
However, ‘reservations’ did not begin proper until the
1850s, when the government negotiated areas which were too be reserved for each
Indigenous tribe to live in; they were huge, and basically encompassed the lands
that each tribe regarded as its sacred land/hunting grounds.
This policy was changed in the 1870s with President Grant’s ‘Peace Policy’. In 1871 the tribes were stripped of their status as independent nations, and were systematically moved to small (and increasingly smaller) reservations as wards (ie ‘children’) of the federal government.
American anthropologists such as Lewis Henry Morgan (1878) developed a theory of
civilisation which saw humankind evolving from hunter-gatherers (‘savages’) to
herders (‘barbarians’) and then to ‘civilised’ farmers; the government saw it as
their task not only to feed their Indigenous wards, but also to encourage them
to evolve into civilised farmers from what it saw as their current ‘savage’
state.
The policy failed. In 1889 a young Sioux witnessed the beef distribution to the Oglala Sioux on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The 500 longhorn cattle were released, whereupon the warriors hunted them on horseback, killed them with bows and arrows, and then the women butchered them in situ whilst the children ate the congealed blood as a treat.
The Indigenous Nations regarded the reservations as a place where they could
RETAIN their traditional way of life; it was not what white America wanted –
after Little Bighorn, there was a strong voice in the US that the Indigenous
peoples were “untameable” and that the only answer was genocide.
In 1883, a group of anthropologists and philanthropists called ‘Friends of the Indian’ was set up. Dominated by white males, it was soon mirrored by a female, more diverse, ‘Women's National Indian Association’ and a large number of local women’s clubs.
These groups did not want to preserve Indigenous ways and values, but they did
not want the Indigenous people exterminated; if they would not civilise
themselves then, like recalcitrant children, they should be made to do so.
Thus there was a concerted effort to destroy, not the people, but their way of life. After 1883, each reservation was required to repress traditional dances, polygamy, gift giving, drunkenness, and ‘medicine men’ & their “heathenish rites and customs”; a police forces and a ‘Court of Indian Offences’ was to be set up to enforce these laws. ‘Indian Boarding (and Day) Schools’ taught Indigenous children English and how to read and write; cut their hair; and made them wear ‘anglo’ uniforms. The Dawes Act replaced communal land-ownership with individual ownership of plots; to get the right to work the plot as you wanted, you had to prove that you were a good, Christian famer, and ‘full bloods’ were discriminated against in favour of ‘mixed bloods’.
Regular inspections checked that farmers were farming, and that women were
keeping their houses clean.
There is no question that the Friends of the Indian were well-intentioned, but:
”paternalistic and ethnocentric non-Native reformers ended up hurting the very Indian families they wished to help.”
Edmund Danzinger, United States Indian Policy (1992)
HISTORIOGRAPHY TO THE 1980s
At the time, reports indicated that this ‘tough-love’, ‘whitewashing’ approach was working wonders:
”During the first four years of their stay in the Indian Territory the con¬dition of the Pawnees was most miserable. The wretched condition of the Pawnees continued up to about 1884 or 1885. By then they had come to realise that it was absolutely necessary for them to go to work if the tribe was to continue to exist. They began to work; at first only a few, but gradually many. Presently a point was reached where it was no longer necessary to issue them government rations…. Nowadays by far the greater number of Pawnees wear civilized clothing, ride in wagons and send their children to the agency school. They are making rapid strides toward civilization….”
George Bird Grinnell, Patvnee Hero Stories and Folk Tales (1890)
Indigenous violence against settlers ceased almost
completely; in 1878 Indigenous perpetrators were accused of 266 depredations
causing $542,000 damage; in 1888 there were three such incidents.
Innumerable instances of a civilising effect on reservation tribes were logged. On the Pine Ridge reservation an ‘honor roll’ was kept of farmers who were making a good “effort”, and in 1921 the superintendent praised one Lakota housewife for being a “first class house-keeper”:
”Dear Madam: I wish to advise you that [the field matron] says you had your house in excellent condition, clean and everything properly arranged.... The condition of your house will be pointed out as an example or model for the other Indians to be guided by.”
It was regarded as a triumph in 1907 when one Oglala sued another tribal member for encroaching onto his plot (in absolute contrast to previous Sioux attitudes to the land). And when a drought devastated the crop on the Fort Berthold reservation in 1890, the Agent reported triumphantly:
”That they have acquired sufficient interest in farming to feel disappointed at the failure of a crop is, I think, an important point gained.”
Historians have to ask themselves how far they are prepared to believe all this, and how general the ‘improvements’ were.
It was in the interests of everyone who could read and write – OIA agents and
teachers trying to prove their effectiveness, anthropologists and Friends of the
Indian trying to validate their theories, a government wanting to save money,
even Indigenous leaders lobbying for greater support – to embellish the record
of how well the reservations were ‘civilising’ the tribes.
In 1928, the Meriam Report to the US government – the first study of Indigenous conditions since the 1850s – blew the lid off the whole deception.
It revealed a population impoverished, malnourished and in poor health; boarding
schools as “grossly inadequate”; and the Indigenous people as demoralised and
victimised.
Particularly after the publication of Dee Brown’s Bury My
Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) histories of the reservations portrayed the
Indigenous Nations as romantic environmentalists, tragic victims of a terrible
injustice.
Studying Farming on the Northern Plains, Thomas Wessel (1986) noted the failure of any reservation to achieve extensive crop farming, and concluded:
”The Indians of the northern plains were soon left without a farming economy, without cattle, without much of their land and for many without hope.”
And there were parallel cries of despair by Indigenous leaders to back this up:
"I don't want to settle. I love to roam over the prairies. There I feel free and happy, but when we settle down we grow pale and die."
Chief Satanta, Kiowa (1870)
”Your great and mighty government... leaves us with-out the promised seed, without tools for cultivating the land, without implements for harvesting our crops, without breeding animals better than ours, without the food we still lack … the government does not keep its word! And so … we are sometimes nearly starved, and go half naked, as you see us! Knowing all this, do you wonder, sir, that we have fits of desperation and think to be avenged?.”
Shoshoni Chief Washakie (1878)
”[White Americans] care nothing for the fate of the Indian, so that their own greed can be gratified.”
Choctaw spokesperson (1895)
Thus an English textbook of 1998 recorded “the destruction of Indian culture” under five headings – ‘territorial’, ‘political’, ‘economic’, ‘religious’, ‘educational’ – and summarised:
”By the mid-1870s the Indians were virtually prisoners on their reservations and, for many, conditions were bad. The reservations were usually on land that the settlers did not want, such as farm land of very poor quality, sometimes in unhealthy places. This made it very difficult for the Indians to feed themselves, and this in turn made them dependent upon government hand-outs of food. For a society based upon hunting and war, the life of a farmer dependent upon government hand-outs was demoralising.
There was no way for a warrior to gain or maintain status.
In some cases the Indians were badly treated by dishonest Indian agents. Housing monies were stolen, food rations were inadequate and medical treatment was not available. People were punished for offences without trial and individuals were sometimes murdered. Disarmed, without their horses, poorly fed and sometimes suffering from diseases such as measles, influenza and whooping cough, the Indians were unable to resist. They could no longer even hunt the buffalo as the herds had been wiped out.”
Martin & Shephard, The American West 1840-95 (1998)
THE NEW WESTERN HISTORY
By the time it was published, The American West was already
ten years out of date.
Coinciding with an Indigenous American cultural
‘renaissance’, historians from the 1980s had realised that to portray Indigenous
people only as pathetic victims was a continued form of devaluation, and was in
fact buying in to the whole ‘exceptionalist’/paternalistic Indigenous ‘failure’
narrative.
It was realised that what white Americans at the time
regarded as ‘backwardness’ and ‘failure’ was in fact passive resistance, and
that what was being touted as ‘successful assimilation’ was in fact Indigenous
individuals and groups manipulating their circumstances to their advantage.
In the 1980s and 1990s, therefore, scholars “tried to
counter the simplistic image of defeated and despondent Indians by emphasizing
the adaptability of Indian communities” (Leavelle, 1998) in such as the Grand
Ronde and Umatilla reservations in Oregon, the Crow and Cheyenne reservations in
Montana, the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, the Makah of the far
north-west, and the Quechan in California.
‘Territorial’ (Land)
One of the main obsessions of the government was to get Indigenous people to regard themselves as individuals, not as part of a community – to ‘leave the tribe’.
This was the whole point of the Dawes Act.
One way the Umatilla sidestepped this was to farm their
plot, then “as soon as the summer commences every one of them will move into
tents [to] move around from place to place”.
Allotment of the land was not imposed, but had to be negotiated, after which tribal members had to be given time to choose their plots. Much to the frustration of the government officials, tribes often managed to string this process out for years, and when the tribe was finally forced into action, a group might chose adjacent plots, farm a small part of their own plot, and then use the remainder communally.
The Umatilla stretched out discussions for five years, spent another six years
addressing amendments, and forced the final agreement to allow older
allotment-holders to lease out the land for a rent-income.
‘Political’ (Authority)
The government actively wanted to disempower the Chiefs and ‘medicine men’, and there is no doubt that this happened; it was obvious to all concerned that decision-making on the reservation lay wholly with the Agent. Whether or not this was a ‘victory’, however, is open to debate.
The authority of the chiefs had collapsed with the military defeats anyway, and
Indigenous people were generally very happy to use modern medicines – the
complaint being mainly that they were denied access to them, not that they were
being made to bypass the ‘medicine-men’.
However, in actual practice, the Indigenous population was far from voiceless or powerless. Short-staffed and underfunded, Agents employed (especially school-educated) Indigenous people as police and judges. By 1881 there were 870 Indigenous police and, by the 1890s, 93 Indigenous judges.
Indigenous leaders were often allowed – within wašíču
laws – to make
laws appropriate to the community.
Not all reservations were passive. When Pasqual,
tribal Chief of the Quechan, died in 1887, it set off a struggle for leadership
which lasted more than a decade and included murder, fraud and arson – the
successful leader, Miguel, opposed the agency at every opportunity, and
encouraged reservation members to keep their children off school and resist
allotment.
The most remarkable instance of Indigenous self-determination occurred in Montana when Cheyenne Chief Little Wolf, having escaped with some 400 followers from Indian Territory, established himself in Rosebud Creek, just 50km as the crow flies from the Little Bighorn battlefield. He declared his determination to become a farmer, joined the Army in repulsing Indigenous raid from Canada, and – when told that some of his former warriors had killed a soldier – declared: “Hang them!” Not only did the government create a new reservation especially for him, when it became so successful that Cheyenne from all over the country went to join him, actually enlarged the reservation, including removing the white Americans who had settled there.
Although unique, this example shows how far the government was prepared to go to
establish the Indigenous Peoples as peaceful, self-sufficient agriculturalists.
‘Economic’ (Work and Farming):
The Indigenous People were under immense pressure to become capitalist, and they also had to survive in a capitalist economy, but that does not mean that they compliantly did what the government wanted. When American observers noted the numbers of Indigenous plot-holders who were farming, they often failed to point out that they were only cultivating one or two acres.
And when they bemoaned the ‘incompetence’ of Indigenous farmers, they did not
consider that maybe the ‘failure’ was intentional.
On the northern Plains, on land generally unsuited to
farming but perfect for stockholding, the Oglala Sioux managed, not just to
continue herding cattle, but to increase their numbers … against massive
pressure from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to force them to stop.
In the far north-western USA, the Makah, in a community accessible only by sea, simply refused to farm, and jeered at anyone who tried to do so; instead they hunted whales, and when that faltered, seals. When, in 1889, the government confiscated the James G Swan, a schooner hunting seals, they took the government to court, and when they lost the case, simply carried on anyway – the James G Swan was confiscated again in 1896 for the same offence. When there was a downturn in the seal fur trade, the Makah fishermen sought anglo advice on modern fishing methods and made a good living from halibut. In the meantime, “their villages
. . . are in fearful condition; dirt and filth of every description is uppermost” as one inspector lamented in 1889, and they continued (in the words of James Swan): “the same breechless savages they were when I first came here in 1862”, holding onto their religion, continuing their ritual dances and beating any child who spoke in English.
When agency police disrupted their potlatches (gift-giving ceremonial feasts),
they simply transferred them to a nearby island.
The Oglala and Makah are examples, not only of the
Indigenous tribes knowing better than the Agency, they show how they could
thwart government rules for decades to maintain their way of life.
The Oglala and Sioux are examples of successful direct refusal, but other Indigenous tribes and individuals were able to adapt in other ways. When you read of Homesteaders taking jobs in town, renting out or even selling their plots, it is represented as Homesteader success. In a similar way, the men of Grande Ronde worked initially for local farmers, gaining not just the money but the skills to set up their farms, houses and barns; by 1873 they were holding an annual fair, sharing machinery, and making loans to reservation residents. The Chippewas of Michigan worked in white towns, lumber camps, sawmills, mines & railroad companies, and some ran fishing fleets on Lake Superior. The Umatilla worked as Army Scouts and reservation police; built the local railroad; as gardeners and launderesses in the nearby town; as beet- and hop-pickers … and as makers of authentic ‘Indian’ baskets and blankets and even actors in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.
Patrick Lozar (2013) regarded this as “Indian perceptions of work, land use, and
wage labor [readjusting] to shifting opportunities and constraints”.
‘Religious’ (Belief and Culture)
We have seen how the Makah managed to hold onto their
traditions and religion, and other tribes adopted different strategies to hold
onto what they could.
Many Indigenous people managed to adopt Christianity whilst
holding on to their native religion; one ??? attended the funeral of a
little girl, “dressed wholly in native garments, not an atom of civilisation
about her”; when asked, the mother explained that, whilst it did not matter on
earth, in death she wanted her daughter to go to “the Indian’s’ heaven”.
Similarly, the Umatilla proved equally ingenious in continuing tribal dances; they asked permission to join the 4th July celebrations and thereby – on a promise not to include war dances or a ghost dance – performed indigenous customs, spiritual ceremonies and several dances in full relagia in front of a white American public!
When the Umatilla Court of Offences took a strict line as regards polygamy, ‘medicine men’ and religious traditions, a number of Umatilla converted to become Presbyterian, which had a much more liberal attitude towards these issues, and were able thereby to merge traditional practices into their new faith. By contrast, when a woman named Minnie was imprisoned for polygamy, one Umatilla, a man named Clapox, led a group which broke her out of jail, then (unsuccessfully) took the Tribal Court to the US District Court! By contrast, when the Umatilla Court sentenced Cayuse Jack Weet Soot to hair-cutting as a punishment, he went to the federal court and won; the court ruled that as an allotment-holder and a citizen, he could wear his hair how he liked!
The Oglala Court on the Pine Ridge Reservation seems to have
avoided cultural and religious issues altogether – a list of cases in 1910
included: adultery 16 cases; killing cattle 3; wife beating 2; selling cattle
without a permit 13; stealing 4; school runaways 5; selling wood outside the
reservation 2; driving cattle off the reservation 2; abusing cattle 2; and
fighting 2.
Other data suggests that Indigenous society was remarkably resistant to change. A 1991 study of relationships on the Crow reservation found that, clan ties had survived, and there were still examples of clan families clustering in certain areas.
Even in 1910, the community was 98% Crow, two-thirds of whom spoke only their
tribal language.
And the US Census of 1899 recorded that only 13% of the
Indigenous population lived in permanent homes, only 28% routinely spoke
English, and only 23% could read.
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