A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 (review)

"A Final Promise has been a very lucky book," writes Frederick E. Hoxie in his 2001 preface to the Bison Books paperback edition of a work first published in 1984. "Not only did it find an audience that has sustained it for nearly two decades, but it also caught the attention of thoughtful reviewers who have helped identify and illuminate the text's central themes" (ix). In my opinion luck had little to do with it.A Final Promise was, and remains an impressive scholarly achievement, based on deep and wide research, its arguments expressed with power and clarity. Eighteen years after publication I would still—but not unreservedly—recommend it as a major contribution to the field of Native American studies.

Hoxie, director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the history of the American Indian at the Newberry Library, Chicago, has produced a careful analysis of the ambitious campaign, intensifying in the 1880s and persisting through the 1920s, to assimilate Indian people into American society. Unlike historians such as myself and Francis Paul Prucha, however, who see much continuity in the attitudes and goals of policy reformers, educators, and concerned politicians across four decades, Hoxie argues that deep changes occurred around 1900. Until then, he believes, these "friends of the Indian" combined an ethnocentric intolerance of tribal cultures with a racially optimistic belief in the capacity of the people for complete assimilation. Allotment of tribal lands, education comparable to that received by white children, and the privileges and responsibilities of full citizenship, these would transform Indians into Americans. After 1900 in Hoxie's view—maintained in his new preface—a deepening pessimism took hold, causing many Americans to lose faith in the potential of Indians and other "backward" peoples to attain full equality with whites.

The effects of this mounting racial pessimism were complex and sometimes contradictory. Ultimately the results for Indians were devastating: escalating land losses, lowered educational expectations as government Indian schools emphasized vocational training at the expense of an academic curriculum, and political marginalization as a colonized people—citizens, to be sure, but simultaneously wards of the nation. "The optimistic expectations of the 1880s by now were long forgotten," writes Hoxie. "Assimilation no longer meant full citizenship and equality. Instead the term now implied that Indians would remain on the periphery of American society, ruled by outsiders who promised to guide them towards 'civilization'" (241).

With a wonderful sense of cultural crosscurrents, Hoxie draws on legal decisions, contemporaneous anthropology, popular writers, the representation of Indians in world fairs, such as Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1892, federal and local politics, and on regional divisions, needs, and special interests. His handling of such diverse sources and mutually-influencing constituencies is still impressive. So, in a different way, is the crude racism—sometimes masquerading as sensitivity to Indian needs—of individuals whom he strategically quotes. Indian policy and practice, he convincingly shows, are never made in a cultural vacuum. He might, however, have dwelt a little more on religion: to what extent did missionary societies, so important earlier in the nineteenth century, influence Indian policy during the decades under review? At times the text becomes tendentiously repetitious as he hammers home his major argument.

Neither Hoxie's 1977 doctoral dissertation nor the book itself, when I first read it, convinced me that such radical changes occurred in Native American experiences around 1900. Although conceding that racial pessimism did deepen and Indians continued to suffer massive loss of land, I remain unconvinced of his major claims at this later reading. Indeed, as Hoxie acknowledges in his 2001 preface, the book is a study of non-Indian politicians and policymakers; Indian responses are rarely analyzed. ForAmerican Indian Children at School, 1850-1930 (1993) I examined about one hundred Indian reminiscences of government...