Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War by C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa (review)

Indian law scholar, teacher, and poet Frank Pommersheim once suggested that one could study law entirely through the lens of federal Indian law and policy. The lack of such a program (or my ignorance of it if it existed) when I was intent upon earning a terminal degree was the reason I never went to law school; I knew I wouldn’t be able to stomach law school if Native America was simply the backdrop, the unfortunate impediment, to America’s exceptional birth.

Joseph Genetin-Pilawa’s recent book, Crooked Paths to Allotment, reminds me of Professor Pommersheim’s contention. Genetin-Pilawa shows how federal Indian relations have reflected and, at times, driven US policy creation in general, and state development and bureaucratization in particular.

The work is organized chronologically and covers a century’s worth of federal Indian policy development (though some of it quite cursorily). It offers a fine-grained analysis of allotment policy details and alternatives, roads not taken, and biographical insight into the persons—policy makers, politicians, and reformers—who supported forced assimilation on the one hand and (mostly unsuccessfully) defended Indian-driven reform on the other. Through fascinating biographical accounts of Ely Parker and Thomas Bland along with their contemporary supporters and adversaries, as well as organizational histories of the Board of Indian Commissioners, the Indian Rights Association, and the National Indian Defense Association, Genetin-Pilawa presents the all too human side of the United States’ drive to save face while using law, policy, and often ill-informed public sentiment to support the ongoing dispossession of Native America.

Although not a history of the Great Plains region per se, Crooked Paths explores a period that produced the ideas that shaped modern America. Foremost among those ideas was the policy that used the destruction of collective Indian land rights and traditional governance as a tool of “civilization.” Numerous Great Plains tribes are mentioned, mainly with reference to their leaders’ attempts to resist allotment policy and the cruelties of corrupt Indian agents (e.g., the Oglala Lakota, Chief Red Cloud, and federal agent Valentine McGillicuddy).

Except for a few typographical errors, one debatable statement regarding the difference between “patent in fee” and “fee simple” ownership (126), and a somewhat confusing passage regarding Bland’s and the National Indian Defense Association’s unfulfilled plans to fight allotment in the courts (154), Crooked Paths fulfills the author’s intention of bringing apparently peripheral historical figures to the center of policy studies, thereby illuminating the “contradictions and inconsistencies of nineteenth-century federal Indian policy” (5).

Drawing from the methodologies of American political development and postcolonial studies, Genetin-Pilawa ultimately creates a space generous enough to accommodate the byways traveled by individuals whose efforts on behalf of Native nations—whether successful or not—deserve our attention and our empathy. Their struggles against powerful and entrenched interests have contemporary analogies whose own complexities become slightly more comprehensible when one considers not only how we got here from there, but also where we might have ended up had we taken a different route.