Allotment Knowledges: Grid Spaces, Home Places, and Storyscapes on the Way to Rainy Mountain

Out of the lands ceded, conveyed, transferred, relinquished and surrendered by Article I hereof, and in part consideration for the cession thereof, it is agreed by the United States that each member of said Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache tribes of Indians over the age of eighteen (18) years shall have the right to select for himself or herself one hundred and sixty (160) acres of land to be held and owned in severalty, to conform to the legal surveys in boundary.

—SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT NO. 17, JEROME AGREEMENT, 1892

Mammedaty had his own life to live, and he thought of being a farmer … He had very little choice in the matter. Under the allotment system he had too little land to raise cattle as a business, and the whites had long since begun to close in on all sides, building roads and fences, churches and towns. While many of his kinsmen gave themselves up to self-pity and despair, Mammedaty sowed cotton and wheat, melons and beans.

—N. SCOTT MOMADAY, THE NAMES, 1976

ON JANUARY 5, 1903, called "one of the blackest days in the history of the American Indian," the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Kiowa chief Lone Wolf's lawsuit against Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the U.S. secretary of the interior.¹ Lone Wolf had sued to resist an act of Congress that allowed the U.S. government to take possession of and title to 2,991,933 acres of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Plains Apache (Kiowa Apache) reservation. When signed by President McKinley on June 6, 1900, this act ratified the disputed Jerome Agreement of 1892, confined tribal members to individual allotments of land, and opened the rest of their reservation as surplus to be sold to whites in what was then called Oklahoma Territory. The dismissal of Lone Wolf's challenge had long-term effects on the economic stability of Oklahoma's Native communities. After being allotted, tribal land progressively decreased as individual Indians sold their land to raise money, were forced into fee patents that resulted in "'heavy losses' from transactions," and were swindled through predatory land sales disguised as leases.² Kiowa landholding fell from the mandated allotment of 160 acres per capita after the ratification of the Jerome Agreement to 17 acres per capita in 1934—losses that, as legal theorist Blue Clark asserts, "cast a whole people into an economic coma."³ At a larger scale, the precedent set by the Lone Wolf decision gave the U.S. Congress the unilateral "right to dispose of Indian lands without the consent of the Indians" throughout the United States. Consequently, as historian Francis Paul Prucha declares, "the treaty system, upon which the tribes in the Indian Territory had so long depended for protection, collapsed [as] Congress asserted its plenary power over Indian affairs."⁴ The complicated landscape sanctioned by Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock—an eroded, discontinuous Indigenous land base, characterized by "checkerboard" property ownership interspersed with non-Indigenous real estate—remains in place in Oklahoma and across Indian Country today.

The "long, messy, and difficult" process of allotment and the ongoing "work of Indian landowner activists and advocates" to reclaim and retain Indian land in the United States have been examined by and large from the disciplinary perspectives of policy studies, law, geography, and history.⁵ The following essay relies on this interdisciplinary scholarship in order to examine allotment through a different set of frames: textual and cultural studies. In particular, I focus on Kiowa textual responses to allotment by comparing Kiowa-Cherokee author N. Scott Momaday's canonical literary text The Way to Rainy Mountain with the "Indigital" cartography currently being theorized and practiced by the Kiowa geographer Mark Palmer.

Numerous scholars have examined The Way to Rainy Mountain since its publication in 1969; it functions as a cornerstone text for Indigenous literary studies. The book has inspired fruitful analyses of the tropes of orality and memory, of multivocal poetics, and of the formal and generic innovations made by Indigenous authors. I propose to study The Way to Rainy Mountain as a geohistoriographical...