The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native Americans and Whites in the Progressive Era

Chapter II: Persistent Peoples: Native American Social and Cultural Continuity

C h a p t e r I I Persistent Peoples Native American Social and Cultural Continuity D espite their overwhelming confidence, the Christian reformers who provided the ideological basis for the vanishing policy undoubtedly expected the greatest resistance to assimilation to come from the more traditional members of tribal societies. Chiefs like Sitting Bull and Red Cloud of the Lakota, or Lone Wolf of the Kiowa, who had been brought up in their own cultures and with their own particular sense of peoplehood, were not going to overthrow their ancient heritages overnight. Logically, tribal allegiance would be stronger in older Native Americans because they had known independence firsthand in the days before reservations and allotments. As one United States agent wrote in reference to the Lakota: The old “fogies” or “chiefs,” who look to their supremacy and control over the people, fearful of losing it, discourage and advise the people to continue in the old rut. It is a contest between the old stagers and the young and progressive.1 Unfortunately for the reformers, Native American resistance to the vanishing policy was much more than a contest between the old and the young. Not only did Native Americans resist the vanishing policy, but also, and perhaps more importantly, their cultures proved remarkably resilient. The resiliency of peoplehood does not necessarily lie in the fact that it possesses the four aspects of place, sacred history, ceremonial cycle, and language, but in the intricacy with which these aspects are connected. Simply put, without all four elements in place there would be no order in the world.To a particular people, the loss of *final holm pages 5/18/05 4:29 PM Page 23 even one of these elements spelled the loss of the other three and, consequently , their eventual extinction. Native Americans fully realized that whites were working toward that end, however, and they fought against it with tenacity, subtlety, and a remarkable amount of understanding of just how and why the whites did the things they did. By , certainly, most Native Americans understood that what the whites wanted more than anything else was Indian land. This idea was very likely axiomatic among most tribes. What that self-evident notion meant to Native people was that the whites were committed to extinguishing not simply the aboriginal title to the land but also each tribal identity. In his  book entitled Political Organization of Native North Americans, Ernest L. Schusky succinctly captured the relationship between place, religion, history, and being a people in his introduction : The Sioux or Lakota . . . often spoke of the disappearance of their people. When I answered that census figures showed their population increasing, they countered that parts of their reservations were continually being lost. They concluded there could be no more Indians when there was no more Indian land. Several older men told me that the original Sacred Pipe [the focus of the Lakota religion ] given the Lakota in the Beginning was getting smaller. The Pipe shrank with the loss of land. When the land and Pipe disappeared , the Lakota would be gone. Discussions of land, and especially its loss, were cast in emotional tones. I have heard similar tones among Iroquois, in the Southwest, and in Alaska when land was an issue. For many Native Americans, an Indian identity is intertwined with rights to land.2 What can be said in  about this linkage between particular peoples and particular territories can equally be said of Native Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. For Native Americans in that period of time, it was not simply a matter of choice. Giving up the land meant the death of the tribal relationship with the spirit world, the disappearance of entire belief and value systems, and the loss of all tribal knowledge. The notion of universal order would be extinguished along with the death of language and its connection with landscape. Native Americans at the end of the nineteenth century were also cognizant of the fact that whites were not above using force to attain a — The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs — — 24 — *final holm pages 5/18/05 4:29 PM Page 24 political or economic goal. During the whole of the nineteenth century , nearly every tribe within the territorial limits of the United States had either been at war with the Americans or had been subjected to removal from their homelands, often at gunpoint. When...