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Q  Q  Q Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q 3 Raw Country and Jeffersonian Dreams THE RACIAL POLITICS OF ALLOTMENT “At first this was just raw country,” Joe Grayson told his interviewer. In 1937, the elderly white man sat in his rural home northwest of Henryetta, Oklahoma, and recounted a classic pioneer story of which he was the hero. “I came to the Indian Territory when I was fourteen years old with my parents,” in 1887. “We had two wagons with ox teams.” On those wagons they hauled the possessions they needed to make a home. The family, he remembered, crossed into the territory “on the Goodlands in the Kiamichi Mountains. We crossed several rivers, forded the Mountain Fork, crossed the Kiamichi River on a ferry.” The family went on and “passed through Talihina, Stringtown, Atoka and went on to Allen.” What was his family looking for? Grayson explained simply, “You found a place that looked as if it would make good crops. Then you built a house and barns and fences to suit your requirements.” Grayson’s story is a familiar one. It resembles that of Laura Ingalls, whose memories of her family’s little house on the prairie 150 miles northeast of the Graysons’ have fired the pioneer fantasies of millions of American children. But a discordant note disrupts Grayson’s idyll. He remembered that at first “you” (presumably a white man) could just find a fertile patch of land and build but “later you had to lease the land from the Indians. Sometimes they took money and sometimes the rent was paid by a portion of the crops.” He found himself obliged to give his listener a short lesson on Indian land law: one could sell “improvements” or crops but not 74 ■ ALLOTMENT the land itself. The indigenous presence erupts into the pioneer narrative just as indigenous law imposed itself on the Grayson family—and just as Osage men strode into the Ingalls cabin, making it clear that this was not, in fact, their home.1 Just two years before Grayson and his family trespassed across Indian Territory nations to squat on Indian land, Senator Henry Dawes narrated another interrupted idyll in an address to a group of white eastern reformers . To the Board of Indian Commissioners he recounted his recent travels to the Cherokee Nation, where “the head chief” (presumably Cherokee chief Dennis Bushyhead) had informed him that “there was not a family in that whole nation that had not a home of its own. There was not a pauper in that nation, and the nation did not owe a dollar.” Yet indigenous land use erupts into Dawes’s tale, also. Despite the solvency of the nation and its people, to Dawes, “the defect of the system was apparent.” Dawes believed in something he called progress, and he believed that, for Cherokees and other Indians as well, progress was halted “because they own their land in common.” This meant “there is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization.” Dawes said that only one change could remedy this problem: “Until this people consent to give up their lands and divide them among their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates, they will not make much progress.”2 This process, known as “allotment in severalty” (or simply “allotment”), was Dawes’s primary cause. It consisted of taking the lands of an Indian nation and turning them into private plots, each plot assigned to one individual. Dawes and like-minded reformers believed that the individualization of property would individualize Indians and unleash the progress for which he hoped. He exhorted his colleagues to transform Indian lands into private property and Indian people into property seekers. Class, region, education, and experience separated Grayson from Dawes, but much linked them as well. Both spoke as white American men. For both Grayson (a western farmer, cowhand, and oilfield worker) and Dawes (a wealthy senator from the East), that meant certain expectations about themselves, racial others, and land. For Grayson, white American manhood entailed the right to own land and even the right to take it from Indians. For Dawes, white American manhood entailed the right to decide how to transform racial others, which included changing their way of using land. Grayson talks of mountain ranges the family...

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