The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915

FOUR: Indian Sacrifice in an Age of Progress

4 indian sacrifice in an age of progress ‘‘The love of possessions is a disease among them,’’ observed Sitting Bull, seeking to distinguish the dominant from the indigenous culture and to explain America’s increasingly predacious behavior toward Indians over the course of the nineteenth century. The pillaging and slaughter that was sanctioned by an Indian removal policy before the Civil War intensified after it, as Reconstruction treaties commandeered Indian lands for railroads and white settlement. Lincoln’s promise to redress these injustices, which was echoed in the 1867 Doolittle report, confirmed the ongoing gap between rhetoric and reality in governmental dealings with Indians. The Doolittle report criticized military brutalities and the greed of reservation o≈cials but predicted the gradual displacement of the weaker race by the stronger, a theory that ignored Indian survival through centuries of warfare , epidemics, and forced migration. The passing of the Dawes Act during the Grant administration resulted in the expansion of reservations, the establishment of reservation schools, and most important, the allotment of land to individual Indian families. According to the 1886 commissioner of Indian A√airs, these measures were designed to instill ‘‘the exalting egoism of American civilization so that he will say ‘I’ instead of ‘We’ and ‘This is mine’ instead of ‘This is ours.’ ’’ But the Dawes Act directly contradicted U.S. v. Kagema, an 1886 Supreme Court decision that declared Indians wards of the nation (which remained in e√ect until the Indian Citizenship Act was passed in 1924). And the division of lands among individual families invariably resulted in tribal losses, in part because American taxation and leasing codes were so opaque, and neighboring cattlemen and farmers were pre- indian sacrifice :: 103 pared to exploit Indian missteps. Every tribe lost land this way, and for some—the Chippewa in the Great Lakes and the Shawnee of Indian Territory —the outcome was landlessness and destitution. As one Oklahoma Creek Indian complained, ‘‘Egypt had its locusts, Asiatic countries their cholera, France had its Jacobins, England its black plague, Memphis had the yellow fever . . . But it was left for unfortunate Indian territory to be aΔicted with the worst scourge of the nineteenth century, the Dawes Commission.’’∞ The diversity of Indian tribes was reflected in their di√erent responses to the daunting transformation of their circumstances; for instance, by the turn of the twentieth century, a population estimated at 1.5 million in the seventeenth century had dwindled to 237,000. Some sought spiritual solace in messianic religious movements such as the Sioux Ghost Dances, which anticipated the return of dead relatives and a lost way of life, and the sacred peyote rituals, which combined consumption of hallucinogenic cacti with a Pan-Indian politics that united adherents from various tribes. Others like the Cherokees and the Creeks chose military resistance.≤ Still another option was represented by a considerable Indian leadership, which formed the Society of American Indians in Columbus, Ohio, in 1911. Comprised of selfproclaimed full-bloods and half-bloods, mostly graduated from industrial or boarding schools, the group appealed to ‘‘the race to strike out into the duties of modern life and in performing them find every right that had escaped them before.’’≥ White and Indian authors writing about cultural conflict and the annihilation of Indian tribes in this period faced the di≈cult task of explaining, whether in political, philosophical, or religious terms, the sacrifice of a people in an age of progress.∂ Some writers, such as Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins and Charles Alexander Eastman, wrote from inside the culture in a tone of suppressed anger, detailing the lost rituals of a civilization, while bearing witness to a nation’s crimes. Eastman’s stance recalled Frederick Douglass’s ambivalent autobiography: at once appreciative of dominant cultural ideals and profoundly critical of the consistent hypocrisy that authorized their violation in the name of principle. Others, for instance, Lewis Henry Morgan and Zane Grey, wrote appreciatively from the outside, convinced that Indians o√ered an admirable social model but prepared to consign it to a heroic past. Still others, like Helen Hunt Jackson and ZitkalaS ̌a, vigorously opposed government and military policies and pled for reform in their fiction and nonfiction. This chapter o√ers biographies of major figures in American Indian a√airs between the Civil War and World War I, focusing in turn on Ely 104 :: indian sacrifice Samuel Parker, Lewis Henry...