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  • Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War by C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa
  • Paul C. Rosier (bio)
Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War. By C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. 248. Cloth, $39.95.)

The title of C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa’s recent book, Crooked Paths to Allotment, conveys his belief that Indian policy reforms of the post–Civil War era followed an uneven path to mainstream federal assimilation policies such as the General Allotment Act of 1887, rather than the linear (and deterministic) trajectory asserted in prevailing historiography. Scholars of American Indian history will find the narrative a familiar one, but readers [End Page 333] less conversant with the literature on nineteenth-century Indian policies, and the key legal decisions that shaped them, will benefit from this compact analysis of the ways in which American Indian issues connected with post–Civil War state formation, civil service reform, and national politicking.

Genetin-Pilawa tracks the development of federal policies that “confine[d]” Indians “on the land and in time, politics, and the law” (32). He contests the idea that nineteenth-century American Indian policy making evolved without significant resistance, from both Indians and non-Indians. He highlights the “alternative” ideas and campaigns of two Civil War veterans, Colonel Ely S. Parker (Seneca Nation) and Thomas A. Bland, both misunderstood figures of the mid- to late nineteenth century, to identify two “constitutive moments” of the Reconstruction years that failed to derail the coercive and antidemocratic programs of “mainstream assimilationists,” most fully expressed in the Allotment Act, one of the most damaging federal Indian policies ever enacted. The story is slow to develop, as Genetin-Pilawa spends nearly a third of the book on Parker’s pre-Reconstruction-era experiences. And the distinction between alternative and mainstream is not clear at times, as the “mainstream” had yet to cohere in ideology or practice. But he succeeds in connecting local contexts to the national and in making a case that Indian issues matter in understanding U.S. history in the decades following the Civil War.

After serving General Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War, Parker served in the Grant administration as the first Native commissioner of Indian Affairs (1869–71). Genetin-Pilawa documents Parker’s efforts to fashion a “peace policy” that sanctioned feeding Indians rather than fighting them. Parker’s agenda as commissioner also emphasized creating opportunities for Native people to adjust to new reservation conditions on their terms and defended the sovereignty promised in national treaties. Even as he promoted assimilationist measures, especially classical (rather than vocational) education, Parker tried to block the efforts of “mainstream” reformers such as William Welsh of the Indian Rights Association (IRA), the most influential “friends of the Indian” organization of the late nineteenth century. The IRA, Genetin-Pilawa contends, waged an effective public relations campaign against Parker and his moderate agenda, employing to good effect racialist language and the trope of the “corrupt” administrator that dogged Grant’s presidency. Genetin-Pilawa wrestles with Parker’s mixed legacy, which includes supporting in principle the allotment policy over which battle lines were drawn beginning in the 1870s. These efforts to construct a humane Indian policy after the Civil War, according to Genetin-Pilawa, “mirrored the larger struggle for [End Page 334] power in the postwar federal government,” which “not only resulted in an ‘unfinished revolution’ for African Americans; it also presented a missed opportunity for Native communities” (98–99).

Thomas A. Bland’s attack on mandatory allotment and the IRA’s mainstream assimilation agenda represents the second “constitutive moment” in Genetin-Pilawa’s account. After serving the Union army as a surgeon, Bland promoted Populist programs such as protesting railroad monopolies and supporting the Greenback Party, but he also worked to protect Indians from East Coast capitalists intent on defrauding them of their land and assets. In 1883 Bland began using the newspaper the Council Fire to advance his agenda of helping Indians “in acquiring the benefits of civilization, and in securing their territorial and proprietary rights”; in 1885 he formed the National...

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