Numipu among the White Settlers

This article is an edited version of a manuscript archived by NARA, Pacific Coast Branch, Seattle, Washington. The manuscript was written in late 1936 and early 1937 in Leningrad, as determined by internal rhetorical language and the use of hectares as land measurement as evidence. It may have been intended for Sovetskaia Etnografia, the official Soviet professional journal for anthropologists and ethnographers. There are also references in correspondence between Archie Phinney and Franz Boas. At this time, Archie M. Phinney was completing a five-year residency as a doctoral student at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Soviet Academy of Science in Leningrad, in the Soviet Union. ¹ Earlier, in 1934, Phinney had completed writing and editing his Northwest classic, the linguistic anthropological book Nez Perce Texts. ²

In 1937 the Stalinist Great Terror began to target anthropologists for arrest, imprisonment, execution, or exile. Phinney judiciously left the Soviet Union in May and returned to the United States in July 1937. Once back he received and accepted an offer of employment from John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Phinney's new position was as a field agent of the Reorganization Division of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The field agents, all of whom were Indians, worked with Indian tribes to develop constitutional governments under the terms of the Indian Reorganization Act, or Howard-Wheeler Act, of 1934. When in 1943 the U.S. Congress refused to fund the Reorganization Division, the field agents transferred to other sections of the BIA. Phinney, after some other assignments, transferred to the superintendency of the Nez Perce Agency back in Lapwai, Idaho. He died there, stricken at his superintendent's desk by an apparent cerebral hemorrhage on October 29, 1949.

There is a legend that Phinney has been seen late at night in his office, working on unfinished tasks. The publication of "Numipu among the White Settlers" completes one of those tasks.

The Dawes Allotment Act of 1887 divested all Indian tribes in the United States of all rights of "sovereignty": "No Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty." ³

The pitiful plight of the Numipu at the end of the nineteenth century was that of a tribe rendered helpless. Their culture had been undermined and vitiated, their freedom and independence had been more than impaired, first by illegal violations, then by the crushing military blow administered by the government in the War of 1877, and later by the Dawes Act. The economic situation of the tribe had become steadily worse through the years of white encroachment on the reservation. This region, once abundant with wild game, fish, berries, and roots, had been transformed into a settled territory, dotted with white town sites and farmsteads. The Indians could no longer derive a subsistence from hunting, fishing, and gathering in a region that was no longer wild, and the economic practices of the Indians, adapted to free range, now required frequent trespassing on the individual landholdings of the whites, which was no longer tolerated. The bison herds across the Rocky Mountains in Montana had already been destroyed by the whites, and the lands occupied, in violation of a treaty of 1855 by which the Numipu had been given hunting rights in this buffalo country to extend for a period of ninety-nine years. ⁴

The Numipu lay crushed materially and spiritually. But the government had a solution to this problem of one and a half thousand Indians ⁵ —a solution readily dictated by the interests of the white settlers, who could not reconcile themselves to the fact that the legal restrictions of a reservation, imposed by the treaty of 1863, still existed. Though the terms of this treaty had been constantly violated by the whites in practice, there still remained a legal obstacle to the free settlement of the reservation. To...