"Death Beneath this Semblance of Civilization": Reading Zitkala-Sa and the Imperial Imagination of the Romantic Revival

In August of 1899, only four months before the Atlantic Monthly printed the first in a series of autobiographical stories by a Yankton Dakota woman writing under the name Zitkala-Sa, the same Bostonian periodical published an essay by Henry Dawes. The essay by the former senator from Massachusetts, titled "Have We Failed With the Indian," detailed what Dawes considered to be the successes of "our [federal] policy with the Indians," policies that had been in effect since the 1887 passage of legislation carrying the senator's name. The Dawes Act, or General Allotment Act, was established to radically reconfigure the relationship between native communities, their land, and the United States by endeavoring, in the former senator's words, to "fit the Indian for civilization and to absorb him into it" (281). As such, the act moved to dissolve communal land-holding practices, with the linked goal of dissolving tribal community, by allotting reservation land to individual landowners: "one hundred sixty acres to heads of families" (283). Moreover, the law ostensibly offered political enfranchisement, via citizenship that protected these landholdings by opening "to these Indians, as to all other citizens, the doors of all the courts," extending "to them the protection of all the laws." To facilitate this assimilation of native communities into the national body, off-reservation boarding schools proliferated around the country (based on the model of the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania) that, in Dawes's estimation, brought "results . . . of a most encouraging character" (282).

But if the effects of the allotment act were indeed as beneficial as Dawes claimed throughout his essay, then why did he need to defend the policy in the first place? Why such retrospection at century's turn? Although the usefulness of the legislation had indeed been interrogated, Dawes wasn't concerned the federal policy would be reversed. Rather, he was concerned because the consequences of such interrogation extended far beyond domestic policy, because, Dawes lamented, "the assumed 'failure' of our Indian policy is quoted in discussions of the nation toward other alien peoples" (281). Much to his vexation, an "eminent preacher . . . [recently] declared to a large congregation, 'I should rather be a Malay subject to Spain than an American Indian subject to the Indian Bureau'" (282).

Clearly this "eminent" preacher's formulation of Bureau policy struck a nerve, but this nerve, for Dawes, had nothing to do with his concern for indigenous communities in North America. Instead, Dawes was frustrated that such criticism of "our Indian policy" was being used to undermine U.S. foreign policy. Namely, U.S. imperialism. The geography of the preacher's quote illuminates this point: by 1900, the United States had transported "frontier warfare" into the Pacific following the Spanish-American War of 1898. What began as a purported effort to "liberate" the Filipinos from the tyranny of Spanish Imperialism ("Malay[s] subject to Spain") turned into an occupation of the Philippines and warfare targeting Filipino nationalists under the direction of Emilio Aguinaldo.¹

The preacher's pithy assertion, therefore, cut to the quick of American exceptionalism. This exceptionalist paradigm, as Julian Go notes, suggested that the U.S. was not "quite an empire," or at least was "a special one":

For unlike European empires, the U.S. enterprise was an exercise in effective benevolence, bringing to those whom it touched the benefits of Anglo-American civilization . . . . It was benign, a civilizing mission rather than one of the missions of conquest that ostensibly characterize the 'world's history' of imperialism.

(2)

To suggest, then, that one would rather be "a Malay subject to Spain" rather than "an American Indian subject to the Bureau" shattered this exceptionalist doctrine. Such an assertion not only implied that continental expansion was indeed imperial, it also implied that the "benevolent" policies Dawes trumpeted were an extension of imperial control. Framed in this light, the logic supporting both the Spanish-American War and U.S. occupation in the Philippines was rendered moot. Spanish tyranny in the Philippines? At least it was better than the professed U...