Allotment, Jim Crow, and the State: Reconceptualizing the Privatization of Land, the Segregation of Bodies, and the Politicization of Sexuality in the Native South

Textbooks (and the professors who write and assign them) usually exclude Native people from their discussions of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era South. They routinely emphasize the rise of Jim Crow and policies designed to segregate people labeled as non-white from those categorized as white, but they typically frame this as a biracial struggle. To them, the Native experience in this era was limited to the Plains Wars, and to an allotment policy intended to integrate Native-held property into the US economy. In either case, the problems were western rather than southern. Native southerners simply were the wrong race and in the wrong place to fit the master narrative.

Emphasizing Natives' perspectives and experiences, however, forces a reconceptualization of southern history. American Indians illuminate not only the pervasive and systematic entrenchment of white supremacy but also the growth of an interventionist and patriarchal state concerned with the sexuality of its citizens. Agents of the state created and enforced segregationist and assimilationist policies in strikingly similar ways, and Native southerners challenged both in discernable patterns. Understanding the connection between them provides valuable context for what historian Susan J. Pearson calls "a new birth of regulation" following the Civil War.¹ Private lives were public business as proponents of segregationist and assimilationist policies attempted to control Native bodies and reproduction, and, as a result, access to property. After briefly summarizing extant literatures on allotment policy and sexuality and on Jim Crow and sexuality, this essay will explore four ways in which government intrusion defined Native southern life—and through them the contours of the entire region.

Between 1887 and 1934 the federal government pursued a policy of allotment that subdivided commonly-held tribal land into individually owned tracts, and dissolved recognized tribal governments for the purpose of forcibly assimilating Indians. A crucial element of that policy, albeit one scholars tended to neglect until the 1990s, focused on gendered issues.² Allotment's proponents wanted to dismantle tribal land bases by dismembering extended American Indian families, and altering gender roles and sexual mores were central components in the process. Assimilationists documented and filed, chastised and criminalized, passed regulations and heard cases about Indian sexuality with astonishing vigor. The investigative component of agents' work illuminates an intent to regulate the sexuality of allottees to facilitate the management of their property.

Such intrusion is at the root of colonization. Literary theorist Mark Rifkin explains that

the coordinated assault on native social formations that has characterized U.S. policy since its inception, conducted in the name of 'civilization,' [can] be understood as an organized effort to make heterosexuality compulsory as a key part of breaking up indigenous landholdings [and] 'detribalizing' native peoples.³

Lamentations over indigenous peoples' supposed sexual depravity were old hat by the late nineteenth century, but the willingness and ability of the state to intervene was far more pronounced than ever before. In the late 1870s moral reformers began to advocate for the curtailment of indigenous sexual agency, and for federal intervention in marital and reproductive choices. At the urging of Anglo-American organizations, especially the powerful Women's National Indian Association (WNIA), successive Commissioners of Indian Affairs recommended that Congress criminalize behaviors such as cohabitation outside of marriage, serial monogamy, and polygamy. Reformers deemed all of these practices morally objectionable and socially degenerative. Reformers also wanted Indian Service employees to register and license couples in the hopes that such documentation would inspire, and ultimately require, them to treat their marriages as permanent.⁴

The 1887 Dawes Act, which authorized allotment, lacked provisions for the criminalization of sexuality, an oversight that led to subsequent agitation on the part of reformers. Their efforts culminated in the passage of the Burke Act in 1906, which authorized a regulatory component pertaining to marriage and reproduction. Although the Dawes Act did not apply to the "Five Civilized Tribes" in Indian Territory (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole and Creek Nations), as the predominant allotment legislation it influenced the men charged with allotting Indian...