The Indian Wars in the United States were mostly over by the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Some fighting continued of course, for example the counter-insurgency wars against the Comanche and Apache in the desert Southwest dragged on and there were still occasional flareups in the Plains, such as those that led to the Sand Creek (1864) and Wounded Knee (1890) massacres. Nevertheless, most western tribes had signed treaties with the US and had been given fairly extensive territorial grants in exchange.
By the 1880s a generation of Indians had grown up on the reservations, received a decent education at reservation schools, and experienced firsthand the degradation and poverty of reservation life. Assimilated into American culture, they began to advocate for a sweeping change in reservation policy, and their actions led fairly directly to the most devastating blow the United States ever levelled against native peoples, one that robbed them of sixty percent or more of their land and severely threatened the cultural viability of most of the western tribes: the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act.
More on the flip...
The Dawes Act, as it was known, broke up Indians' collective landholdings by granting every adult male household head 160 acres of the land that had previously held by the tribe as a whole. Single adults and orphaned minors received half that, eighty acres of land. Other minors received forty acres of land. Land not allotted to individuals was held in trust by the US government, and most of it was eventually sold off to railroads, mining companies, ranchers, or other whites. Most historians today see the Dawes Act as a central element in the near destruction of native culture in the US towards the end of the nineteenth century. Lewis Hyde writes at
onthecommons.org
Over a hundred reservations were broken up by allotment and, through the sale of "surplus" lands and other alienable holdings the Indians eventually lost eighty-six million acres, over sixty percent of the land that they had held prior to 1887.
The website nebraskastudies.org for its part concludes:
Tribal ownership, and tribes themselves, were simply to disappear. The story would be much the same across much of the West. Before the Dawes Act, some 150 million acres remained in Indian hands. Within twenty years, two-thirds of their land was gone. The reservation system was nearly destroyed.
Almost all the websites that comment on the Dawes Act include the same quotation from Henry Dawes, the Massachusetts Senator who sponsored the law. To be civilized, Dawes had written, one had to:
wear civilized clothes...cultivate the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker [Conestoga] wagons, send children to school, drink whiskey [and] own property.
In "Have We Failed the Indian," an article published some twelve years later in the Atlantic Monthly, Dawes further explained his thinking in authoring the Act. Until recently, he wrote, Indian policy had been based on the
prevailing idea ... of guardianship of an uncivilized race among us, incapable of self-support or self-restraint, over which public safety as well as the dictates of humanity required the exercise of a constant, restraining care, until it should fade out of existence in the irresistible march of civilization. It very soon became apparent that under this treatment the race did not diminish, but, by reason of protection from the slaughter of one another in wars among themselves and from diseases inseparable from savage life, it increased in number.
A change in Indian policy, therefore, became necessary:
Inasmuch as the Indian refused to fade out, but multiplied under the sheltering care of reservation life, and the reservation itself was slipping away from him, there was but one alternative: either he must be endured as a lawless savage, a constant menace to civilized life, or he must be fitted to become a part of that life and be absorbed into it. To permit him to be a roving savage was unendurable, and therefore the task of fitting him for civilized life was undertaken.
For Dawes, then, the Act grew out of his belief in the dichotomy between civilization and barbarism (articulated previously in North America by Fenimore Cooper and in South America by Domingo Sarmiento), and it reflected his belief that the only way to resolve the dichotomy was to assimilate the Indian into American culture. It was, that is, an explicit effort to commit cultural genocide. And, needless to say, it nearly succeeded.
Yet many historians believe Dawes was initially inspired by a Native American woman, by the name of Susette La Flesche. Historian Ray Ginger tells the story:
Both of her parents were métis, one grandfather being French, the other English. Her father, Joseph La Flesche, also known as Iron Eye, was the chief of the Omaha from 1853 to 1864 and continued thereafter as a leader until his death. He became a Christian, and urged that the Indian must accommodate himself to the ways of the whites. He must trade the buffalo for the plow, and accept the white man's God or die under the white man's guns. While not rejoicing in these changes, Iron Eye believed that they were inevitable -- and he thought it more useful to cooperate with the inevitable than to languish in proud but futile resistance. Educated in the white man's schools, four of his children became luminaries in white occupations.
Susette La Flesche (1854-1903), because of her lecture tours on behalf of Indian rights, was better known in the white world than were her siblings. She grew up on a reserve in eastern Nebraska, attending there a Presbyterian mission school and than [sic] a girls' seminary in New Jersey. Her prominence began in 1879 when she publicly protested the forced removal of the Poncas from their home in Nebraska to the Indian Territory. An Omaha newspaperman, Thomas Henry Tibbles, described her appearance on the platform at a large local church: "There stood the little figure, trembling, and gazing at the crowd with eyes which afterwards thrilled many audiences. They were wonderful eyes. they could smile, command, flash, plead, mourn, and play all sorts of tricks with anyone they lingered on."
When Tibbles went East to rally support, she went with him. Wearing Indian garb and using her name Inshta Theumba ("Bright Eyes"), she galvanized an audience in Boston that included Helen Hunt Jackson and Senator Henry L. Dawes. The experience helped move Mrs. Jackson to write the best-known pro-Indian tracts of the period: A Century of Dishonor (1881) and Ramona (1884). Dawes was inspired to sponsor the Severalty Act of 1887, which permitted the division of a reservation among individual Indians who could gain the rights of citizenship. Although this act, sponsored by humanitarians and relished by incipient thieves, probably did more to threaten the survival of Indians than all the crooked Indian agents who ever lived, Bright Eyes, faithful to her father's tenets of assimilation, was among its most ardent advocates.
La Flesche's role in the Dawes Act really is a cautionary tale, warning us about the dangers of good intentions. The Dawes Act was an open effort to destroy Native American culture, yet it was enthusiastically welcomed by some Native Americans who had accepted the basic assumption of American racism: that Indians were barbarous savages doomed to destruction by the superior advanced civilization of the United States.
Now that the civilation vs. barbarism dichotomy has reappeared in American culture -- this time opposing our civilization against the barbarous terrorists of the Middle East -- as Americans we really must examine how poorly it has served us in the past.