Indians on the Move
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Indians on the Move

Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century

Douglas K. Miller

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eBook - ePub

Indians on the Move

Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century

Douglas K. Miller

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About This Book

In 1972, the Bureau of Indian Affairs terminated its twenty-year-old Voluntary Relocation Program, which encouraged the mass migration of roughly 100, 000 Native American people from rural to urban areas. At the time the program ended, many groups--from government leaders to Red Power activists--had already classified it as a failure, and scholars have subsequently positioned the program as evidence of America's enduring settler-colonial project. But Douglas K. Miller here argues that a richer story should be told--one that recognizes Indigenous mobility in terms of its benefits and not merely its costs. In their collective refusal to accept marginality and destitution on reservations, Native Americans used the urban relocation program to take greater control of their socioeconomic circumstances. Indigenous migrants also used the financial, educational, and cultural resources they found in cities to feed new expressions of Indigenous sovereignty both off and on the reservation. The dynamic histories of everyday people at the heart of this book shed new light on the adaptability of mobile Native American communities. In the end, this is a story of shared experience across tribal lines, through which Indigenous people incorporated urban life into their ideas for Indigenous futures.

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1
The Bear and How He Went over the Mountain
Confinement and the Boarding School Generation
I do not wish to be shut up in a corral. It is bad for young men to be fed by an agent. It makes them lazy and drunken.
—Sitting Bull (Lakota, 1881)
Recalling his experiences as a child enrolled in California’s Fort Yuma Indian School during the second decade of the twentieth century, Quechan–Mojave tribal elder Lee Emerson disclosed, “If [there] were … repeated runaway[s], they’d catch them and put shackles on them, ball and chains. I always think that, perhaps, they got the idea from the territorial prison right next to us.” He was hardly being melodramatic. Such punitive measures reflected prevailing turn-of-the-century assertions that coercive assimilation into “the main stream” of America would emancipate Indians from their supposedly uncivilized cultural patterns and doomed destinies. So not only did Catholic nuns and federal authorities physically shackle young Indians to distant off-reservation boarding schools, but they also figuratively incarcerated them within a colonizing state’s relentless impositions on how and where Native people could and should belong in the now firmly entrenched United States. It is not surprising, then, that mobility, in its many forms, proved so important to the boarding school generation.1
Yet Native American social mainstreaming and spatial mobility in the early twentieth century can be appreciated less as historical innovations and more as recoveries of historical practices. While the contexts and stakes have changed over time, the urban relocation program, as large as it looms in both this book and recent Native American history, is but one stage among many in Native peoples’ longer history of engaging urban space and maneuvering within and beyond the confines of settler colonialism. Historical examples of North American Native peoples embracing mobility in anticipation of, or in response to, external pressures or internal ingenuities are so ubiquitous in scholarly studies and tribal histories that a series of examples could easily fill one volume.
There is perhaps no better example of precolonial Native American urbanization than the Mississippian city of Cahokia, which two scholars call the “great Native American metropolis.” During its twelfth-century peak, Cahokia was home to over twenty thousand Indigenous people. In the resource-rich Mississippi River valley, near its confluence with the Missouri River, Cahokia functioned as an urban center made possible and shaped by its farming and timber hinterlands, not unlike Chicago in the nineteenth century.2 Cahokia’s five square miles offered planned neighborhoods, temples, space observatories, and—most notably—a grand plaza that functioned as a downtown. The city depended on a complex labor and economic system that exhibited social and class stratification, from manual laborers, to middling skilled artisans, to academics who practiced geometry, astronomy, and calendrics, to a class of royal elites. Its trade networks reached as far north as present-day Minnesota and Wisconsin and as far south as Oklahoma and Louisiana. According to anthropologist Timothy Pauketat, Cahokia provided its inhabitants and area neighbors with peace, religion, food, friends, allies, order, and security. At its peak, the city’s central population eclipsed ten thousand, with somewhere between twenty to thirty thousand more residing in the surrounding area of satellite towns and suburban farming districts. Until the year 1800, then, when New York’s and Philadelphia’s metro populations first eclipsed the thirty thousand mark, Cahokia, to the best of scholars’ knowledge, had been the largest city in North America. By the 1350s, possibly as a result of floods and droughts related to climate change, deadly illnesses, violent internal strife, violent external threats, or some combination thereof, Cahokia’s urban Indigenous people had entirely abandoned their city for better lives somewhere else.3
Iroquoian history explains how the ancient onkwe:honwe, who lived on the turtle’s back, eventually turned to mobility as a survival strategy when “their resources were becoming depleted.” They traveled far. And their journeys to new lands in present-day upstate New York became a formative experience for the Iroquois people, as their migrations ultimately created the Six Nations we recognize today.4 Jon Parmenter’s scholarship on the Iroquois emphasizes mobility as central to their Indigeneity prior to and during the colonial encounters period. Parmenter suggests that the Iroquois people practiced extensive spatial mobility in order to build reciprocal relationships and for political, ceremonial, and economic purposes. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Iroquois people regularly traversed hundreds of miles in every direction from their homeland and, by the end of the seventeenth century, “possessed an unsurpassed level of geographical knowledge of northeastern North America.” Rather than compromise or destroy Iroquoian cultural values, Parmenter argues, mobility strengthened and spread them.5
Facing military defeat at the hands of the Iroquois Confederacy during the seventeenth century, the Wendat (Huron) people in the northeastern Great Lakes area turned to relocation as a survival strategy within a dramatically and traumatically changing world. According to historian Kathryn Magee Labelle, “The Wendat uprooted their population, packed up their material and cultural capital, and re-established themselves in far-off lands according to Wendat customs.”6 In contrast with the Wendat, who resorted to mobility in order to escape overwhelming external power, the Jicarilla Apache in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries depended on mobility from northeastern New Mexico to the Rio Grande River valley to exercise power within a self-regulating regional exchange system dating back five centuries. “The Jicarilla relinquished this position only when the foundation of their adaptation began to erode under American control and ultimately was cut short by reservation confinement,” archaeologist B. Sunday Eiselt writes.7
By the late nineteenth century, Indian nations across the continent were reeling. Reservation confinement tightened its grip, the total Indigenous population dropped to its historical nadir of roughly a quarter of a million, and scars from recent tragedies such as the Wounded Knee Massacre continued to both hurt and heal. Against this harrowing backdrop, several Indigenous communities migrated to survive, while others looked for distant resources to improve life at home. To the northwest, Columbia River Indians fashioned a tribal identity inextricably linked to movement and a collective resistance against being corralled into one externally controlled space. The river, and not a reservation, became central in their evolving criterion for tribal belonging.8 In one final example, late nineteenth-century Ojibwe men in the northern Great Lakes region embraced off-reservation work in the lumber industry to fill the economic void created by land and resource dispossession. “Although they worked in some of the most dangerous jobs, many of them found that this work afforded them a measure of separation from Indian agents, valuable skills, and even a degree of prestige,” historian Chantal Norrgard explains. “Many Ojibwes used new forms of transportation, such as trains and ships, to access resources, begin new economic ventures, invigorate their connections to territory ceded in the treaties, and sustain relationships with one another outside of reservation boundaries.”9 Ojibwe people had been migrating since as long as they could remember. There was great precedent for mobility as a survival strategy. “Migration has always been a key component in Anishinaabe adaptation strategies,” historian Melissa Meyer argues.10
Challenging the American settler state’s long project to remove Indians from the land and erase them from existence, a veritable “infinity of nations” for centuries consistently thought of themselves as peoples of the world and acted accordingly. Indeed, as historian Michael Witgen asserts, Indians have always been an essential part of modernity, at least up until the nineteenth-century era of removals, at which point “the cultural and political space for this sort of multidimensional Indianness was gone.” In the imagination of the colonizers, Witgen explains, “Indians became traditional people, socially and culturally primitive beings incapable of participating in a democratic society, or becoming part of a new nation.”11
Paradoxically, however, federal policy architects never envisioned reservations as permanent solutions to their enduring “Indian problem.” Rather, they conceived reservations as temporary laboratories within which Native people could be dispossessed of the tribal cultural and commercial patterns that were central to their Indigeneity.12 For their part, neither did most Native people value reservation confinement as a solution to their own interpretation of the “Indian problem”—a misnomer, many among them insisted. It is a grand understatement to suggest that they understood the value of land, even when the land for which they negotiated title did not fall into the category of historical homeland. But they never asked for a future existence exclusively bound within reservation limits. As journalist Robert White astutely observed, “The lands reserved for Indians in treaties with federal and state governments became their prisons, and their resulting destitution inaugurated an era of utter dependency.”13 Ultimately, while the goals Native people hoped to achieve through mobility both converged and diverged with those of federal policy makers, what remained consistent was Indians’ determination to direct their own mobility. Gripping the reins of what most outsiders assumed were forlorn futures, Native people defiantly worlded within a world that steadily closed in on them.14
________
In April 1878, Civil War veteran Richard Henry Pratt supervised the transfer of seventeen prisoners from Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida, to the Hampton Institute in Virginia, established ten years prior as an industrial training school for black freedmen. The prisoners that Pratt escorted to Hampton were not former slaves, however. Most were Kiowa and Cheyenne men who had fought against reservation confinement in Indian Territory on the southern plains. While still in Florida, Pratt developed an educational program that embraced his prisoners’ industrial and intellectual capacities, as he imagined them, while jettisoning their cultural value as Indians. If anyone at Hampton felt particularly apprehensive about the prospect of two supposedly inferior races working together, Pratt proved quick to soothe their fears. “There will be no collision between the races here,” he promised. “These Indians have come to work.”15
As a result of Pratt’s apparent success at Hampton, funding poured in from northeastern humanitarian and missionary societies. Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz then asked the school to accept forty Sioux boys and nine Sioux girls from the Dakota Territory, while the federal government offered to contribute $157 per student to help offset travel and enrollment expenses. Building on his success with the pilot program and seeking greater autonomy in his mission, Pratt departed Hampton the following year to found his own Indian training program in Pennsylvania. His new Carlisle Indian Industrial School quickly became the most prominent Indian boarding school in the nation, providing an education for such Native luminaries as physician and Indian rights activist Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai) and world-class athlete Jim Thorpe (Sac and Fox).16
Meanwhile, Pratt’s program at Hampton only grew in his absence. During Hampton’s first ten years of hosting Indian students, 320 Native boys and 147 Native girls from twenty-seven different tribes passed through its doors. The training school pursued three primary goals for its Indian students: to build character (“stimulate the mind”), learn marketable skills, and become financially self-sufficient. If successfully met, administrators assured, these goals would provide a path away from tribalism and toward “civilized” American life. School officials mostly fretted over the third goal. Because the federal government subsidized the Indian students’ education, officials decried the “loss to him of a valuable means of true education and progress.” Notwithstanding many young Native people’s inability to pay for their own education, school officials believed these young people could only truly appreciate an opportunity born from their own hard efforts; they had to want it.17
Rather than return home to the distant West for summer vacation, especially ambitious students could voluntarily, or often through coercion, participate in the school’s summer outing program. This typically occurred from June to October in Berkshire County, Massachusetts—itself a veritable crossroads of the nation’s traditional puritanical past and modern industrial present. Roughly twenty-five to thirty students advanced through the outing program each summer. Students’ wages varied, if they were remunerated at all. But some received “gifts” in the form of clothing, money, and other items. Outing-program sponsors believed that such gifts, alongside the general work experience, would help boost Indian students’ morale and intelligence.18
Hampton program architects also hoped that Indian graduates would continue to pursue opportunities away from their tribal homes. As one instructor wrote, “They are, and are encouraged to feel, free to choose their own homes where they will.” Susan La Flesche—sister of famous Indian rights advocate Susette La Flesche (Bright Eyes) and Smithsonian anthropologist Francis La Flesche—charted such a course when she advanced from Hampton to the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In a letter updating her former teachers on her progress, she discussed how graduates such as herself could serve as beacons of “civilization” for “non-progressive” Indians, and how their example could provide a “stimulus” for other Native people to “go and do likewise.”19 At times, Native elders embraced the same message. For example, a Brule Lakota man expressed his support for the Hampton Institute to the Reverend J. J. Gravatt of Philadelphia’s Indian Rights Association. “I am sick and cannot live long,” he confided. “I want my children to go to school, that they may be able to take care of themselves after I am gone.”20
Still, school officials predicted that most students would inevitably return home. They therefore tried to mold them into sociocultural “missionaries” capable of converting their fellow tribespeople. As Hampton matron Cora Folsom put it, “The idea of Hampton is that its students should be fitted for leaders of their people at just this crisis in their history, when earnest, intelligent men are so much needed.” Indeed, the first Shawnee person to take an individual land allotment was a Hampton graduate who, in Folsom’s estimation, understood the “wisdom” of owning and developing private property. After graduating from Hampton, a third La Flesche daughter, Marguerite, returned to her Omaha tr...

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