their reservations as herein defined, but yet reserve the right to hunt on any lands north of North Platte, and on the Republican Fork of the Smoky Hill river, so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase. And they, the said Indians, further expressly agree: 1st. That they will withdraw all opposition to the construction of the railroads now being built on the plains. 2d. That they will permit the peaceful construction of any railroad not passing over their reservation as herein defined. 3d. That they will not attack any persons at home, or travelling, nor molest or disturb any wagon trains, coaches, mules, or cattle belonging to the people of the United S tates, or to persons friendly therewith.

If any individual belonging to said tribes of Indians, or legally incorporated with them, being the head of a family, shall desire to commence farming, he shall have the privilege to select, in the presence and with the assistance of the agent then in charge, a tract of land within said reservation, not exceeding three hundred and twenty acres in extent, which tract, when so selected, certified, and recorded in the "Land Book" as herein directed, shall cease to be held in common, but the same may be occupied and held in the exclusive possession of the person selecting it, and of his family, so long as he or they may continue to cultivate it. Any person over eighteen years of age, not being the head of a family, may in like manner select and cause to be certified to him or her, for purposes of cultivation, a quantity of land, not exceeding eighty acres in extent, and thereupon be entitled to the exclusive possession of the same as above directed.

The United States agrees, at its own proper expense, to construct, at some place on the Missouri river, near the centre of said reservation where timber and water may be convenient, the following buildings, to wit, a warehouse, a store-room for the use of the agent in storing goods belonging to the Indians, to cost not less than $2,500; an agency building, for the residence of the agent, to cost not exceeding $3,000; a residence for the physician, to cost not more than $3,000; and five other buildings, for a carpenter, farmer, blacksmith, miller, and engineer-each to cost not exceeding $2,000; also, a school-house, or mission building, so soon as a sufficient number of children can be induced by the agent to attend school, which shall not cost exceeding $5,000.

, they often asserted that issues of environmental stewardship were related to the longer history of the damage that the US had done to Native sovereignty

For example, in 1966, the Kinzua Dam flooded thousands of acres in northwestern Pennsylvania and southwestern New York. The dam was constructed by the US Army Corps of Engineers to provide flood control and low-water control on the Allegheny River for the communities in the Allegheny Valley and the city of Pittsburgh. As a result of the decision to build the Kinzua Dam, over 9,000 acres of the Seneca Nation’s habitable land, ancestral homes, farms, community centers, and burial plots, hunting and fishing grounds, were submerged underwater. In the process, the federal government abrogated the Canandaigua Treaty of 1794, one of the nation’s oldest treaties, and coerced nearly 700 Senecas to move to a new housing development. 

“treacherous” and “fanatical” Ghost Dancers had attacked unsuspecting troops. They disavowed any responsibility for the deaths of women and children. In fact, they bestowed twenty medals of honor onto the Seventh Cavalry. They also erected a monument in 1893 at Fort Riley, Kansas, in memory of the soldiers killed at Wounded Knee. 

“But after the soldiers marched away from their dirty work, a heavy snow began to fall. The wind came up in the night. There was a big blizzard, and it grew very cold. The snow drifted deep in the crooked gulch, and it was one long grave of butchered women and children and babies, who had never done any harm and were only trying to run away.”

. The Seventh Cavalry had been dispatched because of non-Native fears about the Ghost Dance. They surrounded the Lakotas and confiscated their weapons. A shot was fired, causing chaos. Native men tried to retrieve their weapons as soldiers opened fire on the encampment.

the US Army sent additional troops, built new forts, and took control of the reservations.

In 1874, the New York Times published an article which depicted American frustrations at the resistance of the “hostile” Lakotas: “…multitudes of Northern Indians, variously estimated at from 10,000 to 15,000 in number, who come there in the Winter to avail themselves of the Government rations dispensed at those agencies. These Indians are turbulent and unruly, and combined with 11,000 to 12,000 Indians who properly belong to these agencies, give a vast amount of trouble to the agents, and utterly defy all attempts to count them, with a view of issuing only the lawful number of rations.”

The Great Sioux Reservation would encompass 25 million acres, including all of western South Dakota, and smaller pieces of Nebraska and North Dakota. In addition, the treaty specified that additional parts of “unceded territory” in Nebraska, North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming would be areas where Lakotas were free to travel and hunt. 

Through these intertwined forces, the colonial process has made the Mineral Estate into another hazardous entanglement. The hidden ties to oil corporations, the fostering of divisive internal politics, privilege, status, U.S. guardianship, and the fear of losing the Mineral Estate were all still very much present during the 2004–6 Osage reform process.

In 1917, the Osage Tribal Council (otc) complained that Superintendent George Wright was “more greatly concerned about and . . . favorable to the inter-ests of big oil companies and men of large financial means and political influence than . . . to the interests of the Osage people.”13 The otc went on to argue that Wright’s agency was spending Osage money needlessly

Rather than buying freedom, Osage wealth led to deep entanglements. In addition to the introduction of the oil lobby into Osage Nation affairs and the arrival of many non-Osage in search of Osage wealth, the Mineral Estate also increased the role of the U.S. government in Osage affairs. From the beginning of the oil production on the reservation, the oIaoverrode Osage decisions and created policies that went against Osage desires and interests. In 1921, the U.S. Congress went so far as to pass a law that “non-competent” Osage, generally those listed as having over one-half Indian blood, could have access to only $4,000 of their annui-tant payments per year. This was justified as an attempt to obstruct Osage consumption patterns and the flagrant fraud occurring throughout the reservation. Both of these justifications were themselves deeply colonial.

Mineral Estate has created a deep divide between Osage “haves” and “have-nots.” Osage descendants born after July 1, 1907, were not only landless and denied any voice in national politics but were also excluded from the proceeds of the communally owned Mineral Estate, which was distributed equally among all those listed on the 1906 roll. Tying Osage citizenship to the Mineral Estate created high tensions among Osage descendants, thwarted earlier attempts at reorganization, and created many obstacles during the 2004–6 reform process

The story of Osage oil, a tale of wealth and prosperity, is also a classic tale of colonization. Oil production on Osage land began at the end of the nineteenth century, with a blanket lease to the entire reservation going to Kansas railroad man Henry Foster and his brother Edwin in 1896.

A 9 Th U ·t d St t t · t -·t bl t h Agents to value im·RTICLE . e Ill e a es agree o appom su1 a e agen s w o provements made by shall make a just and fair valuation of all such improvements now in the Cherokee. the possession of the Cherokees as add any value to the lands; and also of the ferries owned by them, according to their net income; and such improvements and ferries from which they have been dispossessed in a lawless manner or under any existing laws of the State where the same may be situated

Missionary reserva-And whereas by the several treaties between the United States and tionstoJ:>epaid for. h O I d" h U ' d H M" · · t e sage n 1ans t e mon an armony . 1ss10nary reservat10ns which were established for their benefit are now situated within the country ceded by them to the United States; the former being situated in the Cherokee cou

hall be held by the United States. But should the United States abandon said post and have no further use for the same it shall revert to the Cherokee nation. The United States shall always have the right to make and establish such Right to establish post and military roads and forts in any part of the Cherokee country,

the n1te. d Sta es a t e lands owne d l d or possessed b y t hemall theirlands east c a1me the Mississippi. east o:f the Mississippi river, and hereby release all their claims upon the United States for spoliations of every kind

February 1835 stipulate and agree with the Government of the United States to submit to the Senate to fix the amount which should be allowed the Cherokees for their claims and for a cession of their lands east of the Mississippi river, and did agree to abide by the award of the Senate of the United States themselves and to recommend the same to their people for their final determination

his makes it difficult for Native advocates to convey just how much most Native people are struggling, as they remain some of the poorest in the United States. In fact, although Native income growth is growing, it will still take decades for Native people to close their income gap with the average American.

Per capita payments are a topic of controversy among non-Natives as well as Natives. Outsiders often want to know how much Native people make but many tribes don’t make the number public for a reason—they resent the question even being asked. We don’t often ask each other how much money we make and exactly how we make it as individuals—why does it matter? Why do we want to know

However, the power of tribes to sue states was ultimately ruled unconstitutional in 1996.

Some states refused to agree to tribal government requests for compact negotiation,

Seminoles were facing severe poverty on their six reservations in South Florida. When they opened the bingo hall, they did so in the context of the larger trend in the late 1970s in Indian Country, where tribes were trying to establish forms of economic development and engage in self-determination. They decided that gaming was something they could establish and run on their own reservations, and didn’t ask for federal approval or state approval, they argued that it was in their sphere of authority. [19]

As Native people won cases of land claims and fishing rights, their opponents began to challenge the association of Native people with poverty—despite the fact that most Native people remained very poor. A common theme emerged in news coverage that Native people were rich and were playing on Americans’ sympathies about their poverty. Some pronounced Native peoples’ pursuit of economic interests to be greedy.

if Maine’s Indian case has merit, then…no land in any state in the country is safe

The idea was based on the notion of “opportunity theory.” Sociologists Lloyd Ohlin and Richard Cloward had proposed that poverty, juvenile delinquency, and urban unrest stemmed from a lack of opportunity that could be remedied by redirecting young people’s energy away from criminal activities and toward projects to enhance community life.

One of the methods the federal government used in order to coerce removal was financial or economic pressure,

It was the influx of southern, white racists into Oklahoma after statehood that forced the Cherokees to adopt a very rabid form of racism that was imported. It was not indigenous to our people. You know, the first law passed in the state of Oklahoma was segregation of railcars

when you look at the paper-work, you find that the Freedmen are inextricably intertwined in the Cherokee Nation. What we have done, we have basically cut off an arm of our nation, and I believe that in so doing we face the possibility of a national hemorrhage, because once you start chopping pieces of yourself away, what part is next?

Well, the basic premise of tribal sovereignty is the authority to determine who you are, who constitutes the citizens of your nation. The problem that we face in this instance is that that determination is being made on a racial line. The rolls that were made of the Cherokees that we use to determine our citizen-ship were made in an era of rabid racism in the United States, 1902, and so the fact that persons of African ancestry were put on a separate roll in 1902 should not exclude them from citizenship today, and that’s exactly what’s happening

David Cornsilk on Freedmen Citizenship Rights at Cherokee 79Thus began a long legal battle by the Freedmen descendants and some Chero-kee citizens to be re- enfranchised

Prior to this Dawes census, the previous census of the tribe had noted both the Native and the African ancestry of the Freedmen and counted those of mixed ancestry as Cherokee. However, under the new census, census takers reclassified those who looked black (or had known African ancestry) as Freedmen, without noting their Indian ancestry. Nonetheless, whether classified as Indians or Freedmen, they were considered citizens of the Cherokee Nation under the 1866 treaty

someone could be classified as “full blood” or “mixed blood” based on outward appearance, language, level of assimilation, etc. Blood quantum is wrapped up in ideas about Native people disappearing—ultimately, their fraction would be so low that they would no longer be able to be “Indian.”As we discussed in Week 4, race played into how officials determined who should be enrolled in tribes in Indian Territory and who would end up on “Freedmen’s rolls.” In that module, we looked at how Dawes commissioners made judgements about peoples’ amount of Native “blood” based on outward appearance. Their categorizations did not match up with the history of intermarriage between Native nations, and between Native people and Black people. 

“Similarly, these descendants argue that the post–Civil War Treaty of 1866, the ties of kin relationships, a shared cultural past, and a moral code that recognizes the human rights abuse of slavery should guarantee their place in the nation. Some Cherokee citizens support this cause; others see the issue through a racial lens and feel that these descendants are “black” rather than “Indian” and therefore not entitled to hard-won resources distributed by tribal governments; some also feel that the descendants’ appeal to the United States government for a remedy undermines tribal sovereignty and the right of the Cherokee Nation to determine who is Cherokee.”

The Nationalist group wanted no treaty with the Confederates. They argued that it had been Southerners, not Northerners who had carried out Indian removal, and they had done so with the help of the members of the pro-slavery Blue Lodge. Principal Chief John Ross, who had fought hard against removal, was caught in the middle—he was a mixed-race Cherokee who owned a hundred slaves. But his nationalist supporters did not want a treaty with the Confederates. He proposed that the Cherokee Nation should remain neutral. However, when his supporters fled to Kansas to join Union forces mobilizing there, and news came of Union defeats at Bull Run and nearby in Missouri, Ross ended up signing the treaty.

For example, historian Claudio Saunt writes in his history of the Creeks, A New Order of Things, that before the American Revolution, the Creeks had adopted runaway slaves into the tribe. The formerly enslaved people had been formally adopted as tribal members and put down roots within the tribe. However, as the deerskin market began to decline in the Southeast, many Creek hunters turned to the traffic in slaves to meet their needs for valuable goods. Others began to establish plantations.

Thus, Washington’s government agents committed the federal government to provide the tribes with livestock, agricultural implements, and instruction on how to farm. This would ensure that eventually, Native people would be assimilated into American society.

STARVATION WITHOUT ✓f / v\u REPRESEN

one practically nothina: C' to improve the Reservation which it holds in guardianship and trust. The average U. S. citi-zen receives from the Federal government around $300 per year in payments or services; the Navaho, only $84. It is going to take man7 years and much money for the Navajo Reser~ vation to catch up on facilities which are !like,,. as a ·matt.er ot courae by the rest of the,United ·I States. Through neglect, we have let the Reser-vation become America'• biggest slum.

their desperately needed small hospitals have priatlons. Out of 24,000 N~vaho children of been closed. On their-Reoervation of 24,000 school age, there are teaching facilities for square miles, an area three times the size of only 8,000. Sixty-six per cenf of the Navaho Mauachuaetts, there l.s only one traveling den-population bu never been given any schoolinl ti.st, one ft.eld doctor, only one field nurse.

st. That they will make no opposition to the construction of rail­roads now being built or hereafter to be built across the continent. 2d. That they will not interfere with the peaceful construction of any railroad not passing over their reservation as herein defined. Residents,traveiers, 3d. That the.v_ will not attack any persons at home or travelling, norwagon trains. molest or disturb any wagon-trains, coa,ches, mules, or cattle belonging to the people of the United States, o'r to persons friendly therewith. aJimen aud chi!· 4th. That they will never capture or carry off from the settlements women or children

TICLE d5. I_fha!1ybi~dividhualhbedlongingf to_ said tr1ibe, _or legally 5J;tiif/i~~~ice;rncorporate wit it, emg t e ea of a am1ly, shal desire to com-farmmg may select mence farming, he shall have the privilege to select, in the presence Iand8• etc. and with the assistance of the agent then in charg-e, a tract of land within said reservation, not exceeding one hundred and sixty acres in extent, which tract, when so selected, certified, and recorded in the ti!~ect of such sell>,·­" land-book" as herein described, shall cease to be held in common, but the same may be occupied and held in the exclusive possession of the person selecting it, and of his family, so long as he or they may continue to cultivate

and a schoolhouse and chapel, so soon as a sufficient number of children can be induced to attend school, which shall not cost to exceed five thousand dollars.

She found that IHS facilities singled out full-blood Native women for sterilization procedures. She also discovered that Native women generally agreed to sterilization when they were threatened with the loss of their children or their welfare benefits, that most of them gave consent when they were heavily sedated during a Cesarean section or when they were in pain during labor, and that women could not understand the consent forms because they were written in English at the twelfth-grade level. Pinkerton-Uri stated that she did not believe that sterilizations occurred from “any plan to exterminate American Indians,” but rather from “the warped thinking of doctors who think the solution to poverty is not to allow people to be born.” (Pinkerton-Uri is featured in the video embedded above.)

s would help these women because limiting the number of children they could have would help them to become more financially stable.

Due to cases brought against HEW in the mid-1970s, every sterilization form had to exhibit prominently at the top the message: “Notice: Your decision at any time not to be sterilized will not result in the withdrawal or withholding of any benefits provided by programs or projects.

Poverty itself essentially became grounds for child removal, as the standards for Child Protective Service stated things like being malnourished, without proper shelter or sleeping arrangements, lacking medical care, and being dirty as grounds for removal. Native families often lacked the social service benefits that would have alleviated such material deprivation. Some states denied benefits and services to Native people—and then removed their children due to their low socioeconomic status.

eCoteau wasn’t the only one who signed misleading forms with disastrous consequences. Officials recommended that one of the parents make the actual delivery of children into state care even though forms had been signed—but Native women testified that this rarely occurred. They were often bullied or coaxed into signing forms without the presence of relatives or the father of the child. Thus, although technically many women signed consent forms, state officials clearly engaged in coercion. This kind of pressure from social workers was applied to other young, unmarried women (not only Natives). Between 1945 and 1973, an estimated one and a half million babies were relinquished for adoption due to this kind of pressure.

From 1947 to 2000, the Indian Student Placement Program (ISPP) placed an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 Navajos (and some other Native children) with LDS families for at least nine months of each year while the children attended local schools in Mormon communities. The program fulfilled both Mormon goals and (imperfectly filled) the needs of some Navajo families who lacked adequate educational opportunities in their own communities. (More on the Navajo perspective below.) The ISPP was a program rooted in terminationist ideology as well as religious theology. In 1962, ISPP leader Elder Kimball asserted, “I firmly believe that tomorrow there will be no reservations. I believe that integration into our economy and community life is essential and I look forward to the da

who could improve efficiency. One of their essential recommendations was increasing the “efficiency” of existing policies by better organizing and training Indian Service personnel. Thus, it wasn’t a document that completely disrupted existing strains of thought on Native affairs.

Within this report, there is an understanding of poverty that is predicated upon this idea that “paupers” are poor because they expect others to do things for them, that they are unwilling in some way to work for themselves. The Meriam Report does not blame Native people for being “paupers”—it explicitly blames the past policies of the government. However, it asserts that Native people have adopted this “pauper point of view.” For example:

The Meriam Report exposed the deplorable conditions many under which many Native people were living. However, it is not a neutral document. At times, the desire to expose real suffering and hardship butts up against a paternalistic tone. When I read this I was uncomfortable—and I think it is because although it doesn’t necessarily “mean” to, it robs Native people of agency. Here’s an example: “Some people assert that the Indians prefer to live as they do; that they are happier in their idleness and irresponsibility. The question may be raised whether these persons do not mistake for happiness and content an almost oriental fatalism and resignation. The survey staff found altogether too much evidence of real suffering and discontent to subscribe to the belief that the Indians are reasonably satisfied with their condition. The amount of serious illness and poverty is too great to permit of real contentment

e-person team of scholars in the fields of law, family life, and the “conditions of Indians” headed by anthropologist Lewis Meriam,

n this module we’ll examine this history, and also how Native people have pushed back against the overarching “plight narrative,” not to minimize the effects of poverty on their communities, but to disrupt the assumptions behind this powerful narrative.

we knew tribal leaders weren’tgoing to come to our trainings, so we went to them,”

y mom put her on her lap, and said,‘Edith and I are going to sit here and drink this. You’re going to see that nocops are going to come and nobody’s going to go to jail.’ Coya’s this littlenervous wreck. They finished their little glass of wine. My mom said, ‘See?No cops came, nobody’s going to go to jail.’ You see all these trauma issuesthat people have.” For trauma, of course, read “historical trauma,” a termattributed to the educator Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart (Lakota).Karen adopted Coya at the age of five

She paused. “I startedhearing sexism everywhere. I remember being really angry. Of course, I wasalways angry as an Indian, but now I was angry as a woman

I thought, maybe there’s something here I don’t understand, ’cause thesewomen are very excited about the information they’re getting.” Puzzled, Karenwent to see the group’s facilitator, who gave her a number of books that openedKaren’s eyes. “I’d never thought about sexism. I always thought about oppres-sion in terms of racism. Even when I graduated from high school eleventh inmy class [among about 275] and the school counselor was encouraging me togo to cosmetology school because the home ec teacher liked how I did some-body’s hair.” The home ec teacher “even said something about Indians, we

I do think the American Indian Movement and Wounded Knee made allof us more aware of who we are as Indians and what that means. We saw andheard some really good, even great, things.

“It can be interesting, during theday, where you’re talking with someone from a shelter or an advocacy pro-gram and a tribe that’s a thousand miles away about their code and their lawenforcement response. You’re trying to help develop a technical assistanceplan for them, and the next minute you’re revising a budget so you can get itoff to a federal agency. The next minute you’re catching up on signingpaperwork, and the nex

Within this scenario stands Cangleska, the sole shelter for women on areservation the size of Connecticut. Its rooms are so often full that Cangleskais building a larger shelte

ome might say, paradoxically— the United States maintained treaty making as a vehicle for its removal pol-icy, most notably with a range of southern tribes

Consequently, as the United States assumed political control over the territory ceded to it by Britain, which was augmented by the 1804 Lou-isiana Purchase from France, according to the principles of the Doctrine of Discovery, the United States acquired the exclusive right to extinguish Indian title to the lands within its territorial boundaries

e regarded as a facet of international relations.17 Although Anglo-Saxon legal thinking reduced Indigenous peoples’ centuries- long inhabitation of their lands to mere “Aboriginal title,” as affirmed in Johnson v. M’In-tosh (1823), Deloria argued that the implicit recognition that the Indians possessed rights— however diminutive in the minds of the English and Americans— formed the basis of his rebuttal of the claim that white settlers possessed a superior right to the land because of their presumed superior civilization. The latter is no more than the right of the stronger and not the superior.

United States, affirming its rightful place as the true owner of the continent, including the right to set an agenda for stewarding the land, an approach that was more about regarding the land as a natural resource in the economic sense as opposed to being a place in which spirits dwelled

In other words, Indigenous people did not possess a right to say “no” to invasion precisel

United States, indeed its refusal in many instances, to keep its word. One cannot fault a smaller nation for trying to negotiate in good faith with a larger one whose word is generally worthless.

t the onset of Deloria’s explication, the Doctrine of Discovery was not merely an historical artifact, but a prominent part of contemporary Indian affairs, a point he illustrated with references to Presidents Lyn-don Johnson and Richard Nixon

American Indian perspective on these legal and political documents, as opposed to marginalizing that view point vis- à- vis the non- Indian con-quest narrative, is to engage directly with the innumerable violations of federal and international law, not to mention human rights violations

At minimum, Indian Nations have to reclaim community education authority to allow creative education processes in forms of their free choice, in a system of federally-sanctioned unit or consolidated Indian districts, supported by a mandatory recognition of accreditation in all other systems in this land.

Congress establish, with next year, a Treaty Commission to contract a security and assistance treaty of treaties, with Indian people to negotiate a national commitment to the future of Indian people for the last quarter of the Twentieth Century

and in order that Indian Nations may represent their own interests in the manner and method envisioned and provided in the Federal Constitution.

AN INDIAN MANIFESTO RESTITUTION, REPARATIONS, RESTORATION OF LANDS FOR A RECONSTRUCTION OF AN INDIAN FUTURE IN AMERICA

thegovernment,withinstructionstoexaminethemthoroughly,andmakefullreportupontheexpediencyofratifying,rejecting,oramendingthem

hatbetterevi-denceofthelatterpossibilitydowerequirethanthefactthattheSenaterejectedonJuly8,1852theverytreatiesithaditselfauthorizedandappropriatedfundsfortheirnegotiationonSeptember29,1850

Everygroupmetwithislistedasrepresentinga"tribe".WedonotknowwhethertheCommissionerswereawareofthetruenatureofthenamedgroupswhichtheyweredealingwith.

They mobilized around issues such as sterilization of Native women (which we’ll discuss next week), education for survival, the destruction of family and theft of Native children,

Part of the way they looked after Native families in the aftermath of Wounded Knee was to set up survival schools for Native children, providing an alternative form of education from public or BIA schools, designed to instill cultural pride, tribal awareness, and offer tribally specific history and language. The earliest survival schools had been established in the Twin Cities in 1972, by AIM organizers

They expanded their reach to other issues, directly confronting city hall, county and state agencies, and other institutions to demand more responsiveness to the needs and desires of Native people. They accompanied individual Natives to employment centers, welfare agencies, and courtrooms to advocate for their interests, and went to juvenile detention centers and prisons to counsel and connect with Native inmates. They took a confrontational approach to urban institutions, insisting on more Native control over urban services for Native people. AIM founders Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt both have asserted that AIM filled a gap in existing Native organizing in the Twin Cities.

ixon showed sympathy for Native people in part because they were a “safe” minority to help. They numbered fewer than 1 million, so their problems seemed easier to solve than issues concerning African Americans. Popular sympathy largely favored Indian rights. Here was a way to appease younger Americans who leaned Democratic, as well as to appeal to the public at large.

the NCAI remained committed to their strategy of setting legislative precedents, working with Congress members to secure specific programs and increased appropriations, laying the foundation for winning claims in the courts. They feared that demonstrations like the one at the Supreme Court too closely associated Native issues with those of other minorities, and undermined the authority of elected spokespersons.

There is no way to improve upon racism, immorality and colonialism; it can only be done away with. The system and power structure serving Indian peoples is a sickness which has grown to epidemic proportions. The Indian system is sick. Paternalism is the virus, and the Secretary of the Interior is the carrier.”

o bring together economically underprivileged Americans from diverse backgrounds in a massive show of force designed to prod lawmakers to pass an “Economic Bill of Rights” that would end job discrimination and guarantee all people reasonable employment. King was assassinated before it occurre

“The gold on the thousand hills belongs to the Lord God of Heaven, the Great Spirit. HE gave the Indian this land with its gold when the earth was young. Why should it be considered ‘charity’ for the Indian to accept some gold back from the conqueror who owes him all?”

The participants in these workshops went on to reject termination and assimilation in a myriad of ways, becoming elected tribal leaders, educators, doctors, lawyers, documentary filmmakers, writers, and artists. Several participants founded the National Indian Youth Council, the organization which played a large role in the Pacific Northwest fish-ins we discussed in Week 4

non-Native politicians showed that they supported tribal economic development

They are ancestral homelands, retained by us for our perpetual use and enjoyment. We feel we must assert our right to maintain ownership in our own way, and to terminate it only by our consent.”

the end of the conference, the membership was completely unified in their opposition to termination, insisting that the bills violated treaty privileges. The delegates adopted a “Declaration of Indian Rights” which called for a continuation of federal guardianship as well as the rights and benefits of citizenship.

verall, termination was disastrous for the tribes involved. After termination they were no longer eligible for healthcare from the Indian Health Service, they lost federal support of their schools, they were subject to state laws and taxes, and their land was no longer protected by federal trust status.

end federal services to Native people

both Erin and Angela in this GIF.)

states continued to infringe on Native peoples’ right to vote by conducting at-large elections, printing ballots printed only in English, refusing to place ballot boxes on reservations, or gerrymandering voting districts. 

Despite this decision, in the mid-twentieth century, there were still thousands of Native people who spoke only Native languages or were illiterate. Thus, literacy tests were employed to dramatically reduce the number of Native people eligible to vote

Until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, states had almost unlimited power to exclude Native people from voting. Many states, especially in the west, would deny Natives the franchise, using tactics like literacy tests, English language tests, and refusing to refusing to place polling places in or near Native communities.  Western states also used the special status of Native people on reservations as a way to keep them from voting. Some maintained that Natives on reservations could not possibly be “civilized” enough to participate in the democratic process. (Sound familiar?) 

The ICA itself received little public attention. Citizenship was viewed as “obviously just.” However, to many Natives, it wasn’t so obvious. Accepting American citizenship could potentially signify giving up tribal membership. 

Cloud hired Native teachers, with the goal of having Native role models for the students. Students took classes in science, history, language arts, and foreign language. Additionally, since it was a Christian non-denominational high school, students also received instruction in biblical history. Cloud wanted the education they received at the school to encourage students to fight for the well-being of tribes and to be of service to Native people, including challenging the federal government’s colonial policies. One of the graduates, Harry Coonts, became the president of his tribal council.  

The SAI saw their organization as crucially important—it promised to give Native people an entry into an ongoing public conversation that was about them, but excluded them. It also allowed certain Native leaders to represent the Native perspective to a larger audience, and to perform the roles of informed, civic-minded citizens.

Some viewed them as assimilationists struggling to become US citizens, rather than “traditionalists” maintaining a close connection to Native culture and identity and fighting against colonialism. They have been maligned as “sell-outs,” and assumed to have lost a close connection to their reservations and/or communities. However, this narrative flattens the complexities of their perspectives and activism. Renya Ramirez has asserted in her biography of her grandparents, Henry Roe Cloud and Elizabeth Bender Cloud, that it was their “modern” identities (educated, Christian, etc.) that gave them the potential to challenge the state. 

children of savage warriors so docile and industrious.”

Many boarding schools had programs of “industrial training,” and apprenticeships: boys would be trained as manual laborers (usually agricultural), and girls as domestics. Apprenticeships essentially meant that young girls or boys would work with white families. By working in subordinate positions, they were viewed as being productive members of society (integrated to an extent, in the lowest, most marginalized positions). 

They also used each other’s’ allotments, living on land that belonged to extended family members. Those who sold or leased part of their surplus land often used the money to improve the land of a family member. Unmarried adult children commonly continued to live with their parents or siblings. Sexual relationships outside of marriage and serial monogamy also remained common. Stremlau writes about how Cherokees continued to organize their households collectively rather than hierarchically. Ultimately, she argues that while allotment had the potential to divide Cherokee families, Cherokees made use of customary kinship networks and community practices to ward off some of the negative outcomes that came with allotment policy, and continued to thrive as a community.

Richard Henry Pratt, who founded one of the most infamous Indian boarding schools, the Carlisle Institute, argued that through education of Indian children, reformers could remove “traditional” ways of life and replace them with “modern” ones. 

he WNIA financed cottages for Native families through their Home Building and Loan committee. The head of the committee illustrated the positive effects of the loan program when she described a Native woman who supposedly refused to “live and dress more like white people” or to make “white woman’s bread” as her husband wanted. She wrote that the woman “did not like white people, nor their ways, and she would have none of them.” But after her husband used WNIA funds to expand their kitchen and buy a stove for his wife, the effect was supposedly “revolutionary.

I am building me a house and I bound, pound, pound.Brush, brush, brush, now I’ll paint it all so fine;brush, brush, brush, for this handsome house is mine. The girls acted out the motions of washing, singing the “Laundresses’ Song”:When our work is done,They’ll be clean and smooth and white.A civilizing power is the laundress with her tub;We are cleaning more than clothes, as we rub, rub, rub

The adoption of modeling white middle-class homes on the reservation built off the rationale behind allotment. After Native people received their 160-acre plots, building “civilized” homes was the next step in their “progress.” Moreover, these kinds of homes were supposed to guard against Native students “going back to the blanket” when they returned home from off-reservation boarding schools. 

ese allotments would be exempt from taxation and ineligible for sale for 25 years. After the period of 25 years, the trust restriction would be lifted and the Indian allottee would become the owner of the land in fee. In addition, any “surplus” land could be sold off to white settlers.

By replacing her name with her enrollment number, she reinforces her important criticism of the ways that federal policies catalog her as an artifact of their authority to name her, thereby blurring the discursive lines between federal (enrollment number) and cultural (museum catalog) practices of identification. Having been made into a commodifiable artifact, she asserts the need for the repatriation of the right to self- identify/represent herself as (other than) an Indian

the law fail to address the problems of enrollment and the now baffling mire of criteria one must successfully navigate in order to be enrolled: To be a tribal member of the Salish of Montana, for ex- ample, one must have been born on the Salish reservation. In order to be a Hopi, one's mother must be a Hopi tribal member. This means that if your father is Hopi and your mother is Salish and you were born in Saint Louis, you cannot be a member of either tribe, even though you are a full-blooded Native American. (20-21) While affirming the authority of tribes to decide their own require- ments for membership, WalkingStick observes that many are without recognition status: "The net result is that many people who identify themselves as Indian are not recognized as such by the federal govern- ment." Besides, she writes, even today many indigenous people "reject the whole idea of formal tribal membership to the extent that they see it as a foreign, bureaucratic imposition alien to their own traditions of thought"

n't sign." They didn't sign for a myriad of reasons, including distrust of settlers and U.S. policy and in an attempt to retain some measure of self-respect against the "humilia- tion" of being "catalogued" (1991, 20). Despite these reasons, "the only 42 5 way one can prove one is a Cherokee today is to produce the registra- tion number of an ancestor and through such documentation be accept- ed as a tribal m

prohibitions against membership in dual tribe

The failure of the criterion to reflect matrilineality as a consti- tutive element of social relationships and political rights within the Pueblo was somewhat understandable in the context of the land rights struggles that defined the historical moment of

ribal property rights, invested in main- taining a hierarchical Euro-American male privilege over tribal women, had long since impacted tribal socioeconomic structures in North America (see

he power of the state serves the interests of those who work to disenfranchise and dispossess in- digenous peoples of their resources because those interests serve the state's objective to remain in powe

notes, tribal membership has al- ways been about the mitigation of resources as far as the federal gov- ernment is concerned; it has never been about the mediation or affir- mation of the multiple types of cultural beliefs, affiliations, and social responsibilities on which indigenous identities are ba

facilitating all kinds of fraud in the rolls that would result in hun- dreds if not thousands of nontribal people being granted membership. Racial purity, it would seem, is a difficult thing to legislate when con- fronted with the social forces of greed.

helps me think about the ways that identifying indigenous people by the discursive links between the rolls, the certificate, blood, identity, culture, and a racialized authenticity is a means by which the United States continually reinvents its authority to govern indigenous people. Making indigenous people "governable" by roll or certificate or blood allows the United States to reinvent its power to govern indige- nous people as citizens "of a particular kind"-as those who can be en- rolled, recognized, qualified, and eliminated

by blood. This has had con- sequences with regard to the politics of indigenous identification be- cause of the ways that blood emerges from discourses of genetics, culture, and assimilation to code authenticity and righ

expediency. Over- whelmed by the number of applicants, the demands of interviewing and evaluating all members to determine their eligibility for enroll- ment and qualifications for managing private property ownership, as well as both regional and congressional pressure to hasten allotment and so statehood out of Indian territories, the agents came to rely on blood quantum and language to determine patent type

ederal agents who administered the allotment process were directed to use this infor- mation, in addition to evaluations of the "competency" of individuals ascertained from interviews, to determine the actual size and location > of the parcels and the type of titles to be issu

question of establishing criteria for tribal membership, taking for grant- ed racialized equations between blood, identity, and culture in deter- mining who was and was not an Indian. (The assumptions most likely worked because of the intense anti-Indian sentiments within the United States that made it rare for people to claim to be Indian who were not [Berkhofer 1979; Williams 1990, American Indian]). Allotment served as an occasion for the articulation of tribal membership criteria via blood because of its mitigating utility in allocating access to Indian lands

1880s, identifica- tion policies are for many the embodiment of historically consistent attempts by the U.S. government and adverse economic interests to undermine indigenous rights to sovereignty and the means and abilities of indigenous peoples to exercise self-determ

In this essay, I analyze the definitions put forth by the IACA for determining who is an Indian, what is an Indian tribe, and what counts as an Indian product. I have selected the IACA and its definitions as a case study for understanding the cultural politics of identification, politics that emerge from and function to define the epistemological founda- tions of sovereignty for indigenous peoples. These politics are coded through the IACAs provisions for Indian membership, nationhood, and trade as represented by the very public assertion

Representatives Jon Kyl (R.-Ariz.) and Ben Nighthorse Campbell (D.-Colo.)2 submitted the IACA in 1989, based on a 1935 act of the same name (Collier 1934; Schrader 1983), and after extensive revisions it was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush (Par

ll of this pressure to give up the ways of life that had produced these objects came up against the desires of collectors to preserve them. Ultimately, the assimiliationist impulse also undergirded the collection of objects as well. For example, in the situation with the Pueblo pottery, all of those vessels were removed from their communities of origin to be housed in museums, meaning that they no longer were able to serve as models for young artists and no longer served their purpose in community and spiritual life.

he majority of these objects were collected during the time period when Native people were supposed to “vanish” from the American landscape—thus, collectors and anthropologists viewed their efforts as a race against time, the need to collect the so-called last vestiges of a dying race. If they didn’t collect these pieces, no one would ever know they had existed. The term we use to describe this thought process and how it shaped collection is “salvage anthropology.”

The story was no longer about a handful of “renegade” Indians demanding treaty rights. Non-Natives from across racial, ethnic, religious, geographic, and generational lines were joining them—their fight was significant and legitimate. Joseph Quinones (Yaqui from California) argued that the presence of non-Native supporters “pulled us out of isolation” and “lifted the morale” of the activists.

Native picketers held signs which read, “We’d Rather Fish than be on Welfare,” and “We Ketchum to Live—You Ketchum to Kill.”

They gained the support of nearly all the tribes in Washington, as well as support from the Seminoles in Florida, Winnebagos in Nebraska, Blackfeet in Montana, Shoshones from Wyoming, and Lakotas from North and South Dakota. This intertribal action was characterized by NIYC member Herb Blatchford as “the first full-scale intertribal action since the Indians defeated General Custer on the Little Big Horn.

In 1963, a court in Washington state ruled in State v. McCoy against a Swinomish fisher who had been fishing along the Skagit River, and then commercially selling his catches. The court gave regulatory powers to the state’s Game and Fish Department, arguing that state control over off-reservation fishing was both “reasonable and necessary” for conservation purposes. It did not matter that the defendant was a member of a tribe that had signed a treaty guaranteeing their right to fish at their usual places.

his especially affected children of marriages between Native people and whites—they might approve an application of one person but reject his or her children. 

The BIA received many applications, and as a result, needed to develop a system for determining the merit of those applications. Because many applicants were not present on tribal rolls, they resorted to anthropometry and cultural factors to indicate race. The BIA’s default position was that mixed-descent applicants were undeserving of Indian status. This meant that few were successful in their pursuit to be recognized.

he reason was that the tribes had sovereign powers on all subject matters except where Congress legislated. Congress was authorizing a process by which tribes could exercise their existing sovereign powers. Under the IRA constitutions, the tribes’ sovereign powers were delegated to an elected form of government. [1

Collier did not necessarily see the paradox of restoring Native cultures through a thoroughly Western model of organized activities. The assumption was that tribal charters should proceed under a Euro-American form of governance. Many of those living on reservations knew firsthand, or had heard from their parents, how their societies had governed themselves before the reservation era. 

Indian New Deal). 

The federal government would train Native people in such issues as land management, public health, and law enforcement, and prepare them for employment in the Bureau of Indian Affairs

hus, Dawes Commission officials spent a lot of time determining Native peoples’ sexual and marital histories. Commissioners inquired about when and how couples were married, whether those individuals had been previously married, whether married couples lived together and whether they had done so continuously since their marriage. They also sought to confirm fidelity within marriages by asking for names and ages of children in the household and confirming their parentage. They also discussed the information with relatives and neighbors

The interviewer established the person’s “blood quantum”: three quarters, one half, three eighths, so on. The number was recorded on the individual’s enrollment card. Once enrolled you were enrolled as a member of the tribal nation, but also enrolled as a member of a racial group – “full blood,” “mixed-blood,” or “negro.” 

Dawes Act and how it was rooted in a desire to provide a path to citizenship for “competent” Native people.

ecause it seems that the first place tribal courts go is to say, “Well, how did the state do this, and how can we make our system look kind of like that?” And that’s an assimilative kind of ideology, where if we have a court that looks like a state court then we’ll be legitimate. So the first thing that has to happen is an analysis that that’s not really working for us, or for even the non- Native community.

“Oh, these women need therapy,” but I think more so women need to be around their sisters and their communities who can help them think through these things and feel safe again, and that to me is where the bulk of the resources need to g

But, I think beyond that, Indian Health Service has not shown a lot of initiative in terms of providing training for their staff on how to perform these exams and how to work with the FBI to make sure the evidence is collect-ed in a timely manner

many tribes, in an effort to develop their own judi-cial system and have some independence, have emulated that Anglo- American construct. You don’t find that the tribal governments are necessarily doing anything very innovative around sexual violence, but are rather just replicating what they see at the state level, which is not necessarily the fault of the tribes. I mean, a lot of times these laws and these court systems were set up by outsiders from Washington, you know, coming from Washington, D.C., instead of the tribal courts system. But what they have then is just a mini version of what we have at the state and federal level

And if they’re not protecting Indigenous women from non- Natives committing acts of violence on their land, and the tribe is prohibited from prosecuting those non- Natives, that just seems to be a complete paradox. I mean, to me, that is an incredible example of the structural violence that Native women find themselves in, in terms of the barriers to seek justice.

Or educating her about her political and legal rights, too, right? It sounds like a culture of indifference and a cowboy culture mentalit

not because they wanted to prosecute everyday, interpersonal crime but because they wanted to do bank robberies and terrorism and white- collar crime and drug trafficking. And the federal judicial system has never really been set up to handle things like domestic violence or rape. So you have a group of career attorneys who may or may not have wanted to take on these kinds of crimes. And, in fact, we hear culturally within the Department of Justice, attorneys say, “Oh God, not one of these. That’s not why I came here; I wanted to do bank robberies

Native women are targeted when the bars close and offered ride

For those who might not be familiar with reservations, they might be thinking that reservations are where only American Indians are living.

Congress abolished the Creeks’ tribal courts and transferred all pending civil and criminal cases to the U. S. Courts of the Indian Territory. Curtis Act of 1898, §28, 30 Stat. 504–505. Separately, the Creek Allotment Agreement provided that tribal ordinances “affecting the lands of the Tribe, or of individuals after allotment, or the moneys or other property of the Tribe, or of the citizens thereof ” would not be valid until approved by the President of the United State

all their land, East of the Mississippi river,” the U. S. government agreed by treaty that “[t]he Creek country west of the Mississippi shall be solemnly guarantied to the Creek Indians.”

imple, to the Creek nation of Indians for the [assigned] land” to continue “so long as they shall exist as a nation, and continue to occupy the country hereby assigned to them

“Indian country” includes “all land within the limits of any Indian reservation under the jurisdiction of the United States Government.” §1151

‘frontier space,’ wherein discourse is multidirectional and hybridized.” This would be “the zone of trickster, a shimmering, always changing zone of multifaceted contact within which every utterance is challenged and interrogated” using “appropriation, inversion, and abrogation of authority.”

military—yes, even today—to describe enemy territory.31 Taken together, the two meanings of Indian country suggest an enemy territory under control, making that “dependent” an effective prisoner of war

As for the Indians imagined on the wild side of the line, they would either stay in their camps and vanish or evolve into someone who might yet live on the civilized side of time and space. Such was the logic of a world cut in two by imperialism

This is a stereotype, but persistent to say the least. Thinking histori-cally means seeing different Indian spaces invented in different times and social contexts, and in fact our spaces have been imagined in many different ways since the first x-marks were made. At first, Indian space was isolated and always on the move; its image was the camp. On oc-casions when Native and newcomer had to meet, the space for doing so was a frontier.

and to the extent that any of them can be characterized as “modern” (not all of them can, to be sure), they seem associated with the passage of time, not identity

x-marks I am interested in—identity, culture, and the idea of the Indian nation—are historically contingent concepts, and my analyses of them should be understood as serving the larger project of developing functional modern institutions in Native America; that is, I see the mod-ernization that was initiated by treaty signers as an unfinished project that can and should be pursued further.

These grim statistics are not the result of Native migrations but more the consequence of “removalism.” Removal was a federal policy estab-lished in 1830 by President Andrew Jackson, and it would now go by the name of ethnic cleansing.

No fewer than 45 out of a presently spoken 154 languages in the United States face an imminent extinction, with another 90 predicted to go silent by 2050.

The assimilation period was espe-cially bad, as Natives lived on reservations run like refugee camps and children were no longer being raised in their communities but in boarding schools. (Truly, a community without any children can be a dangerous and volatile place.) Treaty-established reservations were whittled away by allotment policy; between 1887 and 1934, Indian landholdings shrank from 138 million acres to 48 million.10 Indian languages were attacked by teachers, and religions were attacked by missionaries and policy makers.

White Oak Point Ojibwe were suffering badly and it was the Americans’ fault. The council continued on with Rice presenting an “extended ex-planation” of allotment, Whiting following with a speech on the value of industriousness, and Marty concluding with the promise of a church. The Nelson Act was signed by most people at White Oak Point, includin

he stated goal was the transformation of Indians into agrarian capitalists. Based on a somewhat superstitious belief in the magical civilizing powers of private property, the Nelson Act was designed to assimilate Indians while opening up “surplus land” for settlers, lumber companies, and the U.S. govern-ment

sense of native motion and an active presence” that is recognized by “survivance, a reciprocal use of nature, not a monotheistic, territorial sovereignty.

rticles IV, V, and VI promised “annuities” (including monies, agricultural implements, education, black-smiths, and assistance with paying off debts owed to traders), and these promises resulted in the arrival of new technologies, cultural practices, beliefs, and ways of living. These things are sometimes characterized as signs of “colonization” and “assimilation”—as well as “Civilization” in the parlance of the mid-nineteenth century—but they can just as well be described as characteristics of modernity. They contaminated the life-world of Ojibwe who made their x-marks, so Ojibwe cultural purity (if such a thing had ever actually existed) would exist no more.

diplomatic relations.” Treaties were different. When made with Europeans—and especially later when made with Americans—treaties increasingly introduced new and unfamiliar concepts that situated peoples, parties, lands, and relationships between them differently. Treaties compelled Indians to change how they lived.

he contract shall be certi!ed by some person appointed for that purpose by the President butshall not be valid 'till the President approves the same.

key congressional allies were willing to support the prosecution of a man who married into the tribe, but not the prosecution of those who may not have ties to the reservation.

In her book, The Beginning and End of Rape, Sarah Deer (Muscogee) writes that the decision has created a crisis situation in some tribal communities, because reservations are perceived as a location in which violent crimes can be committed with impunity. If a non-Native person rapes a Native woman, the tribe has no criminal jurisdiction to punish the offender. Tribal police may be able to arrest a suspect if they are cross-deputized with a local or state government, but the tribal government cannot criminally prosecute the offender.There is a significant disparity in the number of prosecutions compared with the number of Native women experiencing rape. Tribal leaders and others have voiced their concerns about the federal government’s low rates of prosecuting rape and other violent crimes. There are also enormous practical problems with this system. The length of time between an assault and the sentencing, assuming a conviction is achieved, can be significant. Federal prosecutors are often very selective about the cases they pursue, leaving victims without recourse. The decision to prosecute is often hidden from public scrutiny, which has the tendency to make many victims feel abandoned. Indeed, most rapes in the United States are never reported to law enforcement

Upon incorporation into the territory of the United States, the Indian tribes thereby come under the territorial sovereignty of the United States and their exercise of separate power is constrained so as not to conflict with the interests of this overriding sovereignty

he limitation of tribal court’s abilities to incarcerate has had a disparate impact on victims of rape. Because tribal nations lack strong laws or policies on felony-level criminal behavior, if the state or federal systems choose not to prosecute, the victim is left without options.

Peterson stressed that the committee should critically analyze the actions of state and local governments, not of tribal governments, in addressing crimes.

Peterson delivered her statement, significant pieces of legislation and court cases further stymied tribal courts from effectively prosecuting crimes, especially against non-Native offenders.

specially because the federal government did not fund the development of tribal courts in those states.

In 1953, Congress passed Public Law 280, which transferred jurisdiction over tribal lands to state and local governments in California, Oregon, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Other states could unilaterally adopt it if they chose—until 1968, after which the consent of the reservation was required. The objective was to bring Native people under state authority. This piece of legislation was part of a larger policy era known as “Termination.

federal officials perceived Crow Dog’s punishment to be too lenient, and subsequently arrested and prosecuted him in federal territorial quote, resulting in a death sentence. Crow Dog petitioned the Supreme Court, arguing that he was not subject to US authority as a citizen of a foreign government accused of violating foreign law on foreign soil. He won and was released from custody. Ultimately, the court found that the government with authority to respond to that homicide was that of the Lakota people.

These types of state laws and extensions were perceived by some as directly conflicting with federal treaty provisions that guaranteed tribal self-governance. States extended tax laws, criminal jurisdiction, and marriage and inheritance rules over Natives. These were matters seen as properly handled by the federal government.However, the federal government provided no clear and consistent constitutionally based rules in the Marshall Trilogy. Because the federal government’s position was so vague, the states were freer to be vague in explaining why they were permitted to act as they did.

Corn Tassel’s case was appealed to the superior court, which came to the opposite conclusion as that reached in Worcester—that states had full criminal and jurisdiction over the tribes within their boundaries as a matter of state sovereignty. The court ruled that it was impossible for a sovereign nation to exist when it could not hold the title to the land—only the right of occupancy. Thus, the case drew upon the same doctrine of discovery that had been used by Marshall in the cases we discussed i

lthough as we examined last week, Worcester was a victory for the Cherokees, and explicitly stated that states did not have jurisdiction in Indian country, this ruling did not accurately reflect the reality throughout most of the nineteenth century.Legal scholar Sidney Harring writes that during this time, “federal Indian law evolved in a legal battle with the states over federal control of Indians and Indian lands, with tribal sovereignty or the legal rights of native people often not even of secondary concern. [

They transported them to holding camps, where they were housed until enough people were gathered to make up a removal party. Many suffered from exposure, bad water, and inadequate food in these holding camps. Much of the death toll attributed to the Trail of Tears occurred in these camps before the march.

Finally, the Creeks agreed to a similar arrangement as had been made with the Choctaws. US officials proposed that the Creeks sign a treaty splitting their land into individual allotments. [2]After taking a census, the land was divided into half-sections (about 320 acres) and distributed to 6,557 heads of families, and full sections (about 640 acres) for 90 of the prominent headmen and their families.As historian Christopher Haveman asserts, the agreement was “an unmitigated disaster” for the Creeks. Although it was technically not a “removal” document, it in effect ceded all of their land to the United States, legalizing white encroachment. Land not occupied by Creek families could be purchased by whites, which it was. Creek families could also sell their land, which many, in dire economic straits, did.

amilies could stay in Mississippi if they wished—after registering with an Indian agent they would supposedly receive land and citizenship in the state. However, the agent blocked the efforts of Choctaws who wished to remain, refusing to register those who asked or destroying registrations of those who signed up. In the end, only 69 Choctaw families received an allotment of land in Mississippi under the treaty.

After most of the Choctaws who had attended this conference with Eaton had left, Eaton told the remaining members of the council that if they did not agree to remove, the president would declare war on them and send in the army. They agreed to sell their land, signing the first removal treaty of the Five Nations in the Southeast.

Gingoldknew nothing about the BIA (he later said he thought the meeting was about banking with India) and was shocked at the depth of the problem. She persuaded him to take it on

The trust account problem began almost two hundred years ago. Tribes across the nation ceded billions of acres of land to the United States; in hundreds of treaties, the United States promised payment for the lands. After 1820, rather than distribute payment to the tribes directly, the U.S. held the money for the tribes. If a tribe won a money award for illegal taking of their property, the United States held that money as well. The U.S. made the decisions about investing the money, and if a tribe wanted to use it themselves, it had to get federal permission first.

People would come in and try to get information, and they'd just make them sit out in hard, old wooden chairs. I had no idea at that point that it was their own money

To leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness; to govern them as a distinct people, was impossible, because they were as brave and as high spirited as they were fi erce, and were ready to repel by arms every attempt on their independence.21At another point in his opinion, Marshall again uses this language of Indian savagery and implacability to assert that the “character and hab-its of the people whose rights have been wrested from them” provided “some excuse, if not justifi cation,”

The United States, then, have unequivocally acceded to that great and broad rule by which its civilized inhabitants now hold this country. They hold, and assert in themselves, the title by which it was acquired. They maintain, as all others have maintained, that discovery gave an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title of occupancy, either by purchase or by conquest.18

ndian tribes, in other words, were presumptively regarded under the discovery doctrine and European colonial- era conceptions of inter-national law as an inferior race of peoples who could be lawfully con-quered and colonize

aw indeed identifi es the Marshall model as a “moment of originality and authority,” seeking to assimilate the Indian’s radically conceived al-terity within the complex schema of constitutional principles and legal values promoted by a self- identifi ed superior form of civilization and its enlightened system of colonial governmentality. But this judicial act of authoritative interpretation of Indian rights also represents a highly problematic process of displacement and ambivalence as wel

Amazingly, unlike with the decisions in Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson, the justices of the Supreme Court continue to cite this trio of archaic, racist judicial precedents from the early nineteenth century in their present- day opinions on vitally important questions of Indian rights to property, self government, and cultural surviva

upreme Court when they were fi rst asked to address important questions of Indian rights during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Steadfast beliefs in white superiority and Indian savagery can in fact be identifi ed as central organizing principles in the Court’s fi rst set of landmark decisions on Indian rights. In three seminal opinions for the Court, Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), Cherokee Nation v. Geor-gia (1831), and Worcester v. Georgia (1832),7 Chief Justice John Mar-shall, a member of the founding generation himself, developed a legal model of Indian rights that relied upon the same basic language that the Founders had used in defi ning the fi rst U.S. Indian policy.

Library of CongressArticles of a treaty, concluded at the mouth of the Great Miami, on the north-western bank of the Ohio, the thirty-first of January, onethousand seven hundred and eighty-six, between the commissioners plenipotentiary of the United States of America, of the one part,and the chiefs and warriors of the Shawanoe Nation of the other part. http://www.loc.gov/resource/bdsdcc.18101transmitted to the United States in Congress assembled for their decision thereon, whichthe Indians agree to abide by.Art. 6. If any Indian or Indians, or person residing among them, or who shall take refugein their nation, shall commit a robbery, or murder or other capital crime on any citizen ofthe United States, or person under their protection, the nation, or the tribe to which suchoffender or offenders may belong, shall be bound to deliver him or them up to be punishedaccording to the ordinances of the United States; provided that the punishment shall notbe greater than if the robbery or murder, or other capital crime, had been committed by acitizen on a citizen.Art. 7. If any citizen of the United States, or person under their protection, shall commit arobbery or murder or other capital crime, on any Indian, such offender or offenders shall bepunished in the same manner as if the murder or robbery or other capital crime, had beencommitted on a citizen of the United States; and the punishment shall be in presence ofsome of the Cherokees, if any shall attend at the time and place, and that they may havean opportunity so to do, due notice of the time of such intended punishment shall be sentto some one of the tribes.Art. 8. It is understood that the punishment of the innocent under the idea of retaliation, isunjust, and shall not be practiced on either side, except where there is a manifest violationof this treaty; and then it shall be preceded, first by a demand of justice, and if refused,then by a declaration of hostilities.Art. 9. For the benefit and comfort of the Indians, and for the prevention of injuriesor oppressions on the part of the citizens or Indians; the United States in Congressassembled shall have the sole and excl

person under their protection, the nation, or the tribe to which suchoffender or offenders may belong, shall be bound to deliver him or them up to be punishedaccording to the ordinances of the United States;

If any citizen of the United States, or other person not being an Indian,

In the 1903 Supreme Court case, Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, the “plenary power” of Congress over Native nations was solidified. Lone Wolf, principal chief of the Kiowa, sued the government for implementing an agreement to allot the Kiowa and Comanche reservation. While Congress had approved the agreement, the Kiowas and Comanches had not, citing the provisions of the 1867 Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek (our Treaty of the Week for Week 5), which “stipulated that all land cessions must be approved by the tribe.”The Court ruled that Congress had the right to abrogate existing treaties with tribes, and that allotment could be carried out without tribal approval.

Throughout the nineteenth century, this use of wardship was linked with a racialized understanding of Indians as uncivilized and savage, needing “protection” from the government not only from unscrupulous whites, but also from each other.

As legal scholar Frank Pommersheim notes, the notion of tribes’ statuses as “domestic dependent nations,” sovereign entities also reliant on the federal government, continues to exist in the present day, although “its particulars, its contours, and its borders remain elusive.” [12] The ambiguous definitions of this relationship between “ward” and “guardian” drastically affected all subsequent exchanges between Natives and the government (both federal and state).The development of Indian policy and law over the course of the nineteenth century has been characterized as “almost uniformly hostile to Indians.” [13] Significant court cases and policies undermined tribal sovereignty and emphasized the dependence of Natives upon the good will and guiding hand of the federal government.