ABSTRACT

During the ceremony to dedicate an Indian Memorial at the site of the Battle of Little Big Horn in 2003, Russell Means, of the Oglala Lakota, argued that the indigenous peoples of the United States understood the dangers of ethnic fragmentation. Referring to the term ‘American Indian’ he stated, ‘We put American before our ethnicity … We know what it is to be an American and that’s why we are so proud to put it before our ethnicity.’1 In the same year visitors to the reservation of the Blackfeet Indian Nation in Montana could see a hand-made notice with the names of the Blackfeet who were fighting in the war in Iraq. The sign included a message of support for the troops and their efforts in Operation Iraqi Freedom.2 These two instances are offered as examples of the continued complex place of American Indians in US society. A people who were subjected to a relentless campaign to change

their social, political and economic traditions have, at times, shown great loyalty and patriotism towards the polity that sought to affect their metamorphosis. As Michael Elliott has highlighted in relation to the commemoration ceremony at the site of the Little Big Horn, Indians have displayed a form of ‘anti-American Americanism’. Allegiance to the US was encouraged as part of a simultaneous proclamation of ‘loyalties to tribal nations and through anticolonial criticisms directed at the United States’.3 The purpose of this chapter is to focus on the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century which laid the foundations for this paradoxical position of American Indians in American society. The struggle over the place of Native Americans in US society highlights a further part of the process through which the parameters of American citizenship were defined. The following discussion centres on the efforts of those who sought to assimilate the Indians, their successes and failures and the changing motivations of Indian reformers. By 1920 there was a realisation that Native

Americans would not simply melt into the American mainstream. Instead the persistence of their cultural distinctiveness proved the failure of the assimilation process and posed important questions about the place of Indians in American society. Federal Indian strategy after the Civil War was characterised by the

‘peace policy’ which was designed to move the natives onto reservations. ‘The peace policy was a praiseworthy effort … a product of the idealism of the reconstruction era.’4 Reformers believed that moving the Indians to separate lands would protect them from the advances of white society. The Indian Wars which paradoxically emerged from this peace policy were the result of resistance by several tribes to submit to the reservation system. Sitting Bull warned, ‘we want no white man here. The Black Hills belong to me. If the whites try to take them I will fight.’5 Sioux resistance to incursions into sacred lands and attempts to force them into reservations were the catalyst for the warfare from which the heroes and villains of popular histories of the West emerged. Custer, Sheridan, Crazy Horse and others joined Sitting Bull as actors in the drama of the western theatre. Throughout the 1870s many Indian tribes were forced to relocate or concentrate in smaller areas as US authorities pushed to ensure Native Americans lived on distinct reservations.6