“Civilizing the ‘Redman’…”

This chapter interprets a black and white postcard from c. 1910 called “Civilizing the ‘Redman’—Soboba Reservation, San Jacinto, CA.” which features a photograph of ten young North American Indian boys tilling enclosed land at their reservation mission school. The image and text on the postcard are chronologically examined through a specific range of key concepts that centered the Genesis 1:28 commandment to subdue the earth and to be fruitful and multiply: John Locke's seventeenth-century understandings of nature, land-use, and productivity; Adam Smith's eighteenth-century four-stage developmental stages of society that are based around utilization of land; and the nineteenth-century Social Darwinist perceptions of human evolution and racial superiority, which included the concept of Manifest Destiny to religiously justify American expansionism, and the Mission School education policy which mandated the teaching of Euro-American ways of living, worshipping, and working to assimilate North American Indian children. By drawing on these philosophies and ideologies, this chapter charts the strategies by which perceptions of land and land-use were utilized in an attempt through civilizing the “Redman,” thereby to make extinct the traditional lifeways of the North American Indian peoples.