At the end of the nineteenth century and for the first three-and-a-half decades of the twentieth, American Indians contended with a federal government and majority society wedded to the policies of allotment and assimilation. Inaugurated in 1887, the General Allotment (Dawes) Act proposed to convert the 138 million acres of tribally owned reservation lands remaining in Native America into individually owned plots of from 40 to 320 acres. Meanwhile, the larger assimilation project of which it was a part aspired to effect the complete replacement of one identity (Indian) with another (white). These two mutually reinforcing aspects of what President Theodore Roosevelt called a “mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass” had to do with more than land or cultural practice. They addressed a question that vexed the minds of missionaries, federal bureaucrats, members of Congress, and reformers alike—the question of belonging.1
The cant of citizenship emerged as the dominant rhetorical vehicle to talk about what it meant to belong in the United States of America. Inclusion and incorporation offered convenient, even optimistic, desiderata. A settler state, whose existence was made possible only through the ruin of indigenous nations, now offered the survivors of that destructive process a place in the new body politic. But it would come at a cost, and a great one at that. Even the “Friends of the Indian” possessed a narrow, singular conception of citizenship. This citizenship of sameness had little room for cultural pluralism and did not countenance the perpetual continuation of separate political identities.2
The process of incorporating indigenous peoples into the United States extended beyond reservation communities and became integral to the American imperial project abroad. It took a variety of forms from Latin America and the Caribbean to the Philippines but proved most complete in the Hawaiian Islands, where the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 paved the way for annexation in 1898 and statehood in 1959. As they had in the contiguous United States, assimilative pressures accelerated the extension of territorial, economic, and governmental control. As the common refrain of “benevolent assimilation” conveyed, the imperative to be the same—even in the absence of U.S. citizenship—guided the nation’s engagement with indigenous peoples.3
When the United States entered World War I (1914–18) in 1917, the question of belonging took on new meanings. The war served as a transformative force in the lives of American Indians, as many of them left their homes in search of work in war industries or volunteered to fight overseas. And yet, while approximately sixteen thousand Native people served in the military, not all of them had volunteered. Conscription happened unevenly, and it presented a problem. How could a country that did not acknowledge someone’s legal personhood draft that person to fight in its war? As the documents in this chapter attest, some Native communities solved that problem by arguing that their citizens belonged to their own nations and, by extension, went into the military as allies. Some Lakotas, Dakotas, Ojibwes, Goshutes, and Creeks, among others, drew a harder line, reasoning that a settler state they considered illegitimate could not compel them to serve. And still others contended that, in the wake of war, Congress should honor the fact that so many Native people volunteered by bestowing U.S. citizenship.4
The General Allotment Act always had built within it a pathway to U.S. citizenship—one inextricably bound to private land ownership and conflated with competence. The war shortened the distance Native people had to travel—and ultimately left them without a choice of whether they even wanted to go down that road. Between 1919 and 1924, Congress enacted legislation extending U.S. citizenship to veterans and then to all American Indians. As we will see, some welcomed the “gift,” some refused it, and some sought creative ways of making it compatible with tribal sovereignty. The last of these became particularly important as the assimilationist juggernaut continued through the 1920s and manifested itself in such things as bans on ceremonial practices, allotment, inequitable leases, reduced spending on health and education, and passage of legislation that sought to settle disputed land claims in favor of non-Indians.5
Another critical dimension of Native activism during this period grew out of President Woodrow Wilson’s rationale for U.S. intervention and his vision for the postwar world. In April 1917, he told a reluctant public that the “world must be made safe for democracy.” Eight months later, in a special address to Congress, Wilson enunciated the Fourteen Points to give meaning and purpose to the Great War. Among the principles were the right of national self-determination, the adjustment of colonial claims, and the formation of an international body, a League of Nations, “for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” While Congress refused to join the League of Nations, its import was not lost on Indian rights advocates. Native people well understood the need for the right of self-determination.6
The following documents demonstrate some of the ways in which Native people offered their own answers to the question of belonging during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They constructed blockades to stop the pulverizing engine of progress and built new track to direct it away from their communities. But contests over allotment, assimilation, citizenship, incorporation, and inclusion did not simply place “Native peoples” in opposition to “whites.” Rather, these were multivocal affairs that emerged from and served as an impetus for unexpected conversations within and between Native and non-Native communities. Some of the authors in the following documents attempted to delineate nonindigenous and indigenous worlds; others articulated a nebulous space between them—a third space of sovereignty. Talking back to civilization and saying we are nations, then, did not result in a dialogue but an intricate fugue.7