by David Treuer
Dundy then went on to detail with great care how and why the Ponca had come to appear before him. He noted that they were not combatants. Nor had they violated the terms of the treaties that established a home for them in Oklahoma. Moreover, since the treaty period was now considered over (as stipulated by the Indian Appropriations Act) and with it, tribal sovereignty, there was even more reason now to consider Indians as people with the rights of citizens. Dundy’s reasoning was methodical and clearly intended to stand as a wide and widely applied precedent:
Every “person” who comes within our jurisdiction, whether he be European, Asiatic, African, or “native to the manor born,” must obey the laws of the United States. Every one who violates them incurs the penalty provided thereby. When a “person” is charged, in a proper way, with the commission of crime, we do not inquire upon the trial in what country the accused was born, nor to what sovereign or government allegiance is due, nor to what race he belongs. The questions of guilt and innocence only form the subjects of inquiry. An Indian, then, especially off from his reservation, is amenable to the criminal laws of the United States, the same as all other persons. They being subject to arrest for the violation of our criminal laws, and being “persons” such as the law contemplates and includes in the description of parties who may sue out the writ, it would indeed be a sad commentary on the justice and impartiality of our laws to hold that Indians, though natives of our own country, cannot test the validity of an alleged illegal imprisonment in this manner, as well as a subject of a foreign government who may happen to be sojourning in this country, but owing it no sort of allegiance.
At the end of his opinion, Dundy set out his ruling carefully:
That an Indian is a “person” within the meaning of the laws of the United States, and has, therefore, the right to sue out a writ of habeas corpus in a federal court, or before a federal judge, in all cases where he may be confined or in custody under color of authority of the United States, or where he is restrained of liberty in violation of the constitution or laws of the United States.
That General George Crook, the respondent, being commander of the military department of the Platte, has the custody of the relators, under color of authority of the United States, and in violation of the laws thereof.
That no rightful authority exists for removing by force any of the relators to the Indian Territory, as the respondent has been directed to do.
That the Indians possess the inherent right of expatriation, as well as the more fortunate white race, and have the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” so long as they obey the laws and do not trespass on forbidden ground. And,
Being restrained of liberty under color of authority of the United States, and in violation of the laws thereof, the relators must be discharged from custody, and it is so ordered.
Standing Bear and his followers were released by Crook and were allowed (and even helped) to continue their journey. He brought the box containing his son’s bones back to their village site on the Niobrara River, and he and his people were allowed to resettle there and live out their days. In the years immediately following the court case he, the interpreter (now married to Tibbles), her brother, and Tibbles himself embarked on a speaking tour up and down the East Coast, where Standing Bear was greeted enthusiastically by liberals and former abolitionists, many of whom had turned their attention to the “Indian problem” once the issue of slavery had been (in their minds) laid to rest.
Standing Bear’s eloquent assertion of his equal claim to personhood had profound and lasting rhetorical resonance, echoed in legal terms by Dundy’s recognition that an Indian, as a person, deserved the same liberties and protections as other people. Yet even as people, they were not considered Americans: the Fourteenth Amendment, added to the U.S. Constitution in 1868, had made all people born in the United States American citizens except for Indians. Nevertheless, the struggles of Chief Joseph and Standing Bear and their tribes, the attendant publicity, the abolition of slavery as an institution in the wake of the Civil War, and the rise of an eastern protest class (along with a protest literature) forced a recognition, by the 1880s, that the reservation system by which the government had treated and administered to Indians was a moral and administrative failure. And with that recognition, an Indian rights movement began to grow. As such, it was in part the result of the direct, sustained, brave, and thoughtful actions of Indian leaders like Chief Joseph and Standing Bear along with those of journalists, military leaders, lawyers, translators, and judges. Standing Bear also had a profound impact on a woman named Helen Hunt Jackson.
Born to a liberal family in Amherst, Massachusetts, Helen Hunt Jackson was moved to throw her weight behind Indian causes after hearing Standing Bear speak at a gathering in Boston in 1879 where he detailed the suffering and mistreatment of the Ponca. Two years later, she published A Century of Dishonor, a scathing history of U.S. federal policy that ended with strong (and strongly worded) suggestions about how Indian affairs should be administered in the future. Not content with having written the book, she sent a copy to every member of Congress. Stamped on the cover was a quotation from Benjamin Franklin: “Look Upon Your Hands! They are stained with the blood of your relations!” The book was a massive success. Struck by the influence that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had had on public opinion about slavery (in the North at least), Jackson determined to try fiction next. “If I could write a story that would do for the Indian one-hundredth part what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the Negro, I would be thankful the rest of my life.” Ramona was a romance about a half-Indian half-Scots girl who suffers discrimination and is kept from the love of her life because of her ancestry. It may not have been a good book, but it was hugely popular. It sold more than six hundred thousand copies in the first few years after its publication in 1884, and was subsequently reprinted more than three hundred times and adapted for stage and, later, film. Jackson’s two books became founding documents of the emergent Indian rights movement in the late nineteenth century.
The Beginnings of the Indian Rights Movement
In 1882, two reformers—moved by their experience in the Indian service, the public lectures of Chief Joseph and Standing Bear, and Helen Hunt Jackson’s fiction and nonfiction—gathered a group in Philadelphia and formed the Indian Rights Association. Within two years they opened offices in Washington, D.C., and Boston as well. Many former members of the Indian service began to write books and essays about what they felt was the criminal treatment of American Indians by the United States. Beginning in 1883, these “Friends of the Indian” met annually at the estate and hotel of reformer Albert Smiley at Lake Mohonk, near Poughkeepsie, New York. To say that there was overlap between the growing cohort of “friends” and government officials within and tied to the Office of Indian Affairs would be putting it mildly. Clinton B. Fisk, the Union officer and abolitionist who endowed Fisk University and was appointed by Grant to the Bureau of Indian Commissioners in 1874, chaired the Mohonk conference for the first years of its existence. Fisk was clear about the relationship among slavery, Indians, and reform: “We could not fit the negro for freedom till we made him free. We shall never fit the Indian for citizenship till we make him a citizen.” Citizenship was the watchword for the Friends. So was free-labor ideology. Fisk had written that “every man is born into the world with the right to his own life, to personal liberty, and to inherit, earn, own, and hold property. These rights are given to him by the great God: not because he is a white man, a red man, or a black man, but because he is a MAN.”
That Indians themselves might have a different view of their personhood and what constituted their humanity doesn’t seem to have crossed the minds of their friends, but the Indian Rights Association (IRA), the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA), and the Lake Mohonk Conference were united in railing against the reservation system, the government service and Indian
agents who regularly defrauded Indians, the lack of access to education and courts, and the whole treaty-based set of relationships: “The reservation shuts off the Indians from civilization, and rations distributed unearned tend to pauperize them,” wrote one conference regular. The reservation system, wrote a strident member of the WNIA, “keeps the Indian more dependent upon the Government and less able to help himself.” It was “fatal to the Indian.” Another observed: “Treating the black man as chattel created a ‘caste,’ a social separation. . . . Treating the Indian as an Indian and not as a person is as false as slavery; it has created a separation, by way of the reservation system.” The problems the system created seemed clear to the reformers, as did the solutions: civilization through citizenship, free enterprise, and private ownership of land. As passionate as the Friends of the Indian were, they did not consider what Indians thought and what Indians themselves wanted. They may have wanted to destroy old systems that they felt hurt Indian people, but they wanted to, and did, hang on to the heedless paternalism of the prior age. As such, their reforms were bound to go astray. The friends positioned themselves as guardians of Indian interests and assumed an unofficial capacity as auditors of the Office of Indian Affairs—overseeing the work of agents in the field and writing reports to the Bureau of Indian Commissioners and to Congress. What they lacked, at first, was a method. It was one thing to say that Indians were people and needed citizenship. How would they become “ready” for the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and communion with the body of the country? The reformers soon hit upon paths to this end.
The Indian Boarding Schools
Richard Henry Pratt had a lot of experience with Indians. Born in 1840 in Rushford, New York, he grew up hard. His father moved the family to Logansport, Indiana, in 1846 and then left with the Gold Rush three years later when Pratt was nine. In California he was robbed and murdered, leaving Pratt to take care of his mother and younger brothers. When the Civil War broke out, Pratt signed up immediately and served as a private in the Ninth Regiment, Indiana Infantry. As soon as his first tour was over, he reenlisted and was promoted to sergeant. At the end of the war, he mustered out at the rank of captain and returned to Logansport to run a hardware store. But two years later he rejoined the army, serving as a second lieutenant in the Tenth United States Cavalry in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The Tenth was a regiment of black freedmen and freed slaves used as shock troops in the escalating violence of the Plains Indian Wars. Pratt served for eight years on the Plains, fighting Indians in the Washita campaign and the Red River War. At the end of the war in 1875, he was assigned the task of interviewing Indian combatants in order to ascertain how they should be charged. Somehow his sympathies were engaged, and he tried to clear as many of them as possible.
Grant’s attorney general, Amos T. Akerman, felt that the United States could not afford to be at war with its “wards” but that neither could it repatriate the combatants to their tribes and homelands. The resulting rule (not adjudicated in court) was that the combatants would be imprisoned for life far from their homelands on the Plains. Given his experience, Pratt was tasked with escorting the Indians to Fort Marion, Florida. While stationed at Fort Marion, Pratt, under only vague orders, began experiments in education. He reasoned that if wild turkeys could be domesticated, then surely Indians could be civilized. To that end he hired teachers to begin instructing the prisoners in English, art, and mechanical studies. He elevated some of them to guard duty. He was so impressed by the Indians’ aptitude for “civilization” that, after their release, he expanded his mission by placing some of the prisoners in the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, until then reserved for the education of black freedmen. They seemed to thrive there, and Pratt lobbied Congress for funding for a school dedicated to the civilization of American Indians.
In 1879, Pratt opened the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in an abandoned army barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Its first class numbered eighty-two, most of them the children of Plains Indian leaders, including the children of Oglala leaders American Horse (the war chief), Blue Horse, and Red Shirt. Buoyed by the “support” of tribal leaders out west and the “progress” of students at the school, Pratt waxed philosophical about his mission:
A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man. . . . Theorizing citizenship into people is a slow operation. What a farce it would be to attempt teaching American citizenship to the negroes in Africa. They could not understand it; and, if they did, in the midst of such contrary influences, they could never use it. Neither can the Indians understand or use American citizenship theoretically taught to them on Indian reservations. They must get into the swim of American citizenship. They must feel the touch of it day after day, until they become saturated with the spirit of it, and thus become equal to it. Then we cease to teach the Indian that he is less than a man; when we recognize fully that he is capable in all respects as we are, and that he only needs the opportunities and privileges which we possess to enable him to assert his humanity and manhood; when we act consistently towards him in accordance with that recognition; when we cease to fetter him to conditions which keep him in bondage, surrounded by retrogressive influences; when we allow him the freedom of association and the developing influences of social contact—then the Indian will quickly demonstrate that he can be truly civilized, and he himself will solve the question of what to do with the Indian.
Kill the Indian they did. Or tried to. Students were forbidden to speak their native languages, and Pratt condoned corporal punishment to that end. Upon arrival, students were photographed in their traditional garb and then stripped, stuffed into uniforms, and barbered to within an inch of their lives. Luther Standing Bear, son of Chief George Standing Bear, arrived at Carlisle among the first group of students. Told to point to a name, any name, and not knowing a word of English, he pointed at a figure on a print or picture and thereafter was known as Luther. While Luther Standing Bear came to be fond of Carlisle and of Pratt himself, he remembered a traumatic transition:
“The ‘civilizing’ process” at Carlisle, he recalled, started “with clothes. Never, no matter what our philosophy or spiritual quality, could we be civilized while wearing the moccasin and blanket. The task before us was not only that of accepting new ideas and adopting new manners, but actual physical changes and discomfort had to be borne uncomplainingly until the body adjusted itself to new tastes and habits. Our accustomed dress was taken and replaced with clothing that felt cumbersome and awkward. Against trousers and handkerchiefs we had a distinct feeling—they were unsanitary, and the trousers kept us from breathing well. High collars, stiff-bosomed shirts, and suspenders fully three inches in width were uncomfortable, while leather boots caused actual suffering. We longed to go barefoot, but were told that the dew on the grass would give us colds. That was a new warning for us, for our mothers had never told us to beware of colds, and I remember as a child coming into the tipi with moccasins full of snow. Unconcernedly I would take them off my feet, pour out the snow, and put them on my feet again without any thought of sickness, for in that time colds, catarrh, bronchitis and la grippe were unknown. But we were soon to know them. Then, red flannel undergarments were given us for winter wear and for me, at least, discomfort grew into actual torture. I used to endure it as long as possible, then run upstairs and quickly take off the flannel garments and hide them. When inspection time came, I ran and put them on again, for I knew that if I were found disobeying the orders of the school I should be punished. My niece once asked me what it was that I disliked the most during those first bewildering days, and I said, ‘Red flannel.’ Not knowing what I meant, she laughed, but I still remember those horrid, sticky garments which we had to wear next to the skin
and I still squirm and itch when I think of them. Of course, our hair was cut, and then there was much disapproval. But that was part of the transformation process and in some mysterious way long hair stood in the path of our development. For all the grumbling among the bigger boys, we soon had our head shaven. How strange I felt!” For the Lakota, moreover, to cut one’s hair was a sign of mourning, so when the barber commenced there was loud ritual (and heartfelt) wailing.
Pratt, being a military man, organized the school along military lines. Students were woken at dawn and marched in regiments and companies out to the yard for morning roll call. The days were split in half and so was the student body, with half devoting the morning to academic subjects and the afternoon to tradecraft—printing, carpentry, sewing—and the other half on the reverse schedule. There was a military-style court, run by the students themselves, who determined what punishments to dole out for infractions.