This Indian Country

by Frederick Hoxie

  The Supreme Court announced its decisions in Hallowell and Marchie Tiger on the same day, May 15, 1911. Tiger was first. Agreeing with the Justice Department’s characterization of Marchie Tiger as an incompetent, Justice William Day declared:

  It may be taken as the settled doctrine of this court that Congress, in pursuance of the long-established policy of the Government, has a right to determine for itself when the guardianship which has been maintained over the Indian shall cease. It is for that body, and not the courts, to determine when the true interests of the Indian require his release from such condition of tutelage. The privileges and immunities of Federal citizenship have never been held to prevent governmental authority from placing such restraints upon the conduct or property of citizens as is necessary for the general good. Incompetent persons, though citizens, may not have the full right to control their persons and property.45

  After declaring Marchie Tiger incompetent and her land sale invalid, the Court turned to Hallowell. Citing the three cases that had been decided using racial justifications since Sloan had first brought Hallowell’s complaint to them six years earlier (Celestine, Sutton, and Tiger) and noting that “[w]e . . . need not repeat what was there said,” Justice Day disposed of Hallowell’s appeal in a few paragraphs. “The mere fact that citizenship has been conferred upon Indians,” he declared, “does not necessarily end the right or duty of the United States to pass laws in their interest as a dependent people.”46

  Without surviving diaries or personal correspondence, it is impossible to know Thomas Sloan’s reaction to the Tiger and Hallowell decisions. At the very least it would have puzzled him to hear the nation’s highest legal officials mouthing racial stereotypes that his teachers at Hampton had banished from their classrooms a generation earlier. He no doubt sympathized with efforts to protect troubled individuals like Marchie Tiger and to reduce the rates of alcoholism in Indian communities, but his lawyer’s mind would surely have grasped the fact that Judge Day’s decision opened the door to an immense expansion of federal power over Indians and, with it, a drastic reduction in the potential power of Native citizenship. If Indians as a legal class were incompetent, and their freedoms restricted as a matter of standard policy, then the Court could identify no constitutional or statutory limits to the power of the Indian Office. Of course Congress had acted—it had, after all, declared these allotted individuals to be U.S. citizens—but the Court’s expansive definition of Indian incompetence trumped all opponents. As long as he was an Indian, Sloan himself would be subject to arbitrary decisions taken by officials acting according to their definition of his true interest. It is not surprising, then, that the good citizenship gun would have been an appealing slogan to Sloan and his SAI colleagues in the spring of 1911.

  PURSUING CITIZENSHIP ON A NATIONAL STAGE

  In the years immediately preceding the founding of the Society of American Indians, Thomas Sloan entered the orbit of an informal network of like-minded Native activists. Some of those who later became active in the society, such as Carlos Montezuma and Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala Sa), knew of each other as lecturers and popular writers. Others—the ministers Sherman Coolidge, Philip Joseph Deloria, and Charles Eastman’s brother John—crossed paths while working as missionaries. Boarding school classmates frequently corresponded following their return to their home communities. These networks often overlapped with one another. The Eastman brothers, Coolidge, and Deloria, for example, all were active in the YMCA. Bonnin, a former Carlisle teacher, often met with former students and staff members. She and Montezuma were even engaged for a time.

  Regional groups also appeared. These included the Black Hills Council in the Dakotas (1911), the Alaskan Native Brotherhood and Sisterhood (1912), and the Northwestern Federation of American Indians (1914). Since all these organizations became involved in lobbying, legal disputes, and claims cases, their leaders frequently encountered one another at the SAI’s annual meeting or in Washington, D.C., as they called on law firms, legislators, and reform groups.

  It is not clear when Sloan first corresponded with Charles Eastman, Richard Pratt, and Carlos Montezuma, but surviving letters indicate that the Omaha lawyer established a working relationship with each of these men around 1905, when he was working on appeals of the Hallowell and Thurston County cases. In a 1909 letter to Pratt, for example, Sloan referred to a meeting the previous winter in which eleven tribal representatives, counseled by the former Carlisle headmaster, had called on the secretary of the interior to urge greater funding for Indian schools. A press report from the same year noted that Sloan was also part of a delegation of boarding school graduates that called on President Taft a few days after his March 1909 inauguration. The group also included Alexander Upshaw, an Indian Office employee from the Montana Crow Reservation, the aspiring Pawnee writer and fellow Hampton alumnus James Murie from Oklahoma, and the Reverend John Eastman.47

  Sloan’s deepest engagement with other activists in these early years occurred in June 1909, when he joined a group that gathered at Haskell Institute, the government boarding school in Lawrence, Kansas, to found the Indian Memorial Association. Among the organizers of this short-lived organization were Charles Kealear, a Yankton Sioux classmate of Sloan’s from Hampton; Dennison Wheelock, a Wisconsin Oneida graduate of Carlisle who, like Sloan, had read law and been admitted to the state bar following his return from school; and Walter Battice, a Sac and Fox Indian from Oklahoma who had also attended Hampton before going to work for the Indian Office. The group elected Sloan president and adopted a series of resolutions critical of government paternalism. Removing the restrictions of guardianship, they argued, “is indispensable to . . . bringing the Indians into the full enjoyment of the rights and privileges to which they are entitled as men under the constitution and laws of this country.”48 The meeting provided an opportunity for Sloan to reestablish ties to former classmates and allies as well as to meet the Chicago-based Yavapai physician Carlos Montezuma.

  By the time they began working together on the Indian Memorial Association, Dr. Montezuma had become an outspoken critic of the Indian Office. A powerfully built, dark-skinned figure who always appeared in formal attire, Montezuma was a walking refutation of the popular belief that Indians were backward people who could not adapt to life in modern society. His successful medical practice allowed him time for political activism; he rarely passed up an opportunity to speak out publicly against Indian Office arrogance and incompetence. He believed, as he once told the national convention of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, “The Indian . . . is entitled to the privilege of waging his contest for existence . . . just as much as other men are.”49

  Like other self-made men, Montezuma believed his own career should be a model for others. Adopted as a child by an itinerant Italian American photographer in Arizona, he was later placed with a foster family in Urbana, Illinois, the home of the state’s new land grant university. Montezuma fully embraced his new home, learning English, earning a degree in chemistry, and then proceeding to the Chicago Medical College, where he earned his MD in 1889. His hostility to the Indian Office, like Sloan’s, was based on personal experience. He spent four years as a reservation physician in the West and resigned in 1893 because of his disgust with the government’s inadequate support for Indian health and his personal conflicts with the political appointees who ran the local agency. Montezuma moved on to Carlisle, where three years as school physician and a close association with Captain Pratt solidified his belief that education and citizenship would free Indians from government control.

  Montezuma’s return to Chicago in 1896 occurred just as Thomas Sloan’s disputes with the government were producing congressional investigations and lawsuits. Both men witnessed firsthand the government’s growing acceptance of racial incompetence as a justification for federal restrictions. While Sloan argued before judges who were growing comfortable with the view that Indians were incompetents, Mon
tezuma spoke out against the increasingly popular view that the limits of the Native intellect were so severe that government schools should focus exclusively on vocational training. Native people, these experts declared, would require several generations to adapt to the modern world. Most prominent among these racial realists was Francis Leupp, Theodore Roosevelt’s commissioner of Indian affairs, who declared on taking office that “the most common mistake . . . in dealing with the Indian is the assumption that he is simply a white man with a red skin.” The government’s goal, Leupp argued, should be the “improvement, not transformation,” of Native people.50 To Sloan and Montezuma, this “realism” was just another version of government paternalism.

  The alliance between Sloan and Montezuma grew stronger in the immediate aftermath of the Society of American Indians’ founding conference. The October 1911 convention in Columbus, Ohio, elected Sloan chairman and Charles Dagenett secretary-treasurer, presumably because Dagenett was based in Washington, D.C. The group also appointed an executive committee consisting of members of the original organizing group that had met in May. Standing Bear and Cornelius were included, plus Sloan’s Omaha friend Hiram Chase and two newcomers: the Reverend Sherman Coolidge from Wind River, Wyoming, and the anthropologist Arthur C. Parker. Montezuma decided at the last minute not to attend the Ohio gathering.

  Almost immediately, Montezuma, Sloan, and Cornelius complained to the executive committee that as a government employee Dagenett would have a conflict of interest in any disputes with the Indian Office. They insisted that he step down as secretary-treasurer. Doubts about Sloan were also raised from anonymous sources. Charges of unethical conduct first made against him years earlier at the Omaha agency were repeated, as was the charge that he approved the use of peyote in Indian religious rituals. The latter issue, which was particularly important among Christian Indian missionaries like Coolidge and John Eastman, would bedevil the organization for most of its history.51

  When Sloan’s critics suggested in November he be replaced by Coolidge, who lived in Wyoming, the chairman worried publicly that with the mild-mannered Anglican minister leading from his pulpit two thousand miles to the west, “the secretary would control.” Dagenett resigned in January 1912, and Sloan replaced him with Parker. The two seemed to communicate well, but opposition to Sloan continued, and Parker, inexperienced but ambitious, agreed with those who considered the Omaha lawyer a liability. Sloan wanted to continue. “We have waited too long to get together to do something,” he wrote Parker. “I know that every day that we wait some Indian is losing some thing.” Sloan argued that the situation was particularly critical in the West, where the allotment process was being extended to large, arid reservations that would quickly be overrun by settlers. As he explained, “Among the New York Indians a session of Congress or a year in time will not affect a material change, but among the Western Indians they and their property are in the way of an advancing and aggressive civilization. . . . We must be doing something,” he wrote, “or I will resign.”52

  Sloan and Montezuma envisioned an aggressive organization that would provide legal assistance to tribes and lobby on their behalf before Congress. The Omaha attorney traveled to Washington in January 1912, rented an office, and threw himself into the legislative arena. “I have been busy at the Indian Office and with Congress,” he reported on February 19. A month later he wrote that “there are many Indians here. . . . I have been able to get a number of them to come to the office.” He added that the commissioner of Indian affairs had asked him “to meet at dinner to discuss the affairs of Indians generally.”53 The good citizenship gun seemed to be producing results on the national stage. Then suddenly, in late March, Sloan resigned and was replaced by Sherman Coolidge.

  —

  SURVIVING DOCUMENTS tell us little about Sloan’s departure from the SAI, but his correspondence with Parker and the subsequent tone of the society’s activities indicate that the founding leader’s determination to take an aggressive stance toward the Indian Office worried others in the leadership group. Arthur Parker, uncomfortable with legal confrontations and western tribal rivalries, urged caution from the start. A nephew of General Ely Parker, who had served as Indian commissioner under President U.S. Grant, the thirty-year-old had not attended a government boarding school and had little experience with western tribes or reservation politics. His principal interest in 1911 was building a strong base of support among white reformers. Parker wrote Sloan immediately after the Columbus meeting to remind him that “we are a small disorganized body. . . . Unless we win the unhesitating confidence of all classes, we will surely fail as there is a sun in the heavens.”54 When Sloan refused to change his tactics, Parker argued even more strongly for caution. “If we can but demonstrate that we can run in harmony for even a little while and maintain an attitude of constructive criticism toward the government, not mere destructive criticism that suggests no remedy; if we can only demonstrate our sanity . . . and proceed cautiously, we will receive help from quarters that we little suspect.”55

  With the pious (and geographically distant) Reverend Coolidge installed as president, the society adopted a distinctly conciliatory stance. The first issue of the group’s magazine assured its readers, who were both Native activists and non-Indian supporters, that it was not “a political or partisan organization.” The issue emphasized the society’s patriotism and support for the respectable Indian Rights Association. Writing to Pratt after the second SAI convention in Columbus in October 1912, Dennison Wheelock expressed the dissatisfaction of those who opposed this quiet tone. “I have not changed my opinion respecting the Society of American Indians which I told you at Columbus,” Wheelock told his former headmaster. “I did not have very much faith in the society doing very much good for the Indians because of the limited experience of those who are the leaders.” And Wheelock was not impressed with Parker. “The addresses and writings of the Secretary . . . are but the echo of the Indian Rights Association, Lake Mohonk, and such other paper shooters.”56

  Agreeing that the society was now in the hands of “paper shooters,” Sloan returned to his legal practice. He and Montezuma maintained their memberships in the SAI but passed up the group’s annual meetings. Shuttling between Nebraska and Washington, D.C., the Omaha attorney became involved instead with an array of tribes and a number of congressional disputes over federal policy. His repeated confrontations with federal officials over the issue of Indian competence convinced him that Indian Office paternalism was the greatest threat to Indian rights. “Every Congress has before it legislation detrimental to the Indian,” he told an audience of Indian students at Carlisle in 1912. “In nine cases out of ten the legislation is promoted by capitalists, speculators and railroad men who are more able than the Indian to reach their Congressmen, and through them the Indian Office. . . .” As a consequence, the arbitrary powers of this federal agency, charged with protecting Indians, were routinely used to exploit them. “The abolition of the Indian Office,” he soon concluded, “is the only true solution of the Indian question.” He wrote Arthur Parker, “We cannot be an Indian society and be neutral.” He added, “It is time for action.”57

  While Sloan aimed his attacks at the Indian Office, his real target remained the race-based guardianship restrictions federal authorities had established during the previous decade. Alluding to the restrictions placed on the property rights, civil liberties, and personal freedoms of dependent Indians, Sloan argued that Indian citizens were “the only persons who are denied the courts, the only persons who are deprived of liberty without due process of law, the only persons who are deprived of their property without due process of law. The only persons who are kept within Federal restraint and allowed to starve.” The solution to this predicament was “citizenship and individual property rights.” Indians had to rely on the courts, he insisted, because “the political powers may assert themselves over the Indian property and the political preferences are stron
ger than the Indian rights.”58

  Sloan’s passion for the rights of citizen allottees was no doubt fueled by his growing list of frustrated and disillusioned Indian clients. The Omaha attorney, who by 1912 had permanently relocated to Washington, D.C., frequently represented plaintiffs who challenged the government’s determination of heirs to individual allotments or who wished to appeal their exclusion from tribal membership rolls.59 He carried yet another appeal of enrollment decisions at the Omaha agency to the Supreme Court in 1917.60 He also joined forces with administration critics on Capitol Hill such as the Progressive senator Robert La Follette, a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, who were willing to provide unhappy tribal leaders with a forum for their grievances. In 1913 one of La Follette’s Senate allies, Joseph Robinson, from Arkansas, enlisted Sloan as a special agent for a Joint Commission to Investigate Indian Affairs. This assignment produced additional invitations from congressional Indian Affairs committees to travel to the Crow, Blackfeet, White Earth, and Yankton reservations to investigate charges of agency corruption and illegal leasing arrangements as well as charges that officials had arbitrarily classified tribal members as “incompetents.”61

  Sloan’s travels widened the scope of his political contacts and allies. When he conducted his investigation at the Crow agency, for example, he reported: “I met there a number of Indians who I had met before at the schools, either at Hampton or Carlisle.” As a result, he noted, “I did not meet any of the agency officials.”62 The attorney followed the same pattern in 1914 at the Blackfeet agency (where the agency police followed him throughout his visit). He avoided the local agent, spending his time instead with Robert Hamilton, a young Carlisle graduate who offered sensational testimony describing starvation and suffering among the tribe’s traditionalists and widespread corruption among government employees.63 Two years later Sloan used the testimony of some of these acquaintances at a Washington hearing. As he argued in support of a reform proposal, the attorney introduced the senators present to tribal delegates who had recently arrived from the Comanche and Klamath reserves, as well as to Hamilton, also in the city on behalf of his tribe.64