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AMERICAN MASTER NARRATIVES AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIAN CITIZENSHIP IN THE GILDED AGE AND PROGRESSIVE ERA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2014

Philip J. Deloria
Philip J. Deloria*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
*
e-mail: pdeloria@umich.edu
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Abstract

American Indian people fit poorly into the sweeping stories most commonly told about American history. Puritan-inspired stories of national origins and Turnerian frontier narratives cast Indians as outsiders whose role was to be dispossessed and then disappear. More recent counter-narratives of conquest and of redemptive struggles for citizenship allow Native actors important and autonomous roles, but are also premised on a teleology of assimilation and civil rights that flattens the complexity of Indian uses of U.S. citizenship rights. The history of the Society of American Indians, founded in 1911, shows how the paradox of Indian citizenship is central to stories about the broader sweep of U.S. historical practice.

Type
2014 SHGAPE Distinguished Historian Address
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 3 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2015 

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References

NOTES

1 Hoxie, Frederick, “Exploring a Cultural Borderland: Native American Journeys of Discovery in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of American History 79:3 (1992): 969–990CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deloria, Philip, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence, KS, 2004)Google Scholar; Hertzberg, Hazel, The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements (Syracuse, 1971)Google Scholar; Maddox, Lucy, Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform (Ithaca, 2005)Google Scholar; Piatote, Beth, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship and Law in Native American Literature (New Haven, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In its discussion of the Society of American Indians, this article draws upon Deloria, Philip, “Four Thousand Invitations: Situating the Society of American Indians” in The Society of American Indians and Its Legacies: A Special Combined Issue, Studies in American Indian Literatures 25:2/American Indian Quarterly 37:3 (2003)Google Scholar, eds. Chadwick Allen and Beth Piatote. The articles in this special issue reflect the state of the field in scholarly considerations of the SAI. I draw also upon Deloria, Philip, “Conquest Histories and Narratives of Displacement: Civil Rights, Diaspora, and Transnationalism in Ethnic Studies and United States History” in Aspects of Transnational and Indigenous Cultures, ed. Huang, Hsinya (Taiwan, forthcoming 2014)Google Scholar.

2 Society of American Indians. Report of the Executive Council on the Proceedings of the First Annual Conference of the Society of American Indians. Washington D.C., 1912, 15.

3 Society of American Indians. Report of the Executive Council on the Proceedings of the First Annual Conference of the Society of American Indians. Washington D.C., 1912, 17.

4 Society of American Indians. Report of the Executive Council on the Proceedings of the First Annual Conference of the Society of American Indians. Washington D.C., 1912, 15.

5 Thornton, Russell, “Health, Disease, and Demography” in A Companion to American History, eds. Salisbury, Neal and Deloria, Philip J.. (Hoboken, 2008), 74Google Scholar.

6 Society of American Indians. Report of the Executive Council on the Proceedings of the First Annual Conference of the Society of American Indians. Washington D.C., 1912, 178–182, for membership lists.

7 Society of American Indians. Report of the Executive Council on the Proceedings of the First Annual Conference of the Society of American Indians. Washington D.C., 1912, 177.

8 Adams, David Wallace, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence, KS, 1995)Google Scholar; Lomawaima, K. Tsianina, They Called it Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln, NE, 1994)Google Scholar; K. Tsianina Lomawaima, with Archuleta, Margaret and Child, Brenda. Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences (Phoenix, 2000)Google Scholar; Child, Brenda, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln, NE, 1998)Google Scholar.

9 Society of American Indians. Report of the Executive Council on the Proceedings of the First Annual Conference of the Society of American Indians. Washington D.C., 1912, 22.

10 Limerick, Patricia Nelson, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, 1988)Google Scholar.

11 Limerick, Patricia Nelson, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (New York, 2001), 19Google Scholar.

12 Appropriately, perhaps, my thinking on this goes back to Deloria, Vine Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York, 1969)Google Scholar, and in particular the chapter “The Red and the Black,” which compares the political epistemologies of two social struggles, 168–196.

13 Wilkins, David, American Indian Politics and the American Political System (Washington, D.C., 2007), 1–67Google Scholar.

14 John Elk v. Charles Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94, U.S. Supreme Court, 1884; Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 187 U.S. 553, U.S. Supreme Court, 1903.

15 Maddox, Lucy, Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform (Ithaca, 2005), 166Google Scholar.

16 Deloria, Philip, “Nation to Neighborhood: Land, Policy, Culture, Colonialism, and Empire in U.S.-Indian Relations,” in The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present, and Future, eds. Cook, James, Glickman, Lawrence, and O'Malley, Michael (Chicago, 2008), 343–382Google Scholar. Note that my formulation can be read as a set of categories internal to the larger claims embodied in recent discussions of “settler colonialism,” a category meant to distinguish among various forms of colonial practice.

17 Hoxie, Frederick, “From Prison to Homeland: The Cheyenne River Indian Reservation before WWI” in The Plains Indians of the Twentieth Century, ed. Iverson, Peter (Norman, OK, 1985), 55–76Google Scholar.

18 McDonnell, Janet K., The Dispossession of the American Indian, 1887–1934 (Bloomington, 1991)Google Scholar.

19 United States. Cong. House. Indian Citizenship Act. 86th Cong., 1st Sess. House Report 222, 1924.

20 Parker, Arthur C., “Problems of Race Assimilation in America,” Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians (1916): 293Google Scholar.