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Autonomy Through Allotment: Political Strategies of the Ottawa Tribe in Indian Territory, 1870–1892
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 August 2024
Abstract
The late nineteenth-century policy of allotting tribal lands into individually owned tracts is appropriately interpreted as a destructive federal effort to expropriate Native land and eliminate tribal identities. The Ottawa Tribe in Indian Territory, however, had divergent objectives in supporting allotment. This article argues the Ottawa advocated for allotment and U.S. citizenship to escape intrusive federal control over their lands and resources. Although they embraced policies aimed at eliminating tribal existence, the Ottawa rejected the intentions behind those policies, and instead, they drew on long-established community attributes of mobility and interconnection with outsiders to resituate their nation within American society. By centering Ottawa perspectives, this article disrupts progressive narratives that denote the pursuit of U.S. citizenship as an effort to secure equal inclusion. It underscores U.S. citizenship and allotment as tools of settler colonial domination and demonstrates how the Ottawa subversively deployed U.S. citizenship and private property rights to combat colonial administration and maintain tribal sovereignty. Examining a policy often glossed over as invariably imposed on Native nations, this article underscores the necessity of analyzing Native community dynamics and political strategies to understand the implementation and impact of allotment.
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- SHGAPE Graduate Student Essay Prize
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- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)
References
Notes
1 “Ottawa Petition,” in E. Whittlesey to Clinton B. Fisk, Dec. 15, 1882, in Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1882 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883), 31–32 (hereafter cited as ARBIC).
2 Henry L. Dawes, “Petitions and Memorials,” Jan. 5, 1883, 47th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 14, Part 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883), 869.
3 Wolfe, Patrick; “Against the Intentional Fallacy: Legocentrism and Continuity in the Rhetoric of Indian Dispossession,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 36, no. 1 (Jan. 2012): 1–46 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Prucha, Francis Paul, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 716, 659–71Google Scholar.
4 Justice, Daniel Heath and O’Brien, Jean M., “Introduction: What’s Done to the People is Done to the Land,” in Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege, ed. Justice, Daniel Heath and O’Brien, Jean M. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), xii–xiii Google Scholar.
5 “Ottawa Petition,” in Whittlesey to Fisk, Dec. 15, 1882, in ARBIC 1882, 31–32.
6 Deloria, Vine and Lytle, Clifford M., American Indians, American Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), 8–12 Google Scholar; Wolfe, Patrick, “After the Frontier: Separation and Absorption in US Indian Policy,” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 13–51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 There are several Ottawa tribes in the United States and Canada. This article solely outlines the experiences of the Ottawa removed from the Maumee River Valley of Ohio to Kansas and later Indian Territory, known today as the Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma. For an overview for the readers unfamiliar with this nation and its history, see David D. Dry, “Unnatural Naturalization: The Ottawa Indians and U.S. Citizenship, 1854–1978,” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2023).
8 Rosanne Currarino has outlined how the “proprietary-producerist model of citizenship” equated property-holding with political standing, self-sufficiency, and an ideal of an independent and autonomous citizen. See Currarino, Rosanne, The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 3–4 Google Scholar. Nancy Cohen has also outlined how liberal reformers, fearful of the propertyless masses using government authority to seize wealth, championed economic liberalism, or laissez-faire, which lionized the sanctity of property to rationalize limited government intervention in property and market relations. See Cohen, Nancy, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 84–109 Google Scholar.
9 Thomas Biolsi refers to this as a “hybrid political space” and part of a “national indigenous geography” that sees the whole United States as a Native homeland and denotes the “simultaneous existence of two nations in the same physical space.” See Biolsi, Thomas, “Imagined Geographies: Sovereignty, Indigenous Space, and American Indian Struggle,” American Ethnologist 32 (May 2005): 239–59Google Scholar.
10 As emblematized by Angie Debo’s classic book And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes, historians have justly stressed the “orgy of plunder and exploitation probably unparalleled in American history” engendered by allotment. Debo, Angie, And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes (1940; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 91 Google Scholar. More recent work has emphasized “dynamic resistance, defiance, and response” by Native people alongside of the devastating consequences of allotment. See Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O’Brien, “Introduction,” Allotment Stories, xxii. This study denotes allotment as a harmful colonial policy but outlines Ottawa advocacy for allotment as a form of resistance to other colonial impositions.
11 See, for example, Teeters, Lila M., “‘A Simple Act of Justice’: The Pueblo Rejection of U.S. Citizenship in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 21 (Oct. 2022): 301–18Google Scholar; Stanciu, Cristina, “Native Acts, Immigrant Acts: Citizenship, Naturalization, and the Performance of Civic Identity during the Progressive Era,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 20 (Apr. 2021): 252–76Google Scholar; Kantrowitz, Stephen, Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2023)Google Scholar; Witgen, Michael J., Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022)Google Scholar; Crandall, Maurice, These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands, 1598–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 177–225 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 For Native advocacy or proactive manipulation of allotment for tribal ends, see Danziger, Edmund Jefferson, Great Lakes Indian Accommodation and Resistance During the Early Reservation Years, 1850–1900 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 95–120 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Greenwald, Emily, Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, Jicarilla Apaches and the Dawes Act (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Schaefer, Kurt Kim, “A Bitter Pill: Indian Reform Policy, Indian Acculturation, and the Puyallup Act of 1893,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 102 (Winter 2010–2011): 14–28 Google Scholar; Kelli Jean Mosteller, “Place, Politics, and Property: Negotiating Allotment and Citizenship for the Citizen Potawatomi, 1861–1891,” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2013), 170–81.
13 See, in particular, Stremlau, Rose, Sustaining the Cherokee Family Kinship and the Allotment of an Indigenous Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Osburn, Katherine M. B., Southern Ute Women : Autonomy and Assimilation on the Reservation 1887–1934 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Hauptman, Laurence M., The Oneida Indians in the Age of Allotment, 1860–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Tone-Pah-Hote, Jenny, Crafting an Indigenous Nation: Kiowa Expressive Culture in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 For other Native nations who mobilized power through private property ownership in the late nineteenth century, see Hill, Christina Gish, Webs of Kinship: Family in Northern Cheyenne Nationhood (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), 246–48Google Scholar; Makley, Matthew, The Small Shall Be Strong: A History of Lake Tahoe’s Washoe Indians (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018), 86–93 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Andrew Denson, “A Few Unreasonable Proposals: Some Rejected Ideas from the Cherokee Allotment Negotiations,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 84 (Winter 2006–2007), 426–43.
15 “Treaty with the Ottawa, 1831,” in Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, Vol. 2, ed. Charles J. Kappler (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1903), 335–39.
16 On removal as genocidal, see Ostler, Jeffrey, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 365–67Google Scholar.
17 Kelli Jean Mosteller, “Place, Politics, and Property: Negotiating Allotment and Citizenship for the Citizen Potawatomi, 1861–1891,” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2013), 2, 171–81; Bowes, John P., Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 201–08.Google Scholar
18 “Treaty between the United States of America and the Ottawa Indians of Blanchard’s Fork and Roche De Boeuf, June 24, 1862,”in Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, Vol. 2, ed. Charles J. Kappler (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1903), 830.
19 Dry, “Unnatural Naturalization,” 28–86.
20 Miner, Craig and Unrau, William E., The End of Indian Kansas: A Study of Cultural Revolution, 1854–1871 ( Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1978), 55–80 Google Scholar.
21 Unrau, William E. and Miner, H. Craig, Tribal Dispossession and the Ottawa Indian University Fraud (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985).Google Scholar
22 “Treaty with the Seneca, Mixed Seneca and Shawnee, etc., February 23, 1867,” in Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, Vol. 2, ed. Charles J. Kappler (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1903), 960–69.
23 Dave Geboe, interview by Nannie Lee Burns, May 4, 1937, Indian-Pioneer Papers Oral History Collection, University of Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma Libraries, Norman, Oklahoma (hereafter cited as IPP-OHC, OUL); Lizzie Lavore to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, May 12, 1916, Biographical Files, Lizzie Lavore folder, Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma History Archives Library, Miami, Oklahoma (hereafter cited as OTO-HAL).
24 Guy Jennison, “Sparks from the Tribal Fire” [unpublished autobiography], circa 1956, Ottawa Tribe History folder, Ottawa County Historical Society, Dobson Museum, Miami, Oklahoma (hereafter cited as OCHS-DM).
25 Tuttle, A. C. and Tuttle, Emmeline, Friends’ Review: A Religious, Literary and Miscellaneous Journal 24 (1870/1871), 453–54Google Scholar; George W. Mitchell, A. C. Tuttle, and E. H. Tuttle to Enoch Hoag, Oct. 4, 1871, in Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1871 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), 499–502 (hereafter cited as ARCIA).
26 King, Joseph B., “The Ottawa Indians in Kansas and Oklahoma,” Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society 13 (1913–1914), 377 Google Scholar.
27 Albert Wiley, Indian Agent, to Thomas Murphey, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Aug. 28, 1867, in ARCIA Affairs 1867 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1867), 301; Hiram W. Jones to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Sept. 1, 1872, in ARCIA 1881 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881), 243.
28 Guy Jennison, “Sparks from the Tribal Fire” [unpublished autobiography], circa 1956, Ottawa Tribe History folder, OCHS-DM.
29 Dave Geboe, interview by Nannie Lee Burns, May 4, 1937, IPP-OHC, OUL.
30 Lula Wyrick, interview by Nannie Lee Burns, July 20, 1937, IPP-OHC, OUL.
31 Meeker, Jotham, Ottawa First Book. Containing Lessons for the Learner; Portions of the Gospel by Luke, omitted by Matthew and John; and the Ottawa Laws (Ottawa Baptist Mission Station: J. Meeker, Printer, 1850), 102–25Google Scholar; Francis Tymoney to Charles Mix, May 6, 1858, M-234, reel 733, frames 1108–1112, Sac and Fox Agency, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs 1824–1881, RG 75, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC (hereafter cited as NARA-DC).
32 Catherine Jennison to whom it may concern, Dec. 4, 1883, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frame 410, Indian Archives Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (hereafter cited as IAC, OHS); Catherine Jennison to D. B. Dyer, Nov. 10, 1883, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frames 425–27, IAC, OHS; Charles Lacy, interview by Nannie Lee Burns, Jan. 24, 1938, IPP-OHC, OUL; Annie King [sic], interview by Nannie Lee Burns, June 25, 1937, IPP-OHC, OUL; Anna King to Robert H. King, [undated], Biographical Files, Joseph Badger King folder, OTO-HAL. As the area had previously been occupied by the Cherokees, some Ottawas had paid former owners for their improved farms or houses, although not required to do so by treaty. See, Charles Lacy, interview by Nannie Lee Burns, Jan. 24, 1938, IPP-OHC, OUL; Czarina Conlan, “M.B. Pooler, Ottawa Chief,” July 18, 1929, Historic Oklahoma Collection, Series 29, folder Ottawa-Biographies, OHS.
33 In 1883, for example, tribal leaders authorized the distribution of excess corn from communal property to Na-Watch, a widowed Ottawa elder, while the next year, Ottawa men simply “gathered themselves together and put a new roof” on her house. See John Earley to D. B. Dyer, Apr. 2, 1883, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frame 398, IAC, OHS; H. H. Bonwill to unnamed recipient, Mar. 20, 1884, in The Council Fire and Arbitrator 7 (June 1884).
34 Moses Pooler to the Secretary of the Interior, July 19, 1884, in U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, Testimony taken by the Committee on Indian Affairs of the Senate in relation to leases of lands in the Indian Territory and other reservations under resolutions of the Senate of December 3, 1884 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1885), 594–95Google Scholar.
35 King, “Ottawa Indians in Kansas and Oklahoma,” 377; “The Railroad,” Cherokee Sentinel (Baxter Springs, Kansas), Mar. 19, 1870; Lizzie Lavore to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, May 12, 1916, Biographical Files, Lizzie Lavore folder, OTO-HAL.
36 Tuttle, A. C. and Tuttle, E. H., Friends’ Review: A Religious, Literary and Miscellaneous Journal 24 (1870–1871), 453 Google Scholar; Enoch Hoag to E. S. Parker, Oct. 8, 1870, in ARCIA 1870 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1870), 257–58.
37 Moses Pooler to the Secretary of the Interior, July 19, 1884, in Testimony taken by the Committee on Indian Affairs … December 3, 1884, 594–95; Catherine Wind Jennison, et al., to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, May 5, 1883, in Testimony taken by the Committee on Indian Affairs … December 3, 1884, 346–47; Lizzie Lavore to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, May 12, 1916, Biographical Files, Lizzie Lavore folder, OTO-HAL; Edward George (La-bake) to J. M. Haworth, June 11, 1878, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frame 175, IAC, OHS; Ottawa Chief and Council to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Nov. 11, 1878, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frames 176–77, IAC, OHS.
38 King, “Ottawa Indians in Kansas and Oklahoma,” 376.
39 Moses Pooler to the Secretary of the Interior, July 19, 1884, in U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Indian Affairs, Testimony taken by the Committee on Indian Affairs of the Senate in relation to leases of lands in the Indian Territory and other reservations under resolutions of the Senate of December 3, 1884 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1885), 595 Google Scholar.
40 Walter King to Elsie Hand, Jan. 3, 1958, Walter S. King Collection, box 1, folder 4, OHS.
41 Lula Wyrick, interview by Nannie Lee Burns, July 20, 1937, IPP-OHC, OUL.
42 Clarence E. King, interview by Peggy Dycus, May 16, 1969, Doris Duke Collection of American Indian Oral History, OUL.
43 Clarence E. King, interview by Peggy Dycus, May 16, 1969, Doris Duke Collection of American Indian Oral History, OUL.
44 Walter King to Elsie Hand, Jan. 3, 1958, Walter S. King Collection, box 1, folder 4, OHS.
45 Lula Wyrick, interview by Nannie Lee Burns, July 20, 1937, IPP-OHC, OUL.
46 “Isaac McCoy,” Miami Record-Herald, June 6, 1913; Thomas J. Moore to Isaac McCoy, Dec. 9, 1889, Record of the Quapaw Agency, Miscellaneous Letters, 1872–1946, E.1, Record Group 75, National Archives and Records Administration at Fort Worth, Southwest Regional Archives, Fort Worth, Texas.
47 Lizzie Lavore to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, May 12, 1916, Biographical Files, Lizzie Lavore folder, OTO- HAL.
48 Lizzie Lavore to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, May 12, 1916, Biographical Files, Lizzie Lavore folder, OTO- HAL
49 Elmer Cooke, for example, the son of Chief John Wilson’s daughter Nannie Wilson Cooke, was born in Kansas in 1891, but allotted alongside the Ottawas. Angeline Lotz, separated from the tribe for four decades after marrying a white man in 1849, rejoined the tribe in 1889, was accepted by tribal members, and received an allotment. See, Gideon, D. C, Indian Territory, Descriptive, Biographical and Genealogical: Including the Landed Estates, County Seats, Etc., with a General History of the Territory (New York: Lewis, 1901), 536–38Google Scholar.
50 Thomas J. Moore to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Aug. 30, 1892, in ARCIA 1892–1893 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893), 243–44.
51 Whites illegally coming onto the Ottawa Reservation was also a recurrent issue. See, for example, correspondence on the issue from 1878 alone, Ottawa Chief and Council to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Nov. 11, 1878, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frames 176–77, IAC, OHS; Ezra A. Hayt to H. W. Jones, Dec. 10, 1878, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frames 182–83, IAC, OHS; Edward George (La-bake) to J. M. Haworth, June 11, 1878, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frame 175, IAC, OHS.
52 Ottawa General Council Resolution, Nov. 10, 1887, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frame 311, IAC, OHS; Moses Pooler to D. B. Dyer, Mar. 1, 1884, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frames 136–37, IAC, OHS.
53 J. M. Haworth to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Aug. 27, 1879, in ARCIA 1879 (Washington, DC, Government Printing Office, 1879), 76
54 As one Indian agent summarized, “most of the farming is now done by white men: in fact, this agency now presents very much the appearance of a white man’s country.” Thomas J. Moore to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Aug. 30, 1892, in ARCIA 1892–1893 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893), 243–44.
55 “Ottawa Statistics,” Aug. 1881, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-1, frames 441–42, IAC, OHS.
56 These included Sophia Barnett (Sup-pee), a recent widow with three children, and Abigail Wilson, a 50-year-old woman with only an adult daughter living at home. “Ottawa Statistics,” Aug. 1881, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-1, frames 441–42, IAC, OHS; Articles of Agreement between Sophia Barnett and Samuel Albro, Feb. 17, 1880, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frames 223–24, IAC, OHS.
57 D. B. Dyer to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Aug. 25, 1880, in ARCIA 1880 (Washington, DC, Government Printing Office, 1880), 88.
58 “Statistics of the Ottawas,” Aug. 25, 1882, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-1, frames 450–52, IAC, OHS.
59 On the longstanding place of intermarriage in crafting alliances in Anishinaabe communities, see Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire, 78–85. Anishinabek elsewhere also incorporated whites. See, Nesper, Larry, Our Relations … the Mixed Bloods: Indigenous Transformation and Dispossession in the Western Great Lakes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021), 7–12 Google Scholar; Miller, Cary, Ogimaag: Anishinaabeg Leadership, 1760–1845 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 228 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
60 Lizzie Lavore to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, May 12, 1916, Biographical Files, Lizzie Lavore folder, OTO- HAL
61 On the importance of tribal citizenship in constituting nationhood, see Adams, Mikaëla M., Who Belongs?: Race, Resources, and Tribal Citizenship in the Native South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
62 Annie King [sic], interview by Nannie Lee Burns, June 25, 1937, IPP-OHC, OUL.
63 “Ottawa News,” Miami Record-Herald, Apr. 1, 1910.
64 Lula Wyrick, interview by Nannie Lee Burns, July 20, 1937, IPP-OHC, OUL; Sarah Hollingsworth, interview by Nannie Lee Burns, Oct. 15, 1937, IPP-OHC, OUL; Gideon, Indian Territory, 333–35.
65 Lula Wyrick, interview by Nannie Lee Burns, July 20, 1937, IPP-OHC, OUL.
66 Resolution of Ottawa Tribal Council, Jan. 17, 1889, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frames 341–42, IAC, OHS; Interview with Guy Jennison, Gene Jennison, and Walter King Sr., Feb. 5, 1953, Family History folder, OTO-HAL.
67 Thomas Jefferson Morgan to J. V. Summer, July 16, 1889, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frames 346–48, IAC, OHS.
68 See, for example, Resolution of Ottawa Tribal Council, May 22, 1900, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frame 422, IAC, OHS.
69 Guy Jennison, “Sparks from the Tribal Fire” [unpublished autobiography], circa 1956, Ottawa Tribe History folder, OCHS-DM.
70 “Posters Are Out,” Baxter Springs (Kansas) News, June 23, 1894.
71 Petition of Ottawa Indians for Relief to Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price [undated, between 1881–1885], Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frames 3–5, IAC, OHS.
72 Annie King [sic], interview by Nannie Lee Burns, June 25, 1937, IPP-OHC, OUL.
73 Sarah Hollingsworth, interview by Nannie Lee Burns, Oct. 15, 1937, IPP-OHC, OUL.
74 Ezra A. Hayt to J. M. Hayworth, July 23, 1879, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frames 213–14, IAC, OHS.
75 In a telling incident in 1878, a tribal member endeavored to circumvent the lack of formal title under U.S. law by selling “his undivided interest here in the lands held by us in this territory.” Ottawa Chief and Council to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Nov. 11, 1878, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frames 176–77, IAC, OHS. For economic and market forces at work the other tribal responses to allotment, see Meyer, Melissa L., The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 1–7, 69–136Google Scholar; Danziger, Edmund Jefferson, Great Lakes Indian Accommodation and Resistance During the Early Reservation Years, 1850–1900 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 100–106 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
76 Ottawa Chief and Council to the Secretary of the Interior, March 22, 1877, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frames 154–55, IAC, OHS.
77 “The Secretary of the Interior,” Sumner County Press (Wellington, Kansas), Oct. 16, 1879; Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs, E. J. Brooks to Amos Kist, Jan. 30, 1880, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frames 220–22, IAC, OHS.
78 The Indian Office, not the Ottawas, initially rejected the idea of allotment. Federal officials cited Ottawa incapacity and a reluctance to abandon Indian Office control over Ottawa lands in their opposition. One federal official noted, “as the Ottawas are citizens of the United States, if their lands are allotted and patented, they will at once become alienable, and it would become of grave consideration whether they would not soon dispose of their lands and render themselves homeless.” See William Nicholson to H. W. Jones, Mar. 28, 1877, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, frames 156–57, IAC, OHS.
79 Chang, David A., The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832–1929 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 77–78 Google Scholar.
80 Harmon, Alexandra, “American Indians and Land Monopolies in the Gilded Age,” Journal of American History 90 (June 2003): 106–33Google Scholar.
81 Bloom, Khaled J., “An American Tragedy of the Commons: Land and Labor in the Cherokee Nation, 1870–1900,” Agricultural History 76 (Summer 2002): 497–523 Google Scholar; Denson, Andrew, Demanding the Cherokee Nation: Indian Autonomy and American Culture, 1830–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 220–21Google Scholar.
82 D. B. Dyer to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Aug. 27, 1882, in ARCIA 1882 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1882), 84. The other tribes of the Quapaw Agency similarly engaged in widespread leasing to whites. Looking at the Eastern Shawnee, John Bowes describes leasing as substantial aspect of the Shawnee economy in the decades before and after allotment and potentially “just as influential” as allotment in shaping tribal life on the Shawnee reservation. Bowes, John, “Divided Lands and Dispersed People: Allotment and the Eastern Shawnees from the 1870s to the 1920s,” in The Search for Eastern Shawnee History, 1831–1945, ed. Stephen Warren (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), 58–71 Google Scholar.
83 D. B. Dyer to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Aug. 4, 1882, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-5, frame 236, IAC, OHS.
84 According to the 1882 Survey, white renters cultivated 14 acres for John Earley, 40 acres for William Hurr, and 20 acres for Joseph Wind. Hurr resided among the Sac and Fox Tribe at the time.
85 D. B. Dyer to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Aug. 16, 1883, in ARCIA 1883 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1884), 81.
86 “Ottawa Petition,” in E. Whittlesey to Clinton B. Fisk, Dec. 15, 1882, in ARBIC 1882 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1883), 31–32. When endorsing the Ottawa petition on the Senate floor a few months later, Senator Dawes noted 96 Ottawas signed the petition, with most signing their names in English. It is uncertain whether names were subsequently added or if a new petition was forwarded. Although the language of the petition is noted, the list of signatories is not included in the sources cited above.
87 S. 2369, 47th Cong. (1883); H.R. 2055, 48th Cong. (1884).
88 A lack of appropriations for surveys of tribal lands stalled federal allotment efforts throughout the early 1880s. See DeJong, David H., The Commissioners of Indian Affairs: The United States Indian Service and the Making of Federal Indian Policy, 1824–2017 (Salt Lake City : University of Utah Press, 2020), 73–74 Google Scholar.
89 “The Civil Cases,” Independent-Journal (Ottawa, Kansas), Apr. 13, 1871.
90 Guy Jennison Jr., interview by Joseph Cash, June 4, 1976, Interview 1018, American Indian Research Project, Oral History Center, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, South Dakota. On hopes for a future in cattle raising, see Sarah Hollingsworth, interview by Nannie Lee Burns, Oct. 15, 1937, IPP-OHC, OUL.
91 John Earley quoted in Saints’ Herald (Lamoni, Iowa), Nov. 17, 1883.
92 “For Allotment,” Baxter Springs (Kansas) News, June 18, 1887; “The Ottawa Indians Want to Sell,” Fort Scott (Kansas) Daily Monitor, June 1, 1887.
93 “The Ottawa Indians Want to Sell,” Fort Scott (Kansas) Daily Monitor, June 1, 1887.
94 “To provide for allotment; of lands in severalty to the Ottawa Indians,” S. 2442, 52nd Cong. (1892); “Allotments of Lands to Certain Indian Tribes,” S. Rep. No. 615, 52nd Cong. (1892), 43.
95 “An Act to Appoint Thomas Richardville,” Dec. 15, 1891, Thomas Richardville Papers, folder 57, Thomas Gilcrease Library and Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
96 “To provide for allotment; of lands in severalty to the Ottawa Indians,” S. 2442, 52nd Cong. (1892).
97 Unlike earlier Ottawa efforts, the bill retained the 25-year moratorium on the alienation of allotments. This feature perhaps reflected a fear of land loss via taxation, an issue the Ottawas faced in Kansas.
98 Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs to T. J. Moore, Sept. 29, 1892, Quapaw Agency Records, reel QA-9, IAC, OHS; Lawrence Mills, Oklahoma Indian Land Laws (St. Louis: Thomas Law Book, 1924), 407, 442.
99 Lizzie Lavore to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, May 12, 1916, Biographical Files, Lizzie Lavore folder, OTO-HAL.
100 See, for example, George S. Doane to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Aug. 26, 1896, in Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, for the year 1896 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1897), 149–50; Edward Goldberg to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Aug. 10, 1898, in Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, for the year 1898 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1898), 150–51.
101 “To provide for allotment; of lands in severalty to the Ottawa Indians,” S. 2442, 52nd Cong. (1892); “Allotments of Lands to Certain Indian Tribes,” S. Rep. No. 615, 52nd Cong. (1892), 43.
102 An Act to Provide for the Allotment of Lands in Severalty to Indians on the Various Reservations, approved February 8, 1887 (General Allotment Act or Dawes Act), Statutes at Large 24, 388-91, Document A 1887, NARA, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/dawes-act
103 McGirt v. Oklahoma, U.S., 140 S. Ct. 2452 (2020); State of Oklahoma v. Brester, 2023 OK CR 10, S-2021-209 (2023).