Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and Assimilation Policy
234
Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and Assimilation Policy
234Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Blood Will Tell reveals the underlying centrality of "blood" that shaped official ideas about who was eligible to be defined as Indian by the General Allotment Act in the United States. Katherine Ellinghaus traces the idea of blood quantum and how the concept came to dominate Native identity and national status between 1887 and 1934 and how related exclusionary policies functioned to dispossess Native people of their land. The U.S. government's unspoken assumption at the time was that Natives of mixed descent were undeserving of tribal status and benefits, notwithstanding that Native Americans of mixed descent played crucial roles in the national implementation of allotment policy.
Ellinghaus explores on-the-ground case studies of Anishinaabeg, Arapahos, Cherokees, Eastern Cherokees, Cheyennes, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, Lakotas, Lumbees, Ojibwes, Seminoles, and Virginia tribes. Documented in these cases, the history of blood quantum as a policy reveals assimilation's implications and legacy. The role of blood quantum is integral to understanding how Native Americans came to be one of the most disadvantaged groups in the United States, and it remains a significant part of present-day debates about Indian identity and tribal membership. Blood Will Tell is an important and timely contribution to current political and scholarly debates.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496230379 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2022 |
| Series: | New Visions in Native American and Indigenous Studies |
| Pages: | 234 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Katherine Ellinghaus has a Hansen Lectureship in History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in Australia and the United States, 1887–1937 (Nebraska, 2006) and coeditor of Historicising Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the Construction of Identity.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Fraud
The Allotment of the Anishinaabeg
The Anishinaabeg of Minnesota were targeted for allotment in 1889, not long after the General Allotment Act was enacted. Their allotment resulted in such enormous losses of land that, by 1913, it had become a national scandal, the so-called White Earth Tragedy. Allotment also made tribal membership, once regulated by the Anishinaabeg themselves, an unstable and treacherous issue. The various bands of Anishinaabeg that had gathered at White Earth by the beginning of the assimilation period had had a long history of relationships with people from other tribal nations, had participated in the fur trade, and most likely thought of themselves not merely as Anishinaabeg but conceived of their identity in terms of their nindoodemag, or kinship networks. The U.S. government attempted to impose criteria determining who was an "Indian" on this complex population. There was, as a result, much confusion about who was, actually, eligible for enrollment and allotment.
William M. Campbell, the first chairman of the Chippewa Commission (the specially formed government body created to allot the Anishinaabeg), directed attention to this confusion early in his term. "There may be many difficulties ahead of me that I do not yet see," he wrote in 1894. "I have submitted a number of questions to the Secretary of the Interior ... among which [is] ... 'Who is a Chippewa?'" Neither the government officials nor the Anishinaabeg themselves knew how to satisfy the Office of Indian Affairs that someone was entitled to call themselves Anishinaabe. Was it "because my folks knew her Grand parents and God hears what I said to be true [and] [m]y mother always said so," as one man testified in 1897? Or did the receipt of shares in tribal benefits, however small, demonstrate membership? This was what another man argued in 1891, sharing his recollection of his wife's mother with government officials: "She gave mi wife a blanket. She told her in mi presen[ce] there is your share mi daughter." Was it a matter of lifestyle or appearance, as one witness assumed when testifying to the Circuit Court of Appeals in 1917, describing an applicant for tribal membership as wearing "her hair down her back, made moccasins for sale, did bead work ... [She] was an Indian doctor and midwife; she walked pigeon-toed, as most Indian women do ... she lived in a tepee." One thing is certain — after the allotment process began, tribal membership was increasingly regulated not by the Anishinaabeg themselves, but by the U.S. government, drawing upon the discourse of blood and related assumptions about Indians of mixed descent. This chapter explores how the Chippewa Commission answered the question of "who is a Chippewa?," and how, despite the resistance of the Anishinaabeg, its response installed blood as a determinant of Anishinaabeg status and made it harder for the White Earth Anishinaabeg to hold onto their lands.
Anishinaabeg means "the original people" or "Indian person." The people who nowadays wish to be known by that name are descended from a number of linguistically and culturally related bands who came from the shores of the Great Lakes. Recent historical work has shown the impact of Anishinaabeg resistance, leadership, and conceptions of nationhood on the politics of the region in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. People indigenous to the Great Lakes region first encountered Europeans when the French entered the area in the first half of the seventeenth century in the hope of finding lucrative trading partners and products. Anishinaabeg history is replete with migrations, amalgamations, intermarriage, and fluid identities. Over the border in Canada, similar conditions had resulted in the creation of autonomous Métis communities, but this did not happen in Minnesota. After 1837 Anishinaabeg treaties sometimes included special provisions for "halfbreeds," and by the late nineteenth century a number of prominent mixed-descent families lived at White Earth. Historians have demonstrated that intermarriage was fundamental to the Anishinaabeg world long before the Chippewa Commission arrived in Minnesota. Intermarriage and kinship, says Michael Witgen, made Algonquian society "literally like a web." Marriage was a crucial institution to nindoodemag, writes Heidi Bohaker, and the kinship networks, or clans, inherited from the fathers dictated obligations, facilitating long-distance travel and access to community resources. Cary Miller has also shown how important relationships through marriage were to Anishinaabe leaders in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, strengthening ties between villages and allowing leaders to extend the boundaries of their political influence. No wonder William C. Campbell considered that deciding who was a "Chippewa" in conformity with the U.S. government's rigid criteria of Indianness was going to be one of his most challenging duties.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century many diverse interconnected family groups survived by participating in the fur and lumber trade as well as hunting and agriculture. Europeans called them, among other names, "Chippewa," possibly a mutated pronunciation of Ojibwe. The White Earth Reservation, located in northwestern Minnesota, was created by treaty on March 19, 1867. It was the largest of seven "Chippewa" reservations, but the government intended from the beginning to reduce their number and to make White Earth the final home for most of the Indigenous communities in the state. The reservation originally covered 1,300 square miles rich in pine and other natural resources, but was substantially diminished by the events described in this chapter.
The Chippewa Commission
The Chippewa Commission was established by an act of 1889 to negotiate with the Indigenous nations of Minnesota for the relinquishment of all twelve of their northern Minnesota reservations except for White Earth and Red Lake, and the reduction of those reservations in size. The commission, which originally consisted of three Office of Indian Affairs employees, was charged by Congress to compile a census, to direct removals, and to make allotments. This necessitated the definition and determination of who was Anishinaabeg, an undertaking that became ever more complex as time went on. Between 1889 and 1920 a number of ways evolved in which a person could prove their status as a "Chippewa," and myriad ways in which that status could be denied. Mixed-descent Anishinaabeg were never explicitly excluded. Once blood was introduced as a determinant of membership of the White Earth community, a complicated mix of criteria for qualification or disqualification (such as tribal involvement or place of residence) was applied if the person in question was judged to be of "mixed-blood." Allotment was followed by an extraordinary volume of fraud and confusion, leading the government to experiment with novel ways of turning folk biology into a science. By the end of this process, the discourse of blood had resulted in a tragic loss of land for the White Earth community.
During the course of allotment the government adopted numerous policies that ostensibly sought to impose logic on the process of claiming Anishinaabe status, but in practice they resulted in fewer and fewer people being eligible for enrollment. Each time new rules were formulated, more and more Anishinaabeg were denied their share of the lands that once stretched from the edge of Iroquois territory in the Northeast to the Great Plains. The Anishinaabeg negotiated the application of these rules with persistence and often success.
From the very beginning of the Chippewa Commission's work, as it traveled around Minnesota in 1889 holding tribal councils with the various bands, many Anishinaabeg expressed concerns about tribally disconnected Anishinaabeg and intermarried whites. According to Anton Treuer, such concerns had been voiced in Anishinaabe country at least since the White Earth removal treaty of 1867. In many cases, the persons in question were the speaker's relatives, but more generalized anxieties arising from changes in the White Earth population and the effect of allotment on the sharing of resources were also at play. At the sixth tribal council held at White Earth on July 21, 1889, one member of a prominent mixed descent family, expressed his concern that "quite a number of Indians who belong to no reservation" might "come up here and decide to take land. ... If all the Indians in the state should eventually decide to come here, there would be hardly enough land." He was not alone. Another man raised the same issue at the seventh council four days later. "There will not be land enough for the whole; that is what I know positively," he told the commission. He also worried that "those I call my sons-in-law" (intermarried whites) would select the best pieces of land at the expense of the "Indians, the original owners." "Those who are intermarried among us take advantage of the Indian," he told the commission, "and in time, if there is no strong protection thrown around the Indian ... the others are just selfish enough to put the Indian at one side and say the claims are theirs." "Those who talk the best," he opined, "who are so solicitous of their own interests and ... who have more foresight than we" would get the best allotments, just as they had gotten the "seed-grain first" and "anything issued." He anticipated that men would "marry into our tribe just for the purpose of picking out choice pieces of land. ... Those who are here, and who have made it their home with us before this arrangement was perfected, we wish to retain, but now there will be no end to emigration [sic] into this country by claiming relationship with us." The Anishinaabeg were also well aware that many people who firmly belonged to their community were not of full descent, and the tribal councils revealed the complicated relationship between "mixed" and "full." Thus a third man wondered whether a woman married to a white man would lose her right to remain on the reservation. "There is a thing I cannot comply with," he said. "My heart still beats for my children. I can not deprive them of any right to which they are entitled ... they have married for love."
The commission frequently reassured the Anishinaabeg that enrolled members would have a say in deciding who could join them on the rolls. "The mixed bloods ... acknowledged as belonging to your tribe will be treated the same as yourselves. ... If there are any others who apply to be admitted ... and you object, the matter will be referred to Washington," Commissioner Rice told the Mille Lacs. "You are the judges in the matter of the census which will be taken; you know who ought to be on the rolls and who not," he said on another occasion. He repeated the assurance at the ninth meeting of the tribal council at White Earth: "No one will be permitted to settle here to whom you object ... no one shall receive an allotment without your consent. We shall not open the door to such people nor will we assist others to do so." The commissioner of Indian Affairs, Thomas J. Morgan, similarly instructed the chairman of the Chippewa Commission, D. S. Hall, that on the subject of tribal membership "great consideration" should be given to the views of Anishinaabe chiefs.
These assurances were not honored. In just over six years, the Chippewa Commission shifted from their 1888 position of allowing the Anishinaabeg to identify their own members to a strict definition based on blood and geography. From 1895 a "Chippewa Indian" was anyone who was a resident of Minnesota when the 1889 act was passed, and was of "Chippewa Indian blood" (no degree being specified), had "a recognized connection with one of the bands of Chippewa Indians in the State of Minnesota," and lived on one of the Chippewa reservations "with the bona fide intention of making it his permanent home." Although chiefs were sometimes consulted in individual cases, after the initial consultation process they had little input into how Anishinaabe status was defined. The government was motivated by mistrust of Anishinaabeg testimony, suspicion that people were claiming Anishinaabe status to gain resources unfairly, and adherence to the notion that blood was a provable index of status. It deeply misunderstood how the Anishinaabeg thought about their nation and its boundaries. Melissa Meyer notes that the "bands" recorded by the government in the end "bore little relation to those that functioned in reality."
The shift from tribal control to a blood-based definition was gradual but inexorable. After the commission compiled a census in 1889 it spent a significant part of the next decade adding and subtracting names. It did not take long for the census to become contentious. Meyer noted the existence of a "considerable folklore" among the Anishinaabeg surrounding the politics of enrollment, including stories in which liquor played a role and "band leaders ... placed their friends on the rolls or people for whom they 'felt sorry.'" In December 1890 the commission chairman told the commissioner of Indian Affairs that he believed the process of identifying the Anishinaabeg had become complicated because of the linking of that status with rights to land and annuities. The commission was concerned that people were claiming Anishinaabe status in order to acquire land. "A large number of persons who have never lived with the Indians, or upon any Reservation within this state, are now claiming the right to do so," he wrote. "Some of them undoubtedly have rights, and some who were born in Canada have none, and some elsewhere who have no Anishinaabe blood in their veins, as well as some so faded that other evidence than their looks will be required to establish the right they claim." The process was further complicated by the fact that some Anishinaabeg did not look as "Indian" as non-Indian Americans expected.
In December 1891, in response to a number of applicants who had hired attorneys, the assistant attorney general ruled that the census could be amended to allow people who had unjustifiably missed out on enrollment to be included, and undeserving applicants to be excluded, and that the commission had a duty to "hear as carefully and thoroughly as possible each case," after which the commission's decision would be final. With this ruling the federal government acknowledged that some who had legitimate rights had been left off the lists of tribal members, but also that it suspected there were many who were undeservingly on them. The commissioner of Indian Affairs warned the commission that "great pressure will probably be brought to bear by claimants who have no bona fide rights to enrollment among these Indians" and by "a great many unscrupulous and dishonest people of full or part Indian blood." Meanwhile, Anishinaabe people negotiated the process of enrollment by hiring attorneys and, as Jill Doerfler reports, even writing directly to the secretary of the Interior and the commissioner of Indian Affairs to argue their case.
At the same time the government decided that Anishinaabeg who did not reside in Minnesota should be ineligible. This decision was made in response to the commission's report of 1889, which acknowledged that there were more people entitled to be on the census than the 8,304 originally enumerated, that many of them were of mixed descent, and that many lived off the reservations. "In Michigan, Wisconsin and elsewhere we know there are persons of Chippewa blood that will claim, and no doubt many are entitled to, benefits under the recent negotiations," the report admitted. While the commissioners felt that the "safe rule to be observed will be to consult the chiefs and head-men as to the justice of their claims," the assistant attorney general read the original statute to mean that "Congress legislated in this act only for the Chippewa Indians actually resident in the State of Minnesota and that none other should be enrolled."
Enrollment hearings were tedious, confusing, and time-consuming, and the commission gave few applicants, or witnesses, the benefit of the doubt. The single volume of testimony that survives in the archives (relating to eleven enrollment cases heard in the period 1897 to 1899) shows that the official concern of the commission was to ascertain whether mixed-descent claimants were recognized as Anishinaabeg by other Anishinaabeg. Ironically, its distrust of Anishinaabe witnesses undermined this approach.
Most of the questions asked of witnesses at enrollment hearings aimed to find out how long they had known the claimant, whether they knew details of the claimant's family, particularly whether a parent had maintained tribal ties, and whether they believed the claimant was of Anishinaabe descent. Although all claimants brought along several Anishinaabeg willing to swear to their status, the commission did not always find such testimony convincing. In other words, it assumed that applicants were likely to lie in order to exploit the system and to gain land. In cases in which the chairman's reasoning was recorded, it mostly consisted of weighing the various witnesses' testimony against each other. Thus, in the case of a claim by two sisters, Chairman Hall disregarded Anishinaabe notions of kinship in holding that Chief May-zhuck-ke-ge-shig's claim of a "relationship for his mother in law to their grandmother ... is about as vague and indiffinate [sic] as it well could be." In his view a contemporary of the sisters' parents who explained that the sisters failed to come to White Earth to enroll in 1889 because their father, "being an old soldier, was trying get a pension," was "a better witness for the petitioners" than the chief. But Hall eventually rejected the claim because the sisters had not come forward until ten years after the beginning of the commission's work, even though the "petitioners and their parents were almost neighbours to Chairman Rice, all residing in St Paul." Another woman's claim was rejected by Hall because "she does not seem to be very well identified by her witnesses, none of them having seen her for thirty or forty years." Yet another application was refused simply because the evidence was not "sufficiently clear," even though a previous chairman had placed her sister on the rolls. Thus, although the commission certainly asked questions about tribal recognition, in this sample of cases its decisions overrode the evidence of Anishinaabe witnesses because of suspicion that both the applicants and the witnesses were lying.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Blood Will Tell"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
Excerpted by permission of University of Nebraska Press and the American Philosophical Society.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Introduction: The Discourse of Blood in the Assimilation Period 1. Fraud: The Allotment of the Anishinaabeg 2. Chaos: The Dawes Commission and the Five Tribes 3. Practically White: The Federal Policy of Competency 4. The Same Old Deal: The 1934 Indian Reorganization Act 5. Colored: The Indian Nations of Virginia and the 1924 Racial Integrity Act Conclusion: Writing Blood into the Assimilation Period Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index