This Indian Country Read online

  The collective struggle of these men and women reveals the extent to which Native activists generated the ideas and constructed the legal and political doctrines that made it possible for Native American communities to survive in the United States. Taking place as it did in a nation founded on the presumption of Indian invisibility, theirs was a powerful humanistic achievement. Their lives teach us that Native survival was made possible by Indian people and their allies who had faith in their ideas and in nonviolent political activism. Their victories were triumphs earned by Native people who acted in accord with basic indigenous values: loyalty to one’s homeland, mutual respect, and the central importance of human relationships.

  This story of Native American activists should be a far more useful guide to the contemporary scene than tales of Geronimo’s guerrilla warfare or Sitting Bull’s stoic heroism. Most twenty-first-century Americans know that the old story of Indian defeat and disappearance makes no sense. There is too much evidence of Native survival surrounding us. People in the United States today easily recognize the artistic and cultural achievements of the continent’s Native people and readily appreciate the contributions they have made to national life. Galleries and museums trumpet indigenous cultural achievements. And while popular tales of the Olympian Jim Thorpe or the World War II Navajo code talkers may themselves be two-dimensional sidebars, they nevertheless directly contradict the old notion that Native people were always and everywhere the enemies of progress. Similarly, though Indian shamanism may be caricatured or dismissed by some, it is rarely labeled “paganism,” as was the case only a few decades ago.

  Outside the arena of popular culture, Americans are regularly reminded that Indian people are fellow members of our contentious democracy. In recent years tribes have been remarkably successful at asserting and defending their treaty rights to water and other resources. Likewise, instead of ignoring or denigrating tribal leaders, Congress and the White House regularly seek them out for consultation and negotiation. None of these aspects of politics and policy making exists without controversy, but it is unthinkable today that a Supreme Court justice could declare (as Justice Stanley Reed did in 1955) that “[e]very American schoolboy knows that the savage tribes of this continent were deprived of their ancestral ranges by force, and that . . . when the Indians ceded millions of acres by treaty in return for blankets, food and trinkets, it was not a sale but the conqueror’s will that deprived them of their land.”1 Most Americans now know that Indian treaty councils involved more than the “conqueror’s will” and that Native American history contained more elements than “savages” and “trinkets.”

  Within my lifetime American political institutions have come to appreciate that the words inscribed in long-ignored Indian treaties were actual agreements between sovereign powers that carved mutual promises into the edifice of the law. At the same time, religious organizations such as the National Council of Churches have come to accept the wisdom and integrity of ancient Native customs and beliefs. Many Native religious practices now enjoy legal protection, while Native veterans are honored, and tribal logging, fishing, and farming enterprises compete with their non-Indian neighbors for profits and market share. Closer to the nation’s more densely populated areas, gleaming casinos now produce significant cash (and political clout) for Native groups. Poverty and the effects of past injustice remain in many places, but the simple, two-dimensional story of white progress and Indian suffering suggested sixty years ago by Justice Reed is clearly inadequate.

  The people at the heart of this book provide an alternative to the old tale of conquest and victimization. Their story demonstrates that during the past two centuries Native people met the birth and territorial expansion of the United States with an array of strategies that ranged from direct and forceful opposition to flexible negotiation and accommodation. While striking different poses at different times and in different places, American Indians always insisted that for them, the United States did not embody human freedom. It was not, in Thomas Jefferson’s phrase, a true “empire for liberty.” These Native activists and the thousands of others who worked alongside them knew better, and they struggled both to be heard and to find settings where they too could enjoy American freedom. In a way, the story of their struggle is distinctly American, for it illustrates that the appreciation of tribal cultures and tribal governments we see today had its origins in the self-reliance and creativity of Native activists who engaged politically with a government that wanted them to disappear.

  These activists rejected the idea that the worlds of Indians and non-Indians did not overlap and could not coexist, and their enterprise is part of the broad chain of events Adam Smith imagined in the pages of The Wealth of Nations: the struggle of “natives” from the “remote countries” to overcome the “injustice” visited upon them by Europeans in order to achieve an “equality of courage and force” in our own time. That larger story stretches across the globe and involves many others who refused to accept the colonizers’ versions of events. The portion told here is a piece of that larger whole.

  None of the figures in this book has ever made one of the lists generated by my opening-day exercise, but they all were recognized in their lifetimes as individuals unafraid to speak out on behalf of Indian rights and community survival. While many were of mixed ancestry, all were members of American Indian tribes. They exhibited extraordinary courage, though none confronted the United States on the battlefield. Their achievements occurred largely in legislative chambers, lecture halls, and courtrooms. They shouldered a common task: defining a place for American Indian communities within the boundaries and institutions of the United States. They also employed a common strategy: to use the invader’s language, values, and institutions to create and defend that place. They believed that “Indian country” did not lie in the West or the North or the South, out beyond the borders of the nation but instead that it was located wherever Indians gathered together and resolved to live in accord with their ancient traditions and histories. This is their story and, through it, the story of this Indian country.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ERASED FROM THE MAP

  The American habit of disregarding living Indians is not founded in ignorance or prejudice; it is the product of history—of decisions made at the time of the nation’s founding, then etched into policy and absorbed into popular belief. At the close of the American Revolution, when international statesmen and monarchs first recognized the existence of the United States, events and actors on both sides of the Atlantic conspired to erase Indians from the official life, and the official map, of the new nation. This erasure fulfilled the founders’ desire to sever the diplomatic ties that had linked European powers to Native groups for centuries and confirmed the Americans’ commitment to a “new order” on the continent. The young nation’s leaders could then pretend that Indian people were irrelevant in international affairs as well as in much of U.S. public life. Their achievement created a new predicament for tribal activists who found themselves resident within America’s boundaries but invisible to its leaders.

  Despite the tradition of celebrating July 4, 1776, as the nation’s birthday, the United States did not come into formal existence until September 3, 1783, when diplomats from America, Great Britain, France, and Spain gathered in Paris to sign a series of agreements that both ended the conflicts among them and established the boundaries of a new country. It was those treaties, not the ringing words of the Declaration of Independence, that established the American nation-state.1 Perhaps more surprising to modern readers is the fact that the expansive boundaries established for the United States in 1783, which extended to the Great Lakes in the north and the Mississippi River in the west, had little relationship to the places where the new nation’s citizens actually lived. In 1783, 2.3 million settlers and their slaves lived within the new U.S. borders, nearly 98 percent of them in communities hugging the Atlantic seaboard. The 50,000 or so former colonists
who had decamped for Kentucky during the 1770s represented the only sizable group of “Americans” living in the approximately 422,000 square miles of national territory that lay west of the Appalachians.2

  In 1783 outposts such as Fort Pitt, on the Ohio River, or Detroit, on the western end of Lake Erie, contained only a few hundred residents. Beyond Fort Pitt, most of the Europeans living in the North American interior were descendants of the English, French, and Indian traders and soldiers who had activated the imperial claims to the region. Their interests were commercial; they felt no particular sympathy for the new American enterprise. Towns that later became part of the United States—St. Louis, Mobile, Pensacola, and New Orleans—stood outside the nation’s borders and maintained a steady loyalty to Spain. The bulk of the country lying within the new nation’s borders—the Ohio and Tennessee river valleys and the rivers flowing into the east bank of the Mississippi—was home to nearly 200,000 Native people, most of them living in agricultural villages tied to one another through trade, kinship, and military alliances. The inhabitants of this vast “Indian country” viewed the settlers’ new nation with considerable unease.3

  In the colonial era, European powers had asserted their control over the North American interior through diplomatic alliances with Native groups. The American rebels now in nominal control of the continent were prepared to break with that tradition. Not only did they claim that Indian lands were “empty,” but in their negotiations with the European powers they refused to recognize the tribal nations in their territory. When the new national borders were announced, one American officer told an Indian gathering, “Your fathers the English have made peace with us for themselves, but [they] forgot you . . . and neglected you like bastards.”4

  Prominent among those ignored in the new treaties were Joseph Brant (Thayendanega), the charismatic Mohawk war captain who during the Revolutionary War had rallied tribes to attack Americans along the northern border with Canada, and Alexander McGillivray, the Creek merchant leader who had fought with the British in both Florida and Georgia. Both men were firmly committed to the British cause. Brant left his New York home early in the conflict to organize resistance to the “Savage Virginians” in the Ohio Valley.5 McGillivray abandoned his family’s prosperous trading post near Augusta at the start of the war, moving to his mother’s Creek town along the Coosa River. When they were told of the territory granted to the Americans in Paris, Brant and McGillivray must have realized that they had, in fact, been treated “like bastards.”

  Soon after Brant and his Iroquois kinsmen learned of the provisional terms of peace in the spring of 1783, they gathered at the British post at Fort Niagara (soon to become “American” soil) to prepare a response. The Iroquois chiefs quickly concluded that the king “had no right whatever to grant away to the States of America their rights or properties.” Brant shared their outrage, declaring: “England had sold the Indians to Congress.” The assembly urged the Mohawk chief to travel to Quebec to meet with the British governor. They wanted reassurance that “they are not partakers of that peace with the King and the Bostonians.”6 The British commander at Niagara reported that the Indian chiefs with whom he had met found it “almost impossible to believe that the boundaries actually were run as reported. . . .”7

  Forty years old in 1783, Joseph Brant was well prepared to make the case for the Indians’ claim to their homelands. The Mohawk leader had grown up in the orbit of Sir William Johnson, the masterful superintendent of Indian trade in the eastern Great Lakes, whose close alliance with the Iroquois confederacy had sustained the crown’s ties to the tribes in New York and Ohio for decades prior to the Revolution. Like many eighteenth-century frontier traders and diplomats, Johnson had brought a prominent Native woman into his home as his companion and diplomatic guide. Brant’s older sister, Molly, was Johnson’s consort during most of his career. As a member of a prominent family she provided him access to the Iroquois community. She served as hostess, interpreter, and adviser at countless conferences and diplomatic meetings and bore him eight children.

  Brant came to live in Johnson’s household as a teenager, and in 1761 he was sent to Eleazer Wheelock’s Connecticut mission school to polish his English and learn European mores, manners, and customs. (An evangelist who came of age during the Great Awakening that swept through New England in the 1730s, Wheelock established a ministry that included Native Americans soon after he graduated from Yale College. He eventually used his success with young men like Brant to raise funds for ever more ambitious projects aimed at Indian education. The climax of these efforts was the founding of Dartmouth College in 1768.) After two years of instruction in English and the tenets of Christianity, Brant returned to Johnson’s estate in central New York and took up life as a farmer and military servant of the crown. He moved easily among both Europeans and Native Americans. When he visited London just prior to the American war, the handsome young Mohawk met with cabinet officers and charmed the capital’s grand dames with his perfect manners. He capped his visit by posing for the celebrated artist George Romney, whose portrait stripped away Brant’s Christian manners and presented him holding a tomahawk and wearing a feather headdress.

  As warfare with the colonists began in earnest in 1776, British officials turned to Brant to rally tribal leaders to attack the Americans on their western frontier. Paid at the rate of a captain and supplied with uniforms and arms, the Mohawk leader stitched together a regional coalition of Great Lakes tribes that fought with considerable success and continued even after George Washington had defeated the British forces under Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in the fall of 1781. In 1782 war parties organized by Brant were victorious in battles at Sandusky in Ohio and Blue Licks in Kentucky. The following year, with the peace treaty still not concluded, the Mohawk leader urged the British command to launch a new offensive against the Americans. When Brant arrived in Quebec on May 21, he was eager to continue the fight. Baroness Frederika von Riedesel, the wife of a German officer whose troops were serving in Canada alongside the British, reported meeting the man who was considered “chief among the Indians.” She noted in her diary that “his language was good, his manners the best.” She added: “He was dressed half as a soldier and half as an Indian, and his countenance was manly and clever.”8

  Brant’s host was Governor Frederick Haldimand, a Swiss-born mercenary who had served the British in North America since the Seven Years’ War against the French in the 1760s. Haldimand was deeply embarrassed by the terms of the Paris treaty. When he first saw the peace terms in late April, he wrote a friend that his “soul [was] completely bowed down with grief. I am heartily ashamed,” he added “and wish I was in the interior of Tartary.”9 As a military strategist who appreciated the power and territorial reach of Native military leaders like Brant, Haldimand understood that the king’s Indian allies would continue to be important in postwar relations along the American border. He also understood that as experienced diplomats the Indians could sense that the Americans had changed the rules of diplomacy. Leaders like Brant had never before been so completely ignored. As Haldimand later explained to the Tory leader Frederick North, “they entertain no idea . . . that the King . . . had a right to cede their territories or hunting grounds to the United States of North America. These people . . . have as enlightened ideas of the nature and obligations of treaties as the most civilized nations have. . . .”10

  The treaty terms announced in Paris confirmed Brant’s deepest fears. During his 1775 visit to London he had met many of the Whig politicians who later negotiated the Treaty of Paris. He understood that their opposition to royal authority and their enthusiastic faith in the power of international trade led them to believe that abandoning the North American colonies could expand the market for British products and stimulate the national economy. From their perspective, the king’s long-standing alliances with Native leaders were cumbersome and expensive artifacts of the past. Still, the Mohawk war captain made his c
ase to Haldimand with extraordinary intensity. He demanded that the governor “[t]ell us the whole and real truth from your heart.” Brant noted that nearly two hundred years earlier the Mohawks “were the first Indian nation that took you by the hand like friends and brothers and invited you to live amongst us.” In return, he added, his tribe had always considered the British “a great nation bound to us by treaty and able to protect us against all the world.”

  When the Revolution erupted, Brant recalled that the Mohawks and their allies “were unalterably determined to stick to our ancient treaties with the Crown of England.” Brant demanded that Haldimand fulfill his obligations as an ally: “Wherefore brother I am now sent on behalf of all the King’s Indian allies to receive a decisive answer from you and to know whether they are included in this treaty with the Americans as faithful allies should be . . . and whether those lands which the great being above has pointed out for our ancestors . . . and where the bones of our forefathers are laid [are] secured to them.” Knowing that the governor was well aware of the sacrifices his soldiers and their families had made during the long years of war—many, like Brant and his family, driven from their homes by rampaging colonial troops—the Mohawk captain closed by invoking his warriors’ unbending loyalty. The Indians expected assistance, he declared, from “allies for whom we have so often [and] so freely bled.”11