Passing the Frontier

Abstract

Passing the Frontier Laura Da' (bio) Terra Esonis Incognita is a phrase used in cartography to indicate an unknown or imagined world. The etymology can break down in a few ways: Land, Secret, Unknown; Mythical Hidden Land; Clouds on the Border Land; Across the Border There Is No Life. In 1887 the Dawes Severalty Act was passed under the presidency of Grover Cleveland as: "An act to provide for the allotment of lands in severalty to Indians on the various reservations, and to extend the protection of the laws of the United States and the Territories over the Indians, and for Other Purposes." In a Commissioner of Indian Affairs report from the Secretary of the Interior, it is encouraged that Natives who resisted allotment or left their reservations should be, "harassed and scourged without intermission" and made "as comfortable on" and "uncomfortable off" as conceivable. At the end of the report, a loose accounting of the numbers of Indigenous people is divided into the following categories: Civilized, Semi-Civilized, Wholly Barbarous. Allotment promised each head of family a grant of 160 acres to be held in trust by the US government for 25 years. Agents were encouraged to urge allotments upon the tribes in any and every way possible. All around northeastern Indian Territory, registration for allotments was held out of the back of a railroad caboose. Obvious drivers of allotment included assimilation, white settlement, and resource extraction. Deeper in the dark river of the ink is permanent erasure of tribal lives and life: "It seems to me this is a self-acting machine that we have set going, and if we only run it on the track, it will work itself [End Page 79] all out, and all these difficulties that have troubled my friend will pass away like snow in the spring time, and we will never know when they go, we will only know they are gone." So wrote Henry Laurens Dawes, Massachusetts senator, about his eponymous act. Dawes was also an early proponent of national parks and was instrumental in having Yellowstone surveyed and appropriated. The removal of sacred sites was a paramount consideration to the success of the endeavor of allotment. In 1889, Congress opened seized land in Indian Territory for white settlement. The land runs thundered. Many of the settler towns created in the land runs are ghost towns now. Timber, railroads, and mining leaving a host of cavernous emptiness in their wake. What is a ghost town in a nation whose settlements, roads, and parks are directly superimposed over Indigenous cities, trails, and sacred sites? In America, the symbolic magic word for erasure is "first." I am weary of tasting the words as they leave my mouth. Turning frontiers of civilized and city and reservation and graft and outcome. Hours of scanning documents from 1833 or 1912 to make cruelties of syntax and word choice incriminate their drafters. An 1890s census report notes that all Shawnee Indians were fluent speakers of the language. The report itself was made possible by the Dawes Rolls that demanded each head of family be documented to receive an allotment. The rolls also tracked children and were instrumental in coercing families to cede their young to Indian boarding schools in the subsequent decades. Nine Indian bills became law in the 49th and 50th sessions of Congress: six railroad grants, the Dawes Act, and the Appropriation Act. Property is often defined as "objectified will" in these documents. The miles of railroad laid in that decade have not been exceeded since. The timber felled unimaginable. The invention of barbed wire was a boon for anyone with a taste for skin. Allotment was both the whip and the balm both delivered to the same hands. After the Dawes Act came the Curtis Act, which eliminated judicial and executive aspects of tribal government, and then the Burke Act, which cemented a hierarchical government control of Indigenous people on allotments. [End Page 80] Miami, Oklahoma, was plotted from land bought from Ottawa tribal members and aggressively mined for lead and zinc. Railroad lines cut through individual allotments of the Shawnee, Miami, and Quapaw, and each tribal member received about a dollar and a...