The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West by Jennifer Graber

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West by Jennifer Graber Thomas D. Hamm The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West. By Jennifer Graber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xxii + 288 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. The past two decades have seen a shift in the study of Native American history. Influenced by work done in other disciplines, and by the activism of Native American scholars, historians have increasingly turned to non-documentary sources, especially oral traditions. This is controversial, as an exchange in the April 2020 American Historical Review shows. But when done well, it produces excellent history. Jennifer Graber’s The Gods of Indian Country is a prime example. Graber’s focus is the Kiowa people, who in 1800 lived and hunted over what are now the states of Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Kiowas faced relentless pressure from white settlers, state and territorial governments, and the government in Washington to dispossess them of most of their lands and confine them to reservations. Graber sees spiritual practice as key to Kiowa resistance. Central was the Sun Dance, which the Kiowa had learned from the Crow and other Plains Indians. It acknowledged the centrality of the sun in Kiowa life and was a way of giving thanks for abundant buffalo, which were not only the center of the Kiowa diet but also of the Sun Dance’s rituals. In 1869, the Kiowas first encountered Quakers. The new administration of Pres. Ulysses S. Grant embarked on a “peace policy” of attempting to “civilize” and assimilate Native Americans by turning administration of Indian agencies over to religious denominations. American churches answered this call enthusiastically. As Graber notes, since the early nineteenth century, many American Protestants had been what she calls “friends of the Indians,” critics of involuntary removal and dispossession and fraudulent treaties. They were fervent believers that Native Americans, if educated and Christianized, women introduced to habits of domesticity and men changed from hunters into farmers, could become assimilated into American society. Quakers had been involved in such projects since the 1790s, and both Hicksite and Gurneyite Friends accepted agencies. Gurneyites took responsibility for the Kiowa, Arapaho, and Cheyenne through the Associated Executive Committee of Friends on Indian Affairs (AECFIA). Friends Thomas C. Battey, James Haworth, and Lawrie Tatum, agents to the Kiowas, are central to Graber’s account of the 1870s. [End Page 89] Many Friends will find the portrayal of these Quaker Indian agents disturbing. While critical of white encroachment on Native lands, these Friends largely accepted government policies. They urged the Kiowas to remain on reservation lands, to give up the hunt and become farmers, and to send their children to school, including boarding schools that have gained such an evil reputation over the past generation. They viewed traditional Kiowa spirituality as ignorant paganism. Ultimately Friends supported the severalty policy that broke up tribal landholdings. While sympathetic to the Kiowas, Graber is candid. They were a warlike people for whom violent raids against other tribes and whites were a way of life. Kiowa prophets, claiming the ability to bring back the buffalo after 1870 or to turn aside enemy bullets with special spells or shields clearly failed. Graber notes divisions among American Friends. Since the Hicksite agency in Nebraska lies outside her focus on the Kiowa, she dismisses the theological disputes among Quakers as not crucial to her story. But many of the Gurneyite Friends involved in AECFIA were in the midst of a dramatic transformation of their own in the 1870s, laying the foundations of the pastoral system. That theology would lead them, unlike the Hicksites, toward a missionary impulse of their own that included Native Americans and has continued to the present day. This is a minor criticism. The Gods of Indian Country is engaging, widely researched, elegantly written, and convincing. Thomas D. Hamm Earlham College Copyright © 2021 Friends Historical Association