The Tools of “Civilization”

Abstract

After the Revolution, Native confederationists traveled across eastern North America to form military alliances to rival the United States. US officials indicted Indigenous people as peculiarly mobile, and they believed that movement proved Native peoples to be unsteady in their political attachments or without rights to land. U.S agents held only paper claims to power in Indian country, but they hoped that the control of movement would make those paper claims real. Early national policy—“civilization” plans, trading houses, the imposition of federal law—turned on the conceit of “attaching” Native people to the United States. All of these programs were designed to further removal by thwarting movement as a strategy of resistance. The early nineteenth century was a period of profound social change for Native Americans north of the Ohio River. That change was rooted as much in a contest over movement as it was in a contest over religion, political economy, and culture. In the early national period, the “problem” of mobility conversely emerged as a battleground in Native struggles for the right to remain east of the Mississippi River.