Indian Agent Research Articles

How the Women of the SOE Were Made to Wage War: A Brief Account of Noor Inayat Khan’s Experience as a Biracial Female SOE Agent

During the Second World War, thousands of individuals served with the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret organization within the British army; and many of them were women. SOE agents carried out clandestine tasks of espionage and sabotage throughout Nazi occupied Europe. The war created various opportunities for women to join the war effort and the SOE was one of the few that allowed women to use the realities of their sex to succeed in their work. Although femineity often aided female agents in their work, it was simultaneously an extra disadvantage they learned to navigate. Particularly unique in her work with the SOE was British Indian agent Noor Inayat Khan. In addition to the difficulties Inayat experienced as a result of her gender, she carried the hardships of her race. Fascinatingly, in the same way female agents triumphed their femineity, Inayat Khan was aided by her experience as a woman of color. This article explores the ways in which Inayat Khan wielded both her femineity and racial identity as strengths, despite the disadvantages they often presented, as an SOE agent.

“Not a Shred of Evidence”: Settler Colonial Networks of Concealment and the Birtle Indian Residential School

This article examines how the network of settler colonial systems in Canada worked to ensure the widespread and intentional cover-up that allowed one man to remain in the Indian Residential School (irs) system for over two decades (from 1910 to 1932) despite overwhelming evidence of his abuse. Using genocide scholar Andrew Woolford’s metaphor of settler colonial mesh as a framework, this article details the 1930 case against Birtle Indian Residential School Principal Henry B. Currie to understand the multiple strategies of concealment used to protect him. A multitude of actors and institutions were involved in the coverup: the Indian agent and the Department of Indian Affairs, the Presbyterian Church, the court systems, and the public press. Strategies of concealment included blatant bribery, transferring accused principals to other schools, document falsification, forced marriages, and misreporting runaways, along with the irs system itself, which kept children from their families and support systems. The article concludes with a discussion of settler claims of ignorance and the role archives play in revealing the truth about abusers within the irs system.

Registration of Import License for IVD’S In India.

India is a huge market for medical devices and is constantly increasing last few years. The registration certificate and import license is mandatory for manufacturer of India who wishes to import any medical device in India. Indian Agent authorized by CDSCO is required for registering the medical device in India. Duly filled Form MD-14 is required to be submitted for import license registration and license obtained will be in Form MD-15. The review focuses on the regulations concerned to the registration procedures import for new medical device in India with latest amendments in the regulation concerned.

Katrina M. Phillips. Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History.

From tea-slinging members of the Sons of Liberty to American football and baseball teams, non-Natives have appropriated Native American identities for centuries. Since Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian (1999) laid bare these settler fantasies in the United States, scholars have discovered still more iterations of commodified Indigeneity across the globe. In Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History, historian Katrina M. Phillips focuses on Indigenous-themed outdoor dramas in Pendleton, Oregon, Cherokee, North Carolina, and Chillicothe, Ohio. These entrepreneurial small towns turned to Native American history to boost their local economies, drawing visitors to them through what Phillips defines as “salvage tourism.” Economic salvation has not necessarily been the result. But these outdoor dramas have shaped regional memory cultures, drawing tens of thousands of visitors, and have become cultural artifacts embedded, for better or worse, in the communities that created them. Staging Indigeneity proceeds chronologically, beginning with Pendleton, Oregon and the performances of Round Up (1910) and Happy Canyon (1914). Both productions were initiated by town boosters who hoped to rejuvenate the woolen mills, which began their slow decline at the turn of the twentieth century. Pendleton is adjacent to the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Major Lee Moorhouse, the Indian agent appointed to CTUIR, later became the town mayor, and he turned to Umatilla, Cayuse, and Walla Walla citizens for support as he tried to boost the local economy. Moorhouse used photography and his connections with journalists to promote both events, commodifying Indigeneity for non-Native audiences. Indigenous actors, some of whom studied theater at boarding schools such as Carlisle, worked with Moorhouse to create the Round Up and Happy Canyon productions. Despite low compensation for much of its history, certain families on the Umatilla Reservation consider participation in Round Up and Happy Canyon to be a family tradition, an essential site of Indigeneity. CTUIRs Wildhorse Resort and Casino, founded in 1995, has become the real source of economic revitalization in Pendleton, but the productions of Round Up and Happy Canyon continue to attract visitors yearning for nostalgic portrayals of the American West.

The Great Medicine Road: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, Part 4: 1856–1869

The Great Medicine Road: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, Part 4: 1856–1869

James Silas Calhoun: First Governor of New Mexico Territory and First Indian Agent. By Sherry Robinson

James Silas Calhoun: First Governor of New Mexico Territory and First Indian Agent. By Sherry Robinson

James Silas Calhoun: First Governor of New Mexico Territory and First Indian Agent by Sherry Robinson

Reviewed by: James Silas Calhoun: First Governor of New Mexico Territory and First Indian Agent by Sherry Robinson Jerry Thompson James Silas Calhoun: First Governor of New Mexico Territory and First Indian Agent. By Sherry Robinson. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2021. Pp. 390. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, appendix.) After serving eighteen difficult months as the first governor of New Mexico Territory, James Silas Calhoun departed Santa Fe for Washington in May 1852 as crowds from Tesuque, Santa Clara, and Nambé Pueblos saw him off. Suffering from scurvy and unable to stand, the governor rode in a bed in an ambulance in the wagon train of James Hubbell. From St. Louis, he hoped to go on to Washington and then to his home in Georgia. At Fort Union, the post commander, Major James H. Carleton (not John H. Carleton as indicated throughout the text), certain the governor would not reach the states alive, had a wooden coffin made for him. Calhoun died at Hickory Point, thirty-eight miles west of Westport, Missouri, on June 30, 1852. Appointed governor by President Millard Fillmore, Calhoun had taken the oath-of-allegiance on a platform under the portal of Santa Fe's Palace of the Governors. As governor, Calhoun faced daunting problems, seeing as many as fifty visitors a day, making numerous appointments, dealing with the turbulent politics of the territory, and ordering a census. There was not one cent in the territorial treasury, and many of the Indigenous tribal groups in New Mexico were restless and hostile. Although born into poverty in 1799 at Boggy Gut Creek, Georgia, and orphaned at an early age, Calhoun rose to become the mayor of Columbus, Georgia, an able lieutenant colonel of volunteers during the war with Mexico, and American consul in Havana, Cuba, where he learned Spanish. Calhoun arrived in New Mexico as the first Indian agent in 1849 during a turbulent time. "Matters in this territory are in a most deplorable condition—infinitely worse than you possibly can imagine," Calhoun wrote (137). Moreover, the state of Texas was continuing to press claims to all the land east of the Rio Grande, including settlements such as Albuquerque and Santa Fe. In fact, Texas was threatening to send an army of 2,500 men to take eastern New Mexico by force, if necessary. Governor [End Page 271] Peter H. Bell warned he would arrest any military officer who interfered. In Washington, President Zachary Taylor threatened to take command of the U.S. Army in New Mexico and hang Texan interlopers as traitors. Anxious about expansionist Texans, Nuevomexicanos feared they would be "forced into an unnatural and repugnant association with Texas" (165). Robinson disputes historian Howard Lamar's theory that Calhoun, an ardent Whig, created a political machine of sorts in the territory. Not long after arriving in Santa Fe in the late summer of 1849, Calhoun headed west with Lieutenant James Hervey Simpson in an expedition into Navajo country. Although Calhoun possessed great sympathy for the Native Americans, one of the misfortunes during the expedition was the killing and scalping of the six-feet, six-inch Navajo chief Narbona, who was said to be in his eighties and crippled with arthritis. With respect to many of the Native Americans, Calhoun, like many of the citizens and military in the territory, believed in "compulsory enlightenment," even at the point of a bayonet, if necessary (129). Besides the Navajo, the Comanche and Apaches should be "penned up" and made to cultivate the soil, Calhoun argued. Following the misplaced logic of both the Spanish and Mexicans, Calhoun, like many others, thought Native Americans should become good Christians rather than maintain their own beliefs. Calhoun also asked the legislature to pass a law to prohibit free Blacks from the territory. Perceptibly, Calhoun brought on the fury of abolitionists. Robinson points out there were only seventeen free Blacks in the territory at the time, including Jim Beckwourth, who ran the best saloon in Santa Fe. Using numerous quotes from primary and secondary sources, and sixty illustrations, Robinson spins a compelling and entertaining biography of Calhoun that is exceptionally well researched and soundly written. Nothing in Calhoun's life is left...

Intelligence operations, Indigenous cultures, and early U.S. Ambassadors to Native American polities

ABSTRACT This article extends scholars’ recent integration of the history of U.S.-Indigenous relations into the history of American foreign relations by addressing the state’s attempts to acquire information about Native people’s ways of perceiving reality. My focus is on the intertwined careers in policymaking and scholarship of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Schoolcraft used his position as U.S. ambassador (‘Indian agent’) to the Ojibwe people to become the government’s leading expert on Indigenous cultures. The cultural information officials like Schoolcraft gathered was tightly connected to matters of national security, with significant implications for both international relations and the discipline now known as anthropology.

Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Akimel O'odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin by Jennifer Bess

Reviewed by: Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Akimel O'odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin by Jennifer Bess Tom Sheridan Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Akimel O'odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin. By Jennifer Bess. (Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2021. Pp. 464. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Detailed and meticulously documented, Jennifer Bess's Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing tells the story of one of the most remarkable sagas in the history of Native North America. The Akimel O'odham have farmed the floodplains of the Salt River and Gila River in central Arizona for [End Page 508] thousands of years. Their ancestors, the Huhugam, constructed the largest irrigation system in pre-Columbian North America, cultivating about 100,000 acres along hundreds of miles of earthen canals. When Spaniards first encountered them in the late 1600s, the Huhugam had dispersed, leaving their platform-mound communities in response to flooding, internal strife, and perhaps even Old World epidemic diseases. But their descendants continued to raise corn, beans, squash, and cotton along the rivers. With their surpluses, the Akimel O'odham (River People) fed the Tohono O'odham, or Desert People, who came to trade and labor in their fields. And when other Piman-speaking peoples to the south were missionized and conquered by the Spaniards, they remained independent, adopting what they wanted from the Europeans, like winter wheat, but keeping them at bay. When U.S. troops and thousands of gold-seekers on the way to California passed through their territory beginning in the 1840s, the Akimel O'odham became the first agricultural entrepreneurs in Arizona history, expanding production to barter and sell to the newcomers. They considered themselves allies of the Anglo Americans, even forming volunteer militia to fight Apaches and Yavapais after federal troops withdrew during the Civil War. Expecting reciprocity, the O'odham saw non-Native settlers divert their irrigation water instead. The Forty Years of Famine from 1871 to 1910) turned the once-verdant Gila into "dry, parched earth" (102). The great strength of Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing is its emphasis on Akimel O'odham resistance and resilience in the face of these ongoing betrayals. Bess employs O'odham creation stories to argue that the O'odham recognized and accepted cycles of expansion and contraction, developing an ideology that embraced change. The O'odham himdag (way of life) emphasized doing, world building, especially the cultivation of the land. During their darkest hours, the O'odham kept pressuring United States authorities to restore their land and water so they could sustain themselves as they had done since time immemorial. In contrast to their non-Native allies, who portrayed them as victims, the O'odham presented themselves as partners and allies who only wanted to sustain themselves as they had in the past. They did not resist agricultural modernization. On the contrary, they contested their marginalization while non-Indigenous farmers modernized around them. The paradox between the progressive ideology of the O'odham and their economic marginalization continued as the hot, dry climate of Arizona attracted government plant breeders experimenting with varieties of Egyptian long-staple cotton. Even though an experimental station was established at Sacaton on the Gila River reservation, inequities in water distribution and technical assistance exacerbated rather than alleviated O'odham poverty. Like the Green Revolution two generations later, advantages [End Page 509] accrued to those with the resources to maximize production. As one Indian agent lamented, "I found nearly all are willing to raise cotton if the water matter could be adjusted" (138). For much of the twentieth century, however, the "water matter" was never resolved. Between 1910 and 1920, the average size of non-Native farms quadrupled from 135 to 581 acres because of the long-staple cotton boom during World War I, while O'odham farms barely climbed from 7 to 12.3 acres. Dawes Act allotments and the lack of water prevented the O'odham from capitalizing on the transformation of Arizona agriculture. Bess recounts their ongoing dispossession, but she also examines their tenacity to recover their land and water and their right to make decisions...

Indian Agent Involvement in the Establishment of Permanent Settlement for the South Indian Labouring Community, 1923–1941

This article investigates a long-neglected aspect of Indian Malaysian history, namely the Indian Agents of the Government of India to British Malaya. The Indian Agents were representatives of the Indian Government who were appointed under the Indian Immigration Act of 1922 to investigate and report on the state of affairs of Indian communities in the British colonies. The official duties of the Indian Agents in British Malaya were formalised under Section 73 (III) of the Labour Code 1923. Between 1923 and 1941, six Indian Agents were appointed in British Malaya. Throughout their tenure, they focused on and reported extensively on the socioeconomic conditions of the Indian working-class community, particularly south Indian labourers. One problem that came to their attention was the underdevelopment of the community’s permanent settlement in the country. The Federated Malay States (FMS) government did not appear to be concerned about the situation. Similarly, private estate managers reacted indifferently to the issue. Both saw permanent settlement as simply an economic measure to keep the community as a labour force, rather than a way to alleviate their socioeconomic hardships. This article shows how the Indian Agents were able to uncover a range of issues that were impeding the establishment of permanent settlements for south Indian labourers in the FMS. Some of them demonstrated exceptional levels of direct involvement. The article’s primary goal is to assess the degree to which the Indian Agents influenced the overall development of permanent Indian labour settlement.

The Great Medicine Road: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, Part 4: 1856–1869 ed. by Michael L. Tate

Reviewed by: The Great Medicine Road: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, Part 4: 1856–1869 ed. by Michael L. Tate Deborah Lawrence and Jon Lawrence Michael L. Tate, editor, with the assistance of Kerin Tate, Will Bagley, and Richard L. Rieck, The Great Medicine Road: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, Part 4: 1856–1869. Norman: Arthur H. Clark, 2020. Hardcover, $45. The Great Medicine Road: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, Part 4: 1856–1869, the final volume of an ambitious series, covers the last years of emigrant travel over the Oregon–California trails. Each chapter presents a diary, a reminiscence (published and unpublished), an interview, or an official report of individuals who followed the trails from Nebraska to California and Oregon. The reader will come away with a picture of the trials and tribulations faced by the emigrants. Both hot and freezing weather, dust, and mosquitos bedeviled the travelers. Sandy and rocky roads, steep ascents and descents, and dangerous river crossings were routine, and the desert crossings were exhausting. The scarcity of water or contaminated water caused animals to give out and be abandoned to perish along the trail. Stampedes of cattle and horses led to time lost re-collecting the herds. Emigrants died by drowning and disease, and Indian hostility and bad feeling amongst the travelers were serious and at times deadly problems. Rewarding experiences are also reported, including lovely weather, amazing natural formations (Chimney Rock, Devil's Gate, Soda Springs), exciting buffalo hunts, evening campfires, encounters with new and old friends, and even berry picking. Historian Michael Tate has written extensively on Indian/Euro-American relations, including such eminent books as Indians and Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails (2006) and The Frontier Army in the Settlement of the West (1999). In the current volume he emphasizes that during the time period from the late 1850s through the Civil War there was a significant change for the worse in relations between Indians and emigrants. As pointed out in a report by Indian agent Thomas Twiss in 1859, this was primarily due to the ongoing destruction of the Indians' food sources, which in the case of the Sioux was the decimation of the giant buffalo herds. The main trouble that the emigrants faced was, however, with the Shoshone groups west of the Continental Divide, where [End Page 195] the intermontane ecology was easily disrupted by the large wagon trains and cattle herds. The diaries and reminiscences for this segment of the journey all report recent attacks on emigrants by Shoshone, with the number of deaths increasing with time. Of course, the friendly relations that had prevailed earlier did not disappear. A surprising example was that of a freight hauler, Moses Sydenham, whose wagon train was caught in a blizzard in western Nebraska and was rescued by a local Sioux group, who let the teamsters stay in their winter camp until the blizzard was over. Tate begins each chapter with an illuminating overview of the given traveler's background and his/her life after the journey. The published reminiscences are especially well written and compelling. Some readers might wish that Tate had included Noah Brooks's excellent reminiscence written in 1902 for The Century Magazine rather than his diary. Fortunately this article is easily available online. The diaries, which can be terse and repetitious, provide some of the most vivid characterizations of events along the route as on-the-spot reports. The narratives are heavily footnoted, so that a reader with no background in trail history can better follow the exposition. The extensive bibliography is invaluable, and the book is accompanied by maps, historical photographs, and artwork that enhance the reading experience. The book concludes with a promotional pamphlet written for the Union Pacific Railroad in 1868. This broadside extols the virtues to come with the advent of the transcontinental railroad—new cities, factories, farms, mines and minerals, and jobs that would soon be in place in the entire trans-Mississippi West. The long, arduous travel by ox-train and horse-drawn wagons that the emigrants had experienced would no longer be necessary. The destruction of the Native American lifeways was...

The Attempted Potawatomi Removal of 1839

In 1838, John C. Tipton and an armed militia forcibly gathered up more than 800 Potawatomi from their homes and farms in northern Indiana and marched them to Kansas. Over the course of the forced removal, more than forty Native Americans, mostly children and elderly men and women, died. But not all the northern Indiana Potawatomi were removed—many escaped before the forced march and some during it. The federal Office of Indian Affairs, determined to finish the job they had started, planned for another Potawatomi removal in 1839 under the direction of Indian agent and militia general Samuel Milroy and William Polke, one of the conductors of the 1838 removal. Letters between Milroy and Polke reveal why the 1839 removal failed: resistance from many of the Potawatomi; lengthy and poor planning by Milroy and the federal government, which delayed the removal until late in the year; the interference of white traders; and, most decisively, the suspension of specie payment by Indiana banks, which left the planned removal unfunded.

«ПРОСТО МОЛОДОЙ ТУРИСТ В НАШЕЙ СТРАНЕ»: ЛИНГВИСТ И АНТРОПОЛОГ НЕЗ-ПЕРС АРЧИ ФИННИ

Born in Culdesac, ID, Archie Phinney, a Nez Percé, was the first Native American to receive an undergraduate degree from the University of Kansas. He collaborated with prominent Smithsonian anthropologists J. N. B. Hewitt and T. Michelson as well as the great Franz Boas; visited Leningrad after being invited by Vladimir Bogoras in the context of an academic exchange program; defended his candidate thesis at the Institute of Anthropology, Archeology and Ethnography (MAE); and returned to serve as an Indian agent in different reservations in the USA. The USSR scholarship of Phinney fell on a difficult yet crucial period in the history of Soviet ethnography, when it was not yet completely closed and remained receptive to the influences of Boas’ School. Through Phinney and other American researchers like him, who visited the Soviet Union at that time, the Soviet practice of “indigenization” had a reverse effect on J. Collier’s liberal Indian New Deal. Phinney collaborated with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, when the latter was on the Indian Commissioner’s post. Today, Phinney’s figure again attracts interest after some oblivion. The department of anthropology at the University of Idaho, Moscow, occupies a building named in his honor. The scope of the paper is based on the Boas Paper collection — his correspondence with Phinney, Bogoras, Averkieva, Barton and others, stored at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. The analyzed materials, representing the general atmosphere in the 1930s Soviet academic community, are still little-known to the Russian-speaking reader.

"A Man's Children Have No Claim to His Property": Creek Matrilineal Property Relations and Gendered Conflict at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

"A Man's Children Have No Claim to His Property"Creek Matrilineal Property Relations and Gendered Conflict at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century Miller Shores Wright The General [Alexander McGillivray Sr.] left behind him a considerable property in negros, horses, and cattle, little of which went to his children. According to the custom of this nation a man's children have no claim to his property, it belongs to his relations on the maternal line, and they seize upon it, as was the case in this instance. Mrs. Durand and Mrs. Weatherford, the first a sister and the other a maternal sister only, took possession of the greatest part of the property. . . . —Benjamin Hawkins, 1809 In 1809 the United States of America's Southern Indian agent, Benjamin Hawkins, wrote the above description of what occurred to the property of Creek headman Alexander McGillivray Sr. aft er he died in Pensacola in 1793. Writing sixteen years aft er the events occurred, Hawkins demonstrated that during his career among the Creeks, he had come to understand and appreciate the importance and power of matrilineages to the Creek people and other southeastern Native groups.1 Evidence shows that both Creeks and Euro-Americans understood some of the differences in how each organized their societies—including property inheritance and gender norms. Fueled by disputes over property that began within Creek families and expanded to include the involvement of Euro-Americans, changes within Creek property relations began to challenge the place of women and matrilineages in Creek society at the turn of the nineteenth century. [End Page 158] At the time of his death, McGillivray owned extensive lands, "sixty negroes, three hundred head of cattle, with a large stock of horses."2 He attempted to leave this property to his own children, but his matrilineal kin asserted their Creek rights to his property instead.3 Six years later, in 1799, McGillivray's sisters Sophia (Durant), Sehoy (Weatherford), and Jeannette (Milfort/Crook) also struggled to take possession of the property of another brother, Malcolm McPherson Sr., from McPherson's son. Both disputes were part of a new phenomenon that had only recently come to Creek country, in present-day Alabama and Georgia, with the colonial introduction of patrilineal property inheritance among the Creek peoples. Euro-Americans introduced these differently gendered property relations slowly over centuries of contact and intermarriage, which occurred in southeastern North America mostly aft er the middle of the seventeenth century.4 However, by the turn of the nineteenth century patrilineal property inheritance had become widespread enough to inspire conflicts and violence between Creeks following the deaths of family members. This violence exacerbated other tensions in Creek society—tensions that further attracted the participation of Euro-Americans in Creek affairs—and eventually exploded in the Creek Civil War of 1813–14.5 By the late eighteenth century the loose affiliation of Native groups that became known to the British and Americans as the Creek Confederacy was home to people from a multitude of Native ethnic groups that spoke several Native languages, including (but not limited to) Muskogee, Alabama, Uchee, Natchez, Koasati, and Hitchiti.6 Aft er first contact with Europeans in the sixteenth century, Native populations in southeastern North America were decimated by waves of disease and the Native slave trade. The peoples who would form the confederacy known as the Creeks responded to the subsequent demographic collapse by coalescing into loose alliances built on the incorporation of outsiders into towns and clans.7 At the turn of the nineteenth century, geography placed the Creeks in close proximity to expansionist Americans from Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee, to whom they had ceded lands in several previous treaties. The ceded territories were supposed to alleviate the desires for land of expansionist Americans, quash violence on the colonial periphery, and settle massive debts that Creeks incurred to British, American, and Spanish traders.8 As Tennessee was granted statehood in 1796, the Mississippi Territory was incorporated in 1798, and the Louisiana Territory was purchased in 1803, American expansion south, east, and westward into Creek country became a near certainty. Furthermore, the location of the Creeks, who were being surrounded [End Page 159] by American and Spanish...

Re-membering Cherokee Justice in Ruth Muskrat Bronson's “The Serpent”

This article offers a reading of the little-known 1925 short story “The Serpent” by Cherokee writer and political figure Ruth Muskrat Bronson. Published in the Mount Holyoke Monthly, “The Serpent” challenges federal policy during the allotment era, particularly the unparalleled power of Indian agents as key political figures during and after Oklahoma statehood. Bronson represents the threat of sexual violence during this time, forecasting the jurisdictional crisis that Native communities would continue to face up to the present. In response to these dangers to the Cherokee Nation and its citizens, Bronson’s story re-members Cherokee matrilineal and clan legal systems as her protagonist intervenes in the predatory advances of the Indian agent. The story, I argue, marks a turning point in Bronson’s early career as a powerful indictment of settler injustice. Her interventions are much more measured in Bronson’s more familiar 1944 text, Indians Are People, Too. Nevertheless, reading Bronson’s later nonfiction and early fiction illustrates the complexity of the Cherokee literary tradition theorized by Daniel Heath Justice as Bronson moves from resistant Chickamauga consciousness in her early fiction to Beloved Path writing in her later career, all the while advocating for Indigenous justice and sovereignty. This study contributes to broader debates regarding Native writings from the early twentieth century, when figures like Bronson demonstrated rhetorical savvy by moving between political and polemical writings, using literary fiction and nonfiction as vehicles to deliver powerful critiques of the settler state.

Dirt and Morality during Ute Removal

The bloody confrontation between Utes and the U.S. Cavalry at the Colorado Ute Indian Agency in 1879 was a significant chapter in U.S. history. The government and Colorado citizens used this battle as a rhetorical flashpoint to justify removal of Utes from their land. This conflict presents an opportunity to revisit nineteenth-century violence over land. I suggest that a religious studies framework can deepen our understanding of the entanglement of tensions among ethnicity, morality, and land use. Ute Indians pastured hundreds of horses on land that Nathan Meeker, the white Indian agent, wished to plow. This paper argues that notions of religious and racial difference framed the land conflict between Meeker and the Utes, even as both groups viewed land as a means to gain status.

Reading for Land Susan Hill's The Clay We Are Made Of : Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River

Reading for Land Susan Hill's The Clay We Are Made Of:Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River Audra Simpson (bio) With this issue, we introduce a new occasional feature in the journal that opens up space for extended consideration of noteworthy new works. Audra Simpson contributes a close examination of how Susan Hill's prize-winning book (NAISA Best First Book, Canadian Historical Association Aboriginal History Group Book Prize, and Ontario Clio Prize, all 2018) constitutes a fieldchange intervention in Haudenosaunee and Indigenous studies. Matthew Cohen reviews Lisa Brooks's new book by way of an interview with the author about her groundbreaking methodology. Jean M. O'Brien and Robert Warrior SUSAN HILL'S PRIZE-WINNING BOOK The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River (2017) offers a comprehensive history of land and governance that is rare in its framing, its focus, and its execution, rendering it one of the most important studies to emerge on Haudenosaunee history to date.1 In this book Hill documents the relationships that Haudenosaunee had with lands, peoples, and waters in what is now the North American "Northeast." She moves us through the vicissitudes of the Revolutionary War, documenting Haudenosaunee movement up into the northern points of their hunting territory and their relocation and negotiations with Mississaugas at what would become Six Nations of the Grand River. On the way we run into some of the usual protagonists of Six Nations history: Joseph Brant (Thayendenaga), William Johnson, and John A. MacDonald. Brant's sister and Johnson's wife, Molly Brant, appears briefly, and one of the most chronicled Indigenous women in North America, Pauline Johnson, notably does not make an appearance. These are not ellipses or oversights, as Hill's approach is far from hagiographic; thus, there are very different players in this story. The central concern or protagonist is not a person or an event but a set of [End Page 149] ethics. The ethics of land are the central protagonists in this study, and this makes for a very different kind of history than we have been taught about Six Nations.2 These ethics of land speak through the archives that Hill works with: speeches and letters, council minutes, Indian agent correspondence, and arguments and negotiations. Through Hill's readings we see the process of treaty, of deliberation and decision making regarding property and inheritance in colonial contexts laid bare for us, and it is the burning question—the question of the contradiction between ethics and practice in the teeth of settler-colonial constraint and imperative—that orients her analysis. She asks specifically of this material, "If our relationship to the earth and to land is central why would we negotiate land sharing deals, treaties and, leases and direct sales?" (4). These negotiations over land are in seeming contradiction to Haudenosaunee philosophy and belief. We see how chiefs, clan mothers, and councils tried to maintain land and territory through policy, land tenure practice, and inheritance decisions in the face of rapid and unrelenting attempts to divest them of land and (annuity) money. Gone is the emphasis on militarism, decline and defeat, and then cultural salvage that has marked much of the literature on the Iroquois. Not only is this a sort of story different from the one we have been told, but this is also a model study of how to read archives for Indigenous history, theory, and principle. Hill offers a robust account of the Haudenosaunee eighteenth-century alliance with the British, a relationship based on mutual recognition, on equality. This alliance with the British, however, extends the principles of the earlier seventeenth-century Kaswentha ("Two Row Wampum") Treaty between the Dutch and the Haudenosaunee and transposes it onto relations with the British. But eighteenth-century Haudenosaunee not only treated with British, they maintained their relationships to others in the Confederacy and those in the shadow of the Confederacy. As such, they brought with them protectorate nations like the Nanticokes and Tutelos when they moved to what is now Ontario, but they also brought with them their obligations to people and land. Hill demonstrates how these obligations and relationships with other political orders were...

"The Best Lands, Wealthiest Merchants, and Planters in the State of Alabama": A. R. Moen Sells Axes in North Alabama in 1831

"The Best Lands, Wealthiest Merchants, and Planters in the State of Alabama":A. R. Moen Sells Axes in North Alabama in 1831 Robert S. Davis (bio) Augustus réné moen (born in paris, france, on september 1, 1799, and died in Samford, Connecticut, on August 24, 1867) found himself writing of his travels in the Tennessee River Valley of Alabama in 1831. That letter, in a small way, fills in for the notorious lack of gazetteers and other descriptive works from the early years of Alabama. How Moen came to find himself in Alabama makes for a colorful tale. He immigrated to America with his parents Louis and Madeline D'Arquienne Moen in 1808. Moen attended the public schools in Wilna, New York. In 1823, he married Sophie LeClanché, also a native of Paris, in Utica and became the postmaster of Houseville, New York. Eventually, Moen settled in Samford, Connecticut, and became the first deacon of the town's Presbyterian Church. He became a United States citizen in Brooklyn, New York, on October 30, 1840, and served as an officer in the New York State Militia. Augustus also patented a product for waterproofing. His son, Phillip Louis Moen (1824-1891), started Washburn & Moen, a steel mill that pioneered the development of barbed wire. His descendants intermarried with such prominent families as the Loorams, Peabodys, and Rothchilds in a family history that touched on the 1898 war with Spain, the Russian Revolution, the crash of the Hindenburg, and the rise and fall of the [End Page 229] Third Reich. No relationship, however, exists between Augustus R. Moen and the famous engineer and faucet designer Alfred M. Moen (1916-2001).1 A. R. Moen made a career in retailing while making a home in Connecticut and New York. In 1830, he became a traveling agent for the Collins Company of Canton, Connecticut. Begun in 1826 by Samuel Watkinson Collins as an axe company, Collins Company would become a leading tool manufacturer worldwide, focused especially in edged hand tools. (Workers even used Collins tools to build the Trans-Siberian Railroad.) In 1833, Moen likely persuaded President Andrew Jackson to purchase Collins axes for the Indians removed to the West. He joined his employer in petitioning not to allow the dangerous economic consequences of closing the Second Bank of the United States.2 On June 16, 1831, Moen wrote a detailed letter to the Collins Company about his adventures in getting orders for their products in North Alabama. Moen describes how business in the Tennessee Valley involved companies as far away as New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburg. He also mentions a number of prominent towns, including Athens, Courtland, Florence, Huntsville, Mooresville, Russellville, Tuscumbia, and Waterloo, as well as the names of several prominent local merchants. The letter, reproduced below, comes from the A. S. Williams III Americana Collection, part of the holdings of the University of Alabama Libraries in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The W. S. Hoole Library of the University of Alabama also has a letter from Moen to M. P. Collins, dated May 31, 1831, from Greensboro, Alabama, about selling axes on the Tombigbee and Black [End Page 230] Warrior rivers. It does not include the detailed information found in the letter reproduced here, although Moen does mention that Linden in Marengo County had two merchants: "Chs. S. Davenport late of Maine, a young and active man" and "an old Frenchman who follows the even tenor of his ways." Of Demopolis, he wrote, it is not the place you imagined it to be nor as large or important as I expected. Figure to yourself a high Prairie bluff of about 20 acres on which is scattered a few groves of trees and about ten dwelling houses and 5 Stores—and you have Demopolis—and yet there are more goods sold there than a stranger could possibly imagine. Two of the town's merchants, Moen noted, "are doing a business of from 35 to 40 thousand dlls [dollars] per Year." He described one, Allen Glover, as "unquestionably one of the wealthiest men in the State of Alabama consisting of lands negroes and Bank stock." George Strother Gaines, federal Indian agent for trade...

Nation v. Municipality: Indigenous Land Recovery, Settler Resentment, and Taxation on the Oneida Reservation

Nation v. Municipality: Indigenous Land Recovery, Settler Resentment, and Taxation on the Oneida Reservation Doug Kiel (bio) in 2002 oneida nation citizen Hugh Danforth saw the coming trouble with Hobart, a majority non-Native Wisconsin municipality located entirely within the treaty boundaries of the Oneida Reservation.1 As the wealthy suburban town of Hobart formally became a village, it gained a greater degree of autonomous home rule. Danforth took to the pages of the tribal newspaper, Kalihwisaks (“She Looks for News”). “Hobart is an urban cancer that will destroy our reservation, our adopted homeland, and our sovereignty if we don’t do something about it,” he warned.2 Writing on another occasion, Dan-forth urged, “It will be harder for the Oneida Nation to buy back land and it will be harder for the Oneida Nation to put land into trust if Hobart becomes a village.”3 He was right. Within a few years, the historically strained relations between the Oneida Nation and the municipal government of Hobart erupted into an ongoing legal battle over the future of their shared territory. Hobart was born amid a set of competing goals. The Oneida people lost ownership of all but a couple thousand acres of their more than sixty-five-thousand-acre reservation following the implementation of the Dawes General Allotment Act (1887).4 As the Daily State Gazette noted in 1890, an Oneida general council voted unanimously to pursue the creation of towns on the reservation.5 A decade later, when land speculators began gradually encroaching within the reservation, Wisconsin State Assemblyman J. F. Martin proposed that the Oneida Reservation be divided into two townships. Joseph C. Hart, the federal Indian agent at Oneida, purportedly favored Martin's vision for the reservation's future. One local newspaper declared that “up to the present time the Indians have escaped taxation, but under the township system of government, they will be obliged to pay their fair share of the burdens.”6 The proponents of creating the two towns argued that they would bring much-needed resources for infrastructure improvements that would benefit the Oneidas. Moreover, according to the Post-Crescent, published in nearby [End Page 51] Appleton, establishing town governments that could collect taxes “would speedily mean the building of roads and opening the reservation for white settlers.”7 With a small but growing number of non-Native property owners within the reservation boundaries, the newly established governments of the Town of Hobart (1908) and the Town of Oneida (1910) were both led by tribal members.8 As Oneidas gradually became the minority within their own treaty territory, however, they lost political control of Hobart. When the towns were established, nobody—Native or non-Native—imagined that a century later the Oneida Nation would be in a position to buy back so much of the reservation that their white neighbors would feel under assault by a tribal government whose land base was rapidly growing. The Oneida Nation had reacquired ownership of tens of thousands of acres by the early 2000s, and each acre of reservation land they placed back into federal trust meant one less acre from which the nation’s neighboring municipal governments could draw tax revenue. With Hobart being heavily dependent upon property taxes, transitioning to a village government was an important first step toward enacting their own long-term vision for the land. In Wisconsin, village governments have greater authority than town governments to create tax incremental districts (TIDs) as a mechanism to support development projects that help raise property values. “The village of Hobart Board is mainly interested in growth,” Hugh Danforth remarked, and that stood in contrast to the Oneida Nation’s vision of preserving the reservation’s rural character.9 Beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Oneida Nation had signed service agreements with several other neighboring governments whose jurisdiction overlaps the nation’s: Brown County, the City of Green Bay, and the Village of Ashwaubenon. In light of a complex and checkerboarded reservation map that contains both taxable property in fee simple and numerous nontaxable parcels held in federal trust, these service agreements have provided a reasonable solution for compensating local governments for services...

Secularism and Viable Life

Secularism and Viable Life Peter Coviello (bio) Or think of it like this. In 1883 a man named Henry M. Teller, acting in his role of secretary of the interior—a position that gave him jurisdiction over the Bureau of Indian Affairs—authorized the implementation of a "Religious Crimes Code." The document drawn up by his commissioner of Indian affairs, Hiram Price, is, in both its compression and its strange itemized multiplicity, altogether remarkable. Here, for instance, are just a few infractions mapped out in what would come to be known as a "Code of Indian Offenses": 4th. The "sun-dance," the "scalp-dance," the "war-dance," and all other so-called feasts assimilating thereto, shall be considered "Indian offenses," and any Indian found guilty of being a participant in any one or more of these "offenses" shall, for the first offense committed, be punished by withholding from the person or persons so found guilty by the court his or their rations for a period not exceeding ten days … 5th. Any plural marriage hereafter contracted or entered into by any member of an Indian tribe under the supervision of a United States Indian agent shall be considered an "Indian offense," cognizable by the Court of Indian Offenses … 6th. The usual practices of so-called "medicine-men" shall be considered "Indian offenses" cognizable by the Court of Indian Offenses, and whenever it shall be proven to the satisfaction of the court that the influence or practice of a so-called "medicine-man" operates as a hindrance to the civilization of a tribe, or that said "medicine-man" resorts to any artifice or device to keep the Indians under his influence, or shall adopt any means to prevent the attendance of children at the agency schools, or shall use any of the arts of a conjurer to prevent the Indians from abandoning their heathenish rites and customs, he shall be adjudged guilty of an Indian offense.1 Sun-dances, plural marriage, indigenous medicine, "heathenish rites": here, I want to suggest, in compressed miniature, is an arresting portrait of the mechanics of early American biopower. More precisely, the code delineates just what happens to a population whose structures and practices of belief fall hard askance those of an expanding empire that has, with magisterial completeness, folded a liberalized Christianity into the very core of its self-conception, [End Page 889] and has made out of that conjuncture an encompassing, and fully racialized, metaphysics. That entangled in-folding can be usefully designated, I think, by the term secularism. The Religious Crimes Code is a map of its biopolitics. If you've read this far, you likely do not need an exhaustive restatement of the principles of biopower. You will be familiar, I mean, with the conceptual vocabulary that aims to describe the rationalized distribution of capacities across populations in a slatted, hierarchized economy of life, ranging from the healthy to the expendable. The biopolitical names an order of power that operates through a disciplinary investment in the biological life of mass social phenomena, as these are disaggregated into racialized micro-populations, and rationalized in an optimizing calculus designed to foster some forms of life, inhibit or disallow others, and to regulate them collectively in a flexible economy of interaction. Kyla Schuller, in her indispensable The Biopolitics of Feeling, offers a deft and compact definition: "Biopower functions as an umbrella term combining two different yet overlapping instruments of postsovereign power deployed within the regime of civilization: the discipline of the individual body, which worked to 'integrate the body into a system of economic productivity'; and the 'regulatory controls' of biopolitics, which 'aim to adjust population to economic processes.'"2 Let's take this all as given. There are, then, two points I'd like to emphasize in respect to the "Code of Indian Offenses." First, we might observe that the 1883 document offers us a clarifying purchase on the workings of racialization—its cross-wired articulations—through which a subpopulation is made over into a species of misfiring life. For here, racial redemption, erotic propriety, and religious correction take shape as part of a single, fused strategy of disciplinary intervention—an intervention that maps out...