History
Concerned about European-American encroachment on lands reserved for tribes in Indian Territory, Mary Bonney and Amelia Stone Quinton gathered signatures for petitions to demonstrate support among American people to honor the treaties made with tribes by the United States. They submitted the first such petition to the President and Congress in 1880. and Initially The Association first began as a petition drive to persuade Congress to uphold Indian treaties. [2] Initially founded in 1879 in reaction to the prospect of opening Oklahoma Indian Territory to white settlement, additional branches quickly expanded in the 1880s. [3] At its peak the Association supported 98 branch organizations in 28 states and sustained 56 missions on Indian reservations. [2]
The first crusade was a five-year mission devoted to gaining political rights for Indians to vote as United States citizens. [4] Soon, chapters in sixteen states participated in the movement. [4]
In 1882, the male-dominated Indian Rights Association commandeered the lobbying functions of the Association. [2] In response to this, the Association shifted toward a "maternalist" approach and focused on missionary work. [2] The missionary efforts included tasks such as home building, hospital, and educational work on the reservations. [4]
Bonney retired from the presidency of the WNIA in November 1884; she was succeeded by Mary Lowe Dickinson, who was elected to the office. In 1887, Anna Stone Quinton was unanimously elected president in 1887. [3]
The Association underwent several name changes, first named the Central Indian Committee (1879), switching to the Indian Treaty-Keeping and Protective Association (1881-1882), then the Women's National Indian Association (1882-1901). That year they took the name of National Indian Association (1901). [5] The Association was voluntarily dissolved in 1951 due to funding cuts and policy shifts. [2]
Goals of the movement
The Association's aims were to gain assimilation of American Indians into mainstream society, including to encourage their becoming Christian. [6] It maintained missions, produced several publications, and influenced national policy, including the passing of the Dawes Act in 1887. Its main objectives were to assimilate Indians through Christian education and missionary work, and abolish the reservation system. [5]
Quinton described the Association's foundation as a "united effort to move our government to grant a legal status to Indians, the protection of law, lands in severalty, and education." [4] She wrote a pamphlet that criticized the greed of settlers and the unfaithfulness of the United States government toward Indians. [2] Quinton explained the work of the WNIA as "the work of informing the public of the needs, capabilities, and progress of our native Indians, and also it is the work of moving the Government, by direct appeals, to render just to help them." [4]
The WNIA focused on reservation-based communities located west of the Mississippi River. It also supported missions among the Seminole in Florida and the Chiricahua prisoners of war confined in Alabama. [2] During the next decade, the WNIA battled local, state, and federal officials to secure land for them. The WNIA did not believe that the Indian peoples should govern themselves independently but that they should be included in United States mainstream society. [2]
In response to the "maternalist" approach taken by the WNIA, the women tried to teach Native American women about middle-class, European-American practices and roles. They provided materials and resources to enable the women to conform to these "new gendered expectations." [2] Children were taught to read and write in English in mission schools. Mothers were to be taught to make "comfortable and attractive homes" and "cook the foods of civilizations," and both women and children were taught "redeeming Christian truths." [2]
Legislative influence
The Association supported passage of the Dawes Act in 1887. This provided for the allotment of communal reservation land to individual households of tribal members, in order to extinguish Indian land rights in Indian Territory. This was required in order for the territory, together with Oklahoma Territory, to be admitted as a state. In addition, giving households individual plots of land to farm was seen as key to producing subsistence farmers. The Act also granted Indians US (and state) citizenship. It would enable them to vote, but also made them subject to state and federal taxes. [7]
While many of the Association's members considered the Dawes Act an achievement, they did not realize the adverse effects it would have for many Indians. [7] During the subsequent decades, the Five Civilized Tribes lost 90 million acres of former communal lands, which were sold to non-Natives. Many Indians were unfamiliar with land ownership and were targeted by criminals, losing their already small plots of land. Furthermore, the Dawes Act complicated the social structures of the tribes and contributed to their decline in later years.
The Dawes Act of 1887 regulated land rights on tribal territories within the United States. It authorized the President of the United States to subdivide Native American tribal communal landholdings into allotments for Native American heads of families and individuals. This would convert traditional systems of land tenure into a government-imposed system of private property by forcing Native Americans to "assume a capitalist and proprietary relationship with property" that did not previously exist in their cultures. The act allowed tribes the option to sell the lands that remained after allotment to the federal government. Before private property could be dispensed, the government had to determine "which Indians were eligible" for allotments, which propelled an "official search for a federal definition of Indian-ness."
The Indian Territory and the Indian Territories are terms that generally described an evolving land area set aside by the United States Government for the relocation of Native Americans who held aboriginal title to their land as a sovereign independent state. In general, the tribes ceded land they occupied in exchange for land grants in 1803. The concept of an Indian Territory was an outcome of the US federal government's 18th- and 19th-century policy of Indian removal. After the American Civil War (1861–1865), the policy of the US government was one of assimilation.
Helen Hunt Jackson was an American poet and writer who became an activist on behalf of improved treatment of Native Americans by the United States government. She described the adverse effects of government actions in her history A Century of Dishonor (1881). Her novel Ramona (1884) dramatized the federal government's mistreatment of Native Americans in Southern California after the Mexican–American War and attracted considerable attention to her cause. Commercially popular, it was estimated to have been reprinted 300 times and most readers liked its romantic and picturesque qualities rather than its political content. The novel was so popular that it attracted many tourists to Southern California who wanted to see places from the book.
An Indian reservation is an area of land tenure governed by a federally recognized Native American tribal nation under the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, rather than by the government of the state in which it is located. The 326 Indian reservations in the United States are associated with specific Native American nations, often on a one-to-one basis. Some of the country's 574 federally recognized tribes govern more than one reservation, while some share reservations, and others have no reservation at all. In addition, because of past land allotments, leading to sales to non–Native Americans, some reservations are severely fragmented, with each piece of tribal, individual, and privately held land being a separate enclave. This jumble of private and public real estate creates significant administrative, political and legal difficulties.
The Colville Indian Reservation is an Indian reservation in the northwest United States, in north central Washington, inhabited and managed by the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, which is federally recognized.
Henry Laurens Dawes was an attorney and politician, a Republican United States Senator and United States Representative from Massachusetts. He is notable for the Dawes Act (1887), which was intended to stimulate the assimilation of Native Americans by ending the tribal government and control of communal lands. Especially directed at the tribes in Indian Territory, it provided for the allotment of tribal lands to individual households of tribal members, and for their being granted United States citizenship. This also made them subject to state and federal taxes. In addition, extinguishing tribal land claims in this territory later enabled the admission of Oklahoma as a state in 1907.
Susan La Flesche Picotte was a Native American doctor and reformer in the late 19th century. She is widely acknowledged as one of the first Native Americans to earn a medical degree. She campaigned for public health and for the formal, legal allotment of land to members of the Omaha tribe.
Standing Bear was a Ponca chief and Native American civil rights leader who successfully argued in U.S. District Court in 1879 in Omaha that Native Americans are "persons within the meaning of the law" and have the right of habeas corpus, thus becoming the first Native American judicially granted civil rights under American law. His first wife Zazette Primeau (Primo), daughter of Lone Chief, mother of Prairie Flower and Bear Shield, was also a signatory on the 1879 writ that initiated the famous court case.
A Century of Dishonor is a non-fiction book by Helen Hunt Jackson first published in 1881 that chronicled the experiences of Native Americans in the United States, focusing on injustices.
Amelia Stone Quinton was an American social activist and advocate for Native American rights. In collaboration with Mary Bonney, she helped found the Women's National Indian Association in 1883.
Mary Lucinda Bonney born in Hamilton, New York, was a 19th-century American educator and advocate for Native American rights. She is considered to be the most important woman in the Native American movement to protect their tribal lands. She was also involved in the early movement to provide for girls' education. With fellow teacher Harriette A. Dillaye, in 1850 she founded a female seminary in Philadelphia. It became known as the Ogontz School for Young Ladies after it moved to a suburban estate of that name. After a second move, the last campus was developed after 1950 as Penn State Abington.
The Great Sioux Reservation initially set aside land west of the Missouri River in South Dakota and Nebraska for the use of the Lakota Sioux, who had dominated this territory. The reservation was established in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. It included all of present-day western South Dakota and modern Boyd County, Nebraska. This area was established by the United States as a reservation for the Teton Sioux, also known as the Lakota: the seven western bands of the "Seven Council Fires".
Thomas Henry Tibbles was an abolitionist, author, journalist, Indians’ rights activist, and politician who was born in Ohio and lived in various other places in the United States, especially Nebraska. Tibbles played an important role in the trial of Standing Bear, a legal battle which led to the liberation of the Ponca tribe from the Indian territory in Oklahoma in the year 1879. This landmark case led to important improvements in the civil rights of Native Americans throughout the country and opened the door to further advancement.
The Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma is one of four federally-recognized Native American tribes of Odawa people in the United States. Its ancestors had migrated into Michigan and Ohio in the 18th century. In the late 1830s they were removed to west of the Mississippi River, first to Iowa, then to Kansas in what was then Indian Territory. In 1867 they sold their land to purchase territory in what became Oklahoma, then primarily settled by Native Americans.
The Curtis Act of 1898 was an amendment to the United States Dawes Act; it resulted in the break-up of tribal governments and communal lands in Indian Territory of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indian Territory: the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek), Cherokee, and Seminole. These tribes had been previously exempt from the 1887 General Allotment Act because of the terms of their treaties. In total, the tribes immediately lost control of about 90 million acres of their communal lands; they lost more in subsequent years.
American Indian boarding schools, also known more recently as Indian Residential Schools, were established in the United States during the early 19th through the mid-20th centuries with a primary objective of "civilizing" or assimilating Native American children and youth into Euro-American culture. In the process, these schools denigrated Native American culture and made children give up their languages and religion. At the same time the schools provided a basic education in Euro-American subjects. These boarding schools were first established by Christian missionaries of various denominations, who often were approved by the federal government to start both missions and schools on reservations, especially in the lightly populated areas of the West. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the government paid religious orders to provide basic education to Native American children on reservations, and later established its own schools on reservations. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) also founded additional off-reservation boarding schools based on the assimilation model. These sometimes drew children from a variety of tribes. In addition, religious orders established off-reservation schools.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to United States federal Indian law and policy:
The Cherokee Commission, was a three-person bi-partisan body created by President Benjamin Harrison to operate under the direction of the Secretary of the Interior, as empowered by Section 14 of the Indian Appropriations Act of March 2, 1889. Section 15 of the same Act empowered the President to open land for settlement. The Commission's purpose was to legally acquire land occupied by the Cherokee Nation and other tribes in the Oklahoma Territory for non-indigenous homestead acreage.
An Organic Act is a generic name for a statute used by the United States Congress to describe a territory, in anticipation of being admitted to the Union as a state. Because of Oklahoma's unique history an explanation of the Oklahoma Organic Act needs a historic perspective. In general, the Oklahoma Organic Act may be viewed as one of a series of legislative acts, from the time of Reconstruction, enacted by Congress in preparation for the creation of a unified State of Oklahoma. The Organic Act created Oklahoma Territory, and Indian Territory that were Organized incorporated territories of the United States out of the old "unorganized" Indian Territory. The Oklahoma Organic Act was one of several acts whose intent was the assimilation of the tribes in Oklahoma and Indian Territories through the elimination of tribes' communal ownership of property.
Sharp v. Murphy, 591 U.S. ___ (2020), was a Supreme Court of the United States case of whether Congress disestablished the Muscogee (Creek) Nation reservation. After holding the case from the 2018 term, the case was decided on July 9, 2020, in a per curiam decision following McGirt v. Oklahoma that, for the purposes of the Major Crimes Act, the reservations were never disestablished and remain Native American country.
