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 Kickapoo people are an Algonquian-speaking Native American tribe and Indigenous people in Mexico, originating in the region south of the Great Lakes. Today, three federally recognized Kickapoo tribes are in the United States: the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas, the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma, and the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas. The Oklahoma and Texas bands are politically associated with each other. The Kickapoo in Kansas came from a relocation from southern Missouri in 1832 as a land exchange from their reserve there. Around 3,000 people are enrolled tribal members.
The Dawes Act of 1887 regulated land rights on tribal territories within the United States. Named after Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, 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. 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".
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 original Indian title to their land as an independent nation-state. The concept of an Indian territory was an outcome of the U.S. federal government's 18th- and 19th-century policy of Indian removal. After the American Civil War (1861–1865), the policy of the U.S. 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 popular 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 successful, it was estimated to have been reprinted 300 times, with readers liking its romantic and picturesque qualities more 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.
The Sac and Fox Nation is the largest of three federally recognized tribes of Sauk and Meskwaki (Fox) Indian peoples. Originally from the Lake Huron and Lake Michigan area, they were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma in the 1870s and are predominantly Sauk. The Sac and Fox Oklahoma Tribal Statistical Area (OTSA) is the land base in Oklahoma governed by the tribe.
An American Indian reservation is an area of land held and governed by a U.S. federal government-recognized Native American tribal nation, whose government is autonomous, subject to regulations passed by the United States Congress and administered by the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs, and not to the U.S. state government in which it is located. Some of the country's 574 federally recognized tribes govern more than one of the 326 Indian reservations in the United States, while some share reservations, and others have no reservation at all. Historical piecemeal land allocations under the Dawes Act facilitated sales to non–Native Americans, resulting in some reservations becoming severely fragmented, with pieces of tribal and privately held land being treated as separate enclaves. This intersection of private and public real estate creates significant administrative, political, and legal difficulties.
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 medical doctor and reformer and member of the Omaha tribe. She is widely acknowledged as one of the first Indigenous people, and the first Indigenous woman, to earn a medical degree. She campaigned for public health and for the formal, legal allotment of land to members of the Omaha tribe.
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.
Charles C. Painter (1833-1895) was an American abolitionist, Native American advocate and Congregational minister. The son of a Virginia planter who freed the people he enslaved before the American Civil War, Painter served on the faculty of Fisk University, dedicated to the education of African Americans. He was a prominent member of the Indian Rights Association, working out of the organization's Boston office, and, with Samuel M. Brosius, had a long career as an IRA agent and lobbyist in Washington, D.C.
The Great Sioux Reservation is an Indian reservation created by the United States through treaty with the Sioux, principally the Lakota, who dominated the territory before its establishment. In the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the reservation included lands west of the Missouri River in South Dakota and Nebraska, including all of present-day western South Dakota. The treaty also provided rights to roam and hunt in contiguous areas of North Dakota, Montana Wyoming, and northwest Colorado.
Thomas Henry Tibbles was an American abolitionist, writer, journalist, Native American 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 Algonquian-speaking ancestors had migrated gradually from the Atlantic coast and Great Lakes areas, reaching what are now the states of Michigan and Ohio in the 18th century. In the late 1830s the United States removed the Ottawa to west of the Mississippi River, first to Iowa, then to Kansas in what was Indian Territory.
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.
The Cherokee Freedmen controversy was a political and tribal dispute between the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen regarding the issue of tribal membership. The controversy had resulted in several legal proceedings between the two parties from the late 20th century to August 2017.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to United States federal Indian law and policy:
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 Indian country.
The Friends of the Indian was a group that pushed for Indian assimilation during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. After dealing with "the Indian problem" through treaties, removal, and reservations, the Federal Government of The United States moved toward a method that is now referred to as assimilation. The Friends of the Indian group, which was largely connected to and intertwined with the Office of Indian Affairs within the Federal Government presented themselves as speaking on behalf of Native Americans who they viewed as unable to speak for themselves. They claimed that the best course of action for Native Americans was to assimilate them into the larger American culture, rather than allowing them to maintain their existing native cultures. The Friends used many tactics to push for said assimilation. Some went and lived with tribes, or contributed to the new discipline of anthropology to establish themselves as experts and push for cultural change. Some wrote books and essays about the poor treatment of Indians they had seen in the past and how this treatment might be improved. Others lobbied for legislative change through the Federal Government. The Friends of the Indian played a large role in the assimilation of American Indians by pushing for the passing of the Dawes Act, the Indian Citizenship Act, the creation and use of Indian boarding schools, and the continuation of an expectation that Indians could not speak for themselves.
