Indigenous Intellectuals

In the United States of America today, debates among, between, and

within Indian nations continue to focus on how to determine and define
the boundaries of Indian ethnic identity and tribal citizenship. From the
1880s and into the 1930s, many Native people participated in similar
debates as they confronted white cultural expectations regarding what
it meant to be an Indian in modern American society. Using close read-
ings of texts, images, and public performances, this book examines the
literary output of four influential American Indian intellectuals who
challenged long-held conceptions of Indian identity at the turn of the
twentieth century. Kiara M. Vigil traces how the narrative discourses
created by these figures spurred wider discussions about citizenship,
race, and modernity in the United States and elsewhere. By setting
them in dialogue with white American culture, Vigil demonstrates how
these figures deployed aspects of Native American cultural practice to
authenticate their status both as indigenous peoples and as citizens of
the United States.

Kiara M. Vigil is an assistant professor of American studies at Amherst

College and specializes in teaching and research related to Native
American studies. She is a past recipient of the Gaius Charles Bolin fel-
lowship from Williams College, as well as fellowships from the Mellon
Foundation, the Autry National Center, the Newberry Library, and the
Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan.
 Studies in North American Indian History

Editors
Frederick Hoxie, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Neal Salisbury, Smith College
Tiya Miles, University of Michigan
Ned Blackhawk, Yale University

This series is designed to exemplify new approaches to the Native American past. In
recent years scholars have begun to appreciate the extent to which Indians, whose
cultural roots extend back for thousands of years, shaped the North American
landscape as encountered by successive waves of immigrants. In addition, because
Native Americans continually adapted their cultural traditions to the realities of
the Euro-American presence, their history adds a thread of non-Western experience
to the tapestry of American culture. Cambridge Studies in North American Indian
History brings outstanding examples of this new scholarship to a broad audience.
Books in the series link Native Americans to broad themes in American history and
place the Indian experience in the context of social and economic change over time.

Also in the Series:

Lucy Murphy Great Lakes Creoles:  A  French-Indian Community on the Northern
Borderlands, Prairie du Chien, 1750–1860
Richard White The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes
Region, 1650–1815, second edition
Gary Warrick A Population History of the Huron-Petun, A.D. 500–1650
John Bowes Exiles and Pioneers: Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West
David J. Silverman Faith and Boundaries:  Colonists, Christianity, and the Community
among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871
Jeffrey Ostler The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to
Wounded Knee
Claudio Saunt A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the
Creek Indians, 1733–1816
Jean M. O’Brien Dispossession by Degrees:  Indian Land and Identity in Natick,
Massachusetts, 1650–1790
Frederick E. Hoxie Parading through History:  The Making of the Crow Nation in
America, 1805–1935
Colin G. Calloway The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in
Native American Communities
Sidney L. Harring Crow Dog’s Case:  American Indian Sovereignty, Tribal Law, and
United States Law in the Nineteenth Century
 Indigenous Intellectuals
Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the
American Imagination, 1880–1930

KIARA M. VIGIL
Amherst College
 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107070813
© Kiara M. Vigil 2015
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2015
Printed in the United States of America
A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Vigil, Kiara M., 1975–
Indigenous intellectuals : sovereignty, citizenship, and the American
imagination, 1880–1930 / Kiara M. Vigil, Amherst College.
pages  cm. – (Studies in North American Indian history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-07081-3 (hbk.)
1.  Indians of North America – Biography.  2.  Intellectuals – United States –
Biography.  3.  Indians of North America – Intellectual life.  4.  Indians of
North America – Politics and government.  I.  Title.
E89.V53 2015
970.004′97–dc23   2015002193
ISBN 978-1-107-07081-3 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs
for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not
guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
 In loving memory of
R. Max Vigil
Father, artist, and intellectual
 Contents

List of Figures page x

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke 1

1. A Global Mission: The Higher Education of Charles Eastman 34
2. Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics: Progressive Reform and
Epistolary Culture Networks 101
3. Red Bird: Gertrude Bonnin’s Representational Politics 165
4. Luther Standing Bear: Staging U.S. Indian History with
Reel Indians 234
Conclusion: The 1930s, Indian Reorganization, and Beyond 303

Afterword 321
Appendix 325
Bibliography 327
Index 351

ix
 Figures

1 “The Red Man’s Rebuke” pamphlet cover (1893) page 5

2 Musical program for Irene “Taluta” Eastman 58
3 Charles Eastman: Author’s portrait (1916) 60
4 Dartmouth College reunion photograph (1927) 82
5 Carlos Montezuma portrait (circa 1915) 141
6 Gertrude Bonnin portrait by Gertrude Kasebier (circa 1898) 200
7 Gertrude Bonnin portrait by Gertrude Kasebier (circa 1898) 201
8 NCAI: Constitution and by-laws (circa 1926) 211
9 Chief Standing Bear full-length portrait 242
10 Luther Standing Bear actor’s portrait 283

x
 Acknowledgments

I could never have completed this book without a tremendous amount of

scholarly and personal support from other people. In particular, I am grate-
ful to my colleagues at Amherst College, especially those in the American
Studies Department. Professors Lisa Brooks and Kevin Sweeney offered me
feedback on certain parts of the manuscript in its final stages that I know
has made for a better book. I am equally indebted to Karen Sanchez-Eppler
and Barry O’Connell for their inspirational work as researchers, teachers,
and mentors. My colleagues in American Studies have done well to provide
me time and support to finish this book; thank you to: Carol Clark, Frank
Couvares, Robert Hayashi, Sujani Reddy, Molly Mead, Solsi Del Moral,
Leah Schmalzbauer, and Wendy Bergoffen. Much gratitude goes to our staff
members Karen Graves and Lisa Ballou for managing the nitty-gritty of
my life at Amherst when it counts. I am also grateful to Ted Melillo for his
words of wisdom and kindness, as well as to Eunmi Mun and Sahar Sadjadi
for their friendship. In addition to faculty and staff, I  am very thankful
for the help I  received from Amherst College’s students, in particular the
efforts of my incredibly smart and capable research assistants who helped
find images for this book. A very special thanks to: Julian Roberson, Holly
Burwick, and Francheska Santos  – you are all wonderful scholars in the
making and I cannot wait to see what you will do in the future!
I am also indebted to the faculty and staff in the American Culture
Department at the University of Michigan, where this project began as a
dissertation under the guidance of Philip Deloria, June Howard, Magdalena
Zabarowska, and my outside reader, Matthew Briones, now at the University
of Chicago. All four of my readers were instrumental in guiding my research,
writing, and thinking about this work. Phil in particular has remained stead-
fast as a mentor and inspiration; words cannot possibly capture what his
work and friendship have meant to me and this project. Working in the field
of Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS) has also enabled me to

xi
xii Acknowledgments

find a wide range of mentors and colleagues whose scholarship, leadership,

and guidance have greatly shaped the path taken to complete this book. I will
forever be thankful to:  Neal Salisbury, Tiya Miles, Ned Blackhawk, Fred
Hoxie, Phil Deloria, Jean O’Brien, and Robert Warrior; and to J. Kēhaulani
Kauanui, Beth Piatote, Chad Allen, Meg Noodin, Michael Witgen, Vince
Diaz, and Kathleen Washburn; as well as to my fellow graduate students from
Michigan whose work in NAIS is crucial to our field, John Low, Veronica
Hutch, Angela Parker, and Kelly Fayard. Most recently I have had the plea-
sure of sharing my work with NAIS colleagues from across the Five Colleges
in the Connecticut River Valley and I  am grateful for their guidance and
encouragement, with many thanks to: Neal Salisbury, Kathleen Brown-Perez,
Sonya Atalay, Lisa Brooks, Christine DeLucia, Alice Nash, and, of course,
Ron Welburn.
The research for this book would not have been possible without help
from an array of talented archivists and librarians. All of the librarians
working at Dartmouth College’s Rauner Library should be given special rec-
ognition for their knowledge of the collection and availability to help with
just about any item that one might need. I especially want to thank Andi
Bartelstein, Sarah Hartwell, Jay Satterfield, and Joshua Shaw. Huge thanks
also to Katherine Kominis at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center
at Boston University and Amy Hague from the Sophia Smith Collection at
Smith College and all of their staff. Thanks so much to John Cahoon at the
Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History; Cheryl Gunselman at the
Washington State University Library; Kevin Bradley at the National Archives
and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland; and Ashley Adair at
the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at
Austin, as well as to Sarah Allison and Gwido Zlatkes at the Rupert Costo
Library of the American Indian at the University of California at Riverside.
A  special thanks also to Brigham Young University’s well-organized and
highly trained staff who work with BYU’s special collections and who helped
with Gertrude Bonnin’s personal papers; the friendly and helpful staff at
the Center for Southwest Studies in Durango, Colorado; and the incredibly
capable staff at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, Wisconsin, as
well as the librarians of the Newberry Library in Chicago for their assis-
tance with Carlos Montezuma’s personal papers. Of course thanks go to
the many dedicated and highly trained librarians and archivists who work
at the Hatcher Graduate Library of the University of Michigan, the Bentley
Historical Library (especially Karen Jania), and the Clements Library. Thank
you also to the staff and librarians at the Gene Autry National Center and
the Braun Research Library of the Southwest Museum of the American
Indian, especially Marva Felchlin and Liza Posas. An important thank you
also goes to Kate Boyle and the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts,
for helping me with images related to Charles Eastman’s family. Finally, a
special thank you to the library staff of Amherst College’s Archives and
 Acknowledgments xiii

Special Collections, including Mike Kelly and Rebecca Henning, and the
important work they have begun by acquiring and building on the new
Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection, which
arrived at the College shortly after I did and has been invaluable to me in
finishing this book.
My many research trips were well funded because of numerous travel
grants, beginning with support from the Department of American Culture
and the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan. Most
recently my final research was supported (in part) by a grant from the
Amherst College Faculty Research Award Program, as funded by The
H. Axel Schupf ’57 Fund for Intellectual Life. In addition, I received fund-
ing support from the Westerners’ Corral of Los Angeles to enable me to be
in residence at the Autry National Center’s research libraries, which helped
strengthen the fourth chapter. While still writing the dissertation that pre-
ceded this monograph, I received funding from the Newberry Library and
a Frances C. Allen Fellowship as well as support from Williams College,
where I  was the Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in American Studies. At
Williams I worked closely with faculty who helped me develop and grow as
a scholar and I would like to thank Liza Johnson, Mark Reinhardt, Merida
Rua, Cassandra Cleghorn, Dorothy Wang, Ji-Young, Maria-Elena Cepeda,
Jackie Hidalgo, Nick Howe, Vince Schleitwiler, and Scott Wong for their
guidance and their friendship. In addition to colleagues, student research-
ers, archivists, and librarians, this project would not have come to frui-
tion without extraordinary editorial support from Deborah Gershenowitz
of Cambridge University Press. I  am also thankful for the help of Dana
Bricken in securing proper permissions for my images and in assisting to
ensure the quality of their resolution.
The vast majority of research for this project took place across the
United States. I  am thankful for the hospitality of Chris and Sarah in
Durango and Claire Decoteau and Andy Clarno for hosting me during a
short (but productive) stay in Chicago. And, of course, to Paul Farber for
a place to stay in DC. Thank you also to my academic friends who read
parts of the manuscript at various stages; your keen insights have made
all the difference. Thank you, Matt Duques, for still reading so much of
my work. Thank you, Jenn Solheim, my dear writing confidante, for our
thought-provoking feedback sessions; you are a treasure! A  very special
thanks too to Heather Houser for helping me refine my thinking in key
places and for being an extra mentor at crucial moments throughout this
arduous process. Along with these colleagues and friends, I am especially
grateful for those who have remained true intimates and whose kindness
nourished my soul so I could complete this book. To all those who continue
to inspire me every day, thank you so very much: Kathleen Tipler, Denise
Bailey, Miriam Stanton, Miki Yagi, Talia Senders (and her family:  Josh,
Nate, and Jack!), Orlena Yee, Molly Keehn, Julia McQuade, Emily Lordi,
newgenprepdf

xiv Acknowledgments

Jennifer Garcia Peacock, and Sarah Jacobson – I am very fortunate to have
you all in my life.
A final thank you to my family:  my mom, Dr.  Terry Anne Vigil; my
brother, Dr. Ryan Vigil; and my partner, Blake Johnson. All three of you are
smart people who continue to push my intellectual growth. Thank you espe-
cially to the Vigils, who are superb editors and who have read or listened to
a lot of this work with a generosity of spirit that is unmatched. I am very
grateful to them for their insightful feedback, which has deepened my com-
mitment and has encouraged me to write for a wide audience because the
stories of these Native peoples’ lives are worth hearing and worth repeating.
Finally, a depth of gratitude for Blake because without your deep love, sup-
port, pet care, and cooking, this book (while keeping me happy and healthy)
would never have been realized. Any errors are, of course, my own.
 Introduction
A Red Man’s Rebuke

The American government is one where the voice of the people is heard. It is
therefore not a radical step nor a presumption for the native Red Man today
to raise his voice about the welfare of his race. The Red Man has been mute
too long. He must speak for himself as no other can, nor should he be afraid
to speak the truth and to insist upon a hearing for the utterance of truth can
harm no one but must bless all mankind.1
– Zitkala-Sa, American Indian Magazine, July–September (1918)

On the morning of October 9, 1893, Potawatomi political leader Simon

Pokagon rang a facsimile of the Liberty Bell to open Chicago Day at the
World’s Columbian Exposition.2 He had been invited by Chicago’s mayor,
Carter Harrison, who imagined that the ceremony might illustrate an impor-
tant cultural connection between the rise of the great city of Chicago and
the region’s Indian people.3 Yet as Pokagon, dressed in a suit like most white
men that day although distinguished by a feathered cap, struck the bell,
his appearance at the Fair offered a far more complex range of meanings.4
Although Chicago Day may have been a high point for the mayor and oth-
ers, commemorating as it did the anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire of
1871, the moment was a very different one for Pokagon.5 His appearance at
the Fair represented a critical, and urgent, opportunity.6
As a public Indian intellectual,7 Pokagon aimed to engage the Fair’s audi-
ences in rethinking the very premise of the Exposition, namely, that America’s
origins and history could be represented through impressive displays of
architecture, celebrations of scientific discovery, the marketing of new food
products, and the articulation of white cultural supremacy through the dis-
plays along the Midway. This part of the fairgrounds embodied an arrange-
ment of diverse cultures that followed an evolutionary logic for displaying
humanity using a scale that measured human beings according to stages
from “less” to “more” civilized. Within a mile-long strip of populist display
the Midway relied on discrete ethnographic exhibitions of nonwhite people

1
2 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke

performing in their “native” costumes to reiterate a social Darwinist under-

standing of progress. Pokagon saw things differently. He sought to show the
irony of Indians’ participation in these celebrations of America when they
had lost both the political rights and the economic resources needed to claim
sovereignty over land and culture.8
As Pokagon ascended the stage to begin his opening address, he faced dig-
nitaries who had traveled to Chicago from all over the world. Surveying his
audience, Pokagon began, “Where these great Columbian show-buildings
stretch skyward, and where stands this ‘Queen City of the West’ once stood
the red man’s wigwams;”9 His address aimed to fix the site of the Fair in
Indian terms. He did not celebrate the Expo, or praise Chicago Day, or
recall the events of the 1871 fire. Instead, he looked to an earlier time and
lamented the unfulfilled principles that lay behind democratic freedom and
the historical legacy of Columbus’s journey to the Americas. His speech con-
tinued, “here met their old men, young men, and maidens; here blazed their
council fires.”10
Chicago had once belonged to the Potawatomi. Pokagon’s speech
remembered this past, as it baldly criticized American imperialism and the
tide of civilized white settlers that washed over – and displaced – indige-
nous peoples across the continent. His pointed and public counter-history
ignited controversy:  Who invited him to the party? And how dare he
take the opportunity to impugn the message of the Exposition, the mes-
sage  – after all  – of America itself? Contemporary readers might well
ponder the same question. Why was a Native American man chosen to
open Chicago Day in the first place? Pokagon was a trophy, an authentic
connection to the past, a piece of local nostalgia, a gesture toward irony,
a figure associated with a primitive freedom that was understood to be
American – and more.
This book is not about Simon Pokagon at all. But it is about the storm
of meanings, urbanism, industrialism, and imperialism that Indian public
performances elicited at the end of the nineteenth century. Surrounding
Pokagon’s performance on that October day was an American cultural rep-
ertoire that Indians would have to confront, assimilate, master, defy, and
perform for the next several decades. This moment was strikingly different
from the America that earlier generations of Indian people, living during the
beginning of the nineteenth century, had to navigate. For the group of Indian
intellectuals who followed Pokagon had to face this new storm of meanings,
and their histories demonstrate the limits and opportunities to be found in
doing so. Pokagon was hardly the first Indian to grapple with an American
public, but he may have been the first to do so under the bright lights of
modernity,11 and among the first to embody the profound question Gerald
Vizenor has posed to scholars of Native American studies:  “What did it
mean to be the first generation to hear stories of the past, bear the horrors
of the moment, and write to the future?”12
 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke 3

This book aims to provide a collective cultural biography of four Indian

intellectuals who followed in Pokagon’s footsteps: Charles Eastman, Carlos
Montezuma, Gertrude Bonnin (also known as Zitkala-Sa), and Luther
Standing Bear. Pokagon’s history, like theirs, concerned self-fashioning and
the struggle to define oneself for a wide array of audiences. The ambivalence
Pokagon’s performance produced at the Fair connects him to these other
individuals, as a pre-figure, a prototype, a near-ancestral figure.13 Pokagon
offered the opening scene, a moment of self-representation that foreshad-
owed the how and why of Native public performances, whether written
or spoken, that began to flourish during the early decades of the twentieth
century, and that helped define public perceptions of Indianness.14
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, dramatic staged
performances of Native Americans for non-Native commercial audiences
became popular through Wild West shows, circuses, fairs, exhibitions,
vaudeville, and burlesque, as well as in museums and tourist venues. In
these acts of nostalgia, Native people were honored as romantic, brave,
and spiritual, but doomed to extinction because of their inability to adapt
to a modern world. During the century following, Native artists and intel-
lectuals have increasingly taken control of Native performances, molding
drama, music, dance, performance art, and film to conform to their own
needs and values. Pokagon’s opening asks us to turn to a much earlier period
in the history of Native performance, and to consider if and how Native
speakers, writers, actors, and activists were able to strategically harness the
expectations of largely non-Native audiences on behalf of themselves and
Indian Country. Unlike earlier Native public figures, like William Apess
(1798–1839), Pokagon found himself working in a time when dominant
expectations of Indians situated him in an already-doomed-to-vanish posi-
tion that seemed to require a strategic performance of Native culture to
assert an indigenous present and future. By the turn of the twentieth century,
the stakes for Native public figures had shifted when it came to performance
and representation. Despite this shift, Pokagon and the Indian intellectu-
als after him used the forms of writing introduced by European colonizers,
in ways similar to that of their Native predecessors, to record their own
histories, write petitions, and compose political tracts and speeches.15 This
latter generation of Native intellectual leaders faced a new challenge: how
to claim their rights as modern, American citizens who wanted to use cit-
izenship to intervene in the affairs of a government that had already been
intervening in Native peoples’ affairs for far too long. At the same time,
Native leaders were also navigating the occasions when they were called
upon to perform Indianness according to primitivist ideologies that aimed
to define Indianness only in terms of the past – and a past as largely imag-
ined by white audiences who romanticized the “noble savage” figure who
was now in decline.16 For Native intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth
century, their representational politics revolved around how to retain their
4 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke

own definitions of indigenous sovereignty while fighting for political citi-

zenship that was not about integration but rather a means for tipping the
balance of power in their favor.17
For many non-Native people in the audience that day in 1893, Pokagon’s
appearance signified the power of pacification and the closing of the fron-
tier.18 How better to celebrate American progress and the triumph of mod-
ern democracy than by witnessing a Native man strike the Liberty Bell,
a visual and aural reminder of the promises of democratic freedom? In
addition, Indianness more generally enabled many white viewers, from dif-
ferent backgrounds, to celebrate a particular narrative of American free-
dom, one that disavowed the violence of colonialism and slavery on which
the country’s history rested.19 Pokagon at the Columbian Exhibition tied
together:  America’s founding, the industrial site of Chicago, an ancient
Indian past, and a structural and ideological disavowal of the consequences
and legacies of the actual Columbian encounter.20
Pokagon’s rhetoric demonstrated the inextricable relation between the
American nation and Indian people, so that white middle-class Americans
could reimagine the so-called Indian Problem. With his gaze fixed toward
the fairgrounds, Pokagon continued his critique: “The world’s people, from
what they have so far seen of us on the Midway will regard us as savages;
but they shall yet know that we are human as well as they. . . . The Red
Man is your brother, and God is the Father of all.”21 As they were con-
fronted by Pokagon’s narrative, many listeners might be moved to see the
Fair through his eyes. Speaking on this global stage, he sought empathy,
sympathy, and understanding as he gave voice to a lost, or rather neglected,
history. For although his audience may have desired a romantic version of
colonial grandeur, he remembered things differently. His speech highlighted
the construction of this cultural space as a merger of spectacle and anthro-
pological didacticism, in which “Columbian show buildings” erected to cel-
ebrate modern American civilization resulted in an erasure of “the red man’s
wigwam,” an overwriting of Potawatomi claims to the land. He may have
nodded, in his opening remarks, to Chicago as the “Queen City of the West,”
but Pokagon’s speech also critiqued the hegemonic practices of racialization
and cultural hierarchization that were built into Chicago Day’s events and
the Fair’s displays, ready to be consumed by fairgoers.22
Pokagon’s speech was not the only act of performance as resistance at
the Fair. In fact, when the address was over he walked the fairgrounds with
other Potawatomi to sell his published treatise, “The Red Man’s Rebuke.”23
For Pokagon, it was not just remembering or living in the moment, but
writing for both the present and the future that mattered. Writing, in this
sense, is actually a performance, and a central theme of this book. All four
main subjects who came after Pokagon were part of a Native intellectual net-
work who utilized different kinds of writing: the memoir, the letter, the tract,
the polemic, the children’s story, the opera, and so forth. Understanding
 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke 5

Figure 1.  “The Red Man’s Rebuke” pamphlet cover (1893).

Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.

these writings – and the way they emerged out of intellectual circuits – is key
to understanding the cultural politics Pokagon epitomized at the Exposition,
and how his rhetoric prefigured that of Eastman, Montezuma, Bonnin, and
Standing Bear.
In mass producing his “Rebuke,” which was printed on birch bark and
sold as a souvenir, Pokagon exemplified the strategies later Indian intellectu-
als would use to make their voices heard.24 In effect, he is the first member of
the cohort that this book follows. His allusions are not accommodationist
as much as aggressive and forward cultural politics. His “Rebuke” makes
this point plain: “On behalf of my people, the American Indians, I hereby
declare to you, the pale faced race that has usurped our lands and homes,
that we have no spirit to celebrate with you the great Columbian Fair now
being held in this Chicago city, the wonder of the world.”25 So the real legacy
of Pokagon at the Fair might be how he expanded the boundaries of oppo-
sitional discourse and did so on a stage and in writing. Despite the use of
celebratory rhetoric situating Chicago as “the wonder of the world,” the rest
of the rebuke lamented the imperial logic of the Fair.26
The “Rebuke” also positioned Pokagon as a representative figure for
Indian people. Just as Pokagon was tribally transcendent in his writing, so
too were the four figures I  trace, who often tended to speak not for the
6 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke

tribe or for a specific Indian nation but for their “race.”27 This was a crucial
strategy for individuals interested in acquiring the rights of citizenship in
the United States, not merely to become a part of the nation but rather to
have more tools in their arsenal ready to critique and reshape the nation
that continued to threaten indigenous sovereignty. Nowhere did Pokagon’s
“Rebuke” specify his connection to the Pokagon band of Potawatomi, but
instead he used the more general category of “American Indian” to assert
his position and his politics. When he writes, “on behalf of my people,”
he means  – and was read to mean  – Indian people writ large. This type
of categorization enabled Pokagon to juxtapose Indianness with American
whiteness. For then and now Indianness mattered and so, as Robert Warrior
has argued in Tribal Secrets, it was less a matter of emphasizing “Indian” in
essentialist terms and more a matter of disentangling it from questions of
authenticity by looking to different modes of performance; education, writ-
ing, lecturing, and performing (acting).28 Furthermore, when the text refer-
ences the “pale faced race” Pokagon is hailing a white audience. His rebuke
becomes even more personal and emphatic by using the phrase “declare
to you” in order to appeal to his audience through their shared humanity.
Within this personal hailing, however, is always the voice of collectives, both
Indian and white, where the dispossession of Indian lands is a real problem
given that “we” (Indian people) “have no spirit to celebrate” the Fair or the
city of Chicago as any kind of “wonder of the world.” Pokagon’s assertions
offered a powerful counter-narrative to the one embodied in the gleaming
neoclassical buildings of the White City that were built in contrast to exhib-
its of lesser, nonwhite cultures along the Midway. Such distinctions could
not enthrall Pokagon; he performed at the Fair with a keen awareness that
the Exposition’s aims were not his own.29
The Columbian Exposition had certainly succeeded in including if also
misrepresenting indigenous people in several important ways: first, through
inaccurate ethnological displays that characterized indigeneity as linked to
primitivism; second, through staged reproductions of Indian schoolhouses
on the Midway that argued Indian people must Americanize or disappear;
and third, through the appearance of Simon Pokagon, whose performance,
at least in part, pushed back against these other forms of representation.
The bold claims of “The Red Man’s Rebuke,” therefore, put forth Pokagon’s
argument that European conquest ought not be celebrated but rather seen in
terms of infestation and disease as he described early colonists as pests and
parasites who infected Native people. Pokagon’s rebuke ends by referring to
Judgment Day, when God will say to the white man:
I shall forthwith grant these red men of America great power, and delegate them
to cast you out of Paradise, and hurl you headlong through its outer gates into the
endless abyss beneath – far beyond, where darkness meets with light, there to dwell,
and thus shut you out from my presence and the presence of angels and the light of
heaven forever, and ever.30
 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke 7

Concluding with a reference to Christian theology, with his Potawatomi

spin on it, Pokagon urges white readers to consider revising their views on
American history in relation to the usurpation of indigenous lands and cul-
ture. For Pokagon’s “Rebuke” makes clear that Christianity’s God will most
certainly recognize the sins of Euro-American colonization to grant Native
people the power to punish those who have oppressed them, as the red man
casts the white man out of Paradise “forever, and ever.” Beyond Pokagon’s
speech and selling his keepsake, there is yet another moment from the Fair
that offers a different, and somewhat contradictory, example of the pres-
ence and possible futures for Native people at the turn of the twentieth
century. For Pokagon was not alone in using this cultural space to perform
Indianness and to criticize American culture and society, and to use white
and Christian rhetoric to do so.31
It was Wednesday, July 12, 1893, around ten o’clock in the morning,
when the president of the Minnesota branch of the Chicago Folk-Lore
Society gave his address to fairgoers, titled “Sioux Mythology.” No doubt
attendance was high given the topic and the “Indian craze” to see and hear
authentic Indian talks during this period.32 The speaker listed on the pro-
gram, for the International Folklore Congress that day, was Dr.  Charles
A. Eastman. He was the only other Native person invited to present a for-
mal speech at the Fair. Unlike Pokagon, his address was marked neither by
pageantry nor by nostalgia but instead framed by the practical eye of scien-
tific discourse.
Eastman’s remarks began by invoking the rhetoric of social Darwinism.
Although his key terms appeared trapped in a binary structure, civilized in
opposition to savage, this familiar, if also problematic, framing would have
gotten the attention of his audience. When discussing the American citizen,
for example, Eastman employed subtlety to shift between sacred and secular
registers. This shifting enabled him to suggest that in fact, the aborigines of
the United States, like all human beings, possessed the same mind “equipped
with all its faculties” to make them capable “even in  . . . [an] uncultured
state” of the important “process of reasoning.” Eastman’s speech worked
through the language of white civilization and racial uplift to craft a rational
argument for why Indian people ought to have the same political rights as
any other American citizen.33
Like Pokagon’s Liberty Bell address, Eastman’s participation at the Fair
through the Folklore Congress afforded him a space to be strategic in his
self-presentation. He was a member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton tribe and he
was emerging as a well-known public intellectual, as Dartmouth’s Indian
no less, so he could draw on all these aspects of his identity to educate
his audience about the past and present of Indian people. Considering that
Eastman’s speech cast Indians in scientific terms it is curious that it also
briefly touched on spiritual beliefs. At the end of his talk, after listing the
names of Sioux deities in connection to water and land, Eastman abruptly
8 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke

concluded with a subtle reference to a comparison between American soci-

ety and the Sioux Nation. We might wonder if Pokagon sat among the audi-
ence trying to make sense of these closing remarks:

These few hurriedly collected facts concerning the mythology of the Sioux Nation
will tend to show that the American Indian, before the coming of the whites, had
a great faith in his “unknown God,” whose colossal power, physical, moral, and
mental, was so impressed upon his untutored mind and made him so conscious
of his own sinful life, that he felt he was not warranted to approach Him direct,
but through some mediator, who will intercede for him with his Great Mystery.34
[emphasis mine]

Eastman’s reference to “facts” seems to situate him and his topic within a
social scientific discourse more than the study of folklore. When he sug-
gests that the mythology of the Sioux Nation was quite different “before
the coming of the whites,” he deftly participates in a cultural logic that
similarly underpinned Pokagon’s critique of American civilization. Both
speeches refer to loss. For Eastman, faith is at stake, and for Pokagon, land.
In both instances the “coming of the whites,” which we might read as the
arrival of Columbus to the Americas and the occasion for the Fair itself, is
to blame for cultural and physical dispossession. Eastman’s conclusion also
implies that Native people were, prior to colonial contact, more humble in
their engagements with the Great Mystery. One might then infer that this
relationship was changed and corrupted after “the coming of the whites.”
Both talks by Eastman and Pokagon operated within an imagined nostal-
gia promoted by the Fair’s organizers, who sought to recall an America long
gone, but both men also had an eye to the future. For these Indian intellec-
tuals, the past they mourned was neither that of Frederick Jackson Turner’s
closed frontier nor a Puritan New England. In addition, their future was
concerned neither with the extension of American influence abroad nor a
conquest of territories, but rather focused on overcoming and overturning a
history of fraught interactions between whites and Indians that had resulted
in so many losses, in people, in faith, and in land.
For Eastman, the Fair marked the beginning of a career as a public
speaker, a writer, and an educator. In a similar fashion to Carlos Montezuma,
Gertrude Bonnin, and Luther Standing Bear, he moved from the specific site
of the Folklore Congress to other cultural spaces to push beyond the limits
of Indianness defined by types, such as “noble savage,” “wild Indian,” and
“warrior.” Instead, Eastman and other Native intellectuals found ways to
represent a range of ideas about the roles Indian people could play as polit-
ical and cultural citizens of the United States, and as members of Native
communities. Their intellectual work did not capitulate to the ideology of
the Fair, but rather sought to remember and create an American nation that
acknowledged the conquest of Native lands and the necessary presence of
 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke 9

Indian people in its future. These were the stakes and claims Eastman’s gen-
eration of Native intellectuals set forth.

Why Collective Cultural Biography?

This history begins with Charles Eastman, the Native physician well known
for tending to survivors of the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890, just three
years before his presentation at the Chicago Fair, before he became active
as a writer of autobiographies, political tracts, and young adult books. The
next chapter turns to another member of this cohort, Carlos Montezuma
(Yavapai), who, like Eastman, trained as a doctor. Unlike Eastman, however,
Montezuma did not move around different reservations in search of work
or rely on white progressive allies in the Northeast, but succeeded in his
medical career based out of Chicago. Perhaps Montezuma was among the
fairgoers in 1893 who witnessed Pokagon’s speech or came to hear Eastman
talk. Living in Chicago for most of his life, Montezuma was an active mem-
ber of local professional groups, and able to self-publish a Native newsletter
circulated throughout the United States to Indian and non-Indian readers
alike. Montezuma no doubt drew on similar sorts of networks that had
supported Pokagon’s writing and speaking career through the patronage of
white men and women among Chicago’s Gold Coast “high society” and the
Chautauqua literary circuit and “Friends of Indians” groups nationwide.35
The third chapter of this book moves to a friend of Eastman and the former
fiancée of Montezuma, Gertrude Bonnin (Yankton Sioux). Often known as
Zitkala-Sa, after she began publishing short stories, Bonnin also became
active as a lobbyist in Washington, DC. Bonnin’s story also brings us to
the West Coast, specifically Utah, where she and her husband, Raymond,
lived and worked among the Ute. There she collaborated with William
Hanson, a professor of music at Brigham Young University, to produce an
opera titled The Sun Dance in 1910, before she relocated to Washington,
DC, to found and become president of the National Council of American
Indians, a position in which she served until her death. The fourth and
final chapter of this book is largely centered on activities of performance
on the West Coast, in California, and on the acting and activist career of
Luther Standing Bear (Oglala Sioux). Beginning with his education at the
Carlisle Indian Industrial School (where Bonnin had taught, Eastman had
worked as a recruiter, and Montezuma had been the resident physician for
the well-known football team), Standing Bear first became acquainted with
Carlisle’s headmaster, Richard Pratt, who would help shape the young man’s
future. The fourth chapter continues by examining the ways Standing Bear
maneuvered Pine Ridge as a teacher before being hired as a translator and
performer by William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, which set the stage for his work
in the emergent film industry of Hollywood.36 Examining all four of these
10 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke

individuals in detail, while also attending to their points of intersection and

disjuncture, reveals the different strategies Native intellectuals used as pub-
lic figures during the early twentieth century.
All four of them were active as writers. Therefore, I  turn to the work
of American Indian literary critics, such as Robert Warrior, Philip Round,
and Penelope Kelsey, who have focused on the subversive potential of the
writing Native people produced.37 I focus on these four writers in particu-
lar because some of their political works have been understudied and they
have also been criticized for advocating assimilation, despite the fact that
they invariably had tribal-centered agendas, which contradicted arguments
in favor of acculturation. My choice to examine them together contributes
to this scholarship as much as it also reflects the work of historians of the
Progressive Era. This book builds on the work of Frederick Hoxie, who
has highlighted the importance of these individuals, and the recent work of
Cathleen Cahill, whose social history of the Indian Service examines Native
and non-Native employees and broader issues related to governance, colo-
nialism, and gender (Federal Fathers & Mothers [2011]). In addition, Jean
O’Brien’s Firsting and Lasting:  Writing Indians out of Existence in New
England (2010), which looks to an earlier time period and focuses on the
ways that local histories written by European Americans operated to assert
their own modernity while simultaneously denying it to Indian people, has
influenced how I  analyze these Native intellectuals and their engagement
with modernity. This book, like these other histories, aims to push back
against dominant trends in American historical writing that have suggested
the period between the 1880s and the 1930s be understood as a decline
in Native activities because of either population decreases or the so-called
success of assimilation practices. The collective nature of this history aims
to showcase quite the contrary, that there were a diversity of ways Native
intellectuals participated in American society with regards to politics and
culture during the early twentieth century.38
My examination of the cohort of Indian cultural producers in the
pages that follow links their work to political changes, like the Dawes Act
(1887), the Indian Citizenship Act (1924), and the Indian Reorganization
Act (1934) to add to the scholarship of Robert Berkhofer, Brian Dippie,
Philip J. Deloria, and others.39 These scholars have successfully traced the
origins and movements of white attitudes and representations of concepts
like “vanishing Indian” or “playing Indian” that appeared in science, liter-
ature, art, and popular culture, while also influencing federal Indian pol-
icy. Inspired by these earlier studies, but with attention more focused on
Native responses to white perceptions and utilizing Deloria’s theorization
of dominant American cultural “expectations,” I  consider the ways that
American cultural ideologies helped shape policy formation to point out
how this intersection contributed to the emergence of pan-tribal40 networks,
which affected changes in federal policy. Indians perceived this early, as Lisa
 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke 11

Brooks’ and Matt Cohen’s work examining the Northeastern networks of

the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries demonstrates,41 but this later
generation – through writing, lobbying, and performance – saw a real oppor-
tunity to shape white culture and federal Indian policy. At the same time,
they could not miss the possibility of shaping a broad “race” defined by
pan-Indian culture. So their project rapidly became dense and complicated
and contradictory. Through pan-tribal alliances, these Indian intellectuals
responded to threats posed by a coercive and oppressive federal bureaucracy
and educational system, by articulating a common Indian identity that ran
counter to dominant narratives regarding Native savagery or disappearance.
At the same time, pan-tribal organizations such as the Society of American
Indians (SAI) formed when similar sorts of progressive reform groups, cre-
ated by white social activists, aimed to reshape cultural practices and pol-
itics. The strategies used by different pan-tribal groups and the ways these
groups accessed Native and non-Native networks fit within a history of
political organizing from the early twentieth century, while simultaneously
emphasizing the issues and concerns affecting indigenous communities. The
choice to focus on Native writers who had political concerns also aligns
with Beth Piatote’s recent work. In Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship,
and Law in Native American Literature (2013), Piatote examines both lit-
erary texts and legal discourses, in Canada and the United States, which she
argues intersected in a struggle between Native and non-Native people. In
particular she emphasizes how by the late nineteenth century this struggle
had shifted from what she terms the “tribal-national domestic” to the space
of the Indian home or “intimate domestic.” For the four subjects of this
book, the shifting Piatote mentions is most evident in the autobiographical
writings of Bonnin.42
By taking the form of a collective cultural biography, I redefine how we
might think of this group of early twentieth-century intellectuals.43 One
way to consider the work of Indian intellectuals during this period is as
a network of nodes and hubs, with a rich texture of multiple connections.
Certainly Eastman, Montezuma, Bonnin, and Standing Bear’s writings
and political ideas circulated in just this way. They can also be viewed as
a cohort of people with enough social and cultural commonality that they
found themselves acting – not always together – in similar arenas and with
similar goals. Put another way, they functioned as a community collective,
at times working together with intent and planning, and in other moments
as a circuit, a series of stops and positions along which individuals traveled.
All of these metaphoric descriptions hold true, and yet none quite captures
accurately the dynamics involved in their representational politics. Thus, in
turning to the genre of collective cultural biography they can be studied as
individuals and also read together to give us a new picture of the history of
Indian intellectuals within the United States and the world during the early
twentieth century.44
12 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke

One way to examine them together is to focus on the shared circuits they
traveled through; for instance a lecture circuit like those begun by the lyceum
movement and those operated by the Chautauqua assemblies, or a literary
circuit like those established through publishing houses based in Boston
and New York. These public cultural sites were linked by non-Native and
Native peoples’ participation in them as contributors (lecturers or writers)
and through booking arrangements and publishing ventures. Apart from
distinctly cultural circuits, there were well-worn, and at times coercive, cir-
cuits operated and maintained by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (or as it was
known during this era, the Office of Indian Affairs), such as the educational
circuits built around Indian boarding schools, like Carlisle, and efforts to
recruit and retain Native students. In choosing these four figures, it is impor-
tant to note that all of them worked for the Indian Service at one time or
another. As Cahill has shown, “Their employment experiences gave them
firsthand knowledge about the Indian Office and reinforced their recogni-
tion of the shared concerns of Native people.”45
In addition to circuits, I trace the networks accessed, created, and main-
tained by Native intellectuals from this period. Networks have a somewhat
more organic connotation and for the purposes of this book, at times, an
ambivalent function. A  network is a structure, with individual centers of
gravity (the BIA, SAI, publishing companies like Little Brown and Company,
museums, Hollywood, etc.). Everyone had a network, but it is the nodes
where they overlap that are interesting. In a network, ideas flow through
both interpersonal and mediated communication. A  circuit, then, reflects
the patterns that most often come up in a network:  Native people who
meet every year at the SAI, publish in the same magazines, go to Boston to
speak in the same churches or at the same schools, publish books with the
same presses, and correspond with the same people at the BIA. When Indian
people travel the same circuit, we can think of them as a cohort, and thus a
group of people who are not necessarily like-minded but who are nonethe-
less similar and connected. They don’t have to be friends, and they don’t
even have to be social, but they are part of the same visible group. Then,
finally, when they become engaged, or break bread together, they can be seen
as a community. The four central figures chosen for this collective biogra-
phy cover the waterfront. Viewed from Standing Bear’s position, they are a
cohort at best. Viewed from Bonnin and Montezuma’s, they are more like
a community. Viewed from Eastman’s perspective, they are introduced as
people on a network and a circuit who might even be understood as found-
ers of a Native rights movement.
Working within the genre of collective cultural biography enables me to
focus on both categorization and comparison, so that each chapter exam-
ines the specificities of an individual’s life while remaining attentive to col-
lective and cultural aspects that demonstrate the different relationships that
can be drawn between all four figures. They were performers. They worked
 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke 13

in the Indian Service. They were writers. Both Eastman and Bonnin worked
in a print culture driven by Northeastern publishing companies and the cir-
culation of national periodicals, such as Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly,
whereas Montezuma created his own newsletter, Wassaja, and Standing
Bear mainly found support from white editors and writers based out of the
West Coast.
Certainly there are other Indian intellectuals, Seneca archaeologist Arthur
C.  Parker, Ho-Chunk artist Angel de Cora-Dietz, or Wisconsin Oneida
Laura Cornelius – the sole female founder of the SAI – from this period that
could be at the center of this book. In many cases, these other people were
part of the same networks that Eastman, Montezuma, Bonnin, and Standing
Bear helped to establish. In fact, there were a compelling number of Native
anthropologists, like Meskwaki scholar William Jones (1871–1909), an
undergraduate at Harvard before studying with Franz Boas at Columbia
University, and Ella Cara Deloria (1889–1971), another Boas student, who
traveled throughout Indian Country studying Native traditions and lan-
guages to become influential in crucial ways. There were also other Native
artists, like Wa-Wa-Chaw, who came in contact with white intellectuals and
leaders of the day like Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Her
story offers us a different route into American Indian cultural history, one
that considers how passions for art and writing were used to promote equal-
ity for Indian women; she appears in this book as a friend and correspon-
dent of Montezuma.46 During Pokagon’s time there were also Native writers
like Sarah Winnemucca and Alexander Posey and ethnologists like Francis
La Flesche who offer other entry points into the history of Native intel-
lectual production and the various networks they created and navigated.
Indeed, there were still more Native people who were active as performers,
writers, and activists during the early twentieth century, and although not at
the heart of this project, all of them make appearances in the chapters that
follow.
I have chosen to contain and limit my study to these four individuals
because they give us particular opportunities to juxtapose different pro-
fessional worlds, like that of Hollywood and the medical profession. The
different performative strategies Standing Bear (who wore a feathered head-
dress for public talks) used as compared to Montezuma (who opted for the
tuxedo instead) reveal the range of strategies Native intellectuals might use
to make political arguments as public speakers. Another point of compari-
son that engages with differing discourses pertaining to both race and gen-
der comes into clearer focus when considering public perceptions of Bonnin
as a classically trained violinist at Carnegie Hall in contrast to Standing Bear
as an “authentic” Indian reenacting scenes from America’s Wild West. Their
collective story explicates the often ambiguous and complicated matrix
of ideas, performances, and practices in which these particular intellectu-
als engaged over the course of their lives. By tracing out the circulation of
14 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke

their ideas, and delineating the various networks they shaped and formed,
I  highlight how they shared ideas about culture and politics that gained
currency within educational and literary institutions to have an impact on
world events.47
The biographical dimensions of this project engage the personal contours
of each figure’s life to illustrate how their political ideals changed over time
in the context of their personal relationships and professional efforts. In
addition to using the lens of biography and tracing these individuals through
various networks and circuits as a collective, I have organized my analysis
through four main themes. Each chapter, therefore, focuses on one figure as
an exemplar in relation to a specific theme that was visible in that figure’s
life, and yet also visible in the lives of many Indian people from this period.
In pairing Eastman with the theme of education, Chapter 1 considers occa-
sions when higher education was ripe with racist discrimination while pro-
viding the tools for uplift. Turning to epistolary culture and Montezuma’s
correspondence and newsletter suggests the critical links Native readers
made between their own literacy and the power of private and public arenas
for letter writing.48 Although all four were actively publishing their work,
Bonnin more than the others helps showcase the opportunities that arose
by working closely with patrons of the literary arts who might support her
political reform agenda as much as her poetic craft. The fourth theme of
performance equally runs throughout this entire project, but comes to the
fore in Standing Bear’s chapter given his work in all types of westerns and as
cofounder, with Jim Thorpe, of the Indian Actors Association.
This thematic structuring and engagement with particular cultural theo-
ries and historiographies are driven by three central research questions. How
did the first generation of urban Indian intellectuals mobilize and revise
definitions of citizenship, assimilation, and modernity to fight for changes
in federal policy? How did these individuals create and maintain ties to
pan-Indian networks while crafting their own individual positions that bal-
anced the concerns of various Native publics with those of white readers?
How did the cultural productions of these Indian people, as performers and
power brokers, shape and challenge American national policy?49
It has been too easy to look at Eastman, Montezuma, Bonnin, and
Standing Bear – as well as their contemporaries, Arthur C. Parker, and so
forth – and label them “assimilationist” or “accommodationist” because of
the ways their writings seemed to capitulate to a progressive, American ver-
sion of civilization defined by hierarchical rhetoric regarding race, class, and
gender. It is more productive, in my view, to refer to the historically con-
tingent strategies they used to engage in an Indianness discourse. I see this
discourse as mutable and ever-present, so that each figure grappled with it
in her, or his, own way. In a similar fashion, I examine processes of racial-
ization and gendering (whether social, political, or cultural) concerning rhe-
torical, political, and performance choices made by all four of these Native
 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke 15

intellectuals. This approach amplifies the ways this cohort was exceptional
but not entirely unique given that Native people have always used diverse
sets of ways to access and shape modernity.50
This history of Indian intellectuals reflects important shifts in Native and
American print culture. Therefore, my approach to framing and reading the
texts this generation of Native intellectuals produced draws on the work of
literary scholars working within Native American and indigenous studies.51
Robert Warrior’s approach to Native writing in Tribal Secrets: Recovering
American Indian Intellectual Traditions (1994) and The People and the
Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (2005), and Philip Round’s engagement
with bibliographic/print culture in Removable Type: Histories of the Book
in Indian Country, 1663–1880 (2010) both assert the central importance
of Native writings and the development of an intellectual tradition that has
tribal-national roots as well as pan-tribal crossings. Warrior, for instance,
looks to an earlier era and figures such as William Apess to assert “that the
history of Native writing constitutes an intellectual tradition, a tradition
that can and should inform contemporary work of Native intellectuals.”52
My focus on intellectuals and their use of networks builds on Warrior’s
engagement with “intellectual trade routes” by pointing to the origins and
dimensions of a Native intellectual tradition rooted in nonfiction writing
(autobiographies, critical essays, communally authored texts, and political
documents), as well as the emergence of literary and performance texts.53
My emphasis on published writings and spoken performances suggests
that these were cultural sites of resistance that Native people used to fight
the encroachment of white cultural practices and beliefs as well as political
oppression. Round’s study, if earlier than mine regarding time period, also
examines the history of Native intellectual writing as a type of resistance.
He notes, “Nineteenth-century Indian resistance did not merely take the
form of plains warriors on horseback; Indian people authored books that
often argued for Indian rights and criticized land theft. In addition to pub-
lishing books, many of these authors engaged in other rhetorical acts such
as national speaking tours lobbying for Native rights.”54 Moving forward
in time, this book builds on Round’s examination of earlier generations of
Native American writers, “for whom the material properties of texts, as well
as the manner in which they were produced and consumed, would become
an important component of their creative and expressive efforts,” by pair-
ing close readings of texts with the contexts in which they were produced
and consumed as well as their cultural and political impact. These texts are
often written but are also based on speeches and other forms of public per-
formance. I move out of the 1880s, when the first generation of professional
Indian writers was just entering school, Bonnin at White’s Manual Institute
in Indiana and Luther Standing Bear at Carlisle, to follow the histories of
their variegated educational experiences. For Eastman, Montezuma, and
Bonnin were all able to showcase their work within national periodicals like
16 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke

the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s, a point that furthers my claim that they
participated in a Native high cultural edge of modernism, and that builds
on previous historical inquiries by Hazel Hertzberg, Lucy Maddox, Alan
Trachtenberg, and Frederick Hoxie.55

Keywords in Native American Studies

This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to writing a cultural history
of Native America that requires thoughtful consideration of several key-
words. Keywords, a concept I borrow from American studies, organize vast
quantities of complex information. They do lots of conceptual, descriptive,
and sometimes argumentative work. The keywords that return again and
again throughout this book include:  citizenship, intellectual, blood, and
Indianness. All four inform and shape one another and contribute to the
political work and cultural production possibilities and representational
strategies that characterize this generation of Native intellectuals. A central
issue for Native people at the turn of the twentieth century, like today, was
the idea of citizenship. Although many Native people called for, or main-
tained, separation from the United States with regards to indigenous sover-
eignty and tribal nationalism, still more during this era sought to claim the
rights of American citizenship so that they might more productively inter-
vene in the body politic; certainly this was the case for Eastman, Montezuma,
Bonnin, and Standing Bear.56
Citizenship can be defined in both political and cultural terms. Since the
founding of the United States it has remained a contested category: to be a cit-
izen often reflects the existence and permanence of national boundaries that
delineate who can and cannot participate in shaping the nation. This idea of
access has been coded in gendered, classed, and racialized terms given that
the ability to become a citizen has also functioned as a litmus test for social
fitness. For writers and activists like Eastman, Montezuma, Bonnin, and
Standing Bear, access to political citizenship in the United States was of par-
amount importance, not because they aimed for integration into American
society but rather because they saw political equality as a means for reshap-
ing the settler-colonial nation that continued to intervene in the affairs of
their people and in their lives. As Beth Piatote notes regarding the interven-
tion of the “settler-national” state into the domestic sphere of Indian lives,
“The mechanism of citizenship through which individuals come to belong
to a nation works through the personal to produce the national.”57 This cut
both ways for the Native intellectuals who are at the center of this book
in that they used their personal stories and positions to speak on behalf of
Indian people as one race, almost as one distinct nationality, with the hope
of unsettling dominant discourses concerning fitness for citizenship within
the United States. As intellectuals, they were eager to participate in shaping
American culture. As Indians, they were equally committed to reshaping
 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke 17

national narratives that had disavowed the roles Indian people played in the
United States. Therefore, they viewed citizenship as one way to gain access
to revising these dominant narratives. Their attachment to citizenship also
arose out of progressive reform efforts from the late nineteenth century as
well as a politics of racial uplift. Indeed, pan-tribal political organizing was
made possible by the emergence of Native leaders who drew on their edu-
cational training, social status, and the appeal of their cultural work among
American audiences to become ambassadors on behalf of Indian people in
general.58 The path toward equality – visible through citizenship – was never
clearly defined or easy, and yet these individuals found ways to embrace the
notion of racial uplift and the idea of citizenship while remaining critical of
the national apparatus that had given birth to these concepts.59
Certainly citizenship was neither a panacea for social conflict between
Indian and white people, nor could it correct for a long history of political
disenfranchisement. In some ways, it runs against the grain of contemporary
sovereignty discourse, which asserts that Indian nations are distinct political
and cultural entities apart from the United States with their own citizenry. Yet
citizenship remained a central concept and concern in the work of these four
Native intellectuals, and as one avenue through which to effect change. They
navigated the uncertain waters between citizenship on one hand and racial
uplift on the other. For them, the U.S. Constitution’s parameters for defin-
ing nationhood and nationalism through the bodies of its citizens proved
critical to their political reform efforts. As Jean O’Brien argues in Firsting
and Lasting, the long history of political disenfranchisement and the failure
of non-Indians “to accord Indian peoples a legitimate place in modernity”
have their roots in New England histories from earlier in the nineteenth
century.60 My discussion of the kind of “dual citizenship” this later gener-
ation of Indian intellectuals imagined builds on O’Brien’s analysis of how
William Apess personified Indian resistance in New England. In particular,
she argues that his Eulogy on King Philip aimed “to undo the replacement
narrative” in order to advance “a revolutionary idea:  that Indians could
both exercise self-determination as Indian peoples and become citizens, that
is, the notion of dual citizenship.”61 The efforts of Eastman, Montezuma,
Bonnin, and Standing Bear aligned with some of the assertions made by
Apess in that they saw themselves as citizens of both Indian Country and the
United States, and this sort of “dual citizenship” became central to the type
of work they could do as public Native intellectuals.62
One might wonder exactly what we mean when we cluster individuals into
a category called “Native Intellectuals.” As a term, intellectual brings with
it tacit understandings of power, identity, and cultural capital. Intellectual is
of recent, twentieth-century origin and has been applied retrospectively to
earlier centuries as well as to contemporary contexts. In its earlier usage, the
term described those of different occupations in professions who claimed or
were credited with the right to speak over and above particular interests on
18 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke

matters of general philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic importance. What

gives intellectuals this role is their own expertise and the authority of reason
and truth guiding intellectual discourse. Certainly, the intellectuals of this
book were inheritors of Enlightenment reason and a product of modernity.
They were at the same time critical of the social and political effects of this
inheritance, and also guided by indigenous intellectual traditions derived
from their personal experiences and a longer and broader Native writing,
reading, and speaking history. I also take up the term intellectual by drawing
on Edward Said’s discussion of “the intellectual in exile,” which he defined
in part based on Theodor Adorno’s thinking that “the hope of the intellec-
tual is not that he will have an effect on the world, but that someday, some-
where, someone will read what he wrote exactly as he wrote it.” Building on
this idea requires one to rethink the notion of “exile” for Native Americans
at the turn of the twentieth century who would, as Said suggests, be “nec-
essarily ironic, skeptical, even playful – but not cynical” in their intellectual
work. Furthermore, I use intellectual because in many instances this is how
these figures, and their supporters, defined and thought of their roles.63
Many white and Indian people supported the careers of a substantial
number of Indian intellectuals, in part because they understood the effi-
cacy of an intellectual speaking on behalf of a minority ethnic group. An
Indian intellectual in the early twentieth century became someone defined
as uniquely educated and cultured, and therefore better positioned to per-
form in public as a face and voice for all Indian people. Just as Eastman,
Montezuma, Bonnin, Standing Bear, and others traveled between varying
social and cultural spaces to find particular ways of managing white expec-
tations regarding intellectualism and Indian people, circumstances changed
from the 1880s to the 1930s. Each mobilized the very notion of an Indian as
an intellectual to fight for an increase in social, cultural, and political rights
for all Native people. Ultimately, citizenship, racial uplift, and intellectual-
ism were central components to the representational politics members of
this cohort articulated.64
For all four of them, the quest to redraw the boundaries of American
citizenship and revise the history of the United States in intellectual terms
could not succeed without recognizing and adjusting to politics defined by
blood. In material and metaphorical ways blood was a cultural ideology
they had to confront. More specifically, they often encountered the concept
“full-blooded” that could be used to justify their status as representative
Indians. Since the 1830s, the discourse of blood has been used, in various
places and for specific purposes, to classify Indian identity in political and
racial terms across the United States. After the Dawes Act of 1887 and in
the decades preceding the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, a growing
number of Indian intellectuals took up this discourse to assert that any drop
of Indian blood qualified them to represent Indian America. Although an
Indian “one-drop” rule functioned in this way, more often than not, what
 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke 19

also mattered to Indian and non-Indian people alike was whether one could
claim “full-blooded” status as an Indian person. These different notions of
blood in relation to identity occurred simultaneously, and although contra-
dictory their discursive power could be harnessed by many Indian people in
strategic ways.65
For Indian intellectuals, the rhetoric of blood became part of a politics
of recognition and useful as a tactic to illustrate a key argument: the more
Indians among Americans in the United States, the better for the country
as a whole, and the better for the world. Such an argument also clearly
resisted a dominant narrative that presupposed all Indians would vanish
by either assimilation or death. Throughout the early twentieth century, the
vast majority of public lectures and writings by Indian intellectuals used
this “full-blooded” language to argue for social and political inclusion in
tandem with more cosmopolitan perspectives, which reflected the fluidity
of both culture and identity. Eastman, for instance, became a sought-after
public speaker. He was continually framed in terms of his elite connections
and educational status (as cosmopolitan) and equally so through the fact of
his “full-blooded” subjecthood as an Indian. Eastman therefore used both
concepts to demonstrate that he was best positioned to speak about “real”
Indian issues and on behalf of all Indian people. This rhetoric of “blood”
also became part of a broader discourse that I refer to as Indianness.
These Native people were public figures who were as concerned with
their own self-fashioning as they were with how to represent other Indian
people. My aim here and throughout this book is for readers to see represen-
tational politics as a sort of shorthand for the dynamic interplay of Native
self-presentation and how individual Indians sought to speak for Indian
Country more generally; Indianness was a key to this practice. For instance,
as Indian speakers, members of this cohort could represent a public face of
Indian identity that could be read within their individual bodies and voices.
As they drew strategically on an essentialist, white view of Indianness to
speak for a collective race of Indian people, each could self-reflexively shape
their own subjectivity in ways to signal the specific, as an example of Native
progress, on the individual scale. All four took part in public performances
where, whether they wanted to or not, they were interpellated as Indians
by their audiences. In these instances the urge to “play Indian” became a
strategy whereby they could represent and also intervene in a discourse of
Indianness.66 Indianness, then, is critical as a keyword given that it oper-
ated during this era as a productive and destructive discourse gesturing to
all things Indian. For Native people, Indianness indexed sites of possibility
regarding performativity and identity whereby they could use their bodies,
voices, clothing, and writings to conform to dominant white expectations
regarding Indianness or do just the opposite.67 The reality is that most found
strategic ways to do both. By engaging with various tropes of Indianness,
Native people could simultaneously gain the attention of white supporters
20 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke

and progressives while destabilizing the boundaries of Indian subjectivity,

for example when they altered their mode of address to conflict with their
mode of dress.68
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stereotypical
associations between romantic narratives regarding the Plains and nature
as well as noble savagery permeated white cultural formations and expec-
tations. For any of these Native intellectuals to have a voice in changing
Indian political affairs and American cultural formations, they needed to
be legible as Indian people, which often meant working within fraught per-
mutations of Indianness. As a concept, Indianness traveled, perhaps par-
adoxically, because of both its stability and fluidity. On one hand, it was
understood as locatable in the bodies of actual Indian people, and on the
other, also in narratives about how to be Indian that were often drawn from
earlier representations, novels by James Fenimore Cooper or paintings by
George Catlin. Both of these understandings of Indianness grew out of and
were reinforced by white cultural expectations. This book examines how
Indian people strategically participated in performances to consider how
they engaged Indianness, a seemingly essentialist discourse, to “play Indian”
for mixed purposes.69

Indian Play
Like Pokagon before them, this cohort of Native intellectuals grappled with
the politics of performativity. By this I mean how to use speech, language,
and other nonverbal forms of expressive action to intervene in American
culture and politics. For them, public appearances often required a speaker
to perform (or play) Indian, to visually and rhetorically represent oneself
in terms that conjured a strategic sort of ethnic authenticity. The prob-
lem in this type of performative move came at particular moments. For
Eastman, I consider how his use of certain forms of costuming fed into a
self-perpetuating market for Indianness. Despite his education and literary
achievements, Eastman was continually asked throughout his life to “dress
up” and “play” the part of Dartmouth’s College’s famous Indian graduate,
or to even play the part of Samson Occom (1723–92), the foundational
Native figure associated with the College. In the case of Montezuma, his
engagement with performativity and an Indianness discourse ran in a dif-
ferent direction from that of his peers. He relied less on visual tropes (a
feathered headdress, for instance) and more on rhetorical twists and turns
to play the part of a “proper” Indian citizen. For example, he drew on
the faulty logic of an American democratic society that defined citizenship
through the U.S. Constitution without recognizing the legitimacy of Indian
people as members of the nation. His article and speech “Life, Liberty &
Citizenship” provided multiple readings of the song “America” to critique
U.S. history, and because it was printed in Wassaja for Indian readers and
 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke 21

also presented publicly to a mostly white audience in Chicago, Montezuma

succeeded in circulating his ideas to a range of publics interested in Indian
reform issues. For Bonnin the fact that her Indian blood needed to be made
visible for white audiences who asked her to dress up as an “Indian prin-
cess” while she lectured was an important problem. So much so that despite
her own feelings of uneasiness she repeatedly submitted to requests to see
her as an Indian maiden or princess, with the hope of gaining allies in
her quest for wider acceptance of Indian people as members of American
society, who could then perform their own articulations of Native dress,
language, and culture. Bonnin remained increasingly concerned with how
others might trade on this type of “Indian play,” and Chapter 3 reveals how
she wrote regularly to her Indian friends about how best to counteract the
“work” being done at the time by “false” Indians, like Red Fox St. James
and Princess Chinquilla.
Luther Standing Bear recognized the power inherent in having Indian
actors “play” Indian onscreen when he argued in favor of hiring “real”
Indians to portray Indian people in shows and in film. Although his writ-
ings and letters demonstrate concern regarding the misrepresentation of
Indian people, his work with the Indian Actors Association (IAA) in some
ways reified an Indianness discourse that was still guided by rules set by the
Bureau of Indian Affairs, policies such as allotment and the racialized logic
of blood quantum. Relying on such practices to define an Indian’s person-
hood did not necessarily disentangle them from the structures of power that
reproduced the very misrepresentations Standing Bear sought to correct,
and that decades earlier Pokagon had brought to center stage in his appear-
ance at the World’s Fair in Chicago.

A Native Intellectual Network Emerges

Just six years after Pokagon had strolled the fairgrounds during Chicago
Day, on February 7, 1899, Richard Pratt, a white progressive activist, wrote
to Carlos Montezuma about the death of their mutual friend, Chief Simon
Pokagon. Pratt’s letter highlighted the emergence of an Indian intellectual
network that he thought was critical to the future success of the Carlisle
boarding school and the cause of Indian citizenship, the latter of which
depended on the legibility of accomplished Indians as exemplars for a white
American public. Pratt’s letter makes clear that he considered Montezuma
one of these figures. Pratt also refers to books, like Queen of the Woods by
Pokagon that had been published posthumously that same year, as exam-
ples of what an educated Indian might achieve and that could also serve
as cultural tools for educating white Americans. In addition, Pratt’s letter
urged Montezuma to visit Carlisle for commencement. In this instance,
Montezuma was being called on to provide physical proof for the school’s
recent graduates of just what an accomplished Indian could do for himself
22 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke

and for his race. It would seem he was being asked to play the part of an
Indian intellectual.70
Returning to the site of Chicago and the 1893 Fair, we can see how the
future of America relied both on remembrances of America’s past and to
some extent on the role of Indian people in that past. Pokagon’s visage as
he rang the Liberty Bell worked as part of a language of types that had
emerged during this period regarding the role of race in American society.
As Americans mourned the end of particular versions of America, cer-
tain types became increasingly mythologized in order to properly mourn
this passing. For example, the cowboy and the “wild” Indian, which Fair
visitors could see performing just outside the fairgrounds where William
Cody had his Wild West troupe set up, as well as the true woman and the
original Puritan, were typologies that could be mobilized to assert pop-
ular conceptions of identity, often based on social evolutionary theory.
These ideas took hold most visibly and spectacularly at the Fair through
the Midway Plaisance. Visitors there could take a visual accounting of
different “types” of ethnicities presented in such a way as to suggest a pro-
gression toward Americanness, culminating in the monolithic whiteness
signified by the White City at the Fair – the site Pokagon criticized in his
opening address.71
The White City as the beacon of American progress and the Fair as a
call to cultural enrichment helped foster social and cultural hierarchies by
marking distinctions around social types and cultural practices. Pokagon
found ways to maneuver through this hierarchization, just as the Indian
writers and readers who followed him did. Charles Eastman and Gertrude
Bonnin’s participation in the expanding book and periodical market enabled
them to use print culture as the site through which to enter a national dis-
cussion about the corrosive aspects of acculturation and the language of
types. Still, this language created an illusion of stability for class-based and
race-based hierarchies. Therefore, many Indian authors attempted to dis-
rupt this imaginary rigidity by defining Indianness on their own terms even
when faced with publishers and reviewers who aimed to define and market
them as ethnic, exotic others.72 Of course Indian writers, like their white,
immigrant, African American, Latino, and Asian American contemporaries
during this period, varied in their responses to the language of “types” and
debates regarding U.S.  imperialism and national identity, just as Pokagon
and Eastman presented different sorts of speeches at the 1893 Fair.73 Some
Native writings invariably shored up hegemonic cultural practices, while
others challenged laws, policies, films, novels, and performances. Pokagon’s
speech and the circulation of his pamphlet at the World’s Fair offer a couple
instances of these sorts of strategic practices.
Despite the coercive technologies involved in the Fair’s design, Pokagon’s
appearance as an Indian intellectual enabled him to, in a speech and in a
 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke 23

published “rebuke,” resist the racialized logic of the Fair to remind visitors of
an Indian past, present, and future.74 His representational politics illustrates
the different strategies Native intellectuals used to respond to white culture’s
demands. Although it is tempting to recall only the pageantry of Pokagon’s
performance at the Fair, for him the politics underlying this moment were
of the utmost importance. All Indian intellectuals during this period wres-
tled constantly with similar problems regarding self-representation and
Indianness within an array of public spectacles and international events,
like a world’s fair. In Pokagon’s case, his well-choreographed movements at
the Fair, from ringing the bell, to making a speech and then selling a keep-
sake, arose out of different institutional demands and expectations regard-
ing his position as a Potawatomi leader, a supporter of interracial political
projects, and a temperance worker. The Fair was not wholly about illustrat-
ing U.S. supremacy as much as it was also about creating it. Thus, Pokagon
played a lead role at the Fair, where he did and also did not do what the
organizers had planned. Such an opportunity for Native performance
illustrates how Pokagon’s appearance was a critical precursor for the cul-
tural and political work that would be possible for Eastman, Montezuma,
Bonnin, and Standing Bear, as well as other members of their generation’s
intellectual cohort. For many Native people, this was the beginning and not
the end of a quest to redraw boundaries pertaining to indigenous citizenship
and nationalism.

Notes
1 Zitkala-Sa:  American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings, edited by
Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 182.
2 Although President Grover Cleveland officially opened the Fair on May 1, 1893,
the largest single day of attendance was Chicago Day with over 700,000 visitors.
3 For more on the history of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago see:  Hubert
Howe, The Book of the Fair (Chicago:  Bancroft, 1893); David F. Burg,
Chicago’s White City of 1893 (Lexington:  University of Kentucky, 1976);
Chicago. World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893. Report of the President to
the Board of Directors of the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago:  Rand
McNally, 1898); Chicago. World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893. World’s
Columbian Exposition, 1893:  Official Catalogue (Chicago:  Conkey, 1893);
Rossiter Johnson, ed., A History of the World’s Columbian Exposition Held
in Chicago in 1893 (New  York:  Appleton, 1897–8); U.S. World’s Columbian
Commission, Classification of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago,
U.S.A., 1893 (Chicago:  Donohue and Henneberry, 1891); Trumbull White
and William Ingleheart, The World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893
(Philadelphia: Historical Publishing Co., 1893).
4 John Low, “The Architecture of Simon Pokagon,” in Queen of the Woods,
Ogimakwe Mitigwaki, a Novel by Simon Pokagon, with a foreword by Philip J.
Deloria (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011), 9.
24 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke

5 The relationship between Harrison and Pokagon is explicated further by C. H.

Engle, the editor of Pokagon’s book Queen of the Woods (1899), whose intro-
duction provides a brief biography of Pokagon. An important Native literary
contemporary, Joseph Nicolar, produced a text that appeared around the same
time in 1893; see:  The Life and Traditions of the Red Man:  A  Rediscovered
Treasure of Native American Literature, edited by Annette Kolodny (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
6 Frederick E. Hoxie offers one of the first accounts of Pokagon’s work at the
Fair through the distribution of his booklet titled “The Red Man’s Rebuke”
in Talking Back to Civilization:  Indian Voices from the Progressive Era
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Cornelia Hulst notes the importance
of Pokagon’s speech titled “Red Man’s Greeting” in Indian Sketches:  Père
Marguette and the Last of the Pottawatomie Chiefs (orig. 1912, reprinted in
2010). Hoxie and Hulst disagree regarding the clothing that Pokagon wore at
the Fair. The former includes a photograph of Pokagon in a suit noting, “This . . .
was taken about the time he delivered his Red Man’s Greeting at the Chicago
World’s Columbian Exposition,” whereas the latter refers to a painting cap-
tioned “Chief Pokagon, In his tribal attire as he appeared at the World’s Fair on
Chicago Day.” My narrative aligns with accounts based on newspaper reports
about Chicago Day, which is the same conclusion John Low draws in his essay
“The Architecture of Simon Pokagon” (2011).
7 For Native intellectuals see:  David Martinez, ed., The American Indian
Intellectual Tradition:  An Anthology of Writings from 1772–1972 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2011) and Robert Warrior, The People and the
Word:  Reading Native Nonfiction (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota
Press, 2005). For an important overview, if not exhaustive list, see the fol-
lowing for literary and print histories pertaining to Native people before
1890:  Philip H. Round, Removable Type:  Histories of the Book in Indian
Country, 1663–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010);
Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Maureen Konkle, Writing
Indian Nations:  Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography,
1827–1863 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Barry
O’Connell, ed., Son of the Forest, and other Writings by William Apess, a
Pequot (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).
8 For the context in which Pokagon, as a Potawatomi, appeared at the Fair
see: Hulst, Indian Sketches.
9 Talking Back to Civilization:  Indian Voices from the Progressive Era, edited
with an introduction by Frederick E. Hoxie (Boston, MA: Bedford/ St. Martin’s,
2001), 32.
10 For a printed version of Simon Pokagon’s speech at the 1893 World’s Columbian
Exposition see: James E. Seelye and Steven Alden Littleton, eds., Voices of the
American Indian Experience (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2013), 381–2.
11 Modernity can be understood as a condition, rather than the designation for
some particular period of time. Aspects of the modern condition may arise
at any time and place, but they are most generally associated with historical
trends from Cartesian philosophy, industrial capitalism, revolutionary politics,
and cultural changes from the turn of the nineteenth century. Modernity as a
 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke 25

theoretical concept has been used by many different scholars within American
studies. Cultural historians have used definitions for modernization (rather than
modernity) as a historically contingent process in their work. Some key texts
that help to illuminate the difference between thinking through modernity and
the modern as a condition versus modernism as a marker for a specific period
of modernization, and modernism versus postmodernism are: Matei Calinescu,
Five Faces of Modernity:  Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch,
Postmodernism (1987); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity:  An
Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1991); and Fredric Jameson,
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992). This genera-
tion of Indian intellectuals had to contend with modernity as a concept with
ideological roots (pertaining to ways of thinking and acting), and in reference
to a certain historical period marked by the rise of industrial capitalism.
12 See:  Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners:  Postindian Warriors of Survivance
(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994), 51.
13 There were Native writers and intellectuals before Pokagon who prefig-
ured the type of work he did and the range of writing and political strategies
later used by Eastman and his colleagues, such as William Apess. See:  Barry
O’Connell, ed., On Our Own Ground:  The Complete Writings of William
Apess, a Pequot (N.P.:  University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Konkle,
Writing Indian Nations; Brooks, The Common Pot; David J. Carlson, Sovereign
Selves:  American Indian Autobiography and the Law (Urbana:  University of
Illinois Press, 2006); Andy Doolen, Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American
Imperialism (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Eileen
R. Elrod, Piety and Dissent:  Race, Gender, and Biblical Rhetoric in Early
American Autobiography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008);
Karim M. Tiro, “Denominated ‘Savage’:  Methodism, Writing and Identity in
the Works of William Apess, A Pequot,” American Quarterly, American Studies
Association, 1996.
14 For a theoretical study of performance and intersectionality see: Jose Esteban
Muñoz, Disidentifications:  Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
(1999). For Indian performance strategies from an earlier historical period
see:  Joshua David Bellin and Laura L. Mielke, eds., Native Acts:  Indian
Performance, 1603–1832, Afterword by Philip J. Deloria (2011).
15 For more regarding early Native American writers and leaders, such as Samson
Occom, Joseph Brant, Hendrick Aupaumut, and William Apess, see:  Brooks,
The Common Pot.
16 For one of the earliest scholarly accounts examining the history of the “noble
savage” see: Robert Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American
Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1979).
17 For the history of Native American performance with an emphasis on the
post-1960s context see:  S. E. Wilmer, ed., Native American Performance
and Representation (Tucson:  University of Arizona Press, 2009), 3–4. Also
see:  Christy Stanlake, Native American Drama:  A  Critical Perspective
(Cambridge,:  Cambridge University Press, 2009), who contends,
“Performance venues, such as theatre, cinemas, dime museums, wild-west
shows, and world’s fair exhibitions, capitalized on the exotic allure of the
‘vanishing race.’  . . . These stereotypes of Noble/Savage for men or Princess
26 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke

(ready-to-die-for-her-love-of-the-white-man)/Squaw (sexually ravenous sav-

age) for women, weave throughout American history and, in so doing, per-
sist in media representations of Native peoples, even today”(4). For work on
the earlier generations of Native American writing traditions and intellectual
legacies see the following:  O’Connell, ed., On Our Own Ground and A Son
of the Forest and Other Writings Konkle, Writing Indian Nations; Warrior,
The People and the Word; Brooks, The Common Pot; Matt Cohen, Networked
Wilderness:  Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis:  University
of Minnesota Press, 2009); Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians
Out of Existence (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Scott
Lyons, X-Marks:  Native Signatures of Assent (Minneapolis:  University of
Minnesota Press, 2010); and Round, Removable Type.
18 Regarding westward expansion, as well as race, nation, and empire pertaining
to the United States, see:  Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (2000);
Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (2005);
Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in the Age of U.S. Imperialism
(2000); Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power:  Race and the
Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race,
Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995); Paul A.  Kramer, The
Blood of Government:  Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines
(2006); and Penny von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors
Play the Cold War (2004).
19 For white perceptions of Indian people see:  Sherry Smith, Reimagining
Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880–1940 (Oxford University
Press, 2000). Smith examines a group of Anglo-American writers whose books
about Native Americans helped shape Americans’ understanding of Indian
peoples at the turn of the twentieth century. These writers produced work cel-
ebrating Indian cultures, religion, and artwork and revealed their own doubts
about the superiority of Euro-American culture. Moving from the East to the
West, these writers’ work also encouraged cultural relativism, pluralism, and
tolerance in American thought.
20 Mark Smith argues that the transcendent symbolic and aural power of bells is
critical to American culture in Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (2000).
In specific regards to the term Indianness, I use it to refer to a discourse that
circulated throughout America and could be both oppressive toward Indian
people and open to modification by them. As Scott Richard Lyons points out,
“even now discourses of Indianness are generated by institutions, the state, and
the market” (X-Marks, 24).
21 “The Red Man’s Rebuke” (Chicago: Self-published, 1893), 2, Bentley Historical
Library, Ann Arbor, MI.
22 Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair:  Visions of Empire at American
International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1984) explicates the roles that exhibitions were to play as ideological displays
and the specific ties to disciplinary knowledge, which buildings and designs of
the Fair were meant to convey with regard to ideas of evolution, ethnology, and
popular amusements. Figure 1: “The Red Man’s Rebuke,” booklet cover, cour-
tesy of the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke 27

23 Kelsey and other literary scholars argue that Pokagon’s “Rebuke” can be read
within the context of the eastern woodlands method of recordkeeping and
its epistemic function. I  acknowledge this framework, but situate my reading
instead in the context of the Midwestern geography and culture that Pokagon
found familiar and his awareness of the urban site of Chicago and the Fair where
he intended to circulate this pamphlet. For more from her analysis see: Penelope
Myrtle Kelsey, Tribal Theory in Native American Literature:  Dakota and
Haudenosaunee Writing and Indigenous Worldviews (Lincoln:  University of
Nebraska Press, 2008), 3.
24 As a result of a typeset printing process, Pokagon’s “Rebuke” gave the appear-
ance of both handwork and mass production. The object masqueraded as a
tourist commodity  – which it was. And yet, by typing his message onto the
ephemeral outer skin of the birch tree, Pokagon aimed to make both a material
and metaphorical gesture to Indian people, indeed “his own people.” At the Fair,
most visitors would be drawn to the material itself and then forced to confront
the story imprinted on it. Such a strategy was not unique to Pokagon. Decades
earlier, during the 1840s and 1860s, Sojourner Truth had sold images of herself,
to support her lecture tours, in the form of carte-de-visite with the caption: “I
sell the shadow to support the substance.” She aimed to draw attention to her-
self and to the evils of racism and later sexism in the United States. For the
comparison to Sojourner Truth I look to Nell Painter’s Sojourner Truth: A Life,
A Symbol (1996).
25 “The Red Man’s Rebuke,” 2.
26 For other work on Pokagon that views the limits of his positioning see: James
Clifton, The Prairie People:  Continuity and Change in Potawatomi Indian
Culture, 1665–1965 (1998) and A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, “Simon Pokagon,”
in Dictionary of Native American Literature, edited by Andrew Wiget (1994).
27 Gertrude Bonnin speaks on behalf of her race in 1918 when writing her edi-
torial comment on the work of the Society of American Indians in its periodi-
cal American Indian Magazine, from which the epigraph for this introduction
is taken.
28 Robert Warrior, Tribal Secrets:  Recovering American Indian Intellectual
Traditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), xx.
29 Simon Pokagon, “The Red Man’s Rebuke” (Published in 1893 by C. H. Engle
and Michigan Historical Society), 1, which is sometimes confused with the
address Pokagon gave at the fair, called “The Red Man’s Greeting.” In fact, these
are quite different in tone and content. Cheryl Walker’s Indian Nation, Native
American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms (1997) offers a
recent printing of “The Red Man’s Rebuke.” My reading is based off of a fac-
simile of the original birch-bark pamphlet from the Bentley Historical Library,
University of Michigan, as well as Walker’s reprint.
30 Pokagon, “The Red Man’s Rebuke.”
31 African Americans were also noticeably absent as participants in the construc-
tion of Fair exhibitions, although Frederick Douglass was there as a “represen-
tative” for Haiti. Together with Ida B. Wells they circulated “The Reason Why
the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition”; for more
see: Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization (1996).
28 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke

32 Elizabeth Hutchinson, The Indian Craze:  Primitivism, Modernism, and

Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915 (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2009).
33 From the “International Folk-lore Congress Chicago, IL,” World’s Columbian
Exposition (1893), later published by Charles H. Sergel Co. in Chicago, 1898.
Reprinted by (series) Archives of the International Folk-lore Association, v. 1
(inside on Google books, “The number of copies of this book is limited to six
hundred, of which this copy is No. 146”), page 220.
34 Ibid., 227.
35 For Pokagon’s white patrons and benefactors see:  Low, “The Architecture of
Simon Pokagon,” 5.
36 For more on performing Indians and William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s enter-
prise see: L. G. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians,
1883–1933 (1999) and Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory,
and Popular History (2001).
37 Warrior, Tribal Secrets and The People and the Word; Round, Removable Type;
Kelsey, Tribal Theory in Native American Literature, 44.
38 Hoxie, Talking Back to Civilization and Cathleen D. Cahill, Federal Fathers
& Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). O’Brien, Firsting and
Lasting.
39 Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian; Brian Dippie, The Vanishing American: White
Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991);
Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999)
and Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004);
and Beth Piatote, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native
American Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
40 Although pan-tribal was not a contemporary term for these figures, the con-
cept predates them by over 100 years. In fact, as Lisa Brooks and others have
shown, the earliest recorded Native usage of Indian in North America seems
to have emerged from the Algonquian coast in recognition of “the need for
an intertribal alliance some time before the emergence of King Philip and long
before Tecumseh.” For more see Brooks’ essay in Reasoning Together:  The
Native Critics Collective, edited by Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and
Christopher B. Teuton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 243.
41 I refer to networks throughout this book and am indebted to the work of Matt
Cohen in Networked Wilderness, and to Brooks, The Common Pot. Both are
helpful in analyzing the types of networks that Native people created and main-
tained, even if some were later lost.
42 Piatote, Domestic Subjects, 2.
43 I use collective cultural biography as a genre and an analytical framework to
make an argument regarding a particular cohort of twentieth-century Indian
intellectuals. This approach is my own; however, for another model with a sim-
ilar method, see: John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists
and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University
Press, 2002).
44 Circuit is also used productively throughout Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula
Circuits through the U.S. Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012);
 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke 29

also see her article “Hawaiians on Tour: Hula Circuits through the American
Empire,” American Quarterly Vol. 56, No. 1, March 2004.
45 Cahill, Federal Fathers & Mothers, 230.
46 For more on Wa-Wa Chaw see:  Carlos Montezuma Papers, Wisconsin State
Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin.
47 My approach to studying these particular individuals and the larger cohort
of Indian people of which they were a part builds on earlier work of schol-
ars, such as:  Hazel Hertzbeg, Modern Pan-Indian Movements (1982); Hoxie,
Talking Back to Civilization; Lucy Maddox, Citizen Indians: Native American
Intellectuals, Race, and Reform (2005); Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places;
and Martinez, ed., The American Indian Intellectual Tradition.
48 For more on the relationship between letter writing and publishing in connec-
tion with the creation of a public sphere see: Jurgen Habermas, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere:  An Inquiry into Bourgeois, trans-
lated by Thomas Burger (Cambridge:  Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Press, 1991).
49 I consulted Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1977) and Power/
Knowledge (1980) to theorize Indian intellectuals as agents of change through
the transformation of social, political, and disciplinary networks and the work
of discourse.
50 See note 39.
51 Since the mid- to late 1990s, certain methods of interpreting Native writing have
become customary for scholars working within Native American and indige-
nous studies. They include: tribal nation specificity and American Indian literary
nationalism, the former arguing for a move away from identity, authenticity,
hybridity, and cross-cultural mediation to the Native intellectual, cultural, polit-
ical, historical, and tribal national contexts from which indigenous literatures
emerge. By moving away from the ethnographic methodologies that generated
questions about identity and cultural authenticity that dominated American
Indian literary studies during the “Native American Renaissance” (1968–95),
this book builds on the approaches of post-1995 literary critics who accept that
tribal national and community-specific contexts are important points of criti-
cal reference for interpreting Native texts, including work by Robert Warrior,
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Gerald Vizenor, Jace Weaver, Craig Womack, and others.
At the same time, the mobility of the four figures who are the center of this project
and their own pan-tribal and “Indian” racial rhetoric suggests that I also engage
their work through a Native literary lens that focuses on identity that is always
contingent on place, whether urban or rural, Native or not, and how political
issues on the local and federal levels impacted the places and cultural spaces that
these four intellectuals worked in and through as writers and activists. I am aim-
ing for an expansive approach to thinking about Native identity and politics that
is also mindful of the specific histories of tribal nations and communities as they
intersected with the United States as a settler-colonial nation.
52 Warrior, The People and the Word, xiii.
53 Warrior asserts that such nonfiction writing has been the primary form used by
American Indians in developing a relationship with the written word – reaching
far back in Native history and culture, and his scholarship lays the groundwork
upon which this current project can stand.
30 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke

54 Round, Removable Type, 3.

55 Ibid., 5.  Also see:  Hazel Hertzberg, Modern Pan-Indian Movements (1982),
which defines American Indians in terms of other American minorities. I aim,
instead, to recast Indian people not within the rhetoric of minority discourse but
as distinct citizens of tribal nations and as figures who wrestle with how to posi-
tion themselves within the broader national context of the United States. Lucy
Maddox’s Citizen Indians (2005) also focuses on the early twentieth-century
period and the pan-tribal activities of this generation of Native intellec-
tuals, in particular their work with Native organizations like the Society of
American Indians but also with white progressive groups like the Indian Rights
Association. Alan Trachtenberg’s The Incorporation of America:  Culture and
Society in the Gilded Age (2007) offers an interdisciplinary analysis of American
culture during the late nineteenth century, which contributes to how I frame the
period within which these figures emerged. Frederick Hoxie’s Talking Back to
Civilization focuses on the period from 1893 to the 1920s, with a focus on
primary documents produced by Native American reformers who, he argues,
aimed to “talk back” to the civilization that had intervened in their lives and
stolen much of their land, while also attempting to steal or destroy their culture.
Hoxie’s more recent This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the
Place They Made (2012) is a new and useful contribution to Native American
studies that offers a counter-narrative to conventional U.S.  histories. Hoxie
argues for the centrality of American Indian history and the work of specific
Native people, such as Sarah Winnemucca and Thomas Sloan, as political activ-
ists who entered into dialogues with other activist movements.
56 For the historical development, usage, and theorization of “keywords”
see:  Raymond Williams, Keywords:  A  Vocabulary of Culture and Society
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler,
eds., Keywords for American Cultural Studies (New York: New York University
Press, 2007). For a related study of how concepts travel in interdisciplinary
projects and are meaningful when they help us to understand our object of
study see:  Mieke Bal and Sherry Marx-Macdonald, Traveling Concepts in
the Humanities:  A  Rough Guide (Toronto, Canada:  University of Toronto
Press, 2002).
57 Piatote, Domestic Subjects, 8.
58 Cathleen D. Cahill suggests that work in the Indian Service, for many Native
people, enabled the formation of a modern intertribal Indian identity that was
built around a shared identity to organize a national cultural and political
movement (Federal Fathers & Mothers, 7).
59 For more on the ways that individual Native people found to engage in a project
of racial uplift see:  Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha:  Staging Indians,
Making Americans, 1880–1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004). In partic-
ular, Trachtenberg devotes a chapter to the work of Luther Standing Bear as a
young man employed by Wanamaker’s Department Store that emphasizes some
of the ways that Native youth entered the world of market capitalism and the
racism they encountered when doing so.
60 O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, 145.
61 For more on earlier periods when Indian intellectuals claimed “dual citizenship”
see: ibid., 148.
 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke 31

62 Regarding the mutually constitutive relationship between American and

Indian identity see:  Deloria, Playing Indian, and Shari M.  Huhndorf, Going
Native:  Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (2001). For studies of
late nineteenth-century culture in America, and the intersecting categories of
race, gender, and class, see: Susan Harris Smith and Melanie Dawson, eds., The
American 1890s:  A  Cultural Reader (2000) and Gail Bederman, Manliness
& Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,
1880–1917 (1996).
63 Drawing selectively from a wide range of scholarly approaches to conceptu-
alize the term intellectual, I  consulted:  Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
(London:  Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 5–23; C. L.  R. James, C.L.R. James
Reader edited by Anna Grimshaw (1995), 245; Michel Foucault, “Truth
and Power,” an interview with Alesandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino
(New  York:  Pantheon, 1977, 1980); Edward Said, Representations of the
Intellectual: The 1933 Reith Lectures (New York: Vintage, 1994), 61; Warrior,
Tribal Secrets; Martinez, ed., The American Indian Intellectual Tradition;
Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and
Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).
64 Regarding representational politics see:  Joel Pfister, Individuality
Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural Modern (2004) and Deloria, Indians
in Unexpected Places. For national narratives and citizenship and the rela-
tion between nationally defined communities versus more culturally or locally
defined ones see: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), and Homi Bhabha’s edited collection
Nation and Narration (1990).
65 For the political and cultural importance of “blood” in a Hawaiian context
see: J. Kehaulani Kauaunui, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of
Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). For
a contemporary account of questions of Native identity related to DNA test-
ing see: Kim Tallbear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False
Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
For more on “full-bloodedness” as problematically essential to defining Indian
identity in New England during the early nineteenth century see, O’Brien,
Firsting and Lasting.
66 As Jace Weaver has noted, “History of white/Native interaction told largely or
exclusively from the perspective of the settler colonizers is not Native American
Studies” because “ultimately the story being told is about white people.”
See:  Jace Weaver, A Miner’s Canary:  Essays on the State of Native America
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010), 4–5. In addition, two
books complicate this dynamic:  Philip J.  Deloria’s Playing Indian and Shari
Huhndorf’s Going Native. I have consulted both to help me theorize and articu-
late the concept of an Indian “playing Indian” within American culture. Playing
Indian is a phenomenon that is not unlike blackface minstrelsy as examined by
Eric Lott. In Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working
Class (Oxford University Press, 1995), Lott argues these shows were “an index
of popular white racial feeling in the United States”(5). By examining how
white people engaged with performing and performances of blackness, we can
look at how “this articulation took the form of a simultaneous drawing up and
32 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke

crossing of racial boundaries”(6). As Lott’s title references, when white men

played black in minstrel shows during the antebellum period, they both cele-
brated and exploited blackness. This sort of racial performance, as Lott further
suggests, was “an encapsulation of the affective order of things in a society that
racially ranked human beings”(6). Playing Indian, by white men and women, in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was similar as a cultural phenomenon.
Native performers had inherited these associations with the stage and race play,
which they used strategically to affirm but also critique the terms on which
racial difference was marked through Indian bodies and embodiment. Wild
West shows were often marketed as attractions to be seen alongside minstrel
shows, and Wild West traveling entertainments appealed to so many different
audiences that these shows, like the minstrel shows of the antebellum era, could
blur the boundary between high and low cultures; in the process, these shows
commoditized Indianness, which is apiece with Lott’s examination of blackface
minstrelsy as a form of popular entertainment in the nineteenth century.
67 Performance theory is a useful methodological tool for any history account-
ing for Native participation in print and political culture in the Americas. My
readings of speeches, and other performances of Indianness, for this cohort
draws on this scholarship, especially the work of queer theorists and Native
American studies scholars. Drawing on Jacque Derrida, Judith Butler writes
that “performativity cannot be understood outside of the process of iterability,
a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not per-
formed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the
temporal condition for the subject.” See: Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On
the Discursive Limits of Sex (New  York:  Routledge Press, 1993), 95. Also
see: Bellin and Mielke, eds., Native Acts. Native Acts, as Deloria summarizes
in his afterword, focuses on very early examples of cross-cultural performance
where the authors examine both the materiality of embodied performance and
the written and spoken narratives that can also perform and produce claims
about identities and subjectivities as well as so-called truths and authentici-
ties, to include “new intercultural possibilities, and in the end, power relations
themselves” (310).
68 See:  Wilmer, ed., Native American Performance and Representation;
Stanlake, Native American Drama; Jill Lane, Black Face Cuba, 1840–1895
(Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Laura G. Gutierrez,
Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas Y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage
(Austin:  University of Texas Press, 2010); Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible
Desires:  Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC
and London: Duke University Press, 2005). Also see Michelle Wick Patterson,
“‘Real’ Indian Songs: The Society of American Indians and the Use of Native
American Culture as a Means of Reform,” American Indian Quarterly Vol. 26,
No. 1, Winter 2002, 44–66. Patterson uses specific examples of staged perfor-
mance by Indian people involved with the Society of American Indians. I find
Jose Esteban Muñoz’s theorization of disidentification especially helpful with
regards to these Native intellectuals’ using certain types of clothing for specific
audiences and venues.
69 For a more thorough historical account of this concept see:  Deloria, Playing
Indian.
 Introduction: A Red Man’s Rebuke 33

70 From R. H. Pratt to Carlos Montezuma, Letter, Ayer MMS collection, Box 3,
Newberry Library, Chicago, IL.
71 For a literary history concerning social divisions in the United States
see: Richard Brodhead’s Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in
Nineteenth-Century America (1993). For a study of cultural change in relation to
cultural hierarchy see: Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence
of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988). For how the “White City” depicted
whiteness and racial harmony through technological advancement see:  Alan
Trachtenberg’s final chapter in The Incorporation of America (2007). In regards
to studies of critical race theory and postcolonial studies I have consulted: Franz
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1967); Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La
Frontera, the New Mestiza (1987); Homi K. Bhahba, The Location of Culture
(1994); Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack:  The Cultural
Politics of Nation and Race (1987); Black Atlantic:  Modernity and Double
Consciousness (1993) and Against Race, Imagining Political Culture beyond the
Color Line (2000); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural
Politics (1996); Barbara Christian, Black Feminist Criticism:  Perspectives
on Black Women Writers (1985); Kimberle Crenshaw, ed., Critical Race
Theory:  The Key Writings that Formed the Movement (1995); Diana Fuss,
Essentially Speaking (1989); and Harry Justin Elam, ed., Black Cultural
Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture (2005).
72 Gertrude Bonnin, “An Indian Teacher” in American Indian Stories, edited by
Dexter Fisher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 98.
73 See:  Carrie Tirado Bramen, “East Meets West at the World’s Parliament of
Religions,” in Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National
Distinctiveness (2001); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993);
Robert Christopher Reed, All the World Is Here!: The Black Presence at White
City (2000); and Julie K. Brown, Contesting Images:  Photography and the
World’s Columbian Exposition (1994).
74 In regards to the development of whiteness see: David R. Roediger, The Wages
of Whiteness:  Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1999);
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants
and the Alchemy of Race (1999); and George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment
in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (1998).
 1

A Global Mission
The Higher Education of Charles Eastman

It is the impression of many people who are not well informed on the Indian
situation that book education is of little value to the race, particularly what is
known as the higher education. The contrary is true. What we need is not less
education, but more; more trained leaders to uphold the standards of civiliza-
tion before both races.
– Charles Eastman, The Indian To-Day (1915)1

Introduction
On December 5, 1905, an array of literary figures, celebrities, and polit-
ical elites gathered at an extravagant private party at New  York City’s
Delmonico’s Restaurant. Opened in 1830, Delmonico’s by the turn of the
twentieth century had become a pinnacle of haute cuisine and the embodi-
ment of upper-class New York society, especially given the social status of its
clientele. The spectacular party that winter was arranged by Colonel George
Harvey, the president of Harper and Brothers Publishing Company, to cele-
brate Mark Twain’s seventieth birthday.2
Over 170 friends and fellow writers attended the festivities, which fea-
tured a forty-piece orchestra as well as fifteen speeches and formal toasts.
After a brief introduction by author, editor, and critic William Dean Howells,
Twain set a convivial tone for the evening by punctuating his speech with
satirical aphorisms. He remarked, “I have had a great many birthdays in
my time. I remember the first one very well, and I always think of it with
indignation; everything was so crude, unaesthetic, primeval. Nothing like
this at all.”3
One of Twain’s birthday gifts that evening was a book of photographs
featuring guests around their tables. In one, Doctor Charles A.  Eastman
(Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux) sits prominently next to Alice MacDowan,
James Rodgers, and Mrs. A.  D. Chandler. Certainly the most ebullient at
his table, Eastman wears an elegant tuxedo and toothy grin. The picture

34
 A Global Mission 35

appeared in the next day’s New York Times, accompanied by a story about

the historic nature of the event, claiming that “never before in the annals of
this country had such a representative gathering of literary men and women
been seen under one roof.” Indeed, guests came from all across the United
States. Eastman was alone in representing Minnesota, but, perhaps more
important, he was also the only Native American author in attendance. As a
budding writer, he was in good company at Twain’s party, where he mingled
with new authors like Willa Cather and Charles Chesnutt.4
Although the Times reporter did not mention the presence of either
Eastman or Chesnutt, despite the fact that both Native Americans and
African Americans were scarcer than women at the banquet, the survival of
the photograph featuring Eastman signifies twin facets of his life: his career
as an Indian intellectual, and opportunities that brought him into contact
with people who could shape print culture, politics, and public opinion.
Indeed, Twain’s party is but one example of a cultural space where Eastman
could build a powerful relationship between his intellectualism  – as he
understood it and as it was defined by those who read his books and saw
him speak  – and literary networks to promote his educational mission.5
Ultimately, Eastman aimed to teach Americans about the history of his peo-
ple, the Sioux, and through this teaching to argue in favor of citizenship for
Indian people in the United States.6
Just six years later, Eastman attended another historic event, although it
was no party. Instead, Eastman was asked to represent Native Americans
as part of an international congress on race at the University of London.
The first Universal Races Congress was, according to one reporter, meant
to be “a distinctly new and novel proposition.” The United States, among
other nations, was expanding its imperial reach beyond domestic borders
into places like Guam and Puerto Rico, and it made sense for Americans
to attend an international event that aimed to encourage interracial good-
will on a global scale. The universal mission of such a congress was to
make “special reference to bringing about friendlier relations between
Occident and Orient.” Out of the ten Americans invited to present, two
delegates stand out from the event’s program because they were there to
speak on behalf of interracial relations at home. Both were public intel-
lectuals who were well-positioned to represent their races using a global
platform.7
One was Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, the prominent African American sociol-
ogist, who read a paper titled “The Negro in America.” The other was
Eastman, who gave a paper on “The American Indian.” What brought Du
Bois and Eastman, as intellectuals and members of ethnic minority groups
in America, to London in 1911? According to the New York Tribune, they
may have believed in its mission as one committed to the productive dis-
cussion of race by prominent sociologists and anthropologists from around
the world. In fact, the Congress organizers were supported by the political
36 Indigenous Intellectuals

heads of the British Empire and “many members of the permanent court of
arbitration of The Hague,” as well as “the council of the Interparliamentary
Union,” to organize this international forum to discuss race relations.8
As literary scholar Brent Hayes Edwards and others have demonstrated,
Du Bois’s 1911 speech echoed the rhetoric established in The Souls of Black
Folk (1903). Edwards has argued that in Du Bois’s appearance, one can
see the outlines of not simply a “Black Atlantic,” but also a diasporic black
intellectual internationalism. Although Eastman was part of a similar, if less
well-developed global circuit, his mission at the Congress almost certainly
reflected a different history of Indian people in relation to European colo-
nialism. He was there to speak on behalf of American Indians in the context
of an increasingly globalized world.9
Each man also chose to speak for his “race” because of deep-seated
concerns regarding the future of racialized and ethnic minorities within
the United States.10 Eastman, like Du Bois, was well educated, highly trav-
eled, and a skilled orator. He understood that an international event of
this type would be a great opportunity for him to present his own ideas
about the current conditions Native Americans faced. Both men, along
with Franz Boas, spoke on the panel “devoted to the question of the mod-
ern conscience in relation to the negro and the American Indian.”11 Given
Eastman’s quest to educate the American public about Indian people as
modern citizens of the United States, the panel’s emphasis on “the modern
conscience” resonated with his cultural politics. Still, the question such a
panel provoked did not give Eastman carte blanche to speak without cer-
tain reservations.
One reporter from the Tribune predicted that this panel would succeed
in presenting ideas on race and humanity while also avoiding “all bitter-
ness towards parties, peoples, and governments.” In the context of these
concerns, Eastman and Du Bois faced a tall order. Could Eastman include a
historical critique of colonialism and conquest in his remarks on the “mod-
ern conscience” in relation to the American Indian? Could Du Bois refer to
the history of slavery and Jim Crow in the United States? As each speaker
prepared his remarks, they turned not to the specifics of these histories, but
instead to the more future-oriented language that Du Bois used to char-
acterize the color line. The panel showcased the modernist psychological
language of “the veil” and “double-consciousness” for Du Bois, and the
fact of “full-bloodedness” and the “Real” rather than primitive Indian for
Eastman. Du Bois’s assertion seemed precise and accurate; the problem of
the twentieth century was indeed the problem of the color line. Eastman
understood this problem differently from Du Bois, however, seeing the color
line primarily in terms of Indian-white relations, and his speech aimed to
improve interracial harmony with specific regards to Indian people’s con-
cerns.12 Eastman used the opportunity the Congress gave him, like he used
Twain’s party, to present not only on behalf of Indians in America but for
 A Global Mission 37

himself, so he could make new contacts with influential networks of scien-

tists, writers, and politicians.13
Eastman’s ability to address multiple publics exemplifies his success in
accessing different networks to embody a public face for Indianness during
the early twentieth century. Looking closely at his speeches, costumes, and
audiences reveals Eastman’s politics of representation to highlight the inter-
connectedness of his education with his literary work, aspects of epistolary
culture, and performance that undergirded the dynamic ways he then fash-
ioned himself as an educator. For Eastman, the theme of education plays out
in terms of how his status as an educated Indian mattered and also in terms
of his desire to provide an education to others.14

A Public Face for Indianness

Speaking at the London Congress in 1911, Eastman’s address on “The North
American Indian” offered both a general accounting of the geographic, lin-
guistic, political, and religious traditions of indigenous peoples in North
America prior to European contact, and specifics that were significant to
his current position at the international gathering. Overall, he structured his
remarks to reflect the mind of an educator and an intellectual with the ideals
of a reformer. He made references to political organization and social laws
in order to build cross-cultural understanding that could once again affirm
the centrality of Indian people in the making of America, as arbiters of its
unique history and as contributors to its growth in the modern age.
At the outset Eastman claimed that “The government of the first North
American was the simplest form of democracy.”15 This bold statement rei-
magined not only an Indian past but an Indian present. By this time, the rise
of pan-Indian organizations, the decline of living conditions for most Indians
on reservations, and public criticism toward the U.S. Indian Bureau shaped
what Eastman could say about the “modern conscience” as it pertained to
Indian peoples. Eastman linked American democracy with earlier forms of
governance used by Native people to do two critical things. First, he drew
an ideological through-line from an earlier indigenous time to the modern
that suggested democracy was as much Indian as it was American; in this
instance, the question of citizenship for Indian people living in the United
States would be thrust to the fore and the fact of their presence, rather than
absence, in the body politic was no longer in question. Second, by making
reference to how democracy functioned in this earlier era, Eastman recalled
a different sort of presence in the past, one that highlighted the fact of sov-
ereignty and nationalism that predated the formation of the United States.
This precondition enabled Eastman to challenge America’s desire to manage
and control Indian people and their land. He was able, once again, to assert
a modern place for Native Americans within the United States and across
the world.16
38 Indigenous Intellectuals

It was not easy for Eastman to put Native institutions at the center of
U.S.  history while simultaneously offering a critique of that history. He
needed first to debunk racialist discourse that used science and culture to
place Indians, and other people of color, on the lower rungs of America’s
social and political system. Given the academic tone of his address, Eastman
could speak plainly about how although “the physical character[istic]
s of the race are assumed to be well known,” they are “often incorrectly
described.”17 As a published author, physician, and Dartmouth alumnus,
Eastman could rely on his elite status as an intellectual platform from which
to argue, “American historians have constantly fallen into error by reason of
their ignorance of our democratic system, truly a government of the people,
one of personal liberty and equal rights to all its members.”18 This rhetoric
strategically mirrored American political discourse with regards to freedom
and civilization. Considering that the formal qualities of Eastman’s lecture
offered a well-structured account of the past conditions of Indian peoples,
which emphasized his knowledge of modern Western thought and belief in
democratic principles, it is even more critical to note how he addressed con-
tentious topics like exploitation under capitalism, the reservation system,
and fears associated with miscegenation.
At this international meeting, Eastman defined American, not Native,
democracy as intimately linked to material progress promised by market
capitalism. Relying on this link, he could criticize U.S. colonialism and impe-
rialism by remarking on how American civilization necessarily depended on
breeding dishonesty and greed, and “the love of possessions.”19 Eastman
argued this desire to own property and obtain objects ran counter to “free-
dom” as Indian people defined it. In particular, he offered that Native men
were not well equipped to desire participation in capitalism because histor-
ically women owned all property, and it was “considered effeminate in a
warrior” to desire possessions.20 Thus, European colonization brought with
it not only changes in thinking related to economic structures but to gender
as well.
Eastman’s speech tracked the ways Indian people, because of their dis-
tinct cultural characteristics, thrived before European colonists came and
corrupted their pristine living conditions; “the pollution of streams, the
destruction of forests, and the leveling of hills” were thought of by Natives
as “a sacrilege” and too high a price to pay for civilization.21 In drawing
on this binary, and referring to European influence using a rhetoric of cor-
ruption and contamination, Eastman’s speech conformed to certain tenets
of social evolutionary theory that were prevalent at the time. He suggested
that “it was equally inevitable that the vices of the more sophisticated race
[white] should be imitated by the simpler [Indian].” In this instance, Eastman
explains that a failure of early traders and Christian missionaries to learn
from indigenous peoples resulted in the transfer of European cultural val-
ues that included European vices. Underpinning Eastman’s argument is a
 A Global Mission 39

cultural logic that understood race as produced by culture given that “the
simpler” Indian race was without vice prior to their contact with a different,
more sophisticated (in Eastman’s words), European culture. This point of
view is underscored by Eastman’s simplistic depiction of “the savage philos-
opher” whose naturally and necessarily “strong religious sentiment forbade
any effort on his part to deface mother nature.”22 Such a notion conformed
to dominant (and white) expectations that located Native peoples not only
in America’s premodern past but in the landscape itself, both as closer to
nature (rather than culture) and as the earliest environmentalists. By draw-
ing on this relationship between racial identity and cultural formations in
his speech, Eastman began to hone one of the ideas that would become cen-
tral to his representational politics, which was how to present himself as the
embodiment of a modern Native and American subject.23
Ultimately Eastman’s speech argued that American civilization must
correct its flaws to improve the current situation of the American Indian
who lives in a “beggarly” state on reservations, which operate like pris-
ons. Eastman asserted that in this new space the federal government of the
United States had created a “pauperizing effect,” and the graft of petty offi-
cials had led to the final eclipse of the Indian man, who lives like “a wild
animal confined in a zoological garden.”24 Descriptions like these offered his
audience a powerful and provocative parallel by defining wildness in rela-
tion to the primitive and animal-like state of Indian manhood now mutually
constitutive with the construction of the reservation, which was itself a pro-
ject of white Americans. Certainly, Eastman understood that Native men,
like him, could move beyond the limits set forth by a reservation system.25
Given the context in which he gave this speech, Eastman detailed the mate-
rial ways that Indian people had been forced to live in a state of wildness
due not to their inherent otherness, simplicity, or primitivism but rather due
to the constraints imposed on them by a government intent on managing
their development. His critique thus intends not to fault Native people for
living like wild animals but to fault the larger systems that aim to “capture”
them so that this would seem to be one of the only ways to live.26
In order to rally more support from his audience, Eastman used an
important rhetorical strategy in his speech. By using “we” throughout his
discussion of the “reservation policy” that “was a mistake,” which led to
“the fruits of a radical misapprehension of the red man’s native capacity,” he
prompts his listeners to see themselves as part of the problem and also the
solution.27 By focusing on the irony of designing social and political struc-
tures meant to celebrate freedom that have, in fact, undermined the mobility
and achievement of Indian people, Eastman urged his audience to reconsider
the history of U.S. expansion. In addition, because his speech looked to the
future it articulated new arenas that could promote the “development of the
‘new Indian’ ” in America. He pointed to two explicitly: the first was edu-
cational policy, which he saw as moderately successful, and the second was
40 Indigenous Intellectuals

massive reform of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The latter entailed the aboli-
tion of the reservation system and distribution of tribal funds held in trust
to individuals to benefit “the manhood and full independence of the Indian
citizen.”28 This second option aligned with some of the ideology promoted
by the Dawes Act of 1887, which aimed to divide reservation lands into
individual allotments.29 Both solutions stressed the incorporation of Native
peoples into the social, economic, and, ultimately, political structures pro-
duced by the United States. Incorporation for Eastman was not the same as
integration, but rather a means of asserting a presence in the face of a van-
ishing Indian narrative that was pervasive during this period. For Eastman,
another cultural avenue for change that also related to incorporation was
interracial marriage, or as many would have it in 1911, miscegenation.
Given the premise for the Universal Races Congress, Eastman was in
good company to make a case for the benefits of interracial unions. He had
also been married to his white wife, Elaine Goodale Eastman, for nearly
twenty years by this time, so making this point was as much a personal issue
as a political one. Eastman’s speech referenced the racism experienced not
only by interracial couples but by their offspring. He described a common
slur attributed to “mixed-blood” children that defined them as doomed to
having “the vices of both races and the virtues of neither,” and confirmed
such an idea as “absolutely unjust.”30 Perhaps paradoxically, Eastman’s cele-
bration of mixed-race marriages had the added effect of confirming a future
for Indian people that simultaneously accepted “race amalgamation [a]‌s the
only final and full solution of the problem” in regards to the American Indian
being a dying race. Like many of his Native contemporaries who spoke to
similar audiences throughout their careers, Eastman argued for wider accep-
tance of marriages like his so that his offspring could be viewed as both
American and Indian. At the same time, he relied on his own “full-blooded”
status as a tool of authentication to advertise his public talks.
“The North American Indian” speech from 1911 was one of many that
Eastman gave between the 1890s and the 1930s, as he traveled through-
out the United States and the world.31 “The subjects of his many talks
ranged from ‘The School of Savagery,’ ‘The Real Indian,’ ‘The Story of the
Little Big Horn,’ to aesthetic topics such as, ‘Indian Wit, Music, Poetry and
Eloquence.’ ”32 During this time, he also wrote ten books, which circulated
to a range of reading publics, many of them white and some of them Indian.
As Eastman worked on his writing and lecturing, he also maintained volu-
minous correspondence ranging from the alumni of Dartmouth College to
white women’s reform organizations and other leading Indian intellectuals.
All the while he saw himself as part of a larger educational mission with
Indian identity and citizenship at its center.33
Because Eastman initially promoted himself as an author writing mostly
fictional and folkloric pieces for children, many readers were first drawn
to Eastman’s work by Indianness, and yet they ended up learning as much
 A Global Mission 41

about his views on Indian boyhood, nature, spirituality, and tradition as

they did about the politics surrounding the past and present circumstances
of Native-white relations in the United States. Locating the connections
between Eastman’s lifework and that of other Indian intellectuals and
their non-Indian allies hinges on considering their involvement with a lit-
erary world and a political one.34 Bringing the two together was of criti-
cal importance for Native intellectuals during the early twentieth century
given the out-of-date ways social critics of this era often discussed the value
of Native culture. Novelist and critic Waldo Frank, who actually visited
Native American settlements in New Mexico in 1918, concluded the fol-
lowing in his manifesto for a new generation of American artists in Our
America (1919):

The uncorrupted Indian knows no individual poverty or wealth. All of his tribe is
either rich or poor. He has no politics. He has no dynastic or industrial intrigue –
although of course personal and fraternal intrigue does exist. His physical world is
fixed. And in consequence all his energies beyond the measure of his daily toil rise
ineluctably to spiritual consciousness: flow to consideration of his place and part in
Nature, into the business of beauty.35

What is telling in Frank’s desire to create a romantic-democratic role for

intellectuals as prophets of a new American culture is his erasure of Native
participation in modern society, industry, and art – and that what appealed
to him about Indian culture was a seeming lack of politics.36 For Eastman,
the stakes were personal and fraternal, to be sure, but also much larger.
He, like Carlos Montezuma, Gertrude Bonnin, and Luther Standing Bear,
knew that changing the social, economic, and political status of Indian peo-
ple within American society had to take place through culture as much as
through politics. Certainly the two could not be easily parsed for any Native
intellectual during this period. And thus, Twain’s party was not the only
high society affair Eastman attended, nor was the Universal Races Congress
his only opportunity to cross the Atlantic. Before and after these two events,
Eastman was active in fashioning himself as an Indian intellectual. This
meant an educated person and one who – in Eastman’s version – teaches
and leads by example.37
For Eastman and other Native intellectuals, modernity became critical
to how they defined themselves and how they were viewed by those around
them. As Indian people, they sought to recast dominant understandings
of Indianness not as antithetical to, but rather, as mutually constitutive
of Americanness. The modern world that Eastman, Montezuma, Bonnin,
and Standing Bear lived in was one in which ideas about ethnicity, race,
gender, and citizenship intertwined, and often reflected how modernity
and the idea of the modern was experienced. Therefore, as federal Indian
policies changed and new cultural forms were created, Indian intellectu-
als found openings to effectively engage in modern American society, and
42 Indigenous Intellectuals

through that engagement they demonstrated the power of Indian people

as shapers of modernity. Furthermore, by considering the shifting terrain
of Indian policy in relation to Eastman’s cultural politics, we can see the
limits and possibilities he faced as a leading Indian intellectual during this
period. Changes in his thinking with regards to allotment and citizenship
were reflected in his work as a writer who utilized multiple genres, from
autobiography to folklore to polemic, to convey his ideas. Through these
textual examples, Eastman’s mission to educate Americans and the global
community about Native political concerns reflect not only changes in
his beliefs but also broader social and political changes in U.S.  society
and Indian Country. His gift for the spoken word enabled Eastman to
reach a useful array of audiences, whether he spoke to local women’s clubs
or foreign dignitaries. His oratorical training began early as a student at
Dartmouth College.

Vox Clamantis in Deserto

Much of Eastman’s early life as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College
shaped his philosophy and his ability to work as a physician, author, and
lecturer. As much as Eastman benefited from the time he spent at Dartmouth,
so too did the College draw on its association with Eastman as a means for
reaffirming its founding mission.
“The voice of one crying in the wilderness” was Dartmouth’s motto
since its founding in 1769. Established by Congregational minister Eleazar
Wheelock (1711–79), partly with funds raised by Native American preacher
Samson Occom (1723–92), the College considered its primary mission that
of acculturating and Christianizing Native Americans. Despite this found-
ing mission, the College graduated only nineteen Native Americans dur-
ing its first 200 years.38 After an extended period of financial and political
struggles, Dartmouth emerged from relative obscurity in the early twentieth
century – and it did so with considerable assistance from Charles Eastman,
the cultural descendant of Occom.
According to The Aegis (Dartmouth’s yearbook, founded in 1859), the
freshman class of 1887 was distinguished by its only Native American stu-
dent: Charles Alexander Eastman. His athletic and scholarly achievements
were many and his listings include:  a football captain, the Dartmouth
Baseball Association, the Dartmouth Gun Club, a member of the Webster
Chapter, the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, and the Missionary Committee.
Not only was Eastman the only Indian at Dartmouth at this time, but he
also came to Hanover, New Hampshire from the small town of Flandreau,
located in Dakota Territory. His classmates, on the other hand, hailed
mostly from New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Eastman’s
distinguishing achievements took place within the context of a Northern
and New England social community completely foreign to him. Throughout
his life, Eastman nonetheless maintained an association with Dartmouth’s
 A Global Mission 43

prestigious and vast alumni network to elevate the public profile of the
College as one committed to the education and incorporation of Indian peo-
ple within American society.39
Throughout Eastman’s undergraduate years, Indianness remained a piv-
otal component of how others perceived him and how he in turn perceived
himself. During this period, studies of race continued to shift despite the
discourse’s emphasis on biological definitions. A  half-century earlier, in
1839, naturalist and craniologist Samuel George Morton (1799–1851) pro-
duced Crania Americana to provide detailed descriptions of racial difference
for American readers, helping to define the term scientific racism. In many
ways, Morton’s work shaped how Americans thought about the connection
between the idea of race and the materiality of the body. As “Dartmouth’s
Indian,” Eastman could not escape the association others made between his
Indianness and his body, which took shape in blood.40
Beginning in the 1880s, Eastman and others defined his position as an
intellectual through the linked discourse of blood and education. More
specifically, as an Indian student, he was celebrated by Dartmouth as its
“most picturesque figure.” Picturesque is a term that originates from the
Italian word pittoresco or “as if in a picture”; it has been used to describe
certain properties of landscape and garden views in reality or as depicted in
visual arts. The category of picturesque objects has also been defined and
redefined since its invention. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, the picturesque beauty was a positive expression; to call some-
thing picturesque was a compliment. Edmund Burke (1729–97) developed
a theory on beauty and the sublime, but the picturesque was not clearly
defined because it was an irrational “pleasing” synthesis of often contra-
dicting categories. The picturesque then described all those subjects that
did not fit into the realms of beauty on one side and the sublime on the
other. Thus, the picturesque became an aesthetic category that filled the
gap between definitions of beauty and the sublime. This ability to “fill the
gap” demonstrates the ways that the picturesque figure of an Indian repre-
sented one notion of Indianness that could fill a different type of gap, one
between nature and civilization given that Indians were believed to be both
human, and yet, as “noble savages,” part of the natural world – a world
white, mostly male society meant to control and tame as its own. Like the
imaginary Indian of American culture, Eastman, as Dartmouth’s “most pic-
turesque figure,” had an openness that enabled the concept to survive. It is
the very nature of the picturesque to incorporate contradictory aspects and
objects in a new aesthetic, and like Indianness, it becomes an expansive
concept that is always in search of new elements. Despite his many achieve-
ments and the many changes in American society, an obituary written after
his death highlighted Eastman’s association with Dartmouth. He could not
escape having once been its most picturesque figure; in death he was now
famous as the College’s “full-blooded” student.41
44 Indigenous Intellectuals

In 1939, Manchester’s Union provided an extensive obituary titled

“Dartmouth’s Most Famous Indian Grad Dies in Detroit, Dr.  Charles
Eastman ’87, a Full-Blooded Sioux Known as Ohiyesa, Recognized as Most
Learned Member of Race.” The headline itself positions Eastman in terms
of race as a cultural and biological category. Indianness is figured through
his education, reflecting cross-cultural possibilities in a way that reem-
phasizes racial difference. At the same time, the headline notes he was a
“Full-Blooded Sioux,” a seemingly biological statement that actually rested
on cultural assumptions. Throughout his life, Eastman was forced to navi-
gate this complex and often contradictory representation of Indianness, at
once cultural and also biological. Ultimately, he turned to education as a
political lens through which to recast this shifting image. He sought to revise
how the majority of Americans conceived of Indian people by operating as
a living exemplar of the modern Native subject.
Eastman’s later writings and lectures articulated his Indian identity as one
rooted in biology and marked by his link to Dartmouth. As Colin Calloway
has shown, “Eastman’s experience at Dartmouth reflects the complex and
tension-filled relations between Indian people and the United States at that
time. Surviving Dartmouth in the 1880s, like surviving the United States,
exacted a heavy toll on an Indian.”42 In fact, as the college’s “most famous
Indian,” Eastman continually negotiated the issue of Indian dress as a repre-
sentational strategy when he chose which clothes to wear in order to con-
firm or refute biological destiny and perform more culturally rooted ideas
about race.43
On one occasion at Dartmouth, during his undergraduate career from
1883 to 1886, Eastman’s decision to wear certain types of clothing inter-
sected with hegemonic ideas about race and racialization in America. In this
instance, English cultural critic Matthew Arnold (1822–88) had been invited
to give a lecture on literature “as an antidote to materialism in a democracy”
at the College. Upon his arrival, Arnold “asked to see the famous Indian
student.” Arnold was then amazed when “Ohiyesa appeared in faultless eve-
ning clothes and not in war paint and tribal regalia.” Arnold’s remarks and
his reaction to Eastman’s appearance, not “in war paint and tribal regalia”
but instead in “faultless evening clothes,” carries the weight of white expec-
tations regarding Indianness and also the power of performance. Arnold
could have been awed by Eastman dressed in regalia, yet it was a different
awe generated by Eastman in fine evening attire.44
Eastman may have, at first, appeared as an object for Arnold’s consump-
tion because he was Dartmouth’s “famous Indian student.” But on closer
inspection Arnold came to understand that his preconceptions regard-
ing Dartmouth’s Indian did not align with Eastman’s cultural persona. At
the College, Eastman was distinguishing himself not only because of his
Indianness but also because of his athletic prowess as a captain of the
football team and champion distance runner, as well as a competitor in
 A Global Mission 45

basketball, tennis, and boxing. In addition to sports, Eastman participated

in fraternity life at Phi Delta Theta and enrolled in the Latin scientific curric-
ulum that required courses in English, Latin, French, Greek, and linguistics.
He also took classes in zoology, botany, chemistry, physics, natural history,
political science, philosophy, and geometry.45 In addition, because Eastman
was so amiable, the two men met and spoke as equals. This meeting proved
a propos given that Arnold’s lecture encouraged his audience to seek out
intelligent idealism in service to reshape society.46
Reports regarding the details of Arnold’s meeting with Eastman circu-
lated well beyond the small New Hampshire town. Such reports focused
on the encounter as an aberration on two fronts. On one hand, Eastman
was celebrated for exceeding his famous visitor’s expectations. On the other
hand, Arnold was portrayed as embarrassed in his desire to see Dartmouth’s
Indian in Native “regalia” and his failure to imagine Eastman in any other
way. Perhaps Arnold’s desire to see Eastman as an Indian in primitive and
romantic terms offered the potential for a kind of homoerotics of loving
and desiring improper racialized subjects?47 This report, and the absence of
Eastman’s voice regarding their encounter, provided American readers an
opportunity to play the role of Arnold at Dartmouth. They could imagine
ways to locate Indians within different modes of dress and to recognize (as
Arnold did with shock) the limits of their own imagination. For these read-
ers, like Arnold, Eastman’s racialized “otherness” could be desired because
he was distinctly lesser than Euro-American white culture and society and,
yet, if clothed in the right sort of Indian dress also romantic and noble
in his “savagery.” At the same time, these reports enabled American read-
ers a chance to enjoy a laugh at the expense of an elite English intellec-
tual. Although Eastman never commented on how he perceived Arnold, it
seems likely that he was well aware of the gaffe that such a distinguished
visitor made.
Years later, Dartmouth continued to celebrate its most famous Indian
by memorializing him in an oil painting by Julius D. Katzieff (1892–1957).
This portrait captured not the “real” Eastman of Arnold’s encounter, but
the imagined and properly “full-blooded” Eastman adorned “in full tribal
dress.” Today it hangs in the College museum as a gift commissioned by the
class of 1887. Even though Eastman did not honor Arnold’s expectation, he
did acquiesce to his classmates’ demands to memorialize him in regalia and
oil paint. Eastman’s decision to dress one way on the occasion that he met
Arnold and in different costume for this portrait demonstrates the range
of strategies open to him within Dartmouth’s past and America’s future.
Furthermore, Eastman’s ability to dress up as an Indian, or not, enabled him
to address diverse audiences and their expectations.48
After graduating from Dartmouth, Eastman moved south to study med-
icine at Boston University. Not long after receiving his medical degree, he
worked as a physician in the Indian Service. Although initially assigned
46 Indigenous Intellectuals

to work at Fort Berthold, and later Standing Rock, after much back and
forth between Eastman, his benefactor Frank Wood, and Thomas Jefferson
Morgan (commissioner of Indian Affairs), Eastman finally started work
at Pine Ridge in South Dakota. He arrived there during the first week of
November 1890, and was struck by the starkness of his new surround-
ings. Two crucial events would take place during his time at Pine Ridge
that would forever shape the landscape of Eastman’s life and his career: he
would meet and marry his wife,49 Elaine Goodale, and together they would
come face to face with the atrocities the Sioux suffered at the hands of the
American military.50
Just a month after his arrival, Eastman was first on the scene to attend to
Native victims of the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 29, 1890. In a
makeshift hospital at the Episcopalian mission chapel, he treated wounded
and mutilated survivors of the 200 to 300 Sioux who were shot down. The
pews were ripped out and the floor covered with hay and quilts to lay the
patients down. On New Year’s Day, 1891, Eastman and others went out
to the “battlefield” site in search of more survivors. “He found a woman’s
body three miles from the site of the massacre and ‘from this point on we
found them scattered along as they had been relentlessly hunted down and
slaughtered while fleeing for their lives.’ ”51 In fact, the accounts Eastman
and Elaine Goodale gave of the massacre became widely cited as the most
accurate narratives regarding the experiences of Native women, men, and
children.52
Charles and Elaine were, at first, romantic partners who shared a desire
to solve the so-called Indian Problem of the late nineteenth century. Over
the course of their life together (before they separated in 1921), both were
active writers and speakers.53 But the differences in their backgrounds and
the ways the world around them treated men and women would lead to
irreconcilable differences. Elaine had been raised in a stable, middle-class
home in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. She had worked, as a
young adult, at Hampton Institute in Virginia before she found her calling
as a teacher among the Dakota.54 Based partly on interviews with Eastman
descendants, Raymond Wilson has asserted that Charles resented his wife’s
interference with his writing and her supposedly domineering manner.55
Surprisingly, Elaine wrote and said little about her marriage, despite the fact
that their relationship was often held up as a model for the benefits of white
uplift. For she, as a white woman, was well poised to help her Indian hus-
band assimilate into American society. Perhaps what led to their separation
was that Elaine did not sympathize with the limited options that Charles
faced due in large part to his status as an Indian man.56 As Charles became
more disenchanted with white civilization and Christianity, Elaine generally
maintained support for the assimilation agenda; neither their writing nor
their relationship could reconcile this split in thinking.57
 A Global Mission 47

For Eastman, time at Pine Ridge signaled an important loss in terms

of the Indian wars of the nineteenth century and the place where he met
the mother of his children, his often helpful copyeditor, and friend. Later,
Eastman could look back on this time with a different sense of loss for
his marriage as well. Even though Elaine would work with her husband to
produce nine books, and write the foreword for his second autobiography,
From the Deep Woods to Civilization, in 1916, their literary collaborations
could not ameliorate deeper issues, not the least of which was their grief
over the premature death of their daughter Irene in 1918 during the influ-
enza epidemic. Although they never divorced or publicly commented on
their separation, after 1921, they lived apart for the remainder of their lives.
Following his work as the physician at Pine Ridge, much of Eastman’s
later lectures were useful opportunities for him to recount the details of
Wounded Knee and to mourn those who had perished. No doubt bearing
witness to such unprovoked and widespread violence inspired and shaped
the activist work he would take on in the decades that followed. Although
Eastman traveled to different reservations in search of work as a doctor, he
eventually abandoned a career in medicine for a more lucrative one in the
world of publishing.

Imagining the Indian of Today

Eastman’s most overtly political book, The Indian Today, maps changes in
his thinking with regards to federal policies and his cultural politics per-
taining to class, race, and gender. His support for allotment, for example,
appears tied to white reform groups, which he saw as critical to the success
of pan-tribal activism, and his ultimate goal for Indian people, which was
to have their voices heard as citizens in American society. What is more,
because this text was intended to reach both Native and non-Native read-
ers alike, it emerges as one of Eastman’s strongest pedagogical pieces and
represents him as an Indian intellectual and educator. His particular inter-
est in the problems of race leadership also comes to the fore and connects
Eastman with other Native intellectuals from this period. These intellectual
and political relationships illuminate the scope and strength of pan-tribal
networks that emerged as critical sites for redefining Indianness by Indian
activists during the early twentieth century.
The Indian Today: The Past and Future of the First American was first
published by Doubleday in 1915. Unlike Eastman’s autobiographies, Indian
Boyhood (1902) and From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916), which
alternate between casting him as author and subject, and the more spiritu-
ally focused The Soul of the Indian (1911), as well as his turn to folklore in
Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904) and Wigwam Evenings: Sioux
Folk Tales (1909), The Indian Today articulates a new philosophy for
48 Indigenous Intellectuals

Eastman’s readers. Considering the far-reaching influence of captivity nar-

ratives that cast Native people as abductors, and popular history books
that framed the violence on America’s frontier as a consequence of Indians
threatening white people, Eastman aimed to teach his readers history and
traditions of Indian people to counter these narratives. He wrote against the
fictional worlds that celebrated Indianness rather than actual Indian achieve-
ments fabricated by writers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James
Fenimore Cooper. Indeed, The Indian Today challenged white notions about
Indian history by offering a social-scientific approach to defining the mod-
ern Indian subject, as embodied by the educated Indian who participates in
industrial capitalism. Throughout his text, Eastman uses this definition as a
political argument in and of itself. He argues that readers see the necessity
of full citizenship rights for all Native Americans, which at the time (1915)
was still an extremely high priority for many Indian intellectual leaders.58
Eastman’s narrative engaged different publics in order to create a ground-
swell of support for citizenship within Indian communities and America.
For tribally distinct Indians, he aimed to teach about shared accomplish-
ments and histories as well as an emerging pan-Indian movement. For white
Americans, he spoke to the particular efforts of reformers and progressives.
He called on individuals and organizations committed to Indian issues to
become central in creating what would later be the Indian New Deal. A year
later in his autobiography, From the Deep Woods to Civilization, Eastman
continued to reach white audiences by parroting dominant views of white
Americans who assumed the future for a “barbarous” race was limited.
Eastman continued to emphasize education, explicitly noting that the “true
character” of the American Indian is present when recognizing the “deep
demoralization” Indian people had suffered because of the white man. He
writes:
My chief object has been, not to entertain, but to present the American Indian in his
true character before Americans. The barbarous and atrocious character commonly
attributed to him has dated from the transition period, when the strong drink, pow-
erful temptations, and commercialism of the white man led to deep demoralization.
Really it was a campaign of education on the Indian and his true place in American
history.59

This passage reflects a critical component of Eastman’s strategy to seem-

ingly embrace a civilizationist discourse, while the last sentence urges read-
ers to pause to consider how such a campaign of education would lead to
the “true place” for Indian people in American history. This text, like The
Indian Today, represents Eastman’s journey from “Dartmouth’s Indian,” to
a physician, a folklorist, and, finally, a public educator about Indian rights.
His work as a political activist required negotiating civilizationist think-
ing and rhetoric while recognizing indigenous sovereignty, so that he could
attract the support of white progressives and Native leaders.60
 A Global Mission 49

Eastman’s argument regarding Indian rights in The Indian Today has five
central elements: policy, reform efforts, education, networks of Indian intel-
lectuals, and “the problem of race leadership.” By examining each of these
elements, one sees how Eastman described and defined the parameters of
Indian policy in America. Unlike his earlier writings, which demonstrated
his educational philosophy through various forms of practice, this book lays
out reform ideas in conversation with preexisting networks developed by
white progressives and Indian activists. At the same time, education remains
central to his thinking. For example, he focuses on Indian schools and con-
siders the roles college-educated Indians can play in the fight for citizenship.
Finally, what emerges as Eastman’s greatest concern is an ideology that cuts
across various ethnic groups: “the problem of race leadership.”
To instruct his readers toward shaping the future of Indian policy in the
United States, Eastman initially turns to the past.
It must always be borne in mind that the first effect of association with the more
advanced race was not improvement but degeneracy. I have no wish to discredit the
statements of the early explorers, including the Jesuit priests; but it is evidence that
in the zeal of the latter to gain honor for their society for saving the souls of the
natives it was almost necessary to represent them as godless and murderous sav-
ages – otherwise there would be no one to convert! Of course they were not angels,
but I think I have made it clear that they were a God-fearing, clean, and honorable
people before the coming of the white man.61

Chronicling a history of colonialism and conquest vis-à-vis relocation, the

reservation system, and allotment, Eastman emphasizes the changing status
of Indian people within the United States. He argues that the pitfalls of the
federally run Agency System under the Bureau of Indian Affairs has remained
largely unchanged since colonial times. This was a problem because, as
Eastman notes, the U.S.  government’s right of “eminent domain” did not
necessarily deny Indian people the “right of occupancy,” but did impose
limits on tribal sovereignty through the use of treaties, acts of Congress, and
executive orders. By 1915, the sovereignty of tribal nations was under threat
given the Dawes Act of 1887 and a push for universal citizenship for all
Indian people in the United States. Eastman understood these circumstances
and looked to individual rather than treaty rights as a new source of power
for Indian people.62
Eastman’s text highlights the problems inherent in U.S. Indian policy (to
Indian and non-Indian readers alike) to point out the fundamental ambiv-
alence on which later policies were overlaid. He argues that if Indian tribes
could be understood as independent nations, then the policies that encour-
aged practices of elimination and resettlement would not be justified given
their right of occupancy. At the time, Indian people had neither been rec-
ognized as members of sovereign nations nor been given the right of occu-
pancy. Thus, clearly and consistently, the U.S. government mismanaged the
50 Indigenous Intellectuals

welfare of Indian people. This is the history that was critical for Eastman
because he knew how the development of the United States, as a democratic
nation, rested on the political separation of Indian tribes and the rest of
American society. In this sense, Eastman’s text is in close dialogue with W. E.
B.  Du Bois and the integrationist politics of justice espoused by African
American intellectuals, rather than his own intellectual descendants who
turned to the notion of collective rights. Eastman’s argument centered on an
American contradiction, the same dilemma that drove Du Bois: How could
Indian people participate in a democracy that was itself so undemocratic
with particular regards to them?63
Du Bois was led by a long history of social integration matched with
political powerlessness. Political integration – that is, citizenship – seemed
a logical way of putting that social integration into an equitable practice.
Indian history led someplace else. Rather than a long history of intimate
social integration, Indian people had a history of treaty making and politi-
cal independence. The contradiction, then, looked a bit different to Eastman
than it did to Du Bois.
The Indian Today represents how Eastman grappled with the fraught
history of U.S.  colonialism in the context of his efforts as a reformer. He
focused on the processes of dispossession and political independence while
simultaneously arguing for the political incorporation of Indian people.
“In less than a century 370 distinct treaties were made with the various
tribes, some of them merely friendship agreements, but in the main pro-
viding for the right of way and the cession of lands, as fast as such lands
were demanded by the westward growth of the country and the pressure of
population.” Eastman’s account of this history recognized how disposses-
sion was complicated and specific to each indigenous nation. In addition,
the ward-ship system, developed out of treaties and the practical adminis-
trative apparatus of the government, succeeded in separating vast numbers
of Indian people from important tracts of land. Indian lands were “set aside
not only by treaty” but also “by act of Congress” and “executive order” for
the settlement of white Americans. Even though much of Eastman’s rhetoric
favored incorporation through citizenship, he also argued that the future of
Indian policy reform must take into account the specificity of this history of
dispossession.64
As Eastman outlined the stages used to eradicate a preexisting popula-
tion in order to make room for a new one, he used this history to argue
for citizenship. What proves troubling is that Eastman must showcase the
problems inherent in the reservation system to argue for its dissolution. This
is a stance he argued from as early as 1911, in London at the Congress on
Race. The Indian Today reveals his interest in converting Indian readers
to the erasure of this system. Eastman wanted to encourage Indian people
to embrace individual pursuits of work and property because these were
part of the path toward full citizenship – and citizenship was his end goal.
 A Global Mission 51

Eastman advocated reform not through collective action and acts of tribal
sovereignty via treaties, but through individual voices and votes.65
In order to strengthen his case for U.S. citizenship (as opposed to tribal
nationalism), Eastman pointed to corruption within the reservation sys-
tem. Although Indian businessmen “have developed traits that are abso-
lutely opposed to the racial type,” when they work for the Indian Service,
“they become time-serving, beggarly, and apathetic,” Eastman asserted. In
this case, the intentions of a system may be positive but the execution falls
short when American principles are hidden under the shield of a corrupt
agent. Indians who try to avoid being corrupted by resisting the abuses of
the government system are ironically labeled “incorrigible savages.” In these
instances, Indians who are the most aligned with better American principles
cannot escape being seen as “Other.” Here, Eastman highlights the failures
within the system itself, and recognizes that individual Indians can help stall
the growth of corruption within U.S.  society. Eastman argues, ultimately,
that Indian people who are corrupted by the system of the Indian Bureau
are responding to harsh practices, which are part and parcel of that sys-
tem. His text aims to convince nonnatives that this bureaucracy is riddled
with problems that must be solved. Because rations of “cheap blankets and
shoddy clothing” contribute to a decline in self-respect among Indians, then
white Americans must seek out ways to reform U.S. policy with regards to
Indian affairs.66
The larger problem, according to Eastman, was that capitalism and mar-
ket impulses bred corruption among white men, which in turn spread to
the Indian businessmen they encountered. Furthermore, because of out-of-
date farming equipment and impracticable schooling, the political econ-
omy of reservations was neither self-sustaining nor in dialogue with the
market logic outside of these reservations. In many senses, Eastman saw
reservations as prisons for Indian people because they limited Indians’ abil-
ity to advance materially, socially, and politically within the United States.
Although the question of how Americans and Indians could escape the trap
of corruption remained, Eastman was committed to noting how Indian peo-
ple could participate in the world of modern capital with the hope that they
would not be corrupted by it.67
Eastman strongly favored citizenship and the elimination of the Office
of Indian Affairs (the official name of the bureaucracy until 1947, when it
was renamed the Bureau of Indian Affairs) as possible solutions to corrup-
tion born from capitalism, and he advocated a new sort of policy.68 This
shift relied on a strategic alliance between white and Native reformers to
manage modern capitalist expansion. Part of this management required
the embrace of spiritual beliefs. This ideology emerged out of the work of
white progressives who were active in the Lake Mohonk Conference, which
met frequently between 1883 and 1916 to discuss Indian matters and to
make recommendations.69 For them, reform took the shape of stopping land
52 Indigenous Intellectuals

speculators and others on “frontier” settlements in the United States from

taking advantage of Indian people. These reformers sought legislation that
would find a way to promote the progress of Christian settlement. Indeed,
the keyword here is Christian. Their reformist agenda was built on Christian
teachings. Eastman held both Dakota beliefs and Christian ones. As these
white reformers supported Eastman, he became part of the body politic.
In turn, Eastman reconciled his inclusion in the political structures of the
United States by presenting himself as a case study to gain the support of
white activists and as a model ripe for emulation by Indian people.70
In many ways, Eastman’s ideas aligned with those espoused by “eastern
sentimentalists.” Because The Indian Today aimed to reach white Americans
who might be sympathetic to the cause of the Indians in America and to
show Indian people that white reform organizations were essential to the
future of the Red Man, it celebrated what Eastman had learned from spe-
cific groups of “eastern sentimentalists.” He names three groups as espe-
cially helpful:  The Boston Indian Citizenship Committee (est. 1879), The
National Indian Association (org. 1879), and The Indian Rights Association
(org. 1882).71 Eastman makes clear that “To all three of these bodies, as well
as to the Board of the Indian Commissioners, belongs much credit for urging
the reforms which triumphed, in 1887, in the ‘Dawes bill,’ the Emancipation
Act of the Indian.” As Eastman affirmed the merits of these reformers, he
also celebrated, rather than critiqued, certain aspects of the allotment pol-
icy. In time, his ideas about the Dawes Act would shift to reflect a consensus
among Indian communities regarding the disenfranchisement and poverty
that followed in the wake of such a policy. At this time, however, Eastman
was eager to “mend fences” separating white reformers who held political
sway in Washington from an emergent pan-tribal movement whose power
was growing.72
For Eastman, then, reform needed to occur in two directions. First, the
corrupt agent system had to be addressed. This was an American and gov-
ernmental problem. Second, Indian people needed to be educated. For
Eastman, education meant skilled training that would enable Indians to
participate in market capitalism, and Christian ideals that could help them
avert corruption. His conception of education here fits within certain assim-
ilationist logics that underpinned Indian policy during this period. However,
Eastman did not view himself as pro-assimilation. Instead, he wanted to
highlight education’s merits so that schools and systems of education could
be overhauled to benefit Indian students.
Eastman turned to a specific site to support his conclusions about the
power of education: Dartmouth. He pointed to his alma mater and the fig-
ure of Samson Occom as a case study for “the most famous educated Indian
of his day.” Occom had traveled widely to promote Congregational minister
Eleazer Wheelock’s “Indian Charity School,” but Wheelock used any funds
Occom acquired to found Dartmouth College instead. Eastman used this
 A Global Mission 53

case to argue that “individual red men were able to assimilate the classical
culture of the period, and capable, moreover, of loyalty toward the new
ideals no less than the old.” Eastman celebrated Occom somewhat mistak-
enly given that he and Wheelock had a falling out after Occom learned
what had happened to his funds, and the power of education through this
example. Still, Occom’s success as an educated reverend and a member of
the Mohegan nation in the eighteenth century made him an apt subject to
honor, according to Eastman’s argument regarding the relationship between
education and racial uplift. In his overview of “Early Mission and Contract
Schools” and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Eastman again used
Indian education to argue in favor of assimilation, although he understood
it as a means of accessing politics rather than as a tool of manipulation and
oppression.73
Despite his own feelings about inclusion, Eastman recognized that many
Indians felt the debilitating effects of forced assimilation, oppressive educa-
tional institutions (like Carlisle), and paternalism based on racism that char-
acterized much of the Indian service. Certainly, Eastman’s citizenship was
not theirs. But because he was an interlocutor between white society and
Indian Country, Eastman also recognized the centrality of class in making
an argument for citizenship. He understood the contradictions surround-
ing class, race, and citizenship. “Among the thinking and advanced class of
Indians there is, after all, no real bitterness or pessimistic feeling. It has long
been apparent to us that absolute distinctions cannot be maintained under
the American flag.” With these words, Eastman asserts a belief in an elite
class and in the possibility of transcending racist practices through class
mobility in America.74
For educated and middle-class  Indians, according to Eastman, racism
was not a roadblock to entering the body politic of the United States,
which enabled him to make a critical distinction between citizenship and
cultural assimilation. The latter was understood by white and Indian pro-
gressives as a means for shaping the traditions, practices, and politics of
Indian people, so that they better aligned with dominant American society.
This point of view was not shared by all Indian people. Part of Eastman’s
aim was to convince other Native leaders to see education as a means to an
end because advanced schooling could ameliorate some of the differences
and prejudices that separated Indian people from white Americans given
hierarchical understandings of class and race. Still, Eastman remained
aware that educated Indians could easily be misrepresented to white soci-
ety, and he blamed the news media for these errors. “Whenever an Indian
indulges in any notorious behavior, he is widely heralded as a ‘Carlisle
graduate,’ although as a matter of fact he may never have attended that
famous school, or have been there for a short time only. . . . Obviously the
statement is intended to discredit the educated Indian.”75 Regardless of
their socioeconomic status to begin with, a Native person who became
54 Indigenous Intellectuals

educated, Eastman believed, gained skills necessary to successfully maneu-

ver within American society.
While Eastman argues that more education can elevate Indian people’s
political and cultural positions within American society, he also returns to
the race question, suggesting that Indian blood holds a special quality. He
establishes a tenuous link between social mobility, political access, and eth-
nic essentialism. In particular, he uses the figure of Theodore Roosevelt to
make a point about racial formation in America. According to Eastman,
Roosevelt “would give anything to have a drop of Sioux or Cheyenne blood
in his veins.” Eastman does not discuss why it is that Roosevelt would “give
anything” to have Indian blood. Instead, he positions Roosevelt within a
narrative that argues it is the Indian who is the first and real American. In
this case, Roosevelt’s belief in an Indian one-drop rule enables white people
to still be white without having to contend with racism, even while becom-
ing Indian enough to feel their primitivist desires converted into authentic
selfhood. Ultimately, Eastman uses Roosevelt to illustrate that “the intelli-
gent and educated Indian has no social prejudice to contend with” because
“His color is not counted against him.” This is an important point to make
regarding Indian blood as a celebration of authentic Americanness, as
the rightful property of Indian people, and as distinct from the one-drop
rule that worked to disenfranchise African Americans during this period.
According to Eastman, one drop of Indian blood does not taint one’s char-
acter as would one drop of African American blood, quite the opposite.
Eastman goes a step further by positioning himself against Booker
T. Washington, who, Eastman notes, has been “in the habit of saying jocosely
that the negro blood is the strongest in the world, for one drop of it makes a
‘nigger’ of a white man.” Eastman misreads the irony of Washington’s state-
ment to argue that “Indian blood is even stronger, for a half-blood negro and
Indian may pass for an Indian, and so be admitted to first-class hotels and
even to high society.”76 Not only is one drop of Indian blood different than
that of “a half-blood negro,” but it is in fact stronger with regards to passing
for white. His comparison rests on a fluid and fragile link between primitiv-
ist affection, Indian education, and class mobility. Such a link informed the
cultural logic that underpinned Eastman’s career as a writer and lecturer,
and therefore in this moment he is also making an argument about himself.
This example does not reflect Indian reality given that many Indian peo-
ple experienced racism. Ultimately, the anecdote expresses aspiration rather
than realism, but it does showcase the different ways Native intellectuals
could navigate a world where ideas about Indianness could be fluid even
when they appeared fixed.
Considering these two examples of Eastman’s representational politics,
we can see how he moves his readers to think about the “real” versus “imag-
ined” power of blood in terms of policy, possibilities for reform, access to
education, and race leadership. He asks readers to consider whether race is
 A Global Mission 55

a biologically rooted or a culturally constructed category. This is a turning

point in the narrative to prepare readers for what follows: a discussion of
networks and the Indian intellectuals who navigate and manage them.77
Eastman emphasizes how “Some Noted Indians of To-day” constitute a
network of intellectuals who will shape pan-tribal reform. He is among the
first to make this point explicit. His catalogue of successful Indians points
to the types of individuals he recognized as most influential within their
Indian communities and who could come together to affect change across
the United States. He groups them according to profession:  doctors, law-
yers, ministers, writers, teachers, and notable scientists, as well as artists,
businessmen, and athletes. He then turns to two more groups of Indian
intellectuals as essential members of the newly forming pan-tribal political
groups: anthropologists and writers. In regard to the former, he refers spe-
cifically to the careers of William Jones, Arthur C. Parker, and Francis La
Flesche. All three were important interlocutors for Eastman because they
worked within social scientific disciplines studying contemporary Indian
people. Parker was also a close, lifelong friend of Eastman’s. Parker had
professional success as the director of the Rochester Museum of Arts and
Sciences from 1924 to 1945, and was made an honorary trustee of the
New York State Historical Association. In 1935, he was elected first presi-
dent of the Society of American Archaeology.78
Looking at Parker, one sees an example of a specific network of Native
people who joined Eastman as participants in modernity. Parker recog-
nized that the distinctive character of various tribal nations was a chal-
lenge to any pan-Indian movement and why pan-Indian institutions were
“largely sponsored by mixed bloods.” According to Parker, Indian leaders
of mixed-heritage “have perspective; they see over the hills; they see the
reasons and the romance. Perhaps, too, they see the shadow that will soon
mean the setting of the racial sun.”79 Eastman refers to Parker as an Indian
activist who has struggled with these issues. Indeed, Parker’s mixed heritage
could make him more or less Indian in the eyes of others. In this way, Parker
and Eastman shared an ethos regarding their educational missions because
each aimed to bridge not only divisions between Native and white societies
but those within Native communities.
In terms of prominent Native writers, Eastman refers to Francis La
Flesche (who worked as an ethnologist with Alice C. Fletcher), as well as
Gertrude Bonnin and John Oskison.80 La Flesche is notable for his anthro-
pological work and his book, The Middle Five, which presented a critique
of on-reservation schooling. Gertrude Bonnin was a regular interlocutor for
Eastman through her work with the Society of American Indians (SAI), and
because she traveled in similar publishing and literary circles. Surprisingly,
Eastman’s mention of Bonnin is brief, despite her accomplishments as a
teacher, musician, writer, and public speaker during this period. He pre-
fers to highlight her work as a public speaker and because of her higher
56 Indigenous Intellectuals

education. He writes that she “attended a Western College, where she distin-
guished herself in an intercollegiate oratorical contest.” Although Eastman
and Bonnin were well acquainted and they both made a good living pub-
lishing and giving public talks, he says little more about her in this book.
Her gender may have been an influential factor for him. Finally, Eastman
recognizes the accomplishments of John Oskison as similar to those of
Bonnin. He notes that Oskison was “the winner in an intercollegiate literary
contest” and currently works “on the staff of Collier’s Weekly,” where he is
“praised for his literary work.” Eastman uses these three writers to empha-
size the importance of individual careers, but also to point out the various
non-Indian social networks that Native intellectuals, as writers, accessed to
promote their careers and their politics.81
In addition to doctors, lawyers, ministers, and writers, educators are the
backbone of Indian civilization as Eastman sees it. Through specific exam-
ples of other Native leaders, Eastman’s voice emerges not as exceptional,
but rather as characteristic of a larger trend in American society. In fact, a
significant number of the Indian intellectuals that he mentions operated as
a network for political leadership. Eastman’s text makes explicit the reach
and depth of these Native networks.82
After emphasizing how particular Native intellectuals shaped American
society, Eastman turns his analysis to “problems of race leadership.” Race,
in this context, means something like “race” as we might understand it
today and something like a quasi-“national” identity for Indian people.
Race leadership, for Eastman, is not tribal leadership. Indeed, the two
might exist in some tension. He points to the diversity and complexity
of Indian peoples, their distinct cultures, and histories. Yet, despite this
diversity Eastman is invested in a narrative that knits together different
Indian tribes so that they may preserve their “distinct languages, habits,
and traditions” while they overcome “old tribal jealousies and antago-
nisms” to form a newly powerful pan-tribal historical bloc.83 Eastman sug-
gests that the “arbitrary power” put in the hands of the “Indian Bureau”
is the main problem facing modern pan-Indian movements, rather than
tribal differences. Therefore, “race leadership” depends on overcoming a
history of paternalism and a failing bureaucratic system, so that the Indian
“is allowed to take a hand in his own development”  – a hand that is
both tribal (without the interference of corrupt government agents) and
pan-Indian (all Indians can participate in this process). Furthermore, dur-
ing the Progressive Era, race leadership signified a desire to uplift oneself
in material terms while working within a social system that defined race
and class status based on white supremacy.84
Throughout his text, education remains pivotal in Eastman’s assessment
of race leadership. He sees it as the means through which proper training will
produce “leading Indians,” and then identifies “the founders of the Society
of American Indians” as precisely these “leading Indians”:  Dr.  Coolidge,
 A Global Mission 57

Dr. Carlos Montezuma, white ally Professor F. A. McKenzie, Thomas Sloan,

Charles E.  Dagenett, Henry Standing Bear, and Laura Cornelius. The SAI
was a progressive group formed in Columbus, Ohio, in 1911 by fifty Native
Americans. Most were middle-class professionals. The SAI was established
to find ways to improve health, education, civil rights, and local government
for Indian people. The SAI also produced its own journal and publicized the
accomplishments of famous Native Americans, like Olympic gold medalist
Jim Thorpe.
In addition to a journal and conferences, staged Indian performances
proved an important strategy for the leaders of the SAI in promoting their
organization. Both Eastman and Montezuma were active participants in these
sorts of activities. At their fourth annual conference in 1914, Montezuma
suggested mounting a scene complete with an old Indian, an interpreter,
and an agent to represent a slice of reservation life for a largely white audi-
ence, who he believed was ignorant of “real” Indian culture. Such an enter-
tainment aimed to capture white interest by presenting Native culture not
only in real terms but in appealingly primitive and familiar ways. Eastman’s
reform efforts for the SAI took full advantage of both the stage and the page.
In an article for the SAI’s journal and Hampton’s The Southern Workman,
he describes Native contributions to American art, stressing the dangers
of allowing traditional methods and ideas to die out with the passing of
older generations.85 Through Eastman’s work with the Camp Fire Girls, one
of his many attempts to offer “Indian culture” as an antidote to modern
American disenchantment, he promoted goals of civil rights, fair treatment,
and respect through the strategic engagement of Indian culture. He also
invited this group to perform at SAI conferences, and his daughter Irene in
turn performed as a singer of “American Indian Melodies” at Camp Fire
Girls ceremonies.86 Irene Eastman had her own brief performance career
that capitalized on her musical talents.87
Like other Native women of the early twentieth century, Irene was often
marketed as an “attractive” and “charming” “Indian” girl. Like her father,
she wore different costuming for specific occasions, as the musical pro-
gram for one of her concerts shows. On the front cover, Irene’s supposedly
non-Native clothing represents middle- to upper-class fashions for white
women during this period. The back cover of the program notes that “Miss
Eastman has a musical voice, and, in her Indian dress, a fine presence.” The
interior image depicts Irene in the “Indian dress” she used for her concerts.
As “Taluta,” Irene performed at a myriad of public meetings and gala occa-
sions, including those put on by the Daughters of the American Revolution
and other women’s clubs. For the leaders of the SAI, their attempts to use
Native cultural performances to advance their political and social goals
were apiece with the strategies used by both Eastmans and other Native
intellectuals who sought large white audiences to hear their pleas for fuller
recognition of Indian rights.88
 newgenrtpdf
58

Figure 2.  Musical program for Irene “Taluta” Eastman, inside images.

Courtesy of the Jones Library, Inc., Amherst, MA.
 A Global Mission 59

Despite varied efforts toward reform, the SAI’s influence dwindled after
1923. The organization finally disbanded in the 1930s. Although the Society
did not last long, it provided a forum for Indian leaders and a basis for later
attempts to improve conditions for Native Americans. By 1915, Eastman
had served briefly as the SAI’s president and succeeded in organizing new
members while strengthening ties to white reform groups. Based on the pol-
itics he asserts throughout The Indian Today, we can see Eastman is express-
ing concerns within the SAI regarding methods for leadership. Although
Eastman’s involvement in the SAI decreased as he focused on his speaking
career, he continued to support its efforts. Through his success as an author
and speaker, Eastman increased his visibility as a public intellectual; with
this increase in visibility, he could “help his race” in ways that stretched
beyond the scope of the presidency of the SAI.89

How to Market an Indian Author

The most indelible marks about Indianness that Eastman left as an educator
can be found in his published works. By looking more closely at the circula-
tion of his texts and the reception of some of his ideas within key pieces, we
can access how Eastman made a living as a writer and, more importantly,
what his cultural and political aims were. Like his invitation to Mark Twain’s
birthday party, the world of books offered opportunities for Eastman to con-
nect with publishing and reading networks, which would not have been pos-
sible through Dartmouth, medicine, or pan-tribal organizations like the SAI.
Indeed, some of the particularities of his career as a writer add to how one
reads his spoken performances and other political projects. Eastman was
marketed as an Indian author, often in racialized terms, which enabled him
to gain support from fellow writers and white reformers.
Just a year after the photo of Twain’s party was snapped, Eastman again
appeared in a tuxedo jacket. This time, Charles Harvey was the photog-
rapher capturing Eastman holding a book while seated in a high-backed
and ornately carved chair. Harvey’s photograph appeared in the American
Monthly Illustrated Review of Reviews in 1906. It offered readers a rare
glimpse of Eastman not as the “full-blooded,” authentic Sioux Indian wear-
ing buckskin and feathers, but rather as a modern man, a reader, and a mem-
ber of elite American society. This image positioned Eastman as an author,
like the author’s portrait Little Brown and Company used in 1916 on the
inside of his second autobiography, From the Deep Woods to Civilization.90
Images like these framed Eastman more in terms of an upper-class and
educated cultural space as opposed to the spectacle of the lecture plat-
form where Eastman gave talks about “full-blooded” Indians while wear-
ing Sioux regalia, costumed according to white expectations of Indianness.
Eastman was an author whose work circulated to white reading publics
through well-worn intellectual networks. The doors to these networks often
60 Indigenous Intellectuals

Figure 3.  Charles Eastman: Author’s portrait (1916).

Archives and Special Collections, Frost Library, Amherst College, Amherst, MA.

opened to Eastman because of popular interest in Indian folktales as told

by an Indian. As much as Eastman’s books aimed to educate young readers
and their parents about Sioux culture and history, he also needed to earn
a living as a writer given that his medical practice was unprofitable. Both
these economic concerns and demands to see Eastman required that he live
a peripatetic life as a writer, reformer, and public speaker.
A large part of Eastman’s educational mission that has often been over-
looked are his efforts to teach America’s youngest citizens. By writing for
and speaking to white children, Eastman could reverse the Indian boarding
 A Global Mission 61

school dynamic in critical ways. His desire to teach children (whether white
or Indian) before they became fully entrenched into one particular cul-
ture enabled Eastman to shape how they thought about race, class, and
nation. This type of approach was in dialogue with the emergence of the
scouting movement in America. During this time, Ernest Thompson Seton
(1860–1946), a noted author, wildlife artist, and founder of the Woodcraft
Indians, began promoting the establishment of the Boy Scouts of America
(BSA). Eastman worked with Seton, who was heavily influenced by Lord
Baden-Powell (the founder of scouting in general). Eastman chose scouting
and similar back-to-nature movements, like the Camp Fire Girls, to further
his argument that white American children lacked Indian ties to nature and
the spiritual properties of those ties. Eastman’s stories for children, along
with his first autobiography, Indian Boyhood, represented the philosophical
ideals that underpinned scouting practices, namely that moral and spiritual
development could be fostered through outdoor activities such as camping
and hiking. All three men embraced the belief that American Indian culture
should be a central component of the BSA. This aspect of American culture
implied one possible audience.91
Eastman’s books were marketed across the United States to all types of
readers: boys eager to read tales of adventure similar to familiar pulp or
dime novels, folklorists who wanted to own a piece of Native culture, and
white bohemians living in cities who sought out examples of primitivism
to save them from their increasingly modernist selves. These audiences
were participating in an “Indian craze” that was in full swing by this time.
As Elizabeth Hutchison defines it, the “Indian craze” was a type of col-
lecting that connected “Indian things” to arts and crafts societies, museum
exhibitions, and world’s fairs. Furthermore, Hutchinson sets the “Indian
craze” against the backdrop of American primitivist and reformist engage-
ment with tribal peoples and in the context of an emergent American con-
sumer culture.
Eastman and his publishers exploited the market for “Indian things” by
navigating racialized expectations for Indian writers and advertising his
books in order to garner the widest possible readership. Two advertisements
for Indian Boyhood, from McClure, Phillips and Company, emphasize the
authenticity of Eastman’s story and its cross-generational appeal: “Boys will
delight in this book, because it tells how real Indian boys lived and played;
grownups will find it interesting, because it is the only story of Indian
life ever written from inside.” This sort of marketing was not limited to
the Northeast. An ad from the San Francisco Chronicle notes, “In fact, it
would be difficult to name a book containing so much of interest to boys
as ‘Indian Boyhood,’ ” while the Milwaukee Sentinel told readers that for
a postpaid price of $1.73 they could not only buy Eastman’s book as “an
unique contribution to literature,” but they could also own it as a piece
of American history. These types of ads framed Eastman’s narrative as a
62 Indigenous Intellectuals

distinctly indigenous story that was also a part of a larger American narra-
tive. For many white readers, Indian Boyhood was “the first time Indian life”
could be “presented from the inside” to them. Thus, they might embrace the
notion that Eastman’s book was “of distinct value as a rare human docu-
ment” because it was an Indian’s contribution to American literature. The
success of Indian Boyhood suggests that Native peoples were not outside of
capitalism, but instead an integral part of capitalist and gendered forms of
reproduction. Eastman recognized this sort of interplay and used it to his
advantage through his work as a lecturer, where he could condemn the pit-
falls of capitalism while drawing a salary based on market-driven demands
to see and hear a “real” Indian speaker. As a writer, he was also able to sell
his books as “unique” because they were written “from the inside” and then
tell a personal story that celebrated aspects of his Indian upbringing as well
as his life as a modern American.92
Eastman’s narrative throughout Indian Boyhood focuses on his child-
hood to argue for the successful conversion he made from living the wild-
ness of Indian youth to becoming an educated member of modern and white
American society. On one hand, by contextualizing his story in primitiv-
ist terms, Eastman could reach a white youth market interested in figuring
Indians and Indianness as authentic when viewed through the lens of noble
savagery. On the other hand, Eastman’s adult readers could embrace him as
an Indian doctor; in this position, Eastman’s authorial voice carried within
it a narrative of education, modernity, and assimilation as well as the types
of contributions he sought to espouse.93
Among the wide range of people who read Eastman’s books were other
American authors interested in writing about Indian subjects. One of the best
known, who became an ally of Eastman, was Hamlin Garland. Although it
is not clear how Garland and Eastman first became acquainted, they met
on a number of occasions. Both were living in Boston during the 1880s and
had attended and presented talks at the World’s Columbian Exposition in
Chicago in 1893. During this period, Garland was the first, together with
Thomas J. Morgan (then commissioner of Indian Affairs) to promote a pro-
ject to rename the Sioux in order to resolve any legal complications resulting
from enforcement of the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887. It was Garland who
thought to select Eastman to help in the renaming process, and so he was
hired to work for the Office of Indian Affairs in this capacity from 1903–9.
During this time, Eastman continued to pursue his writing career, perhaps
because he had the support of a fellow writer like Garland.94
Around 1901, Garland sent an enthusiastic letter to Eastman about
Indian Boyhood. Garland expressed that he had found it a “most delight-
ful” book, which could have been even longer. He wrote to Eastman, “You
must have a great deal more to say.” Garland’s remarks here refer more to
politics than literary craft. Specifically, he encourages Eastman to go a step
further with his next book by writing for a wider adult audience on the
 A Global Mission 63

topic of racial prejudice: “This book is, in a sense, a book for young people.
I would like to see a book from you addressed to men of like minds. Men
to whom race prejudice is a survival of no better pass.” Garland’s letter rec-
ognizes both the marketable quality of Eastman’s work for young readers
and the political possibilities now open to Eastman if he were to address
adult readers. This particular intellectual exchange augured the production
of Eastman’s second autobiography, From the Deep Woods to Civilization,
which did have a more mature tone and would reach adults in favor of
Indian rights.95
Like his exchange with Garland, many of the personal letters that
Eastman received celebrated his career as a writer. These materials, along
with an extensive set of book reviews, are objects of epistolary culture that
demonstrate the circulation of his books and his contribution to print cul-
ture during this period. In addition, the reviews reflect changes in Eastman’s
work as well as how readers responded to those changes in the context of a
broader American literary tradition.
The majority of book reviews for Indian Boyhood appeared in peri-
odicals based in New  York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, and other
urban areas like Atlanta, Chicago, and Rochester; with a few circulat-
ing to less-populated regions in California and Minnesota. In addition, a
smaller sampling of reviews appeared in locally situated outlets like the
Sioux City Journal, St. Paul News, Pittsburgh Gazette, Kansas City Star,
and subject-specific journals, ranging from aesthetics to religion to politics,
like Book News, Art Interchange, Literary Digest, Missionary Review, and
The Indian’s Friend. This range in publication of reviews for Eastman’s most
popular book demonstrates that his work appealed to urban as well as rural
readers and those interested in American literary studies as well as progres-
sive reform, whether secular or religious in nature. Overall, the social geog-
raphy suggested by the circulation of these reviews indicates that there was
a wide, perhaps diverse in terms of class, race, religion, and gender, audience
for a “real” Indian’s account of his life and the contemporary situation faced
by Indian people living in America.96
Among the reviews a consensus appears regarding the value of Indian
Boyhood: one ought to read it not only because an actual, “full-blooded
Sioux Indian” wrote it, but also because it dealt with details of Indian
life that paralleled familiar topoi in American literature. As one reviewer
from the Boston Post, circa 1906, notes, readers could both recognize ele-
ments in Indian Boyhood and find something new: “It is claimed for this
book that it is ‘the only record in existence of Indian life as it is seen,
not from the outside, by such poetic narrators as Longfellow, Cooper and
Chateaubriand, but by one whose own boyhood was passed among the
scenes described.’ ” These reviews, like Eastman’s publishers, framed his
writing using cultural authenticity and promoted it as the embodiment of
the author, as from the “inside.”97
64 Indigenous Intellectuals

As critics positioned Eastman within a larger literary history, they

implicitly suggested he might be taken seriously as an author because
his work could be read alongside that of more well-known writers like
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. However, they continued to rely on (and
make explicit) an authority that referred to the raced/blooded body of
Eastman as an author. His authority then depended on his status as an
Indian, perhaps as Dartmouth’s Indian, but still always as an Indian.
The very avenue through which Eastman gained access to attention and,
potentially, canonicity trapped him in the very expectations of Indianness
that he worked his entire life to overcome. In the Review of Reviews,
for example, Eastman and his work are described in just these terms.
“Dr. Eastman, who is a full-blooded Sioux Indian . . . embraced our civ-
ilization. ‘Indian Boyhood’ stands alone in our literature as a record of
much that has passed beyond the range of human experience, never to
return.” For both Eastman and his book, the “range of human experience”
is “never to return.” Thus, time for Native people is separated out from
the imperial machinations of the British, the French, and the Spanish.
Certainly Eastman knew this colonial past was long gone. Although his
writings gesture to an American nostalgia for this past, his primary goal
was to convince Americans to recognize the lasting relevance of Indian
people, not to relegate them to the past.
A review from the Chicago Inter-Ocean understood Eastman’s larger
point, and sought to reimagine Indian people based on Eastman’s narrative.
“It also appears that the Indian is not a stoic by nature, but is made stoical
by his training. Nor is he ever the stoic that he appears. He has a keen sense
of humor, and laughs as heartily as any one. He has affections the same as
any one else, and loves his parents and his family, his pony, and his dog. . . .
In short, according to Dr. Eastman, the Sioux is a good deal of a man and
a very decent member of the community after his own rights.” This review,
like so many others, emphasized to readers that “Indians are human too.”
Indeed, it seems that because the Indian is “not stoic by nature” but can be
“made stoical” by some sort of training, Eastman’s texts might be read for
Indianness that is both fluid and stable.98
Even though it was crucial to Eastman’s work to negotiate the fine line
between definitions of American identity and Indian identity, many reviews
still celebrated Indian Boyhood in explicitly racialist terms. One review
from the Boston Herald serves as a representative sample:  “The book is
unique, besides being full of information about the vanished civilization;
but it is the author’s pride in his race that makes it worth while.” Another
review, in the New York Tribune, uses even more paternalistic rhetoric: “An
Indian boyhood as this Indian describes it was full of action and entertain-
ment. The little Indian studied mankind and nature as the little Caucasian
studies books.”99 This reviewer sets up a binary separating Indian children
from the domains of “white” culture given that they are more inclined
 A Global Mission 65

toward the study of “mankind and nature” whereas white children put their
energies toward “books.” Read even more closely, Eastman’s childhood is
not without study even if his autobiography is to be taken as a work of
“entertainment” rather than a crucible for change. There were many who
read Eastman’s work, as Hamlin Garland did, and knew that he had the
tools to revise white expectations that situated Indianness in nature, apart
from civilized society and the world of books. This reviewer at least, ironi-
cally, elides Eastman’s current status as both an Indian and an author. These
were tenuous observations at best and destructive ones at worst. The specific
pathos of the Indian boy so easily collapsed into an ethnological frame and
simultaneously defined as entertainment contributed to celebrating the type
of Indian that Eastman sought to revise. He was all too aware of its corro-
sive power within American imagination; despite his best literary efforts,
this sort of Indianness survived, and paradoxically reinforced some of the
representations he aimed to destroy.100
A discourse of Indianness tied to intellectualism emerges further through
several reviews that position Eastman in the company of other Native writ-
ers, demonstrating an emergent network built and maintained by these
writers, their publishers, and readers. One article from Book-Buyer, titled
“Recent Writings by American Indians,” defines notable Native writers as
contributing to the formation of a uniquely American literature. The critic
observes:
Of Late years we shall call ourselves Americans, but, after all, are only foreigners
“changed by the climate,” have had opportunities to read a small amount of purely
American literature in the writings of some of the educated American Indians. Three
authors in particular – Dr. Eastman, Mr. La Flesche, and the Indian girl Zitkala-Sa –
have notably enriched our records of the characters and customs of their people.

In this case, Eastman, La Flesche, and Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin’s popular

pen name) are incorporated into a new American literature where the line
separating the genre of ethnography and literature is blurred. This fuzziness
produces a different sort of genre that promised readers authentic tales by
real Native writers. In Before Cultures, Brad Evans focuses his analysis on
the intersection between anthropology and American literary history with
examples of writers who were interested in culture in an anthropological
sense, and who published in literary periodicals, much like Eastman did. As
Evans notes, popular magazines such as Century Illustrated Monthly pub-
lished Frank Hamilton Cushing’s anthropological studies as articles along-
side literary pieces by authors like Henry James. For these writers, having
their work appear within a print culture that embraced the literary and
the anthropological was helpful in promoting their work, if also misleading
given that they could then be framed as natural anthropologists whose writ-
ings would enrich white readers with “records of the characters and customs
of their people.”
66 Indigenous Intellectuals

Looking more closely at the gendered and hierarchical language this critic
used to describe these Indian writers reveals a rationale behind why Eastman
was listed first. The title of “doctor” suggests he was given top billing not
just because of the popularity of his books but also because of his status as a
physician and a man. Notably, of the three only Zitkala-Sa is framed first by
her race and then her gender. Restating the fact of being an Indian highlights
the important pairing of Indianness with femaleness to suggest an underly-
ing desire for the exotic Native princess. And yet she is framed within a
colonialist discourse that genders her not as an adult woman, but rather like
Pocahontas, as decidedly childlike by using the diminutive “girl.” Neither
Eastman nor La Flesche is framed using this paternalistic rhetoric.101
In addition to classifying these writers based on the ethnographic dimen-
sions of their work as well as their race, gender, and class, the Book-Buyer
article argues for the critical role to be played by Indians as intellectuals.
As Robert Warrior and others have shown, the writings of Indian people
pushed at the boundaries drawn by scholars in academia, and by white pub-
lics who could not imagine the possibility of indigenous contributions to an
American literature.102 From today we can look back to this earlier moment
to reconceptualize American literary history. All three, Eastman, La Flesche,
and Bonnin, mention the benefits of white civilization while also valuing
Indian traditions.
It is interesting to observe that each of them has emphasized the finer aspects of the
old order – which, for them, has changed forever – with a pride that cannot fail to be
recognized by the casual reader, even where it is accompanied by the most courteous
acknowledgement of the merits and advantages of civilization.

As Book-Buyer notes, Indian writers worked as cultural in-betweens

when they preserved “the old order” to retain the finer aspects, even if the
same reviewer asserts that any cause for racial pride is now complicated
given that the old order “has changed forever.”
Looking to how reviewers categorized Eastman as an author and the
content of his work in terms of genre and audience gives us a window into
the world of print culture and his impact on it.103 These reviews also point
out the wide-ranging appeal and attention that Eastman’s books gener-
ated within local, regional, national, and international literary markets. For
example, on November 2, 1911, Eastman received a letter from Florence,
Italy, and another, in French, from Castres, France. Both letters requested
copies of The Soul of the Indian. As a narrative about Native spiritual-
ity, it attracted a diverse array of responses. Theodore Stanton, the writer
from France, expressed interest in the book because it constituted a remark-
able “oeuvre” unto itself. In addition, Stanton asserted that it was unique
because it was drawn from Eastman’s life experiences, and therefore, he
wished to purchase additional copies because of its educational value for
the public of France. Eastman must have been pleased to receive this sort of
 A Global Mission 67

affirmation in that it confirmed his larger aim, which was to educate not just
Americans but the world about Dakota spirituality in an effort to increase
public support for Native issues.104 Indeed, some of his later work, like From
the Deep Woods to Civilization published by Little, Brown and Company
of Boston in 1916, reached popular and influential readers who subscribed
to sources such as The Dial, Vogue, and The Nation, as well as periodicals
that highlighted Indian issues, like The New York Times, The Chauttaqua,
North American Review, The Red Man, and The Southern Workman.105 The
majority of reviewers positioned Eastman as authentic in the sense that his
writing lay somewhere between the tropes of primitivism and the ideals
of literary intellectualism.106 From the standpoint of publishers like Alfred
McIntyre, Eastman’s books were viewed more simply as commodities. In
fact, in 1916, McIntyre was anxious to get Deep Woods out by that fall,
so he offered Eastman “an advance of $250.00 on account of a royalty of
[twelve and a half percent] on the first two thousand copies sold, and fifteen
percent on sales thereafter.” After From the Deep Woods to Civilization was
published, McIntyre wrote to Eastman to celebrate the power of the new
book: “We . . . congratulate you on a splendid piece of work, which would
do much to give people a better understanding of the Indian.”107 In addi-
tion to support from publishers, Eastman received a plethora of letters from
friends, fellow writers, and interested readers who loved what he had writ-
ten and urged him to write more.
Considering the ways Eastman’s publishers promoted his books, the reac-
tions he received from his friends and political supporters, along with how
book reviews represented him as an author, suggest that Eastman reached
many different types of readers and that he contributed to building a dif-
ferent, distinctly Native sort of literary history for this period. The ways
Eastman’s books were marketed and read by young people, white writers,
and critics, as well as how he portrayed himself through these writings and
imagined different audiences for his ideas reveal a complex author’s portrait;
an image that dovetailed with his career as a professional speaker. A differ-
ent circuit through which Eastman produced knowledge about Indian his-
tory, culture, and politics, and where his efforts toward reform turned on the
power of public performance, took full advantage of the lecture platform.108

Performance Politics: Body and Blood

Based on the professional and personal networks he was able to access,
Eastman was often invited to give talks throughout the Northeast. Two
trustees of Wellesley College, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Wood, with whom
Eastman lived while attending medical school at Boston University, helped
launch his college speaking tour by writing to their friend, President Palmer,
of Wellesley College.109 In addition to women’s colleges, Normal Schools
became primary venues for supporting Eastman’s lecturing career. By this
68 Indigenous Intellectuals

time, Normal Schools had formed to train high school graduates to become
teachers. The label “Normal School” itself stemmed from the French use of
ecole normale in the nineteenth century. These institutions provided a model
school with model classrooms in order to offer “hands-on” training to their
would-be teachers. Given Eastman’s own experiences with higher educa-
tion and his mission to educate Americans, it is no surprise that he would
so often choose to speak in front of audiences filled with future teachers.110
In 1908, the principal of Worcester’s Normal School, Mr. E. H. Russell,
celebrated the power and excitement surrounding Eastman’s visit to his
school. Russell’s letter confirmed the important role Eastman could play
as an Indian intellectual by noting, “The secret of your power I  cannot
fathom, but I suspect it is in part that you do not give the lecture, but you
are the lecture.” Russell’s reference to a merger between the messenger and
his message reflects sentiments shared by other letter writers, friends, and
newspaper reporters during this period. Although Russell did not actually
understand the “secret” of Eastman’s “power,” he recognized that perfor-
mance was at work when Eastman dressed up to give talks on the topic of
the “Real Indian.” Russell linked the content and form of Eastman’s talk
plainly. “You seem for the time to be the embodiment of your race, and that
in its best state.”111 Indeed, this letter raises an important question: What
was the power of Eastman as the embodiment of his race? One answer lies
in the power of performance itself.
Russell understood that there was some power inherent in a public per-
formance by an Indian man who presented himself as both the representa-
tive of Indian people and Indianness as a cultural category. However, Russell
could not fully fathom the extent to which Eastman’s talks succeeded in
linking cultural aesthetics with political consequences. In the context of
Russell’s reading of Eastman’s lecture, one can imagine that the Native cer-
emonial dress Eastman wore was as important to gaining the attention of
audiences as were modulations in his voice and the positioning of his body.
Dress, the cadence of one’s voice, and bearing always play some role in con-
vincing listeners to take one’s speech to heart. Yet there was more at play
when a “real Indian” gave a public talk about the future of “The Red Man
in America.” The difference for Eastman was that he designed the content
of his talks to disrupt the expectations of his white audiences. For example,
in 1928, Eastman participated in a speaking tour in England where he was
encouraged to wear “Sioux regalia.” Such a request suggested his audiences
desired he play Indian for them, at least with regards to costuming, which
he did. And yet Eastman took advantage of this engagement and others to
speak on behalf of Indian people and argue their spirit had a real and last-
ing impact on American society. Wearing regalia could signify the past, but
Eastman’s words spoke to the future.112
Eastman’s 1908 trip to the Worcester Normal School proved so success-
ful that Russell argued more talks would be required. Russell went so far
 A Global Mission 69

as to say that “a larger and larger hearing year by year” should take place,
“until the remarkable characteristics of your race, now so little known and
so generally misunderstood, shall be fairly apprehended and appreciated by
ours.” Eastman must have been delighted to see that his educational mission
was starting to take hold, and Russell was correct. Eastman was able to
book more speaking engagements in the years that followed.
Eastman and other Indian intellectuals were often forced to navigate
their public presentations of Indianness in complicated if also contradictory
ways in the early twentieth century given the question of political message
versus an imagined racial essence.113 In fact, of the over forty-five articles
that appeared throughout New England, the New York Tri-State area, and
the Midwest from the early 1900s to the 1930s, featuring accounts of the
lecture career of “Dr.  Charles Eastman,” the most popular topic was his
interpretation and representation of “the real Indian.”
Two studio portraits taken while Eastman was an undergraduate at
Dartmouth College augured the performative nature of his speaking career,
and some of the ways he would embrace and redefine Indianness. In one
photo, Eastman wears a button-down shirt, tie, and suit jacket. This cloth-
ing was typical for him throughout his life. In the other, Eastman is pictured
wearing a Sioux costume with a feathered headdress, holding a bow and
arrows. Which Eastman could his audiences expect to see before them when
he came to give an address on the subject of “the real Indian”: the man in
the suit or the man with a feathered headdress?
In many cases, Eastman chose to wear different sorts of buckskin shirts
and pants, often with extensive fringed edges, and he would carry a hatchet
and/or wear some sort of feathered headpiece. He chose most often to repre-
sent Indianness by adorning himself with clothing and symbols that would
ring familiar to audiences. These were truly moments of performance given
that he drew on visual tropes that aligned with expectations stemming from
Western dime novels, Wild West shows, and later Western films. He was
keenly aware of the power of performativity given the many requests that
audiences made to see him appear in “real” Indian costume, rather than a
tuxedo or everyday suit and tie.114
Many accounts of Eastman’s lectures point to the intimate and powerful
connection he made with audiences by blurring the line between the method
and message of his talks because he dressed up in Native costume. More
often than not, stories regarding Eastman’s public appearances highlight
that he appeared in “full Sioux regalia,” even as they celebrate his topic,
the “Real Indian,” as one Americans needed to know. In these instances,
Eastman played Indian for audiences in ways that enabled them to hear
him. Ironically, the clothes that made him visible and audible to these audi-
ences’ expectations of Indianness also, in some ways, erased the reality of his
present situation. The trade-off was that Eastman could argue that Native
American people were fit for citizenship and integral to the making of
70 Indigenous Intellectuals

modern America. Thus, his physical presence as an Indian dressed in Sioux

clothing authenticated a particular definition of Indian culture for white
publics. By using buckskin to signify Indianness, Eastman elided the fact
that he usually wore tailored cloth suits. As an Indian intellectual, Eastman
needed a performative costuming repertoire, from a tuxedo to full Sioux
regalia, which he could draw on in strategic ways depending on the differing
expectations of his audiences.115
By the late nineteenth century, the proliferation of powerful imagery of
Indian people created by fiction writers had taken visual form in posters
advertising “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West and embodied performance by
the Native actors Cody hired to join his troupe. The popularity of these rep-
resentations may have prompted intellectuals like Eastman to find a variety
of ways to authenticate themselves as Indians. Eastman crafted a public per-
sona that was amenable to wearing a tuxedo as much as full Sioux regalia.
In either instance, Eastman could showcase his own display of Indianness,
and then use that same occasion to speak against hegemonic understandings
of Indian-white history that relied on and reified the tropes that made his
Native costume popular and spectacular. Eastman’s public performances, in
many ways, represent the high point of his career as an Indian intellectual
and the coming together of his education, publishing work, and the negoti-
ation of networks that linked Indian and white activists, intellectuals, and
supporters. The question remains, though: How did specific performances
and the discourses that were produced around these talks solidify a space
for Eastman as an Indian intellectual in American history?116
Like Normal Schools, the Chautauqua Circuit offered Eastman a net-
work of white publics interested in hearing his ideas regarding assimilation,
history, and federal policy pertaining to Indian people. The Chautauqua
Circuit was a traveling show that attracted communities to gather for sev-
eral days in a festival tent setting. The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific
Circle (CLSC) began in 1878 to provide those who could not afford to
attend college the opportunity to acquire skills and essential knowledge of
a college education. The circuit brought programs to rural Americans not
only to educate, but also to inspire and entertain them. The Chautauqua
experience was crucial in stimulating thought and discussion on important
political, social, and cultural issues, and helped to plant them in the minds of
citizens. This circuit was useful for Indian intellectuals like Eastman because
through it they could tap into other arenas: women’s clubs, elite men’s soci-
eties, and religion-based reform groups.117
At 8:30 in the evening on Friday, February 23, 1912, Eastman was invited
to present a talk about “The Nature Life of the Indian” at the annual meet-
ing of the National Indian Association (NIA) at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
His performance that evening spoke to the concerns of the NIA by calling
for a need to reform Indian policy in America. The Association was known
as the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA) from 1879 until 1901
 A Global Mission 71

because it was founded by white female progressives during the 1880s. It

is not surprising that the NIA was a largely female organization. The con-
nection between white female activists and Indian issues had been widely
established since the antebellum period, when women and clergy worked
together to send petitions to the U.S.  government to protest the forced
removal of the Cherokee from Georgia to Oklahoma, and continued well
into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries given the proliferation
of all-female reform groups. Eastman’s marriage to a white woman and his
ability to charm his audiences no doubt would have made him a popular
speaker among these types of organizations.118
Initially, WNIA’s efforts included approaches to end the encroachment of
white settlers on land set aside for Native Americans because of the Dawes
Act of 1887. They used a petition to address the obligation of treaties (with-
out a hint of irony given that allotment aimed to break up tribally held land)
between the United States and American Indian nations. Despite many mem-
bers’ support for assimilation practices and the spirit behind the policy of
allotment, the NIA remained committed to treaties and the recognition of
Native tribes as sovereign nations. They set an important legal-political and
social precedent for the work of other progressive organizations. Eastman
and the women involved in leading the NIA were interested in issues of sov-
ereignty, power, and tribal nationalism, even if they also supported allotment
and citizenship for Indian people. Eastman’s participation in this meeting
offers an example of how white reform groups allied with leading Native
figures. National in its scope, such an event was attended by high-profile fed-
eral officials like Francis E. Leupp, then commissioner of Indian Affairs. Just
two years later, and across the East River, Eastman was again the featured
speaker at an equally opulent event, although his sponsors were not female
and the theme of the evening had nothing to do with federal Indian policy.119
Given Eastman’s work in the formation of the Boy Scouts and his regular
association with members of the YMCA (he served as secretary for their
International Committee from 1894–8), it makes sense that he parlayed these
connections into an invitation to speak for the third annual sportsman’s din-
ner, a highbrow affair sponsored by the Montauk Club of Brooklyn, a pri-
vate men’s social club founded in 1889. Eastman may have been surrounded
by former Dartmouth classmates when he delivered his lecture on Monday,
February 16, 1914.120 Fraternal organizations of this sort offered white men
spaces to “play Indian” and the funds to invite actual Native speakers to
present at their events. The Montauk Club was a bit different in terms of
gender given the separate spaces set aside for the wives and daughters of
Club members so they “shall share with them all the enjoyments and plea-
sures which membership in the Montauk is expected to afford, and in this
respect they set a very proper and commendable example.”121 Any attempt
at gender inclusivity aside, race still played a critical role in how the Club
positioned itself.
72 Indigenous Intellectuals

The naming of the Club was both a negation and affirmation of

New  York’s indigenous history. Building on its Native association, the
Montauk Club distinguished itself from similar sorts of social spaces in
Europe. The architecture of the club made this sort of distinction clearer
still. The Club House, designed by New York architect Francis H. Kimball
and finally completed in 1891, was featured in an article printed in Frank
Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper to highlight the architectural elements of the
Club and to showcase the elite status of Club members, their contribution to
society life in Brooklyn, and the larger cultural role such a space could play
in the national imaginary. As the review from 1890 notes, “A grand balcony
will extend around the building at the fourth story level, and underneath
this will be a frieze, two and a half feet in width, consisting of a panorama
in red and yellow terra-cotta, illustrative of the progress of American civili-
zation.” This review also celebrated the future contributions that could arise
out of these new social spaces. “We hazard nothing in predicting that the
Montauk Club will become a most influential factor in the social life of our
sister city.”122
By the late nineteenth century, other Brooklyn clubs  – both men’s and
women’s  – sprang to life by the dozen:  the Hamilton, the Crescent, the
Union League, the Unity, the Germania, the Brooklyn, the Carlton, and
many others. Indeed, Park Slope had begun to rival Brooklyn Heights as the
borough’s prime residential area. According to the 1890 census, Park Slope
had the highest per capita income in the country and its residents were the
leaders of Brooklyn society. It was within this changing social milieu that
the men of the Montauk Club invited Eastman to present on current issues
facing Native Americans in the United States. As Brooklyn Life reported,
Eastman presented at: “A Memorable Sportsmen’s Evening at the Montauk
Club” dressed “in full regalia of a Sioux chieftain.” He spoke “before an
audience of what as a whole could be called typical up-to-date commercial-
ized Americans,” and reportedly succeeded in keeping “them spellbound.”
Indeed, the reporter speculated that members of the Club might struggle
to reconcile Eastman’s address on the merits of Native spirituality with the
decline of their own spirit, “whether with all our marvelous achievements
we had accomplished anything worth while when, by contrast, we seemed
so pitifully small in spirit and defective in physical endurance beside the
primitive, untutored aborigine.”123
A reporter from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle also commented about the
numerous stories recounted at the Club and the popularity of the event, not-
ing that “three hundred members of the club” had been present to answer
the “call of the wild” and in addition to dramatic tales of near-death experi-
ences in pursuit of wild game the men were entertained by movies show-
ing animals and fish in their natural habitat. After their dinner, stories, and
movies, Eastman was, according to the Eagle, invited to talk as an “added
attraction.” The reporter framed Eastman’s presence in terms of his status
 A Global Mission 73

as a physician, his position as a graduate of Dartmouth College, and the

authenticity of his Sioux regalia. Moving on to the substance of Eastman’s
talk, the article noted, “Dr.  Eastman, glorifying the men of his own race,
explained that, while the Indian was the greatest of all sportsmen, it was not
the desire to slay wantonly that impelled him to hunt game.” This appar-
ently “sounded strange, coming from a redskin, after the other speakers
had spoken so eloquently and enthusiastically of their achievements with
the gun, but then they all knew and understood the big chief and he was
roundly applauded when he concluded his interesting speech.” The report-
er’s interpretation of the reception of Eastman’s talk reveals two important
things. First, Eastman used this opportunity to recall a time before coloniza-
tion to highlight different approaches to hunting, to subtly critique the cur-
rent practices of the white men he addressed whose own exploits had been
touted that evening and no doubt fell under the category of wantonly killing
game just for fun. Second, the sportsmen at the Montauk Club bore witness
to an Indian who was skeptical about their contemporary hunting practices,
and yet whose very presence signaled the primitivism they longed for, so
they applauded Eastman’s remarks to signal their understanding. What the
reporter failed to articulate was the extent to which Eastman’s speech was
really “understood” from his vantage point and not just another interesting
story told by a “big chief” who ought to be celebrated as an “added attrac-
tion” for the sportsmen’s dinner.124 This example parallels the many occa-
sions in England when Eastman gave similar talks while dressed in costume,
surrounded by elite white men in lavish venues that equally embraced and
celebrated white understandings of a warrior aesthetic and primitive past
that Eastman would then undermine through his spoken remarks.
Like he did during his experiences abroad, Eastman used his definition of
the “real Indian” to denounce caricatures created by Cody’s Wild West and
later featured in Western films. Eastman questioned his audiences’ famil-
iar understandings of Indian people based on these fictional representa-
tions. In one lecture, he noted that the “real” aspects of being an Indian are
separate from the “happy hunting grounds” that have been invented by a
white man’s imagination. Still, despite Eastman’s attempts to revise domi-
nant understandings of Indian peoples’ lives as part and parcel of nature
and divorced from the contemporary moment’s technologies, ideas, and
practices, many news reports emphasized that his talks were about “Folk
Lore of the Indians,” which were made even more appealing because he
appeared “in Native Costume.” In these instances and others, the “real
Indian” rhetoric effaced the idea of indigenous peoples critiquing the his-
tory of colonization.125
One report in particular is representative of the kind of press that sought
to define the limits and possibilities for Eastman as a Native speaker.
According to Oregon’s Portland Argus, the widespread appeal of the “Real
Indian, Dr. Charles A. Eastman, A Full Blooded Sioux” who “Talks to the
74 Indigenous Intellectuals

Woman’s Club” rested in Eastman’s attire for the evening. He had been
invited to address the Literature Department of the Woman’s Literary Union
in Portland. However, despite Eastman’s career as an author, the reporter
defined Eastman’s expertise based on a description of his clothing:

Dr. Eastman was dressed in the full war costume of the real Indian, his head dress
being a genuine war bonnet, and his costume decorated with the wonderful bead
work which characterizes the best of these Indian costumes. It was not the costume
of the Indian Reservation or the Indians of the frontier who commercialize their
folk lore and their costumes, but it was an exact copy of the real North American
Indian’s costume.

Although this article focused on Eastman’s appearance, it also recognized

what was a “costume” and what was not. Eastman is figured as an authentic
Indian even when his “real” Indian dress is a “copy” rather than the original
“war costume.” Despite the ways that the report locates Eastman in terms
of ethnic authenticity, the recognition of costuming demonstrates a more
nuanced understanding of Indian performance. This may have grown out of
the development of cultural spaces in the United States that featured Indian
people as performers. By 1910, a large number of Indian people were work-
ing in show business and performing according to certain racialized scripts,
often reenacting the violence of the Western frontier. The vast majority of
these actors had not actually experienced this sort of violence firsthand.
They knew this, and in many cases so did their audiences; just as the Argus
reporter knew that Eastman chose to wear “the full war costume of the real
Indian” to reenact a historical imagining of Indianness rather than present
himself in contemporary dress.126
In fact, the Argus reporter’s reference to the reservation and the frontier
locates contemporary Indian people within two distinctly different spaces.
The first – the reservation – was a place in which government subsidies and
surveillance attempted to regulate bodies, land, and practices of Indian peo-
ple. And the other – the frontier – reflected an imagined and romanticized
performance space in which Indian actors managed the expectations of their
white audiences and the shows’ organizers with commercialized “folklore”
stories. In this cultural space, actors, like Eastman, wore copies of war rega-
lia to draw on popular narratives for the purpose of entertainment. Unlike
Eastman, they were not lecturing to a crowd interested in learning more
about the “real Indian,” but rather, they were performing part of an imagi-
nary Wild West that dramatized events from the past.
In addition, the reporter’s decision to discuss three different represen-
tations of Indians “in costume” and then to position Eastman outside of
these forums does important cultural work. Eastman’s exterior positioning
confirms a certain form of authentically Indian perspective, one where his
word is gospel by virtue of the fact that he is the real thing. In addition, the
references to other types of performances where Indian people, culture, and
 A Global Mission 75

history are reworked to function as entertainment suggests Eastman’s edu-

cational lectures may have operated as moments of strategic performance.
The question nonetheless remains:  To what extent did Eastman’s perfor-
mances succeed in blurring the line between fact and fiction, so that his
readers and the women who attended his talk might discern the rationale
behind his decision to “play Indian” for them?127
Like Eastman, other Native American people were capable of trans-
forming colonial concepts like authenticity through strategic performances
of dress-up. The political ramifications of ideas about “real Indians” dur-
ing the period when Eastman lived, wrote, and lectured often constructed
Indianness based on a set of binaries: Indian/white, traditional/modern, and
uncivilized/civilized. Those Indians who did not conform to these defini-
tions for authentic Indianness, based on the interplay of these binaries, were
often restricted by and challenged to think about how to “play Indian.”
Eastman’s speeches invoked full-bloodedness to “play Indian” as a lecturer.
But Eastman also used these forums to educate the American public. A cen-
terpiece of his intellectual work relied on challenging Indianness as it had
been articulated by writers like James Fenimore Cooper and by spectacular
Wild West shows, but also by more dramatic staging produced by Indian
operas, and those captured on film. Eastman took up this American cul-
tural history of representing Indians to argue for the incorporation of Indian
people as modern American citizens, to show the ambiguities surrounding
these sorts of performances. Therefore, his lecture performances and writ-
ings encapsulated the strategic and accidental elements shaping his larger
educational mission. Because he lectured with an awareness of the narrative
imaginaries that defined Indianness, many representations of Eastman as
a performer reflect strategic choices that worked as advertisements for his
work, leaving a lasting impression of his success as an Indian intellectual.128
Many reports also assessed Eastman’s performance through a discourse
of the body. The Pasadena Star, for example, highlighted an event when
Eastman did not dress up to align with certain expectations of Indianness.
This report describes Eastman as speaking “with the unemotional nature
of the Indian, clothed in the garb of the society paleface” who “kept his
audience spellbound with the simple directness of his story.” Still, Eastman
in “the garb of the society paleface” is figured as an Indian who is racially
distinct from his audience because of the “unemotional” affect of his coun-
tenance. The idea of the unemotional nature of the Indian subject indexes
here gendered ideologies around violence, for Eastman’s lack of emotion
points to an overcoming of a past that required violence when white west-
ward expansion met Indian armed resistance. The Los Angeles Times also
describes him in bodily terms, noting that his “coal-black hair, his high cheek
bones,” and “his copper color, his majestic carriage” define him as a “thor-
oughbred Indian.” These two examples help demonstrate how Eastman did
not always wear a costume, and yet he remained racialized as other, as the
76 Indigenous Intellectuals

proper embodiment of Indianness. Both the Star’s reference to “the unemo-

tional nature of the Indian” and the Times’ emphasis on his facial features,
carriage, and skin tone elide the political effect of Eastman’s clothes for these
talks. In these moments, we can consider Eastman’s body as a palimpsest,
a destabilizing tactic with the tuxedo, where meaning shifts each time he
dresses for a performance. His facial expression (or imagined lack of expres-
siveness) substitutes for Native costuming in these reports, and does its own
symbolic work, perhaps suggesting that Eastman as stoic warrior had much
to teach his audiences through the “simple directness of his story.”129

Transatlantic Networks
Eastman’s first crossing of the Atlantic in 1911, like that of Luther Standing
Bear and others, maps his mobility within indigenous history as a part of the
Atlantic world.130 These movements reveal the power and possibility open to
this cohort of Native people. For Eastman, the trip was possible because of
the connections he had made through Dartmouth College, his work within
the Indian Service for the Office of Indian Affairs, and his involvement in
the publishing industry. He returned to Europe in the late 1920s as part of
another important speaking tour. A series of letters exchanged between the
autumn of 1927 and the spring of 1928 between Eastman and members
of the Royal Colonial Institute of London showcases the types of lectures
he gave while abroad. For Eastman, these events were the high point of his
speaking career, and newspaper outlets from London, Liverpool, Bristol, and
Wales outlined his itinerary to promote his trip to European audiences.131
Eastman’s travels in 1928 would not have been possible without generous
support provided by the Brooks-Bright Foundation of New York, established
by Florence Brooks-Aten to foster good relations between English-speaking
people in America and Great Britain. The Foundation funded him “for two
months to speak before schools and societies.” Naturally or perhaps ironi-
cally, a photograph from the Daily Mirror captured Eastman “in full rega-
lia” during one of these tours. He stands next to Lord Dartmouth right
before his primary speaking engagement at the Royal Colonial Institute.
One among a number of colonial societies, the Institute was formed in
the 1860s and was headquartered in London at King Street, St. James. It
aimed to “provide a meeting place for gentlemen interested in colonial and
Indian affairs,” the latter referring to the Indian subcontinent, not to Native
Americans. This elite and storied location was an ideal setting for Eastman
to begin an extensive tour, which enabled him to give lectures throughout
England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Certainly, Eastman’s undergraduate
career at Dartmouth College amplified the interest of his hosts. Many of
them maintained personal if not ideological ties to the founding mission of
the College, as a place dedicated to the education of Indian people in the
Americas. As Colin Calloway has noted, Eastman’s prominence at the turn
 A Global Mission 77

of the twentieth century appears as an anomaly given that many saw the
College as ignoring its founding mission until the 1970s. This distinction
suggests his trip was even more critical.132
As the tour commenced, Eastman found many willing and curious local
hosts. Charles Thomas of the Royal Colonial Institute in Bristol, for exam-
ple, was “most anxious to entertain” Eastman at tea “at the Red Lodge
Wigwam” before his scheduled lecture on March 9, 1928.133 For this tea,
appropriate “dress” was requested. Thomas wrote explicitly about what
Eastman might wear. “We have been most interested to see the picture of
yourself in the current issue of ‘United Empire’ and we do very greatly hope
that you will honour us by bringing with you your ceremonial Indian dress.”
When Eastman arrived, he was ushered into a “wigwam” – a cultural space
rich with American Indian (and other) curios and trophies. Eastman was,
in a sense, a human trophy for the institute in Bristol as he wore his full
regalia and performed Indian authenticity for Thomas and his colleagues
from “The Savages Club.” No doubt club members were enthralled by the
presence of a former “savage” among them who played to their expecta-
tions regarding savagery. In the Wigwam, wearing “full Indian dress” and
performing according to Thomas’s expectation, if not outright obsession
with “things Indian,” Eastman took advantage of the Indian craze that had
spread from the United States across the Atlantic to England.134
The market for Indian things was largely dependent on primitivist
impulses, and rapidly manifested through the marketing of Indian com-
modities  – including actual people saying actual words, like Eastman.
As Elizabeth Hutchinson has shown, at the turn of the twentieth century
there was a marketplace for Indian objects, stories, and photographs that
depended on capitalist ideology and industry. In fact, Native American
baskets, blankets, and bowls could be purchased from department stores,
“Indian stores,” dealers, and the U.S.  government’s Indian schools. Other
activities related to this collecting emerged to include Native American arti-
facts in art exhibitions sponsored by museums, arts and crafts societies, and
world’s fairs, as indigenous handicrafts became models for nonnative artists.
In this context, no matter what his philosophical claims, Eastman could
not avoid participating in a marketing of his own ethnicity, for the “Indian
craze” was becoming global in its scope.135
Indian intellectuals like Eastman found ways to participate in the “Indian
craze” that developed and proliferated between the 1890s and the 1920s.
Two consequences of this craze reflected changes in both culture and pol-
icy. The first was an increase in the demand to see and market Indianness,
which fed into Wild West show business, dime novels, and films, as well as
the increase in sales of Indian curios and a surge in popularity of Indian
music – most of the parlor music that was sold was created by white com-
posers imagining Indianized themes. This emergent market was one that
both white and Native cultural producers could manage. In many instances,
78 Indigenous Intellectuals

Native people used an array of strategies to participate in the marketing

of Indian wares and Indian performances, whether live or onscreen.136 The
second outgrowth of this “Indian craze” was an embrace of the ideology
of primitivism in artwork, which necessitated the creation of art by Native
people. By 1935, the success of Native cultural producers and the wide-
spread effect of this market culminated in a shift in federal policy with the
establishment of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act. Eastman’s second trip to
Great Britain took place during the height of this “craze” precipitating the
Act.137
On Wednesday, March 7, 1928, radio listeners in England could tune
in to hear “An Interview with Dr.  Charles Eastman, Chief of the Sioux
Indians.” For many who happened to turn the dial this might be the first
time they ever heard a Native person speak, and so eloquently too! Less
than two weeks later, on Friday, March 16, 1928, the Western Daily Press
out of Bristol reported that “The Red Indian” at the Colonial Institute,
while dressed “in full native costume,” had given a talk the night before
during which he explained “the significance of the eagle’s feathers” and
other parts of his costume. Eastman’s talk, titled “North American Indians,”
was about the history of the “Red Indians” in America. Audiences listened
to him explain how, since 1894, he had represented the Indian nation in
Washington, and that the costume he wore was given to him by those he
represented. He went on to recall how in 1914, 2,000 Boy Scouts passed
through his hands in Washington, where the first principle they were taught
was “Indian honor.”138
Eastman’s agenda at the Colonial Institute was twofold: to provide his
listeners with personal stories and anecdotes that noted how Indians had
“evolved a high civilization without materialism,” and to emphasize that
despite a history of conquest and displacement, “the Indian spirit was hav-
ing an influence in America to-day.” Eastman used lyrical phrasing as he
described the important teachings Indian mothers passed on to their sons.
Through this depiction, Eastman’s crafting of Native families aligned with
normative notions of gender promoted and protected by a white patriarchal
society; indeed, however much Native people ought to be viewed as equal,
Native women should remain at home and in charge of the children. And yet
Native mothers, he argued, taught their sons “that possession was a danger-
ous thing, and that they must divide with their neighbors.” Ever aware of the
global setting in which he spoke, Eastman criticized capitalist impulses and
the detrimental effects of materialism on young people. At the same time,
he wore authentic Indian dress, ironically drawing on the very materiality
of his costume to enthrall his audience and add weight to his argument and
his place as a commodity.
Eastman’s lecture took place in the context of increasing industrializa-
tion, which posed a very real threat to workers, strained urban social rela-
tions among strangers, and, as Eastman and others saw it, contributed to
 A Global Mission 79

a decline in morality. Therefore, much of his speech emphasized the future

roles to be played by girls and boys, who should be taught to be friendly
to all of humanity. Like he had in his books for children, Eastman aimed
to educate the world community about an Indian solution to the problems
inherent in capitalist modernity; at the same time, he was able to argue
that Native people still had critical roles to play in shaping the moderniz-
ing world. Any apparent conflict between his anti-materialist rhetoric and
the spectacle of his own costume that evening reflected an uneven, if also
powerful, strategy of representational politics for an Indian intellectual who
was aiming to reach people across the world. Eastman’s political aspira-
tions while abroad revealed a highly stylized form of performance that mir-
rored his deep understanding of foreign desires to see him as the essence of
Indianness and also as a cultural ambassador for America. The fact that he
was speaking to a British audience, who were within a decade of the end of
the First World War, is reflected in his concluding remarks, which recognized
the value of peace and recalled an earlier era, his first trip to England in
1911 and the quest of the Universal Races Congress. Eastman, as transna-
tional humanitarian, left the audience with this final thought: “Peace I bring
you from America, peace not in the diplomatic sense, nor in the commercial
sense, but in the deeper, spiritual sense, that of humanity.” This second visit
to England demonstrates the endurance of Eastman’s commitment to racial
uplift and harmony, even while his educational mission itself was made pos-
sible by a culture of capitalism that created a market for Indian people as
public speakers.139
Eastman’s travels throughout the United States and Great Britain from
the 1890s and into the 1930s enabled him to make public speaking central
in his mission to educate others about Indian history and politics. Whether
looking at Eastman’s early engagement with educational institutions, his
foray into published authorship, or the various performances when he was
a “real Indian lecturer,” the complicated dialectical interplay between the
method and message of his work shows how strategic he was in his repre-
sentational politics. Whether he was mingling with aristocrats like Lord
Dartmouth, Englishmen who “played Indian” at their savages clubs, or
young people interested in joining the Boy Scouts, Eastman employed strat-
egies that yielded powerful if uneven results.140
As Eastman lectured throughout Great Britain and the United States,
reporters narrated the events of his talks in ways that sometimes ran coun-
ter to Eastman’s agenda. For example, some reporters misrepresented the
message of these talks when they ventriloquized Eastman. One reporter
paraphrased Eastman’s lecture, writing that “[he] laments the popular-
ity of Fenimore Cooper’s tales as conveying a false impression of the old
Indian life” and “represents the Indians as they were when their life had
been corrupted. The white man had placed a bounty on scalps, and a people
normally peaceful [was] reduced to savagery.” In this instance, the press
80 Indigenous Intellectuals

surrounding Eastman’s lecture reflects both his ideas and the ways that
editors and reporters interpreted these ideas. In other words, a reporter’s
misreading could be intimately intertwined with Eastman’s own representa-
tional strategies.
Eastman’s language was not exactly the language of the reporters, but
it was similar. Looking more closely at these reports, one traces a type of
colonial shadow language that echoes, mimics, and engages and is almost
the same. Eastman’s ability to openly and persuasively critique Cooper’s
Indian, for example, while he is dressed “in Indian costume” participates in
a counter-hegemonic performance that refigures Indianness. And yet, when
Eastman plays the part of a “real Indian” dressed in authentic attire, he
also points to particular origins for this sort of ethnic essentialism. Within
this same moment, Eastman strategically captures the complicated set of
representational politics he was forced to confront throughout his life as a
representative of Indianness, and as a speaker on behalf of Indian people.
Beyond the circuit of Normal Schools and international lecture tours are
other performance sites where Eastman mobilized and challenged defini-
tions of Indianness as a public figure.141
Through these different speaking engagements the very otherness of being
an Indian in American society enabled Eastman to address a diverse array of
audiences, and to perform both the role of the Indian philosopher and that
of the ruggedly masculine warrior. Eastman’s athleticism and Indianness
were often linked together to fit into an American manhood characterized
by an expression of strength in the physicality of the body. His ability to
embody the best of white and Indian manhood certainly made Eastman an
appealing speaker for white women’s organizations, and for white fraternal
groups who aimed to celebrate manliness through shows of strength that
were inspired by Indian manhood. Both types of audiences were interested
in Indian policy. The men’s groups, however, were more interested in playing
Indian through primitivist display than in lobbying for political change.142
Throughout Eastman’s life, he continued to draw on his early association
with Dartmouth because there were many advantages to maintaining this
relationship. On two separate occasions, separated by over two decades,
Eastman was called on by his alma mater to reprise his role as Dartmouth’s
famous Indian graduate, to remind students and alumni of the power of
Indianness in the College’s foundational narrative.

Still Dartmouth’s Indian
In late September 1904, Eastman received a letter asking if he would be “the
guest of the College on occasion of the laying of the corner-stone of Dartmouth
Hall.” Not an unusual request for a distinguished alumnus. However, this
invitation asked Eastman to participate in a double-performance. His pres-
ence was requested to recognize him as the most distinguished member of the
 A Global Mission 81

class of 1887, and to reenact a scene from Dartmouth’s founding moment.

Thus, Eastman was asked to play Dartmouth’s original Indian:  Samson
Occom. Dartmouth’s president, W. J. Tucker (1893–1909), wrote to Eastman
in reference to “a series of historical representations” that would take place
to bring out “a good many dramatic points in the early history of the col-
lege.” Tucker’s request for Eastman to play Occom “especially in his audi-
ence with George the Third, or in Whitfield’s church” was an unusual way
to celebrate the achievements of Eastman’s own life.143
By 1904, Eastman had already worked as a doctor, traveled widely with
the Indian Service, and was beginning his career as an author and pub-
lic speaker. In many ways, he was also beginning to assert his educational
mission: to teach the world about the real history of Native people in the
United States. Thus, returning to Dartmouth to portray Occom would have
been strange not only because one Indian should not necessarily stand in
for another, but also because Eastman clearly saw himself as apart from
Occom’s time and place. He was a modern exemplar of Dartmouth’s contin-
uing mission, which for Eastman rested not in civilizing indigenous peoples
through the process of education, but rather in educating Americans about
Indian civilization. Despite the oddness of Tucker’s request, Eastman none-
theless acquiesced and continued his long and fruitful association with his
alma mater, acting in the role of Occom in a series of tableaux staged by the
Dartmouth Dramatic Club. It would not be the last time Eastman was asked
to return to Dartmouth as a representative of Indianness. But, at least next
time, he would be asked to play himself (for most of the time).144
Thirteen years later, in 1927, Eastman returned to Hanover, New
Hampshire, to attend his fortieth college reunion. Throughout the reunion,
several photographs of Eastman were taken. In all of them he is dressed in
buckskin with a feathered headdress, and in one he appears seated atop a
horse in a parking lot surrounded by a set of black automobiles. Taken in
front of Dartmouth College’s buildings, these portraits celebrate Eastman
as “Dartmouth’s Indian” from 1887. Another, more provocative image was
taken with him posing next to his classmate, Stanley F. Johnson. This sepia
print from 1927 includes some telling details on the back. It reads: “Eastman
right, Stanley F. Johnson left, dressed in attire worn by his father on his hon-
eymoon in 1847 (I kid you not!).” This comment about costuming and the
past offers two critical elements to consider when examining the photo-
graph more closely and most importantly in thinking about Eastman as a
public face for Indianness in 1927.145
Eastman stands twisting slightly to the side as he looks off to the left,
and is nearly out of the frame on the far right side. The focal point between
the two men is occupied by foliage. Johnson lifts a cigar to his mouth with
a fuzzy left hand and grips a cane with his right. Both men are dressed
“in costume,” but the note on the back refers only to Johnson and not to
Eastman. Eastman wears moccasins, a long feathered headdress, and lots
82 Indigenous Intellectuals

Figure 4.  Dartmouth College reunion photograph (1927).

Rauner Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. Courtesy of Dartmouth
College Library.

of fringed buckskin clothing brightly decorated with different colors and

shapes. A hatchet rests in the crook of his left arm.
This photograph also displays particular kinds of gendered excess
intersecting with both whiteness and Indianness. A top hat, morning coat,
and bright white trousers for the former juxtaposed to intricately beaded
leatherwork, fringe, and feathers for the latter represent two different
forms of elite, elegant, if also extreme, manliness. One might see Johnson
and assume he plays the leisurely and empowered role of an upper-class
gentleman. Eastman’s dress could be read as chiefly in its warrior aes-
thetic, suggesting not that he is a savage, menacing figure but rather a
well-positioned diplomat and interlocutor between Indian communities
and white America.
Both men appear “dressed up,” and yet onlookers may have interpreted
a top hat quite differently than a feathered headdress. Indeed, an alternative
reading of the foliage as a framing device situates Eastman within the realm
of nature, whereas Johnson’s cane connects him solidly to both cement and
modernity, with pavement signifying industrial capital and the wealth born
 A Global Mission 83

out of modernization. But were these two men meant to be read in opposition
to each other? Perhaps yes and perhaps no. This image offers one glimpse
into Eastman’s choice of self-presentation. No doubt there were others. By
1927, Eastman knew how to navigate the arenas of performance that were
open to him in several ways. He had learned that his work as an educator
might require he wear a tuxedo, for occasions like Twain’s birthday party or
a meeting with Matthew Arnold, whereas other appearances might require
Sioux regalia depending on the invitation by his hosts, and still others would
allow Eastman to wear his everyday suit as he spoke at a local YMCA or
before a women’s literary circle. It is likely that for this reunion photograph,
he chose to adorn himself with clothes familiar to the audiences of his pub-
lic talks, but also to his friends and other alumni equally familiar with his
success as a public Indian intellectual. On this occasion, Eastman could not
retreat from the expectation that he was Dartmouth’s most “picturesque
figure” because he was also an Indian. During the reunion, Eastman again
played the part of Samson Occom to reenact the Mohegan’s first meeting
with Wheelock in 1743 and his sermon at the London tabernacle of George
Whitefield in 1766.146
By 1930, the man who had once been “the hero of the Boston society
girls” and who had “talked with Emerson, Longfellow, Francis Parkman,
and many other men of note” left most of his public life behind him. Eastman
retreated to a cabin along the northern shore of Lake Huron. This new life
in the woods allowed Eastman to focus anew on writing. Once there, he
started to work on a novel about Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa, based on a
1763 conspiracy and war against white colonial forces. Unfortunately, this
novel never came to fruition. However, the fact that Eastman had begun this
work suggests his optimism regarding how to change American culture had
not waned. While he worked on his novel, Eastman occasionally practiced
medicine and delivered lectures. During the colder winter months, he would
move southward to the Detroit area, where he lived with his son, Ohiyesa.
On January 8, 1939, at the age of eighty, Eastman died in a Detroit hospital
and was buried nearby at Evergreen Cemetery.
As Eastman wrote in The Indian Today on the topic of Indian identity,
the Native American man was a profound subject to study as “a man, a
philosopher,” and “a noble type both physically and spiritually.” With these
words, Eastman described himself as much as how to best define Indian
manhood. After his passing, people cherished what they had learned from
him as they sent scores of letters to his estranged wife, Elaine Goodale
Eastman. Throughout these letters, like the many reporters and audience
members who saw Eastman talk or who read his books, there is the sense
that he was understood as the physical and intellectual embodiment of a
modern Indian citizen. He was “symmetrical and finely poised in body”
and without “the garb of deception and pretence.” Indeed he was, in his
own words, a “true child of nature” in the best possible sense.
84 Indigenous Intellectuals

His story is a compelling part of this earlier era given his work as an
author, a doctor, and most profoundly as a voice for other Indian people
who were challenged by demands for assimilation into American society
and dominant expectations regarding cultural conformity. In the words of
his second, and last, autobiography, From the Deep Woods to Civilization,
Eastman leaves his readers with an ever balanced, if strategically ambiva-
lent, image of himself that engages these challenges. “I am an Indian; and
while I have learned much from civilization, for which I am grateful, I have
never lost my Indian sense of right and justice. I am for development and
progress along social and spiritual lines, rather than those of commerce,
nationalism, or material efficiency. Nevertheless, so long as I live, I am an
American.”147

Notes
1 Charles Eastman, The Indian To-Day: The Past and Future of the First American
(New York: Doubleday, 1915), 938.
2 By 1890, the Delmonico family restaurant business included four restaurants;
the “Citadel” at 56 Beaver Street was the longest running, beginning in 1837.
Today, it is one block from the National Museum of the American Indian.
Eastman entered a building that was eight stories tall and featured, for the first
time, electric lights with an entrance framed by Pompeii pillars and cornices.
Joe O’Connell, “History of Delmonico’s Restaurant and Business Operations in
New York,” at: http://www.steakperfection.com/delmonico/History.html.
3 The New York Times, the New York Herald, and New York World reported on
the event, in: Charles Alexander Eastman Papers, 1891–1983, MS 829, Rauner
Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH.
4 Ibid. This archive will be abbreviated as:  CAE Papers, Dartmouth Collection.
A  special supplement to Harper’s Weekly (December 23, 1905)  published its
speeches. Other notable figures:  William Dean Howells, John Kendrik Bangs,
Kate Douglas Riggs, Brander Matthews, Richard Watson Gilder, Andrew
Carnegie, George Washington Cable, Hamilton W. Mabie, Agnes Repplier, Irving
Bacheller, Rex E.  Beach, and Hopkinson Smith. For more on Mark Twain’s
birthday party see the PBS Web site: http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/
writings_seventieth.html.
5 Raymond Wilson, Ohiyesa:  Charles Eastman, Santee Sioux
(Champaign:  University of Illinois, 1983). The following shaped my read-
ing of Eastman’s written work: David Martinez, Dakota Philosopher: Charles
Eastman and American Indian Thought (Minnesota Historical Society, 2009);
David H. Brumble, American Indian Autobiography (Lincoln:  University of
Nebraska Press, 2008); Peter L.  Bayers, “Charles Alexander Eastman’s ‘From
the Deep Woods to Civilization’ and the Shaping of Native Manhood,” in
Studies in American Indian Literatures Vol. 20, No. 3 (Fall 2008), 52–73;
Theodore D. Sargent, The Life of Elaine Goodale Eastman (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2008); Michael Oren Fitzgerald, ed., The Essential Charles
Eastman (Ohiyesa), Foreword by Raymond Wilson, Introduction by Janine
Pease (Bloomington, IN:  World Wisdom, 2007); Bernd Peyer, “The Thinking
 A Global Mission 85

Indian”:  Native American Writers, 1850s–1920s (New  York:  Peter Lang,

2007) and Bernd Peyer, ed., American Indian Nonfiction:  An Anthology of
Writings, 1760s–1930s (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007); David
J. Carlson, Sovereign Selves:  American Indian Autobiography and the Law
(Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2006); Harvey Markowitz and Carole
A. Barret, American Indian Biographies (Pasadena, CA:  Salem Press, 2005);
LaVonne Brown Ruoff, “Eastman’s Maternal Ancestry:  Letter from Charles
Alexander Eastman to H.  M. Hitchcock, September 8, 1927,” in Studies in
American Indian Literatures Vol. 17, No. 2 (2005), 10–17; William R. Handley
and Nathaniel Lewis, eds., True West:  Authenticity and the American West
(Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Malea Powell, “Rhetorics of
Survivance:  How American Indians Use Writing,” College Composition and
Communication Vol. 53, No. 3, February 2002, 396–434 and “Imagining
a New Indian:  Listening to the Rhetoric of Survivance in Charles Eastman’s
From the Deep Woods to Civilization,” Paradoxa, August 2001 (Special Issue
on Native American Literatures, guest ed. Kate Shanley), 211–26; Erik Peterson,
“ ‘An Indian  . . . An American’:  Ethnicity, Assimilation, and Balance in Charles
Eastman’s From the Deep Woods to Civilization” in Early Native American
Writing, New Critical Essays, edited by Helen Jaskoski (Cambridge: University
of Cambridge Press, 1996); Carol Lea Clark, “Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa) and
Elaine Goodale Eastman: A Cross-Cultural Collaboration” in Tulsa Studies in
Women’s Literature Vol. 13, No. 2 (Autumn 1994). Also see: Penelope Myrtle
Kelsey, Tribal Theory in Native American Literature: Dakota and Haudenosaunee
Writing and Indigenous Worldviews (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press,
2008) for her chapter on Charles Eastman that argues he engages with Native
epistemologies as a method for defending Native rights, and specifically Dakota
worldviews. I disagree with Kelsey’s oversimplification of the critical contribu-
tions of scholars such as David Brumble, Arnold Krupat, Dexter Fisher, and
Bo Scholer given that Kelsey asserts they “overlook the subversive potential” of
Eastman’s work. Although these scholars do not emphasize Eastman’s rhetorical
strategies as methods of resistance, they do offer compelling portraits of him as
an author that allow for nuance and complexity.
6 Lucy Maddox, Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race & Reform
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), points to how representations of
Indians in the 1880s can be traced back to the earlier years of the nineteenth cen-
tury and the roots of Indian-white cultural interactions between performers and
audiences. Also see: Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
7 Out of fifty-four presenters at the First Universal Races Congress, ten men were
from the United States. Five of these were photographed in this order:  W.  E.
B. Du Bois, Prof. Earl Finch (Wilberforce University), Dr. Franz Boas (Columbia
University), Dr. Paul S. Reinsch (University of Wisconsin), and Charles Eastman.
See: New York Tribune (1911), CAE Papers, Dartmouth Collection.
8 In September 1911, Saint Nihal Singh articulated the mission of the Congress as
“trying to solve the world’s problems of race.” Singh’s article argues that human-
ity must be led by the demand “of the yellow, brown, and black races that the
‘white’ folk treat them in accordance with the Golden Rule,” a demand that
aligned with the work of both Du Bois and Eastman because they saw themselves
86 Indigenous Intellectuals

as leading figures with regard to racial politics in the United States. Saint Nihal
Singh, “Trying to Solve the Problems of Race,” The American Review of Reviews
Vol. 44, No. 3, September 1911, 339–44.
9 See: Kate Flint, The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2008), which argues Native perspectives are critical to our
understanding of transatlantic relations in this period and the development of
transnational modernity. Also see:  Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic:  American
Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), which defines the Red Atlantic
as the movement of western hemisphere indigenes and indigenous wealth, ideas,
and technology around the Atlantic basin from 1000 c.e. to 1927.
10 See: Robert Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian
from Columbus to the Present (New York: Random House, 1978); Tom Holm,
The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs:  Native Americans & Whites in the
Progressive Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 51.
11 Emphasis mine.
12 “Racial Problems,” in Irving Church (1913) was an article that announced pan-
elists’ papers would be published by the World Peace Foundation. CAE Papers,
Dartmouth Collection.
13 See:  Frederick Hoxie, A Final Promise:  The Campaign to Assimilate the
Indians, 1880–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001) and Talking
Back to Civilization:  Indian Voices from the Progressive Era (Boston, MA
and New  York:  Bedford/St. Martin, 2001). For progressivism see:  Richard
Hoftstadter, The Age of Reform:  From Bryan to F.D.R. (New  York:  Knopf
Publishing, 1955). And the work of:  Norman Pollack, C.  Vann Woodward,
and Lawrence Goodwyn in Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1966).
14 Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha 1880–1930 (New  York:  Hill and
Wang, 2004), 33, 10.
15 Charles Eastman, “The North American Indian” in Universal Races Congress,
edited by Gustav Spiller (London: P. S. King and Son; Boston, MA: The World’s
Peace Foundation, 1911), 367.
16 Ibid., 1–2. The World Peace Foundation was founded by Edwin Ginn of the Boston
Ginn and Company publishing house (1868). Like Eastman, Ginn was situated
at the nexus of two types of white networks that enabled Indian intellectuals to
circulate their ideas to influential white publics. See: World Peace Foundation,
records, 1899–1993, Digital Collections and Archives, Tufts University. Peter
Filene, “The World Peace Foundation and Progressivism:  1910–1918,” The
New England Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 4 (December 1963), 478–50.
17 Eastman, “The North American Indian” 367.
18 Ibid., 368.
19 Ibid., 369.
20 Ibid., 369.
21 Ibid., 369.
22 Ibid., 369.
23 For politics of representation see:  Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture
(New York: Rutledge Press, 1994), 247. Bhabha theorized hybridity, that which
arises out of the culturally internalized interactions between “colonizers” and
 A Global Mission 87

“colonized” and the dichotomous formation of these identities, as constructing

a shared culture. Bhabha has argued that colonizers and colonized are mutu-
ally dependent within a “Third Space of Enunciation” where cultural systems
are created. The advantage, then, for someone like Eastman was that he could
be more aware of the construction of culture and the invention of tradition.
Similarly, as public speakers, Native intellectuals from this period could embody
hybrid positions to strategically reject claims of boundedness within race, lan-
guage, and nation, as they constructed their own politics of representation.
Eastman’s very existence could then exemplify a merger of Dakota traditions
with values and skills gained through association with elite circles of American
society.
24 Eastman, “The North American Indian” 374.
25 For manhood as a gendered discourse that intersected with class and race
see:  Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization:  A  Cultural History of Gender
and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago:  University of Chicago
Press, 1996).
26 Eastman, “The North American Indian” 6.
27 Ibid., 374.
28 Ibid., 376.
29 Congress passed the General Allotment Act in 1887, the same year that
Eastman graduated from Dartmouth. Named after Senator Henry Dawes of
Massachusetts, who introduced the legislation, the Act required reservations
to be surveyed and divided into 160-acre sections, which were then allotted
to individual families for improvement. Any “surplus lands” would then be
open for sale to non-Indian settlers. Allotment would terminate communal
ownership and, its supporters believed, liberate Indian people from the hold of
tribe and community, where kinship obligations and reciprocal generosity gov-
erned individual conduct. For Eastman’s involvement see: Colin Calloway, The
Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth
(Hanover, NH:  Dartmouth College Press, University Press of New England,
2010), 120.
30 Eastman, “The North American Indian” 375.
31 Eastman first gained experience lecturing during college by giving speeches
before groups and at the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian.
See: Lake Mohonk Conference, eighth session, 1890, 46.
32 Wilson, Ohiyesa, 141. In fact, after the publication of Indian Boyhood in 1902,
Eastman accepted a lecture invitation from the Twentieth Century Club in
Brooklyn, New York for $100. There he met Major James B. Pond, a lyceum
manager, who helped book further speaking dates. See ibid., 140–7.
33 Eastman, “The North American Indian,” 7 and 9.
34 Eastman made his greatest impact as a writer with early sketches of his child-
hood that were first published by St. Nicholas:  An Illustrated Magazine for
Young Folks and later incorporated in his first book, Indian Boyhood, pub-
lished in 1902. See:  Wilson, Ohiyesa, 131. For Indian intellectuals as writers
see:  Robert Warrior, Tribal Secrets:  Recovering American Indian Intellectual
Traditions (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Maureen
Konkle, Writing Indian Nations:  Native Intellectuals and the Politics of
Historiography, 1827–1863 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina
88 Indigenous Intellectuals

Press, 2004); Kelsey, Tribal Theory in Native American Literature; and David
Martinez, ed., The American Indian Intellectual Tradition:  An Anthology of
Writings from 1772–1972 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).
35 Waldo Frank, Our America (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919), 113–14.
36 Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph
Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), c­ hapter 5, “The War and the
Intellectuals,” 174–5.
37 The Royal Commonwealth Society formed in June 1868, and was named the
Royal Colonial Institute in 1870. See: Trevor R. Reese, The History of the Royal
Commonwealth Society 1868–1968 (London: Oxford University Press, 1968)
and R.  Craggs, “Situating the Imperial Archive:  The Royal Empire Society
Library 1868–1945,” Journal of Historical Geography Vol. 34, No. 1 (2008),
48–67. See: CAE Papers, Dartmouth Collection.
38 For more on the history of educating Native American students at Dartmouth
see: “About the Native American Program” from Dartmouth College’s Web site:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nap/about/.
39 The Aegis (1885), Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College,
Hanover, NH. Phi Delta Theta was founded in 1884. Eastman’s life at
Dartmouth revolved around athletics as much as academics. At an 1883 track
meet, he ran the two-mile race in 11 minutes and 56 seconds, not quite fast
enough to break the College record, but an impressive showing for that day.
Off the field, Eastman, like many Dartmouth men, grew acquainted with sev-
eral people living in Hanover. In 1887, he sent a letter to a young elementary
schoolteacher, Miss Clarke, to accept her invitation for a game of whist. To Miss
Clarke from Charles Eastman, April 13, 1887, Letter, CAE Papers, Dartmouth
Collection. Such a letter was donated by Katherine B.  Evertitt, niece of Miss
Freelove A. Clarke, who, “in 1887, was a young Teacher in the Hanover graded
schools,” February 2, 1964 (Winchester, NH).
40 As Ann Fabian and others have noted, early nineteenth-century American inqui-
ries into race and racial characteristics often relied on collecting and dissecting
the bodies of Native Americans. Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science,
and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
41 William Gilpin’s Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel;
and On Sketching Landscape: to which is Added a Poem, On Landscape Painting
were published in London in 1792. Richard Payne Knight, An Analytical Inquiry
into the Principles of Taste (1806); Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque,
as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; and on the Use of Studying
Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape, revised edition (London,
1796). Dorothy Wordsworth wrote Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland,
A.  D. 1803 (1874). John Ruskin identified the “picturesque” as a genuinely
modern aesthetic category in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849). In the
twentieth century, see: Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point
of View (1927). The picturesque idea continues to have a profound influence
on garden and planting design. George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical
Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1971),
and John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque:  Studies in the History
 A Global Mission 89

of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Press, 1994).
42 Calloway, The Indian History of an American Institution, 113.
43 Ibid., 112. A chapter focused on Eastman argues that he was Dartmouth’s “most
famous Native son.”
44 Ibid., 118.
45 For more on Eastman’s life as a student at Dartmouth, see ibid., 116–18.
46 G. W. E. Russell called Matthew Arnold “the most delightful of companions”
in Portraits of the Seventies. T. H. Warren described Arnold as “a voice poking
fun in the wilderness.” It was Arnold’s introduction of a method of literary
criticism that brought him attention. Arnold shifted from literary criticism to a
more general critique of his age in Culture and Anarchy (written between 1867
and 1869), where he popularized the term philistine to describe the English
middle class during the Victorian era. A common ground may have existed for
Arnold and Eastman because both had to contend with misrepresentations of
themselves and they enjoyed a shared interest in literature. See: Lionel Trilling,
Matthew Arnold (New  York:  W.  W. Norton, 1939); Park Honan, Matthew
Arnold, a Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 399; and Ian Hamilton, A Gift
Imprisoned: A Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold (London: Bloomsbury, 1998).
47 Arnold does not just expect and want to meet Eastman because he is an Indian
but he desires to see a certain type of racialized subject that enables him to
fetishize Indianness as apart from himself, as the colonized “other.” In this
moment we might recognize in a flash the intersection of homoerotic desire
with orientalism, even though Eastman as “subject” is from neither Asia nor the
Middle East. A selective bibliography of scholarship that I have found helpful in
regard to queer and postcolonial studies follows. Michel Foucault, The History
of Sexuality, Vol. 2:  The Use of Pleasure (New  York:  Vintage, 1985); David
Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek
Love (New York: Routledge, 1989); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race,
Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995);
John C. Hawley, Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections (Albany: State
University of New  York, 2001); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and
Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2002); Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires:  Queer
Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC:  Duke University
Press, 2005); Rahul K. Gairola, “White Skin, Red Masks:  ‘Playing Indian’ in
Queer Images from Physique Pictorial, 1957–67,” Liminalities:  A  Journal of
Performance Studies Vol. 8, No. 4, September 2012.
48 President W. J. Tucker to Charles A. Eastman, September 1904, Letters, CAE
Papers, Dartmouth College.
49 Newspaper article:  “Wedded to a Sioux Indian:  The child poet of Sky
Farm becomes Mrs. Charles Eastman,” The Sun, Elaine Goodale Eastman
Papers [hereinafter EGE Papers], Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College,
Northampton, MA.
50 While Eastman attended Boston University, he lived with Mr. and Mrs. Frank
Wood. The couple influenced Eastman in terms of Christianity, and as trust-
ees of Wellesley College helped him to procure a speaking engagement there.
90 Indigenous Intellectuals

For more on their relationship see:  Anna Lee Stensland, “Charles Alexander
Eastman: Sioux Storyteller and Historian,” American Indian Quarterly Vol. 3,
No. 3, Autumn 1977, 199–208.
51 Calloway, The Indian History of an American Institution, 123; Wilson, Ohiyesa,
59–61; Charles Eastman, From the Deep Woods to Civilization (Little, Brown
and Company, 1916), 11–14.
52 John G. Neihardt to Elaine Goodale Eastman, September 5, 1945, Letter, EGE
Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. Years later,
in 1945, Elaine received letters from John G. Neihardt (director of information
for the Office of Indian Affairs) and Arthur C.  Parker (then president of the
New York State Historical Association) that applauded her excellent article on
“The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee Massacre.” Neihardt remarked, “I spent
a great deal of time studying in that field, and I think yours is easily the best
article I have seen on the subject.”
53 Ruth Ann Alexander, “Elaine Goodale Eastman and the Failure of the Feminist
Protestant Ethic,” Great Plains Quarterly 8, 1988, 89–101; Elaine Goodale
Eastman, “All the Days of My Life,” South Dakota Historical Review 2, 1937,
171–84; Elaine Goodale Eastman, Sister to the Sioux, edited by Kay Graber
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978).
54 Elaine was a poet and a writer before she became a teacher. Some of her earliest
publications are available in the Jones Library Archives, Amherst, MA.
55 Wilson, Ohiyesa, 163–5; Margaret D. Jacobs, “The Eastmans and the Luhans,
Interracial Marriage between White Women and Native American Men,
1875–1935,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies Vol. 23, No. 3, 2002, 38.
56 According to Margaret D.  Jacobs, Elaine’s “vision of womanhood and man-
hood began to veer away from that of her husband’s” (“The Eastmans and the
Luhans,”40).
57 Kiara M. Vigil, “From Ohiyesa’s ‘Deep Woods’ to the ‘Civilization’ of
Charles: Critiquing and Articulating Native American Manhood in Eastman’s
Autobiography,” Master’s Thesis, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH,
2006, 54–8.
58 Indian Boyhood (1902; McClure Philips and Company), From the Deep Woods
to Civilization (1916; Little, Brown and Company), The Soul of the Indian
(1911; Houghton Mifflin), Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904; Harper
and Brothers), Wigwam Evenings: Sioux Folk Tales (1909; Little, Brown and
Company).
59 Eastman, From the Deep Woods to Civilization, 187.
60 In the preface to The Indian Today, a biography of Eastman lists his educational
path: two years at Beloit, then Knox College, IL, then Kimball Union Academy,
NH, and Dartmouth College (1887), and a MD from Boston University in
1890. See: Eastman, The Indian To-Day.
61 Eastman, The Indian To-Day, 11.
62 “Eminent domain,” also called “condemnation,” is the legal process by which
a public body (and certain private bodies, such as utility companies, railroads,
and some others) are given legal power to acquire private property for a use that
has been declared public by constitution, statute, or ordinance. Eastman, The
Indian To-Day, 298.
 A Global Mission 91

63 For more on an African American intellectual tradition see:  Edward J.

Blum and Jason R. Young, The Souls of W.E.B. Du Bois:  New Essays and
Reflections (Macon, GA:  Mercer University Press, 2009); W. E.  B. Du Bois,
The Souls of Black Folk (1903; repr., Oxford:  Oxford University Press,
2009); Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood:  The Emergence of the
Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987);
James West Davidson, They Say: Ida B. Wells and the Reconstruction of Race
(New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2007); Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race
& Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1981); Kevin Kelly Gaines, Uplifting the
Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel
Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Alice Gambrell, Women
Intellectuals, Modernism, and Difference:  Transatlantic Culture, 1919–1945
(Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1997); Paula Giddings, When and
Where I  Enter:  The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America
(New  York:  W. Morrow, 1984); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous
Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Zora Neale Hurston, Mules
and Men (1935; repr., New York: Perennial Library, 1990); Manning Marable
and Vanessa Jones, Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Tricia Rose, Kennell A. Jackson, and
Harry Justin Elam, Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance
and Popular Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); Booker
T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (1901; repr., Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1963); Deborah G. White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women
in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New  York:  W. W.  Norton, 1999); E.
Frances White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics
of Respectability (Philadelphia:  Temple University Press, 2001); Victoria W.
Wolcott, Remaking Respectability:  African American Women in Interwar
Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
64 Eastman, The Indian To-Day, 20.
65 Ibid., 304, 317. Eastman and other reformers were influenced by Helen
Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1881). For Native American history
see:  Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father:  The United States Government
and the American Indians (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1986);
Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age
of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
1986); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in
the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1991); Gregory E. Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indians’
Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1992); Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (Boston,
MA: Penguin, 2002); James Brooks, Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and
Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill:  University of North
Carolina Press, 2002); Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism
from Lewis & Clark to Wounded Knee (New  York:  Cambridge University
Press, 2004); Tiya Miles, Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family
in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
92 Indigenous Intellectuals

66 Eastman, The Indian To-Day, 23.

67 Ibid., 373 and 379. See:  Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; Hoxie,
Talking Back to Civilization; and Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation
of America:  Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New  York:  Hill and
Wang, 2007).
68 With help from Hamlin Garland, Eastman was hired to work for the Office of
Indian Affairs (between 1903 and 1909) to help in renaming the Sioux in order,
he thought, to assist them in receiving allotments and other benefits from the
Federal Government. For more see: Wilson, Ohiyesa, 120–9.
69 White leaders and reformers who allied with Eastman in working toward a
policy of inclusion were: General Grant, Bishops Whipple and Hare, William
Welsh and his nephew Herbert Welsh (of Philadelphia), Commissioner of Indian
Affairs Smith, General Samuel Armstrong, General Richard Pratt, and many
who created Chautauqua societies and women’s organizations, as well as Albert
K. Smiley, the founder of the Mohonk Conference. See: Eastman, The Indian
To-Day, 435–49.
70 Eastman, The Indian To-Day, 435 and 449. Eastman credits “the influence of the
missionaries and their converts” for “the practical education of the Indian chil-
dren” (467). Smiley was also a member of the Board of Indian Commissioners.
71 The Boston Indian Citizenship Committee was an association for the protection
of the rights of Indians; organized in 1879 because of the forcible removal of the
Ponca. Chief Standing Bear, released on a writ of habeas corpus, went to Boston
to note that signatures in favor of removal were fraudulent and to enlist the
sympathy of Hon. John D. Long, then governor of Massachusetts. The commit-
tee then attempted to secure citizenship for Indians on the basis of the payment
of taxes, a principle that was finally denied by the U.S. Supreme Court. After the
Dawes bill was passed, the committee devoted its attention to securing honest
allotment. See: Frederick Webb Hodge, Handbook of American Indians North
of Mexico (Washington, DC:  Government Print Office, 1906). The National
Indian Association began as the Women’s National Indian Association. The
Indian Rights Association was a humanitarian group dedicated to federal U.S.
Indian policy and protecting Indians of the United States. The first meeting of
the Association was held on December 15, 1882 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
in the home of Herbert Welsh, who served as its executive secretary. Welsh,
along with Matthew Sniffen and Lawrence Lindley, directed the group’s efforts
from 1882 to 1904, mostly out of Philadelphia. These figures were regular cor-
respondents with Charles Eastman, Carlos Montezuma, and Gertrude Bonnin.
For primary documents see:  Manuscript 061, The Indian Rights Association
Pamphlets, Years: 1884–1985; bulk 1884–1934, Center of Southwest Studies,
Fort Lewis College, Durango, CO.
72 Eastman, The Indian To-Day, 486–90. The National Indian Association slo-
gan: “Education; Land in Severalty; Citizenship!”
73 Eastman, The Indian To-Day, 543, 585, 591, and 944 for reference to Carlisle.
Also see:  Elaine Goodale, Pratt:  The Red Man’s Moses (Norman:  University
of Oklahoma Press, 1935). For more on Carlisle and other Indian schools
see:  Robert Trennert, The Phoenix Indian School:  Forced Assimilation in
Arizona, 1891–1935 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988); Tsianina
K. Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light:  The Story of Chilocco Indian
 A Global Mission 93

School (Lincoln and London:  University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Devon

Mihesuah, Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee
Female Seminary, 1851–1909 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
74 Eastman, The Indian To-Day, 861.
75 Ibid., 939.
76 Ibid., 970–2, 975.
77 Ibid., 970–2, 975.
78 Arthur C. Parker to Elaine Goodale Eastman, July 13, 1945, Letter, EGE Papers,
Smith Collection. Like Whitecloud, Bonnin, Deloria, and Eastman, Parker was
himself of “mixed” descent. His family had both Seneca and Scots-English roots.
79 Ibid.
80 Alice C. Fletcher (1838–1923) worked for Frederick Ward Putnam and trained as
an ethnologist under Franz Boas. She was the leader of “Friends of the Indians,”
and with WNIA introduced a system of making small loans to Indians, so they
could buy land and houses. She published Indian Education and Civilization
(1888), was a member of the Archaeological Institute of America (1879), and
worked with the Omahas through the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and
Ethnology at Harvard University. See: Joan Mark, “Fletcher, Alice Cunningham”
in American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
See: The Papers of Alice Cunningham Fletcher and Francis La Flesche, National
Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
81 Indian business leaders:  General Pleasant Porter (president of a railroad line
in Oklahoma), Mr. Hill (of Texas), Howard Gansworth (graduate of Carlisle
and Princeton); Indian athletes:  Longboat, Sockalexis, Bemus Pierce, Frank
Hudson, Tewanima, Metoxen, Myers, Bender, and Jim Thorpe. See: Eastman,
The Indian Today.
82 Eastman, The Indian To-Day. Eastman uses his brother John Eastman (minis-
ter) as an example of a less formally educated yet still influential Indian intellec-
tual leader.
83 Although Eastman was no student of Antonio Gramsci, they did live during
the same time period. It seems possible that some of Gramsci’s thinking regard-
ing the attainment of power through cultural hegemony may have reached
Eastman’s intellectual circles. In regards to Eastman’s thinking, in The Indian
Today we can see that his views align with Gramsci’s notion that any class that
wishes to dominate in modern society must move beyond its own narrow eco-
nomic and corporate interests, to exert intellectual and moral leadership, and to
make alliances and compromises with a variety of social forces. Gramsci defines
this union as a “historic bloc,” taking a term from Georges Sorel. Eastman was
certainly invested in finding a way to assert power for Indian people within the
preexisting social order, rather than through violent revolution. His ideas would
in some ways reproduce the hegemony of the dominant class that had so long
subordinated him and other Indian people, which was especially true when he
first supported allotment and the Dawes Act, although his views on this policy
would shift decades later.
84 Eastman, The Indian To-Day. See:  “In Search of Progressivism” (1982) by
Daniel Rodgers, who argues the pluralistic and political scientists’ readings of
Progressives moved the historiographical debate past the “essence” of progres-
sive politics to focus on the context of the historical moment. In this reading,
94 Indigenous Intellectuals

standardization and professionalization are the tools with which this rising
middle class can grapple with social and economic dislocations of an increas-
ingly industrialized, urbanized, and mechanized world.
85 Eastman, “My People,” 181–2; Charles Eastman, “Life and Handicrafts of the
Northern Ojibwas,” Southern Workman 40, May 1911, 273–8.
86 Charles Eastman, Indian Scout Crafts and Lore (New York: Dover Publications,
1974); Marguerite Norris Davis, “An Indian Princess Comes into Her Own,” St.
Nicholas 50, July 1923, 939; “Men and Women Whose Lives Count for the Red
Man’s Cause: Irene Eastman, Taluta, Soprano,” American Indian Magazine 5,
October–December 1917, 263–4; “American Indian Melodies” (a program for
Irene Eastman) in SAI Papers, reel 3.
87 For musical program, photographs of Irene Eastman, and other ephemera
related to her performance career see: Eastman Folder, Jones Library Archives,
Amherst, MA.
88 Sherry Smith has argued that many educated Native people “understood”
that their world included interactions with white Americans and that their
self-definition in particular could not exist outside of white society. Sherry
Smith, Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880–1940
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 11. For more about SAI members’
efforts to use staged productions of Indianness see:  Michelle Wick Patterson,
“ ‘Real’ Indian Songs: The Society of American Indians and the Use of Native
American Culture as a Means of Reform,” American Indian Quarterly Vol. 26,
No. 1, Winter 2002, 44–66.
89 In The Indian Today, Eastman announces the fifth meeting of the SAI, gives a
brief history of the organization, and recognizes Arthur C. Parker’s contribution
as secretary and treasurer. Members of the SAI were committed to reforming
not only policies, but also perceptions of Indianness in America. For example,
some lobbied against the use of derogatory terms such as buck and squaw; oth-
ers wrote articles against the use of “show Indians” in Wild West entertainment
spectacles. Unfortunately, reaching consensus proved difficult for the SAI and
may have contributed to its decline. For example, Carlos Montezuma urged the
SAI to openly criticize the Office of Indian Affairs for the mismanagement of
reservations and called for its termination. As a result, he faced pushback from
the majority of Society members for being too radical; after all, many Native
people were employed by the Indian Service. Consequently, Montezuma turned
his back on their efforts.
90 Figure  3:  Charles Alexander Eastman, 1916, author’s portrait for From the
Deep Woods to Civilization (Boston, MA: Little Brown and Company, 1916),
courtesy of the Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg Collection of Native American
Literature, Archives and Special Collections, Frost Library, Amherst College,
Amherst, MA.
91 Brian Morris, Ernest Thompson Seton, Founder of the Woodcraft Movement
1860–1946:  Apostle of Indian Wisdom and Pioneer Ecologist (Lewiston,
NY:  Edwin Mellen Press, 2007); David Witt, Ernest Thompson Seton, The
Life and Legacy of an Artist and Conservationist (Utah: Gibbs Smith, 2010);
Jay Mechling, On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth
(Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2001); Wilson, Ohiyesa; Charles
Eastman, Indian Scout Craft and Lore (New York: Dover Publications, 1974).
 A Global Mission 95

92 Newspaper Clippings, CAE Papers, Dartmouth Collection.

93 McIntyre to Charles Eastman regarding Indian Boyhood, September 28, 1900,
in CAE Papers, Dartmouth Collection. Publisher: “The rest of this is still in Mr.
Phillips’s hands who is so much interested in what he has read that he wishes
to read every line of it. I think I could not send you a more favorable report.”
94 Donald Pizer, Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1960) and Keith Newlin, Hamlin Garland, a Life
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). Also see: Wilson, Ohiyesa, 121.
95 Hamlin Garland to Charles Eastman, November 14 circa 1901–2, in CAE
Papers, Dartmouth Collection. Hamlin Garland, The Captain of the Gray
Horse Troop (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1901); second print-
ing by Curtis Publishing Company in 1902. These two publication dates give
us a sense of when this letter was sent.
96 See CAE Papers, Dartmouth Collection. I  have found approximately
seventy-five book reviews of Indian Boyhood. Most of the reviews are titled
“Indian Boyhood” or “Book Review” or in some cases “A Sioux Indian’s
Autobiography” or Tales of Indian Boyhood Spent in a Sioux Tepee” (Brooklyn
Daily Eagle).
97 For a different account of the politics of authenticity with regards to race, gen-
der, and authorship see: Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).
98 CAE Papers, 1891–1983, MS 829, Rauner Special Collections Library,
Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH.
99 CAE Papers, Dartmouth College, Special Collections, Hanover, NH.
100 Ibid.
101 Brad Evans, Before Cultures:  The Ethnographic Imagination in American
Literature, 1865–1920 (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2005) and
Michael Elliott, The Culture Concept:  Writing and Difference in the Age of
Realism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2002) inform how I contextu-
alize the ways that readers and reviewers sought to position Charles Eastman’s
writings.
102 Robert Warrior, The People and the Word:  Reading Native Nonfiction
(Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Philip H. Round,
Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Maureen Konkle, Writing Indian
Nations:  Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827–1863
(Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Annette Kolodny,
ed., The Life and Traditions of the Red Man: Reading Line: A Rediscovered
Treasure of Native American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2007); Barry O’Connell, ed., Son of the Forest, and other Writings by William
Apess, A Pequot (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997); and Lisa
Brooks, The Common Pot:  The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
103 The handful of reviews of Indian Boyhood fairly represents the larger array of
reviews for the book, and the other reviews that appeared between 1904 and
1916 featuring all of Eastman’s work. Over ninety reviews were printed in 1904
about Red Hunters and the Animal People, over forty featuring Old Indian
Days in 1907, and in the years that followed, twenty-seven about Wigwam
96 Indigenous Intellectuals

Evenings, and nearly sixty celebrating his spiritual work in The Soul of the
Indian, with over forty each for: Indian Scout Talks, The Indian Today, and
Great Chieftains & Mighty Heroes. See CAE Papers, Dartmouth Collection.
104 P. Roemarre to Charles Eastman, November 2, 1911, in CAE Papers, Dartmouth
Collection. Theodore Stanton to Charles Eastman, October 2, 1913, in CAE
Papers, 1891–1983, MS 829, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth
College, Hanover, NH.
105 Charles A. Eastman as author for:  Red Hunters and Animal People (Harper
and Brothers, 1904); Old Indian Days (McClure Company, 1907); Wigwam
Evenings: Sioux Folk Tales Retold (coauthored with Elaine Goodale Eastman)
(Little, Brown and Company, 1909); The Soul of the Indian: An Interpretation
(Houghton, 1911); Indian Scout Talks (Little, Brown and Company, 1914);
The Indian Today (published by Doubleday, Page and Company, New York,
originally priced in 1915 at sixty cents net). Book reviews from: CAE Papers,
1891–1983, MS 829, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College,
Hanover, NH.
106 In defining Eastman, and others, as a participant in literary intellectualism,
I am building on the work of literary scholars whose primary focus has been
the written work of Native American people, in both historical and contempo-
rary studies. See: Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. and James W. Parins, A Biobibliography
of Native American Writers, 1772–1924 (1981); Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred
Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986); Gerald
Vizenor, ed., Narrative Chance:  Postmodern Discourse on Native American
Indian Literatures (1989); Arnold Krupat, The Voice in the Margin:  Native
American Literature and the Canon (1989); A.  LaVonne Brown Ruoff,
“Literature,” in Native America in the Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia,
edited by Mary B.  Davis (1994); Arnold Krupat, ed., New Voices in Native
American Literary Criticism (1993); Arnold Krupat, For Those Who Come
After:  A  Study of Native American Autobiography (1994); Gerald Vizenor,
ed., Native-American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (1995);
Lawana Trout, ed., Native American Literature: An Anthology (1999); Craig
S. Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (1999); John
L.  Purdy and James Ruppert, eds., Nothing but the Truth:  An Anthology of
Native American Literature (2000); Jace Weaver, Craig S. Womack, and Robert
Warrior, American Indian Literary Nationalism (2005).
107 Alfred R.  McIntyre to Dr.  Charles Eastman, May 9, 1916, in CAE Papers,
1891–1983, MS 829, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College,
Hanover, NH.
108 Elaine Goodale Eastman to Mr. Rugg, April 19, 1939, Letter, EGE Papers,
Smith College, Northampton, MA. For an account of their marriage, with
an emphasis on Elaine’s perspective based on her letters see: Sargent, Life of
Elaine Goodale Eastman.
109 Alice Freeman Palmer was only twenty-seven when she became president of
Wellesley College.
110 For more on the first Normal Schools in the United States see:  Charles A.
Harper, A Century of Public Teacher Education: The Story of the State Teachers
Colleges as They Evolved from Normal Schools (Westport, CT:  Greenwood
 A Global Mission 97

Press Publishers, 1970) and Allen Ornstein and Daniel Levine, Foundations of
Education, 9th ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993).
111 E. H.  Russell to Charles Eastman, 1908, Letter, CAE Papers, Dartmouth
College Special Collections, Hanover, NH.
112 For my reference to the “Red Man in America” speeches that Eastman gave
see: Newspaper Clippings, CAE Papers, Dartmouth Collection.
113 Letters sent to Eastman regarding lectures:  E.  H. Russell, 1908; Mr. W.  A.
Baldwin, March 26, 1909; Frank Fuller Murdock, February 8, 1909; Charles
E.  Bloch, March 2, 1910, The Free Synagogue, New  York, April 10, 1919;
from: CAE Papers, Dartmouth Collection.
114 Ibid.
115 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999)
and more recently in Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence:  University
of Kansas Press, 2006) chronicles the practice of “playing Indian” by white
Americans as a desire to constitute their Americanness as distinct from
Europe. In his later work, Deloria looks briefly to moments of performance
that draw on this history but are different given the moments when Indian
people “play Indian” for largely white audiences, which is the sort of “play-
ing Indian” I reference here. Eastman’s lecture career began as early as 1895.
See:  “Indian Spoke” in Boston Journal, October 28, 1895 in CAE Papers,
Dartmouth Collection.
116 Elizabeth Hutchinson, The Indian Craze:  Primitivism, Modernism, and
Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915 (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2009). For Eastman, the craze for “Indian things” and “things Indian”
offered him an opportunity to harness the intimate relationship between art
and politics, and to make representation and subjectivity central to his speak-
ing performances. Elin Diamond, ed., Performance and Cultural Politics
(London and New York: Routledge, 1996); E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating
Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2003) examines how blackness as an identity category is
not always self-constituting, but like performance, “often defies categori-
zation.” Jose Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications:  Queers of Color and the
Performance of Politics (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1999);
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble:  Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(New York: Routledge Press, 1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive
Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993).
117 Charles Eastman, “The Real Indian,” the Stanley L. Krebs Lectures, Chautauqua
Assembly, Connecticut Valley; Charles Eastman, “First Full Day of Work.
Address by Dr. C. A. Eastman,” Republican (no date); Charles Eastman, “Talks
of the Real Indian,” Concord Monitor (NH) Walker free lectures. See:  CAE
Papers, Dartmouth Collection.
118 For more on WNIA see: Papers of the Women’s National Indian Association
#9237, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University
Library. According to WNIA records, this convention was held regularly
between 1911 and 1926.
119 Maddox, Citizen Indians, 82. According to Maddox, the NIA “early on” had
chosen to direct “its energies toward missions and leave the political reforms
98 Indigenous Intellectuals

to male-dominated organizations such as the Indian Rights Association.” She

argues that leaders of the SAI needed financial and political support from out-
side of their own ranks.
120 Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New  York), Tuesday, February 17, 1914,
page 7, Brooklyn Newsstand Collection, Brooklyn Public Library. For more on
Eastman as Indian secretary of the YMCA see: Wilson, Ohiyesa, 82–9.
121 “The Montauk Club Brooklyn,” in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,
November 1, 1890.
122 Ibid. Founded in 1889 by prominent Brooklyn residents like Charles Pratt,
Richard Schermerhorn, and Edwin C. Litchfield, the Club hosted political fig-
ures and former U.S. presidents: Grover Cleveland, Herbert Hoover, Dwight
D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Senator Robert Kennedy. Named for the
indigenous peoples of Long Island, NY, the Montauketts, the Club had a rep-
resentative of the Montauketts, Chief Robert Pharaoh, as a guest at the 115th
anniversary celebration in May 2004. See: http://montaukclub.com/.
123 Brooklyn Life Magazine, February 1914, Brooklyn Public Library (Brooklyn,
New York).
124 Ibid. For another example of an all-male audience see: “Indian Lecture Well
Attended,” Republican, CAE Papers, Dartmouth Collection.
125 Of the documented talks by Charles Eastman that I have found, twenty-five
were presented to all-female groups, whereas five to ten seemed aimed at youth
groups and ten to wholly religious organizations. CAE Papers, Dartmouth
Collection.
126 Portland Argus report in CAE Papers, Dartmouth Collection.
127 For more on Wild West performance see:  Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild
West:  Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New  York:  Hill and
Wang, 2000).
128 Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians:  Episodes of Encounter from the
Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (Durham, NC:  Duke University
Press, 2005), 12. See:  Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,”
in Classic Essays on Photography, edited by Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven,
CT: Leete’s Island Books), 199–219.
129 Los Angeles Times, “ ‘Ohiyesa’ in Swallowtail. Courtly Sioux Tells Story of His
People,” and Pasadena Star, “The Eastman Lecture Big Success. Tells of His
People, the Warlike Sioux. Story of the Little Big Horn and Death of Custer.”
CAE Papers, Dartmouth Collection (dates unknown).
130 Weaver, The Red Atlantic. Weaver shows how indigenous people from the
Americas crossed the Atlantic as royal dignitaries, diplomats, slaves, laborers,
soldiers, performers, and tourists. He argues these cosmopolitan agents acted
as conduits for resources and knowledge to bring about international changes
that shaped the world.
131 CAE Papers, Dartmouth Collection.
132 “Clipping,” in Westminster Gazette, March 15, 1928, CAE Papers, Dartmouth
Collection. Also see:  Contract between “Mrs. Florence Brooks-Aten and
Charles Alexander Eastman,” January 1928, “Mensel Papers,” CAE Papers,
Dartmouth Collection. For more about the history of Indian students at
Dartmouth see: Calloway, The Indian History of an American Institution.
 A Global Mission 99

133 For a foil to Eastman’s appearance at the Redman’s Wigwam in

England see:  Elliott Young, “Red Men, Princess Pocahontas, and George
Washington:  Harmonizing Race Relations in Laredo at the Turn of the
Century,” Western Historical Quarterly Vol. 29, No. 1, Spring 1998, 48–85.
134 “Engemmard” (difficult to read) to Eastman, March 9, 1928, Letter, CAE
Papers, Dartmouth Collection.
135 For more on the history of representation and expectation in regards to Indian
figures see: Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University
of Kansas Press, 2004), 11. Deloria describes expectation as “a shorthand for
dense economies of meaning, representation, and act that have inflected both
American culture writ large and individuals, both Indian and non-Indian . . . in
terms of the colonial and imperial relations of power and domination existing
between Indian people and the United States.”
136 As Sherry L. Smith has shown in Reimagining Indians:  Native Americans
Through Anglo Eyes, 1880–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000),
there were many white writers who acted as spokespersons for America’s West
in their depictions of the region and Indian people they met. At the same time,
Smith notes, “Native Americans involved themselves in the discourse about
Indians, then, because they understood the connection between knowledge,
ideas, and truth, on the one hand, and agency, power, and practice, on the other.
They attempted to both shape ideas and exercise social power despite their lim-
ited access to political power. Moreover, Indians did not agree on either what
constituted truth about themselves and their cultures, or on the proper goals of
policy” (11).
137 On performativity see: Jose Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queer of Color
and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999) and Butler, Gender Trouble. Also, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990
made it a criminal offense “to sell a product as Indian” if it was not produced by
someone other than an enrolled member of a federally or state-recognized tribe,
or as an artisan certified by such a tribe. What follows is a selective bibliogra-
phy of work in performance studies I consulted for performativity. S. E. Wilmer,
ed., Native American Performance and Representation (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 2009); Christy Stanlake, Native American Drama:  A  Critical
Perspective (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009); Jill Lane, Black
Face Cuba, 1840–1895 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005);
Laura G. Gutierrez, Performing Mexicanidad:  Vendidas Y Cabareteras on
the Transnational Stage (Austin:  University of Texas Press, 2010); Gayatri
Gopinath, Impossible Desires:  Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public
Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
138 “To-day’s Broadcasting” (March 7, 1928)  and “The Red Indian:  A  Chief’s
Address at the Colonial Institute” (March 16, 1928), both in Western Daily
Press, Bristol, England. The British Newspaper Archive.
139 “The Red Indian:  A  Chief’s Address at the Colonial Institute” (March 16,
1928), Western Daily Press, Bristol, England. The British Newspaper Archive.
140 A photograph of Eastman in Indian regalia surrounded by men in “the wig-
wam” of the “Bristol Savages” is captioned:  Frank Stonelake, C.  E. Kelsey,
A.  C. Fare (president), Alderman J.  Fuller Eberle, T.  Kingston, E.  H. Ehlers,
100 Indigenous Intellectuals

H. E. Roslyn, R. H. Pezzack, and Stuart Thomas, in CAE Papers, Dartmouth
Collection.
141 Eastman was also described by the Springfield Union:  “Indian Lectures in
Northampton. Dr. Charles Eastman of Amherst Speaks under Auspices of Red
Men. Is in Indian Costume. Portrays “The Real Indian” in Glowing Terms and
Scores His Enemies,” in CAE Papers, Dartmouth College. See: James Graves,
“Charles Eastman,” in Bostonia (alumni magazine, spring 1993 issue), 54.
142 Deloria, in his theorization of the concept in Playing Indian, makes a help-
ful specific reference to Eastman in regards to performance and authenticity
related to dress: “When Eastman donned an Indian headdress, he was connect-
ing himself to his Dakota roots But he was also – perhaps more compellingly –
imitating non-Indian imitations of Indians . . . [making] it ever more difficult to
pinpoint the cultural locations of Dakotas and Americans, reality and mimetic
reality, authenticity and inauthenticity,” 123–4.
143 President W. J. Tucker to Charles A. Eastman, September 1904, Letters, CAE
Papers, Dartmouth College.
144 Ibid.
145 Unknown photographer, “Stanley F. Johnson and Charles Alexander Eastman,”
1927, CAE, Dartmouth Collection.
146 Calloway, The Indian History of an American Institution, 127.
147 For more on Eastman’s role in Boston society, see James Graves’s biographical
essay “Ohiyesa” in Bostonia (alumni magazine, spring 1993). Eastman’s obitu-
ary, Bostonia Vol. 12, No. 5, February 1939. Eastman, The Indian To-Day, 30
and From the Deep Woods to Civilization, 195.
 2

Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics

Progressive Reform and Epistolary Culture Networks

To those who are familiar with his history, what a flood of memories are
awakened and what thoughts attend at sight or mention of the word Indian.
– Carlos Montezuma, “What It Is to Be an Indian”1

Introduction
Among the boxes of files, piles of letters, memoranda, and subscriber lists
for Carlos Montezuma’s self-published newsletter, Wassaja, in the Wisconsin
Historical Society is one note, revealing in two important ways. The first
side of this scrap of paper has the imprint of just two words, now purple
rather than blue and nearly illegible, Indian Journal. Montezuma believed
the future of American Indians was contingent upon personal correspon-
dence and periodicals, like the Indian Journal – the leading publication for
the Society of American Indians (SAI).2 Through this reform group that
Montezuma helped found and through his contacts with prominent white
Chicagoans, as well as Wassaja, Montezuma addressed a range of topics
from the dismantling of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the need for
higher education for Indian people to changes in Indian cultural practices
and fictional narratives misrepresenting Indianness.
On the flip side of this small rectangle of faded green paper is an equally
important hand-scrawled message with two more words:  “spurious citi-
zenship.” With these words, Montezuma named an issue that was central
to debates among Indian intellectuals and of the utmost concern to him.
Although he had achieved entrée into middle-class white society in Chicago
because of his work as a physician, Montezuma never gave up fighting for
more recognition and inclusion for himself and other Indian people. In
fact, the issue of American citizenship underpinned his work as a progres-
sive reformer. This particular piece of archival ephemera is a metaphor for
the centrality of a culture of letters within Montezuma’s intellectual work.

101
102 Indigenous Intellectuals

As a Native intellectual leader interested in reworking dominant tropes of

Indianness and struggling to gain citizenship, Montezuma relied on circu-
lating his ideas through a myriad of print media to reach a wide array of
Native and white audiences.3
Taken together, the handwritten note and the stamped image evoke a
critical aspect of Montezuma’s representational politics: his ability to raise
the level of public discourse concerning the future of Native America. As
Montezuma worked to be read as a legible citizen-subject who was both
Indian and American, the result was always a struggle over cultural and
social representations of Indianness.4 This scrap of paper also captures the
central tensions in his life as a writer, doctor, and activist:  a struggle to
define Indianness for an emergent pan-Indian identity while avoiding the
many problems inherent in the Euro-American concept of race, and his fight
to attain the equal rights promised by American citizenship while preserv-
ing tribally based traditions and practices. An examination of print culture
considers the rhetorical impact of these notations, his many letters, and the
important published writings Montezuma produced over the course of his
lifetime – to lend context to Montezuma’s multifaceted career.5 As the rich
archive of Montezuma’s personal papers reveals his thinking, these texts
also point to strategic alliances he made with a diverse network of politi-
cians, business leaders, taste makers, white reformers, and fellow Indians,
which is reflective of an urban Indian experience that has been long over-
looked. In particular, his publication of Wassaja, and his diligent correspon-
dence with his readership and colleagues, provide a window into the various
ways Montezuma mobilized a politics of racial uplift in his daily practices as
an Indian intellectual leader.
Although born to Yavapai parents in Arizona Territory in 1865,
Montezuma spent the majority of his life in Chicago. As a practicing doc-
tor, he enjoyed some of the comforts of middle-class life, and attained, to
a degree, the status promised by American citizenship, which was a useful
position for accessing print culture to present himself as an exemplar for
Indianness. He relied on the politics of racial uplift to argue for inclusion,
which meant incorporating Indian people into American society not only as
citizens, but also as capitalists. As much as Montezuma may have wondered
for whom does “genuine” citizenship achieve its meaning, his life and work
in Chicago remained distinct from the experiences of most Indian people
during the early twentieth century. Like Eastman, his citizenship was not
theirs, and yet his writings raise an important question: As an Indian living
in America, in which contexts could one be viewed as more of a citizen – or
less of one? The majority of his written and spoken texts engage this ques-
tion to critically analyze the structures and people with the power to deter-
mine who was or was not a citizen. Ultimately, he remained committed to
the idea that Indian people ought to have a voice in this decision regardless
of their social class. Like Charles Eastman, Montezuma believed citizenship
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 103

might bring with it the power to reshape American politics and culture from
the inside out.
On October 5, 1912, Montezuma gave an address titled “The Light on
the Indian Situation” at the annual conference for the SAI. In this context,
he referred to “Indian matters” involving military service and citizenship
to urge his fellow Indian intellectuals to “awaken and express ourselves”
for these causes.6 Then, during World War I, in 1917, Montezuma pub-
lished an article in Wassaja that asked the world community to “see that
all men are treated on an equal footing, equality and human rights must
be upheld  . . . Indian Bureauism is the Kaiserism of America toward the
Indians. It enslaves and dominates the Indians without giving them their
rights.”7 These two examples, one an address and the other a printed text,
represent the strident tone Montezuma often used throughout his work
as a reformer, and how determined he was to make citizenship a political
reality for Indian people. He did not and could not work alone to achieve
his goals of citizenship, reforming the BIA, and reshaping how Americans
viewed Indian people.
Throughout his lifetime, Montezuma used correspondence to remain
actively connected to a wide array of Indian performers, activists, and polit-
ical leaders. He exchanged letters with archaeologist, historian, and folklor-
ist Arthur C. Parker; Cherokee journalist, writer, and magazine editor John
Oskison; visual artist Wa-Wa Chaw; and pan-Indian organization activists
like Gertrude Bonnin and Charles Eastman, as well as nationally recog-
nizable and politically influential leaders like Plenty Coups. In addition,
correspondence connected Montezuma to white progressives who were
sympathetic to Indian causes. He wrote regularly to journalists like Helen
Grey, who investigated the BIA and land deals, and bureaucratic leaders
and educational reformers like Richard H.  Pratt. Correspondence, and to
a lesser extent publishing, function as material goods, as intellectual theses,
and useful lenses for examining Montezuma’s ideas regarding race and cit-
izenship as well as the types of political and cultural networks he accessed,
created, and maintained.
Also imbedded within epistolary culture are ephemeral items that reveal
the subtlety of Montezuma’s self-perception and his changing views on con-
tentious topics such as Indian identity and cultural authenticity: countless
notices from the SAI; leaflets from organizations like the Indian Fellowship
League; circulars from the Order of Red Men; and more. Because of the
diversity of this archive, I focus on visible discursive formations to showcase
Montezuma’s representational politics, his literary production, and his abil-
ity to interact with a plurality of white and pan-tribal publics. Furthermore,
although epistolary writing has not been the major focus of scholarship on
the Progressive Era, it has figured prominently in a number of studies from
the earlier period in Native writing.8 These studies inform my close readings
of Montezuma’s texts, whether written or spoken.
104 Indigenous Intellectuals

Like other Indian intellectuals, Montezuma navigated his own politics of

representation to shape the cultural and political development of the United
States during the early twentieth century. Montezuma’s public and private
writings contributed to a print culture emerging out of a white American
imagining of Indian people and their history, and that of the readers and
writers in Indian Country. Indeed, Montezuma’s written and spoken texts
became central to how Native publics and counterpublics were established.9
More specifically, his personal letters and his public newsletter, Wassaja,
hailed an expanding network of Native people during the Progressive Era.
Certainly, his letters did different work from that of his more formal news-
letter. Looking at both, however, as representative texts for intellectual
circuits demonstrates the diverse networks that connected Indian writers
and reformers with white Americans. When letters became pamphlets that
became newsletters that became journals and magazines, Montezuma’s
ideas (and those of other Indian writers) traveled along an important con-
tinuum. For instance, the letters Native people sent to Montezuma when he
was editor of Wassaja produced an important form of internal and national
dialogue across Indian Country. Montezuma’s personal letters and ideas
expressed in Wassaja demonstrate an emerging pan-Indian public sphere
that diverged from American representative democracy, even as individuals
like Montezuma aimed to incorporate themselves into that system in order
to reform it.10

Education: “The Public Knows Very Little of the Indian

People in the Right Way.”
Montezuma’s life and writings were intimately connected to his educational
experiences and the ways Indian education, in general, went about train-
ing Native people to become proper citizens of the United States. Such an
argument rests on an understanding of education as performance based.
Therefore, by considering his life in relation to education, one can see how
his career as a physician afforded him a space and social capital to work as
an activist and a writer. It is rarely an easy road from childhood to medical
school, and for Montezuma it was rocky, to say the least.
Montezuma’s parents named him Wassaja at his birth, but soon he would
be known by another name. At a young age, Montezuma was captured by
the Pimas, a neighboring tribe to the Yavapais, who in turn sold him to an
Italian photographer, Carlo Gentile, who had been traveling throughout the
Southwest taking pictures of Native peoples. According to Montezuma’s
own recollections, Gentile paid thirty silver dollars for the boy. It was a
fairly common practice to sell captured women and children as slaves
to other tribes, to Mexicans, and to white settlers in the Southwest dur-
ing this period. Gentile named the boy after himself and the pair traveled
around the United States before finally relocating to Urbana, Illinois. Once
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 105

there, George W.  Ingalls, the director of the Indian Department, person-
ally selected a placement for the eleven-year-old Montezuma in the house-
hold of Reverend William H. Stedman, pastor of the First Baptist Church
of Urbana. According to one biographer, Montezuma maintained a positive
relationship with the Stedman family throughout his life, with Reverend
Stedman presiding at his wedding in 1913.11
Montezuma’s private education was supported by Stedman’s hiring of a
tutor to assist him in passing the entrance exam for the preparatory school
of the University of Illinois, which he attended for one year. In 1880, at the
age of fourteen, Montezuma entered the university. He graduated four years
later. While he was enrolled in the College of Natural Science in the pharma-
ceutical program of the School of Chemistry, Montezuma’s education was
sponsored by the university YMCA. Fortunately, in his second year, because
his grades were good enough, the University waived all fees. Montezuma
was well liked and well known among his classmates, and he was elected
president as well as secretary of the class of 1884. He also became the presi-
dent of the Adelphic Debate Society, where he gained early training in public
speaking. In fact, Montezuma’s success as an Indian debater was reported
by the student newspaper, The Daily Illini, on May 5, 1883, which noted
that he gave “one of the rare treats of the evening on ‘Indian’s Bravery.’ ”
Clearly Montezuma was successful in building financial and intellectual alli-
ances while at college, as he distinguished himself among his classmates.12
On June 21, 1884, Montezuma entered the Chicago Medical College as its
first Indian student. While earning his degree, Montezuma supported himself
as a pharmacist. Like almost all Indian intellectuals, he also gave lectures on
“the Indian” to a variety of audiences ranging from ladies’ clubs to church
organizations. He benefited from a tremendous proliferation of women’s
and church clubs that created a circuit for such lecturers, and Montezuma
began earning extra money through these speaking engagements. In 1888,
for example, he gave a speech titled “The Indian of Tomorrow” in front of
the National Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Chicago. It was one
of many similar events.13
After graduation, and before he became nationally known for his politi-
cal writing, Montezuma worked to establish his career as a doctor. Thomas
Jefferson Morgan, the commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1889 to 1893
(also a Baptist minister and professional educator), saw in Montezuma, the
Indian doctor, a model of achievement. He wrote to offer the young doc-
tor a position as a physician in the Indian Service. “My friend, Captain
Pratt, tells me that you have finished your medical studies, and have entered
upon the practice of your profession. . . . I have recently appointed Miss La
Flesche, who graduated from the medical school in Philadelphia, and sub-
sequently had some hospital training, as physician among her own peo-
ple, the Omahas.” Montezuma promptly accepted Morgan’s offer. “For my
part, I am willing to do anything which will reform them and also to do all
106 Indigenous Intellectuals

I can to set them a good example. . . . I remain yours for justice in the Indian
Affairs.” Montezuma’s ability to seemingly capitulate to the patronizing rhe-
toric commonly used by white progressives who had committed themselves
to solving the so-called Indian Problem enabled him to claim that he could
“reform them,” meaning other Native peoples. His later speeches and writ-
ings indicate that Montezuma believed Native peoples were inherently capa-
ble of managing their own uplift, in a social and political sense, if given the
right tools: such as access to higher education.14
On September 20, 1889, Montezuma began work at Fort Stevenson,
close to the banks of the Missouri River in North Dakota.15 By this time
the “Fort” was no longer operating as a military facility, but rather as the
Fort Berthold Indian Agency. After practicing in North Dakota for a few
years, Montezuma moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he worked as the
Carlisle Indian Industrial School’s physician, and ended up traveling with
the school’s football team as its doctor. This time was likely formative in his
thinking about both Carlisle and Indian children’s welfare more broadly,
especially given the huge cemetery at the school that marked the school’s
failure on the health front. This was also when Montezuma forged a per-
sonal connection to an institution that was central to the experiences of
the era’s Native leaders, including Charles Eastman, Gertrude Bonnin, and
Luther Standing Bear. But this post was only temporary. Montezuma longed
to return to Illinois and set up his own practice. In December 1895, he
returned to Chicago and established a private practice in two locations. He
continued working in the city until 1922.16
Despite his ties to Carlisle, Montezuma drew on experiences with the
business community of Chicago and his upbringing with the Stedman fam-
ily when formulating his ideas about the education of Native peoples. He
writes in a letter from 1921, “A great work must be done to educate the pub-
lic that an Indian is the same as they are” because, as Montezuma saw it, the
vast majority of non-Indian people in the United States knew very little “of
the Indian people in the right way.” Montezuma’s desire was twofold when
it came to education. First, he wanted to retool reservation day schools and
boarding schools in order to increase the numbers of Indian students who
could attend college. Second, like Charles Eastman, he wanted these indi-
viduals to become like him and serve as representatives of their race to help
educate the rest of America. This vision aligned with Eastman’s educational
mission in many respects. Indeed, the two men had similar experiences when
it came to attending college and then medical school.
At the same time, Montezuma was better positioned than Eastman to
highlight himself as a “success” because he earned a steady income as a
doctor in Chicago. Eastman had struggled for years to set up a practice,
and eventually gave up the idea that his main source of income would
come from being a physician. Like other progressives, Montezuma took an
approach to changing Indian education by being in dialogue with different
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 107

reform organizations that aimed to find political and practical solutions

to the “Indian Problem.” His contacts with the business world of Chicago
taught him that there was a preexisting network of white progressives who
might be able to help. Many of these groups were established during the last
two decades of the nineteenth century.17
In 1909, the National Indian Association (NIA) celebrated its thirti-
eth anniversary. Founded and run by white women, the NIA represented
a significant strand of thought and activity that characterized national
reform efforts aimed toward Indian affairs.18 Critical to the work of these
women was the circulation of their monthly magazine, The Indian’s Friend.
Montezuma, like other Indian intellectual leaders at the time, was a regular
subscriber to the journal. It is likely he read reports in August of that year
regarding the performance of Hiawatha that the NIA noted “was presented
by forty-five of the Indian students of the Haskell Institute at Lawrence,” as
a play for the National Educational Association’s meeting. For the major-
ity of Americans, plays based on Indian stories, events, and histories pro-
vided easy access to learning about Indian people. This type of educational
entertainment offered a different way of reframing how American audiences
viewed Indianness but also drew on a longer history of performance that
had replayed historical events involving Indians that had been popular in
various parts of the United States since the early nineteenth century.19
The NIA and Montezuma shared the belief that the education of Indian
people and the education of the American public about Indians were key
reform issues.20 However, the organization’s reformers and Montezuma dif-
fered when it came to the power of performance. Montezuma saw himself
as an educator who publicly scorned performances he thought separated
Indian people from modern society by locking them into an imagined past.
Shows like those promoted by “Buffalo Bill’s” Wild West, for example, were,
according to Montezuma, dangerous arenas in which Native actors could
not only be taken advantage of but might end up taking part in devastating
misrepresentations of Indian history.
More difficult for Montezuma to protest were events like the one spon-
sored by the NIA, where Haskell staged a production of Hiawatha. For
Montezuma, this type of low-level Indianized performance, promoted
by progressive groups to aid the cause of citizenship, was a powerful
tool for imagining but also undermining Indianness. In the first issue of
Wassaja, which appeared in April 1916, Montezuma publicly denounced
such Indianized staged performances. Specifically, he attacked the celebra-
tion of American Indian Day that included its own elements of pageantry,
which had been promoted by Arthur Parker and other members of the SAI.
Montezuma called it “a farce” and warned Wassaja readers that such events
would not help Indian people but rather “the Indians will be used as tools
for interested parties. To the Indian it is a mockery because he does not
enjoy freedom, but is a ward and is handicapped by the Indian Bureau.”21
108 Indigenous Intellectuals

The stakes for Montezuma were high because he was determined to make
Indian citizenship a reality, and he believed stereotypical and highly racial-
ized performances and mismanagement of Indian affairs by the Bureau
together threatened the future for Indian people.
Montezuma believed that full citizenship could not happen, as long as
white America imagined Indian people in primitive and anachronistic ways.
At the same time, to further his cause Montezuma needed to be legible as a
citizen who was an American and an Indian. Thus, even though his “cause
in favor of citizenship” was political, he also had to grapple with cultural
and social representations of Indianness. As a doctor in an urban space,
Montezuma was well positioned to argue for the inclusion of Indian people
in the body politic of the United States. His membership in local Chicago
business organizations run by white, middle-class Americans gave him social
status and a sort of de facto citizenship.22 Yet he needed to speak and write
against a plethora of misrepresentations in popular performances, films, and
novels that continued to marginalize Native people by limiting how others
could imagine them.23
Other Indian intellectuals joined Montezuma in emphasizing the role of
education in a public fight for recognition of Indian people as modern citi-
zens of the United States, rather than icons of the Wild West or America’s
lost past. On September 6, 1918, Gertrude Bonnin, then the secretary and
treasurer for the SAI, sent a letter to the “Honorable F.P. Keppel,” the third
assistant secretary of war. Bonnin’s letter, perhaps inadvertently, recaptures
earlier moments in American history when the military functioned as a crit-
ical site of engagement for Indian policy. In reality, the War Department had
ceased to be the main avenue through which Indian affairs were managed
after the establishment of the Department of the Interior on March 3, 1849.
But it was also necessary because the Army still owned the buildings and the
site used by the Carlisle School, and was reclaiming use of the property at
this time as a war-related measure.24
Her letter begins straightforwardly enough. “I have the honor, in behalf
of a small body of Americans, the Red Americans, to beg your forbearance
in this request for a reconsideration of the non-continuance of the Carlisle
Indian School. It is understood that the law of 1882 provides for the rever-
sion of this property for military purposes.” Bonnin introduces herself and
her allies vis-à-vis the careful use of a comma. Her pause is an important
one, as it punctuates two key tenets of the SAI ideology, as well as the SAI’s
particular interest in asking for a reconsideration of the matter involving
the Carlisle School. The SAI’s commitment to full citizenship rights for all
Indian people comes across in Bonnin’s rhetorical decision to define them
as composed of “Americans, the Red Americans”; a description that sig-
naled to Keppel how this particular organization conceived of itself as both
American and Indian. These modes of articulation were politically and cul-
turally salient for Bonnin given that, by 1918, vast numbers of Indian people
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 109

had been encouraged if not forced to become American through the erasure
of languages, traditions, and cultural practices that would mark them as
Indians. Ironically, this process was most often carried out in the classrooms
of places like Carlisle, against which she had written – a place Montezuma
knew all too well. But in this letter, Bonnin speaks on behalf of the SAI. For
SAI members like Montezuma, to be “Americans” and also “Red” provided
them with a complex and distinctive status, and an opportunity to claim
political citizenship (which many did not legally have) while simultaneously
retaining their Indian identity. They neither wanted nor needed to advocate
for full cultural assimilation into white American society, but could claim
Carlisle on their own terms.25
Institutionally, Carlisle was at once, as Bonnin’s letter notes, “the Red
Man’s University” and an old “barracks” the military had used during the
Civil War. In actuality, it had been established as a military post in the late
1750s; some of the buildings dated to the eighteenth century. She makes
plain how “this fact today bears directly upon Indian education and civi-
lization to which our Government pledged itself in good faith.” Her letter
argues education is at the heart of this matter for Indian people because to
close Carlisle “for military purposes” would result in the transfer of Indian
students to “inferior schools,” and, more importantly, “not make up to the
race the loss of educational opportunities only Carlisle can give.” In this
sentence, “Carlisle” represents not only a specific educational vision, but
also the U.S. government’s role as a patron of Indian education and granter
of political power through that education. Despite the devastating effects of
a Carlisle education on Native pupils (the loss of language, cultural prac-
tices, and other markers of identity), Bonnin, like Montezuma and other
Indian intellectuals of this period, believed that social uplift and education
went hand in hand, even if Carlisle was one of the places where schooling
would take place. She asserts this belief and also calls attention to the fact
that despite schools like Carlisle, and the efforts of educated Indians like
herself, “the sad fact” is that “approximately 20,000 Indian children eli-
gible for school are still without schools in our America.” Her use of “our”
here claims a space of belonging within America, and a voice with which to
change it. The work of the NIA and the SAI, as well as individual writers
like Bonnin and Montezuma, exemplified the centrality of Indian education
as a component of race and nation making, both facets of Montezuma’s
activist work. Like Eastman, Bonnin, and Luther Standing Bear, Montezuma
found an ally in Carlisle’s headmaster and social architect:  Richard Pratt
(1840–1924), the white progressive.

Dear Monte: Correspondence with Richard Pratt

Because Montezuma worked primarily as a physician and not an author,
correspondence functions differently for him as a political organizing tool
110 Indigenous Intellectuals

when compared to the efforts of Charles Eastman, Gertrude Bonnin, and

Luther Standing Bear. Letter writing worked to bridge the publishing forum
of Wassaja with different discursive formations of Montezuma’s speeches
and printed texts and reveals the progression and changes in his cultural
politics over time. One of the primary examples of changes in his thinking
emerges through an extensive set of correspondence between Montezuma
and Pratt. As a former Union Army officer, Pratt was well known among
white reformers for being vocal on behalf of educated Indians seeking citi-
zenship. He became famous for repeating a slogan regarding education as a
process of assimilation, which promised Americans citizens that schools like
Carlisle could: “Kill the Indian, and save the man!”26 Sounding outrageous
today, this mantra in the context of his time appeared sympathetic toward
Indian people, if also underpinned by a racist logic. In reality, Pratt was
friends with many of his Native students, who went on to become teach-
ers, as well as doctors, lawyers, missionaries, and actors. Their achieve-
ments highlighted, for Pratt, the fact that he never gave up the fight to solve
America’s “Indian Problem” and what he saw as the persistent marginali-
zation of Indian people in economic, social, and cultural terms. Over the
course of their letters, Montezuma and Pratt often agree about the best tools
for the advancement of Indian people, even if Montezuma would never go
as far as to say you had to “kill the Indian” to “save the man.”27
Writing to Pratt, Montezuma maintained an important contact within
the white “Friends of the Indian” reform circles that dominated national
debates about the futures of American Indians. Montezuma and Pratt had
built a dynamic friendship over a twenty-five-year period, as many of their
letters demonstrate. Throughout these exchanges, themes emerge that reflect
Montezuma’s growing concerns regarding broader campaigns for justice
related to education, allotment, and citizenship, as well as social issues per-
taining to race. Writing to each other about these themes, the two discussed
the ideal of the educated Indian, the public role of the ideal Indian, and
the role that religion, specifically Christianity, ought to play in the lives of
Indian people. Many letters showcase Montezuma’s desire to dissolve the
reservation system and the BIA, which was a frequent headline for issues of
Wassaja. Sprinkled throughout their correspondence, too, are personal mis-
sives and friendly turns of phrase. Looking more closely at some key passages
reveals the complexity of their relationship and the centrality of correspon-
dence both in Montezuma’s political career and as a tool for reconstructing
the networks of possibility Indian intellectuals navigated using their letters.
Not long after leaving Carlisle and setting up his medical practice in
Chicago, Montezuma put forth his own thoughts on the “Indian Problem”
or the “Indian Question.” In fact, his speech, “The Indian Problem from
an Indian’s Standpoint,” was so well received by the Fortnightly Club on
February 10, 1898 that it was printed as a pamphlet and distributed to
interested Chicagoans. A similar version of the text was later published in
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 111

Current Literature in April 1898 and retitled: “An Indian’s View of the Indian
Question.” For Montezuma, the “Indian Question” had not been adequately
addressed by white America because it was not fully understood. “You are
blinded and ignorant in the enjoyment of your civilized life; in the midst
of your refinement and education you are without a trace of an idea of the
facts of the Indian question.” He goes on to argue in favor of an allotment
policy that would “wipe out these dark reservations,” and with any money
earned in resettling these lands, he suggests, every Indian child could then
be educated in the public schools of the United States. “Let them be brought
up in and become citizens of the various States.” Citing himself as an exam-
ple, Montezuma suggests that Indian children become “civilized” if taken
while they are very young to be “in direct relations with good civilization.”
In essence, he is arguing in favor of assimilation, and despite the paternalis-
tic tone, he is also against the policies he believes have failed Native people
now living on reservations, which he likens to demoralizing prisons. For
Montezuma, the space of the reservation is emblematic of the larger failings
of the federal system as a “barrier against enlightenment, a promoter of idle-
ness, beggary, gambling, pauperism, ruin and death.” Finally, Montezuma
drives his point home by bringing up Pratt’s methods of civilizing Native
children by distributing them among white families, as part of Carlisle’s out-
ing program. Building on this strategy, Montezuma argues the same needs
to be done with reservations, to “divide and civilize; attack the reservations,
cut them up and educate the divided parts in turn.” Ultimately, he is arguing
in favor of integrating public schools. He writes, “I wish I could collect all
the Indian children, load them in ships in San Francisco, circle them around
Cape Horn, pass them through Castle Garden, put them under proper indi-
vidual care in your public schools, and when they have been matured and
moderately educated let them do what other men and women do – take care
of themselves. This would solve the Indian question.”
At this moment, Montezuma appeared adamant about how allotment
and education represented “the only way to liberty, manhood and citizen-
ship” for Native men. The narrowness and sexism of these views are of a
piece with how white progressives imagined the future for Native people
in America, and reflect Montezuma’s endorsement of a capitalist ideology
that measured achievement based on the work of the individual rather than
the collective. For Montezuma, if Native children were able to go to public
schools, like so many of the new immigrants arriving in the United States,
they would be able to make something of themselves. Native people would
no longer be in need of financial or other support from the federal gov-
ernment. Pratt most certainly agreed with these sentiments in 1898 when
Montezuma’s talk first appeared in Current Literature.28
The next year, on February 7, 1899, Pratt wrote to Montezuma about
the death of their mutual friend, Simon Pokagon. Pratt referred to Queen
of the Woods, which Pokagon had written and which was published shortly
112 Indigenous Intellectuals

after his death, noting to Monte that “You can count on me to take a dozen
copies of his book to begin with.” His letter also highlights an emerging
network of Indian intellectuals as critical to the success of Indian educa-
tion and the cause of citizenship. The latter depended on the legibility of
accomplished Indians as examples for the American public. Pratt considered
Montezuma one of these representative figures. Pratt used books, like the
one by Pokagon, as one example of what an educated Indian might achieve
and as a tool that could inform other Americans. His letter urges Montezuma
to visit Carlisle for commencement. If he made the trip, Montezuma could
be used as physical proof for the school’s recent graduates of just what an
accomplished Indian could do for himself and for his race.29
In September of that same year, Pratt wrote again about the topic of
accomplished Indians and referred specifically to Montezuma’s emerg-
ing role as a leader. In this letter, one can see that affiliation, along with
self-presentation and careful use of rhetoric, were key strategies Indian intel-
lectuals used as political activists and leaders. Pratt writes, “Every Indian
that can separate himself from the crowd and get out among the people in
any way, moves in the right direction. I am glad to know that you will stand
by [Frank] and get your friends in Urbana and Champaign to do so.”30 Frank
was a young man Pratt sent to the University of Illinois by way of Chicago.
While in Chicago, Montezuma assisted Pratt by offering fellow Indians a
place to stay and an introduction to important people. Pratt helped to nur-
ture this type of networking, as he sent additional money for room, board,
and transportation to Montezuma. In this letter and many others, material
concerns aligned with philosophical issues. The two would come to a head
when it came to Montezuma’s public presentations, his views on race, and
how other Indian people chose to engage a politics of performativity. As the
first decade of the twentieth century neared its end, Pratt would once again
call on Montezuma to act as a leader and spokesperson for the Indian race.
On December 21, 1908, Pratt wrote to Montezuma about the future of
educated Indians and the BIA. His letter suggested they “press upon Mr.
Taft our ideas as to what should be done for the Indians.”31 Integral to their
plan was the development and strengthening of a network of Indian intel-
lectuals who could work in local and regional contexts toward changing
national policy. Montezuma was one example, and in his letter Pratt points
to another Indian intellectual they both knew well:  Reverend Sherman
Coolidge (Arapaho, 1863–1932). Coolidge had advanced professionally
within the ministry and showed how Indian clergy could be central to pro-
gressive reform within contemporary Indian affairs. Pratt described him as
“levelheaded” like other Indian religious leaders, such as Henry Roe Cloud
(Winnebago, ca. 1884–1950) and Reverend Philip B. Gordon (Ojibwe and
Catholic priest, 1887–1948). Cloud had published “The Future of the Red
Man in America” in The Missionary Review of the World,32 whose goal
was to create an institution that would combine secular vocational training
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 113

with an interdenominational Christian curriculum for Indian students. He

sought to counteract the increasing loss of authority religious bodies were
experiencing during this period with regards to the field of Indian educa-
tion since the federal government began to discontinue the mission contract
schools in 1897. In addition, Cloud’s widely read autobiographical essay
“From Wigwam to Pulpit,” subtitled “A Red Man’s Story of His Progress
from Darkness to Light,” appealed to white reformers like Pratt for its refer-
ences to the uplifting power of Christian teachings for the advancement of
Indian people. As some historians note, Cloud’s “contributions to theologi-
cal inquiry, the education of Native Americans, and the formulation of gov-
ernment policies contribute to his inclusion in any list of the most prominent
Native Americans in history.”33 Like Cloud, Rev. Philip B. Gordon used pub-
lishing to assert his religious and political views. In fact, he started a monthly
four-leaf newsletter, The War Whoop, but was unable to publish it because
his superiors in the Catholic Church forbad him to do so. Montezuma
was influenced by Gordon’s efforts to print his own paper: Wassaja. Like
Cloud, Gordon was a founding member of the SAI, and perhaps more than
Coolidge and Cloud was able to succeed both as a religious leader and as a
political activist. As a Christian, Montezuma may have admired Gordon’s
ability to remain active in his faith and politics.34
Pratt’s letter authenticates the type of power embodied in Rev. Coolidge
because of his education and Indianness. Pratt writes to Montezuma, “being
like yourself, a full blooded Indian, highly educated, his views are entitled
to the most serious consideration.” Pratt’s sentiments link discourses of the
body with the mind by reconciling Indian blood with education. He also
participates in a discussion of assimilation, a process he thought necessary
for Native people to incorporate themselves into American culture. Pratt
defines citizenship through a careful combination, rather than a synthesis,
of an “authentic” Indian subjectivity tied to blood quantum, with a right to
speak based on one’s educational background. So assimilation broadly con-
ceived could cut two ways. First, educated Indians could draw on the inter-
section of Indian subjectivity as defined by blood and education to assert a
particular space for themselves as political activists. This is interesting and
somewhat surprising for someone who wanted “to kill the Indian.” Second,
someone like Montezuma could use his class position to assert a unique right
to speak on behalf of Indianness writ large. In other words, like Eastman,
Cloud, and Gordon, Montezuma could fashion himself as one of the best
Indian leaders, someone to be counted on because he was educated and also
full-blooded, or at least he was being hailed to do so at Pratt’s urging.35
On May 22, 1909, Pratt wrote again to Montezuma concerning the
future of Indians in America by emphasizing the power of educated Indians
to change policy. “I suggested to [Mr. Owen] that a petition to Congress
coming from educated Indians would be a splendid thing to help him out
and he agreed and suggested that I  write it.” Here Pratt conveys a world
114 Indigenous Intellectuals

of possibility for Indian intellectuals, but highlights the roles to be played

by white activists who were necessary to write the petition. He presses
Montezuma to become personally involved in an effort to reform the BIA: “If
you or some other intelligent Indian or Indians would take it up you would
make a tremendous case. I don’t believe the country would agree to let the
Bureau go but the move could be made to compel the Indian bureau to come
to time and perform its duty.” Pratt gives up some of his white authority, for
a moment, by urging Montezuma “or some other intelligent Indian” (imply-
ing one might easily be exchanged for another) to take up the petition. By
this time, Montezuma had openly criticized the BIA in public talks and writ-
ten pieces; he would no doubt have jumped at the chance to lead others in
an assault on this arm of the federal government. Read another way, Pratt
may also be trying to rechannel the venom of Montezuma’s attacks into an
effort to reform instead of completely abolish the BIA.36
In August of that same year, Pratt wrote to Dr. Carl E. Grammer, a pro-
fessor at the Virginia Theological Seminary and the president of the Indian
Rights Association (IRA), concerning Indian education and sent a copy of
his letter to Montezuma. It was common practice among these activists to
send each other copies of letters to compel action based on the letters as sup-
plemental evidence. This particular letter shows the divide between efforts
of white reformers like Grammer and Pratt about all-Indian educational
institutions like Carlisle. Pratt writes, “You say ‘it has seemed to me that
eventually the need for such schools as Carlisle must cease,’ but I  do not
understand the Indian Rights Association to favor any immediate steps in
that direction.” Here Pratt questions the efficacy of Grammer’s organiza-
tion as an advocate for fuller citizenship for Indian people if Carlisle must
close. Unlike Pratt, Montezuma believed places like Carlisle needed to be
abolished so Indian students could attend the same schools as white stu-
dents, a point he had made strongly and clearly back in 1898 when speaking
about the “Indian Problem.” In this sense, Montezuma would have agreed
with Grammer’s assertion that “schools as Carlisle must cease.” However,
Montezuma would also have understood Pratt’s view that the IRA was an
organization that had failed to achieve this goal because Indian schools
rather than integrated schools remained the norm and Indian education in
general seemed beyond the reach of the IRA’s efforts.37
Why did Pratt and Montezuma differ on this point regarding Indian edu-
cation? Perhaps because they had different understandings of assimilation.
Pratt’s outlook was practical, much like that of Booker T.  Washington’s
vision of advancement for black people, in that he saw schools like Carlisle
as paving the way for Indians to get off reservations and to integrate into
the white economy through low-paying service jobs, which would let them
attain a working-class social status in the larger society. It was the Carlisle
Industrial School, after all. A  similar approach was applied to the educa-
tion of foreign immigrants during the same period, and because of this it
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 115

was seen in many educational circles as a “progressive” approach in terms

of social reform. Montezuma had hoped integration would produce more
Indian professionals like himself who could then work toward political
influence through citizenship. He had succeeded because of his education,
but his was not an Indian school education, but rather one based on being a
part of white America’s educational system.
The debate concerning where to properly educate Indian children, in pub-
lic schools or places like Carlisle, reflected to some extent a longer history and
a time when Indian education had been tied to practices of Christianization
rather than efforts to obtain citizenship. For Pratt and Montezuma, both
practicing Christians, religious instruction could be an important compo-
nent of educating Native children. This enabled them to find some common
ground in their differing points of view regarding the value of integrat-
ing Indians into public schools. Not all reformers believed in the merits of
religious instruction as critical to assimilation, but Montezuma, who had
found support for his own schooling from the YMCA, believed coopera-
tion between Christianity-based reform organizations and educational insti-
tutions could lead to the success of Indian students. In fact, Montezuma
received (from Pratt) copies of two letters that point out the early history
of this type of cooperation. One letter, from July 5, 1895, was sent by C. K.
Ober, a white Chicagoan (then the secretary of the International Committee
of the YMCA), and the other, from June 28, was sent by Charles Eastman.38
Eastman’s letter demonstrates how Indian intellectuals worked together
with white missionaries and teachers. Ober’s letter suggests that Eastman
was an example of an educated Indian who embodied the possibilities
of Indian education. Ober recommends that Dr.  Eastman, because of his
“experience in college athletics, and his medical training,” is “admirably fit”
as both a subject “for the study of this problem” regarding the direction of
Indian education, and as a fellow reformer “for the direction of this new
effort.” In this example, the figure of the Indian athlete and the question of
the body as well as gender seem critical to confirming Eastman’s status as
representative subject, when coupled with his medical education. Educated
Indians, like Eastman and Montezuma, bore a heavy burden as public
figures who had to demonstrate intellectual development, athletic accom-
plishment, and moral character. Ober’s letter makes explicit that “health-
ful athletic sports” work “in place of the demoralizing heathen practices of
the Indians,” suggesting sports could be a more helpful and American way
of channeling a supposedly primitive warrior instinct and practice. Thus,
Indian men could harness and achieve a white and an American as well as
a Christian and a muscular manhood if they received a proper athletic as
well as an intellectual education. An individual like Eastman was “fit” for
“the study of this problem, and for the direction of this new effort” because
of both his intellectual and physical strength  – a view in keeping with a
muscular Christianity discourse during this period, which sought to define
116 Indigenous Intellectuals

proper American manliness through the body as much as the mind. In this
exchange, and in others throughout Montezuma’s archive, manliness oper-
ates as the preeminent gender identity embraced by Indian and non-Indian
male reformers and worthy of highlighting for political ends.39
Eastman’s letter does not shrug off the role he must play. Instead, it draws
together the work of missionaries and Christian teachers by defining them
as “deeply in sympathy with our work.” Writing from the standpoint of an
Indian Service employee and intellectual, Eastman sees “our” here both in
terms of the network he and Montezuma were building as Native (male)
leaders and in the context of cooperation between Indian groups and white
reformers. Taken together, these letters bring Montezuma into the fold of
a relationship that was forming between these groups. Montezuma was a
Christian Indian who had been raised by a Baptist family in Illinois. His
experience of Christianization and education did not necessarily have del-
eterious effects on his Indianness. For Montezuma, being a Christian func-
tioned in much the same way as being a doctor did; it afforded him entrée
into middle-class white society, and from that class position he could do and
say more on behalf of Native people.40

Wassaja’s World in Print

As a Chicago physician, Montezuma participated in Masonic activities,
belonged to the Press Club of Chicago, and subscribed to several medical
journals, all while operating a successful medical practice for at least fifteen
years. By 1914, however, many of his patients fell on hard times. They could
not keep up with their payments, and things took a turn for the worse. By
1916, Montezuma had to close his downtown office, and he had started to
publish Wassaja: Freedom’s Signal for the Indians.
Montezuma used his self-published newsletter to promote his views on
education and those of his readers, who wrote many letters to the editor.
Within Wassaja, Montezuma combined different ideas of Indianness with
a shared goal of citizenship. He used the newsletter to combat what he saw
as pernicious stereotypes of Native Americans to offer an idealized vision of
Indianness that was pan-tribal and compatible with full citizenship rights.
The circulation of this periodical captured and shaped critical debates
across Indian Country. Its subscriber lists reveal and document different
networks through which Montezuma, other Indians, and his friends and
white allies created and participated in a shared discourse concerning both
tribal-national and American citizenship.
First published in April 1916, Wassaja remained in print until November
1922. In fact, the last issue appeared only two months before Montezuma
died. Readers paid five cents per copy or fifty cents for a year’s subscrip-
tion. Montezuma also encouraged local distribution by providing 100
copies of an issue for only two dollars. Many subscribers listed show that
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 117

Wassaja circulated throughout different rural reservation communities in

the Southwest, the Great Lakes area, and the Plains States. In 1920, how-
ever, Montezuma was forced to double his subscription rates because of an
increase in printing costs, which may have lowered the number of readers
he hoped to reach.41
The impetus behind Wassaja was to remind Indians and Americans of the
history of abuse perpetrated against Indian people by the U.S. government.
The newsletter’s title means “signaling” or “beckoning,” which embodied
Montezuma’s desire to create a national, Native American newspaper to “sig-
nal” fuller citizenship and participation in American society. Because he had
been named “Wassaja” at birth and was later renamed “Carlos Montezuma”
by his white adoptive parent, the act of naming the paper after his Yavapai
birth name enabled him to reclaim this part of his past. Like Bonnin and
Eastman, this double name claim was important to Montezuma’s subjec-
tivity and to the politics of his self-representation. Naming and renaming
remained critical tools that Indian people could use to contest oppressive
cultural practices they experienced, whether as students (as Luther Standing
Bear notes in his autobiographical account narrating how he selected an
English name off of a blackboard after coming to Carlisle) or later as adults
who wanted to be legible as Indians and Americans. Perhaps readers came
to recognize Carlos both as the Indian doctor “Montezuma” from Chicago
and as the writer “Wassaja” – the Indian advocate and political critic. It is
likely that many of his Native readers may have already been familiar with
the notion of using a persona to write about controversial subjects affecting
Indian Country, especially those who had read some of Alexander Posey’s
writings as “Fus Fixico.” A Creek journalist and poet living and writing in
Indian Territory at the turn of the century, Posey wrote letters under the
pseudonym Fus Fixico (“Heartless Bird”). These appeared in the Indian
Journal – the same name the SAI later used for its periodical – the newspa-
per Posey ran from Eufala, Creek Nation, from 1902 to 1908. Written in
an Indian-English dialect, the letters captured readers’ imaginations with
their humor and commentary on contemporary events, making Posey “one
of the best Indian humorists of all time.” One might then imagine a Native
writing and reading continuum that begins in the nineteenth century and
carries over into the twentieth, when increased literacy rates enabled grow-
ing numbers of Indian readers to consume both Posey and Montezuma’s
newspapers.42
Following in the footsteps of Rev. Philip Gordon, who had edited two
newspapers – War Whoop (Lawrence, Kansas) in 1916 and a-ni-shi-na-bwe
E-na-mi-ad (Reserve, Wisconsin) in 1918 – Montezuma entered the news-
letter business with a discourse that critiqued and defined Indianness in
America.43 It is likely he used Wassaja in much the same way that Bonnin
used copies of letters (SAI memoranda, for example) for mass distribution of
critical ideas and platforms, a tactic shared by pan-tribal organizations such
118 Indigenous Intellectuals

as the Brotherhood of North American Indians, founded in Washington,

DC by Richard C. Adams, a member of the Delaware Tribe in Oklahoma,
in 1911.44 With a mailing list that at times numbered 1,000 from across
the United States, Wassaja reached an incredibly diverse public. The cir-
culation of Montezuma’s paper together with the copied letters Bonnin
sent out reflect the connection these activists made between the political
power of epistolary culture and the territory magazines and journals occu-
pied in the context of an expanding print market during the early twentieth
century. Both sent materials out to Indian people and white progressives.
Both believed these audiences were eager to stay informed about efforts
to reshape U.S. federal policy with regards to Indian affairs. Much of their
intellectual labor, and that of others in their cohort, took the form of writ-
ing, copying, and mailing out a varied set of texts to engage Native and
non-Native people alike.
Because many issues of Wassaja showcased letters from readers, the
paper itself functioned as a critical site for public discussions by Indian
people regarding national issues, such as policy and education, as well as
more localized concerns, such as land rights and reservation management.
In a typical issue, Montezuma might publish three to four letters from read-
ers as well as his responses to previous letters. As an arena for exchange,
Wassaja enabled Montezuma to strategically represent himself as an Indian
intellectual with a desire to be seen as an Indian leader and facilitator, and a
citizen. At the same time, it honored different representations of Indianness
by including a range of Indian voices. He did this not to impose an essen-
tial Indian subjectivity, but rather to open the idea up for discussion in
order to fight for citizenship, which he believed would allow for individual
choices of how to be an Indian in America. In addition to including articles
by other Indian intellectuals and letters to the editor from across Indian
Country, Montezuma used an array of genres and literary styles through-
out the pages of Wassaja. By including prose and poetry as well as liturgy
and parody, Wassaja spoke to the tastes of a broad range of readers and
invited them to discuss all things Indian in whichever mode struck their
fancy. Montezuma used political cartoons and allegories, parody and sar-
casm as tools to make his criticism both clear and lighthearted, so that his
readers might better discern fact from fiction, and real Indians from the
popular misrepresentations of them that figured so prominently in other
public arenas.
Not every issue of his newspaper featured U.S. citizenship as a subject for
editorial comment. But most did. In March 1918, Montezuma wrote: “[T]‌he
country must first make him a free man, and then give him his citizenship.
But to give him citizenship with conditions attached to it is not citizen-
ship that is enjoyed by true American citizens. That is false freedom!” Like
“spurious citizenship,” Montezuma’s “false freedom” rhetoric questioned
the federal government’s definition of citizenship. Indeed, the changing and
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 119

uncertain nature of the relationship between the federal government and

Indian tribes complicated the issue of citizenship for Native people dur-
ing the early twentieth century. Wassaja became an important outlet where
Montezuma and others voiced their discontent regarding this history and
raised questions regarding sovereignty because the United States continued
to break many treaty obligations.45
Like many problems that confronted and continue to confront American
Indians, the denial of citizenship can be traced to the treaty-making system.
During the colonial period, France, Spain, and Great Britain had distinc-
tive ways of dealing with Indian tribes, but despite their differences they
established a pattern of treaty making that provided the basis for dealing
with these tribes as independent and sovereign nations. The United States
continued this early treaty-making tradition until the landmark Supreme
Court Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) case, where Chief Justice John
Marshall redefined tribes as having the fraught status of “domestic depen-
dent nations.” This ruling became fundamental for establishing a process by
which Indians had to work through Congress in order to change the nature
of their relationship to the federal government. This was a crucial precedent,
as the Cherokee Cases of the early nineteenth century inaugurated a new era
of diminished sovereignty for Indian nations, at least from the perspective
of the U.S. government. In 1871, an act of Congress banned treaty making
between tribal nations and the federal government, which further weak-
ened the inherent sovereignty of tribes as independent and foreign nations.
During this period, individual Indians were defined as citizens through their
relationship to their tribe. Therefore, Indians were citizens of tribal nations,
and in order to become a citizen of the United States, they had to give up the
rights of citizenship established by their individual tribes, a trade-off many
did not want to make.46
For those who voluntarily disassociated from their tribal nations, citi-
zenship remained legally ambiguous until 1884, when John Elk (living in
Omaha, Nebraska) tried to vote and was refused. In the case of John Elk
v. Charles Wilkins, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld this decision and ruled
that an Indian could not become a citizen of the United States by abandon-
ing tribal allegiance without the consent and cooperation of the U.S. gov-
ernment. Only through an act of Congress would all Native people receive
the rights of citizenship. Many pro-assimilation activists, both white and
Indian, who worked through Indian reform organizations during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, believed citizenship was needed to
secure legal protection, which was essential to becoming part of American
civilization. Despite the fact that the Dawes Act of 1887 supposedly granted
citizenship to Indians who separated themselves from their tribes and began
living on their own private property, most Indians involved in the allotment
process were not actually eligible for citizenship until they received titles to
their lands, which came after a twenty-five-year trust period. This sort of
120 Indigenous Intellectuals

waiting is exactly the type of policy that angered Montezuma, and was fod-
der for the articles in Wassaja.47
For Wassaja readers, the racialization of citizenship remained an impor-
tant sticking point, especially because of the peculiar, extra-constitutional
position in which Native peoples were subject (or not) to U.S.  law. For
instance, the 1790 U.S. Naturalization Act limited citizenship to any “free
white person,” and in 1857, in Dred Scott v. Sanford, the Supreme Court
confirmed that no one of African ancestry could be a citizen. Then the
Fourteenth Amendment was passed to make African Americans citizens by
granting citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,
subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” But at the same time, the amendment
denied citizenship to Native people because most Indians were regarded
as not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, but subject to the
jurisdictions of their particular tribal nations. In 1883, in Ex Parte Crow
Dog, the Supreme Court affirmed the exclusion of Natives under tribal gov-
ernment from the jurisdiction of the United States, and finally this jurisdic-
tional exclusion began to break down with the seven major crimes act of
1885, which placed certain crimes committed on tribal lands under federal
jurisdiction, but did not extend citizenship in any universal way to Native
people. These restrictions regarding eligibility for citizenship were based
on class and race, as much as gender given its invisibility as a category,
which aimed to keep women outside of the new body politic as well. During
Montezuma’s lifetime, these sorts of exclusions remained a central concern
of Native people who sought both political and social recognition. The roles
Native people could play in American society dominated the debates they
waged on the pages of Wassaja.48
One article, “Life, Liberty & Citizenship,” written between 1917 and
1918 against the backdrop of World War I, offered a sentimental digest of the
song “America.” It had served as a de facto national anthem for the United
States before the adoption of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Montezuma’s
text invokes the opening lines of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” to point out
how “Let freedom ring” rings differently for the colonized subject. Indeed,
for him, an analysis of this song produces a cultural space where he charts
the racialization of Indian people as different from white citizens. He sug-
gests that when Montezuma and other Indians listen to the song, it cannot
be heard without sadness coming to mind. He writes, “It is sad and it often
makes tears come to my eyes, because the song carries me to my people,
to the wigwam, to the reservation, and I  see my race enslaved by those
who sing this song of liberty.” Here Montezuma criticizes those who sing
this song to constitute an American nation for embracing what can only be
understood as spurious liberty for the Indian in America. For Montezuma,
the moment of listening becomes marked by apprehension. “When I hear
this song it makes my heart grow and I wonder if it is true.” Such wondering
does not lead to wonderment but rather to the harsh reality that the song’s
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 121

title does not recognize how “ ‘My country-’ it was once” and the truth of
Native peoples’ dispossession.49
Montezuma’s article continues working through other stanzas in
“America” to expand on how the song takes him back to “the wigwam”
and the space of the reservation to question the concept of liberty. He uses
call and response to incite the reader to listen to the song, and to hear it
as he does. “ ‘Land where my fathers died-’ that is true, but does ‘Freedom
ring from every mountain side?’ – where are you and where am I as chil-
dren of the real Americans?” In this passage, Montezuma points out the
flaw in the song’s aim to define America as unified by the principles of lib-
erty, despite a history of conquest where he notes “my fathers died.” He
flips the genealogical logic of the founding moment of America by claiming
Indian fathers as foundational figures rather than the white “fathers” of
Washington, Jefferson, and the like. The fathers of his relatives then become
the “real Americans” missing from the song’s narrative about freedom
because of their deaths. Montezuma’s inversion supports his next claim,
that this “Sweet land of liberty” is one in which Indian people “are not free;
liberty is not ours to enjoy.” Analyses and claims like this appear throughout
other issues of Wassaja.50
The denouement to “Life, Liberty & Citizenship” evokes the concept of
liberty framed through the prism of Montezuma’s life as a young boy in
Arizona. He engages his Indian readers more explicitly by shifting from
first person singular “I remember the days when I was with my people in
Arizona” (emphasis mine) to first person plural:
We lived out in the open air on mother earth. We drank the water from the spring,
we lived on nature’s provisions and killed game for meat. No one owned anything.
There was no law. To us there was no such thing as time; we went where we pleased.
No one disputed our claim. We all lived as one. That is liberty.

This moment enables Montezuma to recall the past in idyllic and precap-
italist terms, especially given that U.S. “citizenship” would not have been
an issue to confront given that “there was no law.” In his utopian fram-
ing, real liberty is neither produced out of American civilization (and, we
might surmise, documents that authenticate that civilization, like the U.S.
Constitution), nor celebrated by a national anthem. Instead, liberty is iden-
tified with a people and a place apart from the United States, and one not
yet claimed by the hegemonic practices of colonialism. Still, this conception
of liberty is locked in the past, thus acknowledging the capitalist present and
its shifting terrain for Montezuma.
As a Christian, he calls out to God to reestablish the missing link between
liberty and citizenship for Indian people. His call indicts the United States
as a Christian nation, by noting how Native people are caught in the grasp
of American nationalism, but ironically, not entitled to any of its benefits.
He writes, “God help us to redeem our people by being free, by gaining our
122 Indigenous Intellectuals

liberty and by being citizens.”51 This call for redemption fits within Christian
teachings, and is not just symbolic, but also material. Indeed, the act of
redeeming can be one in which an individual (or a group) seeks recovery of
something that has been pawned or mortgaged. It can also refer to the pay-
ment of an obligation. In this latter case, Montezuma implies that it is not
really God so much as the U.S. government that must redeem Indian peo-
ple, and by extension redeem the nation itself. His version aims to become
the real national anthem. Here we get something of what Montezuma sees
as the relationship between Christianity and citizenship. Like abolitionist
William Lloyd Garrison, who saw the Constitution as “a covenant with
death” and “an agreement with hell,” he is appealing to an authority that is
higher than the U.S. government to grant Indians their rights.52
Despite Wassaja’s popularity and the power of its rhetoric, it was a costly
enterprise for Montezuma to keep up. Each month, he spent at least $20 of
his $200 income to keep the newsletter in print. In 1922, he wrote to Pratt
complaining of the financial strain Wassaja had placed on his life. “I have
to forego many things in order to get out the Wassaja. I want to take a rest
in Arizona a month, but now I can see no way to do it. If I were wealthy
I do not think I would think very much about my people, but being poor,
my heart yearns for them.” So despite his career as a doctor and a penchant
for wearing tuxedos for public talks, Montezuma did not consider himself a
wealthy man. He chose to use his personal income toward Indian activism; a
consequence was that he cut back on other material goods. Like Bonnin, he
put himself and his income to work on behalf of all Indian people.53
Montezuma’s financial records for Wassaja include a collection of sub-
scriber slips and sixteen pages of a mailing list. Although these records are
not a complete accounting of Montezuma’s readership, the range of his news-
paper’s circulation provides a window into the types of readers who paid for
annual subscriptions, suggesting the range of publics Wassaja reached. For
example, within these records William Bergen of Martin, South Dakota is
listed as the earliest subscriber from June 1916, and He Dog of the Rosebud
Agency (also located in South Dakota) is listed as a subscriber for December
1920, near the end of the paper’s run. Within these four years, Wassaja
fought a discursive battle against the Indian Bureau, called for widespread
reform with regards to Indian citizenship, and celebrated the feats of Native
American soldiers who fought in World War I.  Between 1916 and 1920,
times were not easy at Rosebud and other agencies across the United States
in terms of employment opportunities, given the lack of sufficient govern-
ment subsidies. At the same time, an increase in schooling also meant an
increase in literacy, so there were many readers on reservations who may
have been drawn to Wassaja’s more radical politics and who favored the
abolition of the BIA.54
Within his subscription list, it is well worth considering specific individual
subscribers in order to assess Wassaja’s influence and the different circuits
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 123

through which Montezuma was able to address a range of publics. These

figures are not meant to be representative of entire groups or movements,
but nevertheless, the readership appears to have been very diverse in terms
of race, geography, class, and gender, to suggest the reach of Montezuma’s
ideas, if not their acceptance. Still, knowing a bit more about who sub-
scribed to Wassaja can suggest the particular ways Montezuma’s ideas were
understood. Looking at these readers also reveals the ways literacy contrib-
uted to establishing and maintaining different types of regional and national
Native communities.55
Like Gertrude Bonnin, who commented that she “[w]‌as glad to refresh
myself in reading the Wasaja,[sic],”56 Indian activists and intellectual leaders
Henry Roe Cloud, Henry Standing Bear, and Charles Eastman, founding
members of the SAI, all subscribed to Wassaja. However, the vast majority of
Indian people who subscribed did not necessarily know Montezuma person-
ally, nor is there much evidence to suggest they were active in national poli-
tics with regard to Indian issues. Yet these are people who may have engaged
in a discourse of pan-Indian activism through their reading of Wassaja.
Harvey Ashue, a member of the Yakima Indian Nation who lived in Wapato,
Washington, a town founded in 1885 by Indian postmaster Alexander
McCredy, along with Moses Archambeau from Greenwood, South Dakota,
and De Forest Antelope of Watonga, Oklahoma, were Wassaja subscribers
between 1918 and 1919. De Forest Antelope, an 1895 graduate of Haskell
Institute, commented that the paper was “a fine example of the educated,
industrious and successful Indians.”57
In addition to lesser known Indian men and women, there were also sub-
scribers who stand apart from the figures already mentioned because of
their unique circumstances. Two men in particular wielded different sorts
of power within Indian Country and American history. The first is Jackson
Barnett (1856–1934), a Creek from Henrietta, Oklahoma. Known as the
“Richest Indian,” he became an American folk figure because of the dis-
covery of oil on his allotment in 1912. In 1920, Barnett married a white
woman, and by 1923, he had left Oklahoma to live in a mansion in Los
Angeles, California. The second is Chief Plenty Coups (1948–32), a Crow.
Montezuma’s mailing list locates him in Pryor, Montana, which in 1996
became a National Historical Landmark where visitors could see the chief’s
log house. Not far from “the Homestead of Chief Plenty Coups, one of
the last and most celebrated traditional chiefs of the Crow Indians,” is the
Chief Plenty Coups Museum. More a political and cultural leader than a
man of material wealth like Barnett, Plenty Coups became very visible in
American society. He was well known for allying the Crow with whites
out West against their traditional enemies, the Sioux and Cheyenne, who
opposed white settlement of the area.58
Plenty Coups came to the attention of other Indian people and the wider
American public when he was eulogized, by Scott Leavitt of Montana, in
124 Indigenous Intellectuals

the House of Representatives on Saturday, March 5, 1932. Leavitt framed

his remarks by noting it was “not customary” to announce the passing of
a private citizen to Congress “unless he has achieved distinction of the first
order.” Leavitt began by speaking about his personal relationship with Plenty
Coups and on “his history,” written by Frank B. Linderman, “a Montana
author.” Leavitt celebrated as well as flattened the life of Plenty Coups in
his eulogy by defining him as a product of Americanization, noting how he
was “in truth a symbol of the absorption of the American Indian into the
citizenship of the United States.” This is an odd comment to make given
how Plenty Coups’ actions have often been interpreted as a strategic way
of engaging with the forces of colonialism in order to guarantee Native
survival, which is not quite the same thing as working toward or accept-
ing the “absorption of the American Indian” into the United States. Both
Montezuma and Plenty Coups were known for their ability to lead Indian
communities and to productively engage white audiences. Both contributed
to a discourse of Indian citizenship that sought political power while main-
taining Indian cultures and traditions.59
Despite a large number of Native readers, non-Indian readers constituted
the largest number of subscribers to Wassaja. From enthusiasts who col-
lected “Indian things” to Indian agents working for the U.S.  government,
to vaudeville performers, business magnates, and progressives, a wide
range of white readers was interested in what Montezuma had to say about
Indian affairs. Fellow Chicagoan Edward E. Ayer, the uncle of Elbridge Ayer
Burbank, who painted and sketched more than 1,200 Native Americans
from 125 tribes, was a successful business magnate, museum benefactor,
and avid antiquarian collector of books, original manuscripts, and materials
relating to the history and ethnology of Native American peoples, and an
devoted Wassaja reader. E. E. Ayer’s collection, one of the founding dona-
tions to the Newberry Library in Chicago, contains a number of his nephew
Elbridge’s works, including the most complete collection of Wassaja issues.
Both Ayer and Burbank were enthusiastic collectors of Indian artifacts,
which included Native newspapers.
Another subscriber, John R.  Brennan, was affiliated with the Oglala
Sioux Indian Reservation. Brennan came to the Black Hills in 1876, and
helped found Rapid City, South Dakota. Later he was appointed agent at
the Pine Ridge Reservation on November 1, 1900. He served in this post
until July 1, 1917. According to Montezuma’s records, Brennan was a sub-
scriber in 1919. However, it is likely he could have read Wassaja even earlier
because the two men became acquainted in 1904 following a train accident
in Chicago involving some “show Indians” from Pine Ridge who were trav-
eling on their way to perform for William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West.
Montezuma tended to the Native men injured in the crash and recorded
details for their lawsuit against the railroad companies involved as a medical
witness. One might imagine a situation where an Indian agent like Brennan
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 125

picked up the paper and ended up reading polemical articles sought to

undermine his very existence.
Life at Pine Ridge could have produced just such an occasion for Brennan,
who could have discussed the issue with Native subscribers living on the
reservation. Perhaps an even more unusual subscriber is Fannie Beane from
Wagner, South Dakota. One of the earliest comediennes of vaudeville, Beane
began her performance career in 1875 and later married Charles Gilday in
1883, after which they performed together. We might speculate that Beane’s
interest in Wassaja was based on her life in Wagner because there were many
other subscribers from that town. Perhaps she wanted to participate in local
debates and conversations about news from Indian Country. In addition,
she may have subscribed because her performances were likely to involve
some themes and events based loosely on Indian-white relations.60 Another
Wassaja reader who, like Beane, was interested in representations of Indians
and their history was Joseph K. Dixon (1856–1926).
Dixon photographed American Indians between 1908 and 1923 on
behalf of the Wanamaker Expedition sponsored by the department store of
the same name. Today, the Wanamaker Collection holds over 8,000 images
of individuals from over 150 tribes. Dixon was in charge of the “Educational
Bureau” for his employer and sponsor, Rodman Wanamaker – son and part-
ner of John Wanamaker, who founded both the Philadelphia and New York
stores. Dixon’s interest in Montezuma’s newsletter was partially motivated
by a desire to market Indianness. In addition to photographs, Dixon worked
with the Wanamaker store to sell “goods” such as mages, artifacts, and
recorded sounds that “explorers” brought back from Indian Country; such
goods became part of elaborate displays and theatrical productions staged
in both the Philadelphia and New York department stores, which capital-
ized on the myth of the vanishing Indian. One such production narrated “A
Romance of the Vanishing Race.” In 1914, four years before he subscribed
to Wassaja, Dixon succeeded in publishing The Vanishing Race (with illus-
trations by R. Wanamaker), published in New York by Doubleday.61
One can imagine Dixon read Wassaja with mixed feelings. On one hand,
he may have liked the idea that this particular Indian intellectual sought
to incorporate Indians into America as proper capitalist citizens, and on
the other hand, he may have worried about a loss of authenticity whereby
“Indianness” disappeared under the cloak of American citizenship. In actu-
ality, Dixon and Montezuma were fundamentally at odds in their goals: the
former needed the large government apparatus of the reservation system
to better navigate among Indian people in search of real Indian things to
sell, and the latter was committed to abolishing the Indian Bureau because
he saw its mismanagement and mistreatment of Indian people as a perpet-
ual problem. For Montezuma, citizenship and capitalism remained central
issues in the newsletter, and were useful sites of engagement for a white
businessman like Dixon, who wanted to market Indian things and to learn
126 Indigenous Intellectuals

how to market to Indian people. This latter aim fit neatly into the goals of
Pratt and other white progressives, who understood Native incorporation
into U.S. society as political, social, and also economic – and as much about
production as consumption.
Another entrepreneur who read Wassaja was William Bishop from Port
Townsend in northwest Washington. A  logger and a capitalist, Bishop
helped create the Northwest Federation of American Indians (NFAI) with
his son Tom. The NFAI was organized in 1913 by landless tribes in Puget
Sound to resolve their status as tribes and to assert their treaty rights.
Thomas G.  Bishop of the Snohomish tribe was their first leader. After
the Treaty of Point Elliot in 1855, tribes such as the Duwamish, Samish,
Snoqualmie, and Snohomish did not remove to the assigned reservations
but instead continued to live along the shore, lakes, and rivers in the area.
This was also the era of Gifford Pinchot and the Forestry Service’s efforts
to practice conservation in U.S.  forests, which did reduce opportunities
for exploitation of prime timber lands, so private timber companies had
to look for other forested areas, which may have been another factor
influencing these tribes to remain in their ancestral homelands.62 They
preserved their tribal identities despite the fact that the U.S. government
declined to recognize them. Bishop was a Wassaja reader who would have
been concerned about changes in federal policy affecting tribal nations in
the Northwest, and he could use the paper to promote the work of the
NFAI in 1919.63
Perhaps the most infamous subscriber was neither an Indian nor a
performer, but certainly an entrepreneur and industrialist:  Henry Ford
(1863–1947). He may have celebrated the self-publishing work of
Montezuma because of his own recent venture in publishing the Dearborn
Independent, which he had acquired in 1918.64 Ford may have even met
Montezuma; the latter made frequent trips as a lecturer to towns in Michigan
close to Ford’s hometown of Dearborn. Without more to go on, it is difficult
to know for sure why Ford, or any other readers for that matter, subscribed
to this paper and to know what they took away from it. Perhaps Ford was
attracted to Indians for what he saw as exemplars of a simpler and purer
version of rural life. Reynold Wik makes clear that Ford idealized a prein-
dustrial and rural American way of life while also promoting a machine that
dramatically transformed rural America. Not only did he create Greenfield
Village, he also promoted square dancing among workers in his plants to
promote or preserve what he saw as traditionally American. In addition, in
1927, Ford traveled to the Amazon, where he built “Fordlandia.” There his
intention of growing rubber became an export of America itself, including
golf courses, ice cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts
rolling down broad streets.65 Perhaps the pull of nostalgia and the trap-
pings of Indianness motivated Ford to read the paper. Montezuma was by
no means against capitalism, and so it is possible that the two men saw eye
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 127

to eye on matters of industry regarding both material production and the

rights of the individual.66
Certainly the articles printed in Wassaja produced a marked increase in
demand for Montezuma as a lecturer and writer in other arenas. Plus, the
popularity and circulation of the newsletter expanded his already large vol-
ume of correspondence. One letter that Montezuma sent to Pratt mentions
the 100 letters or so that Montezuma had received and his intention to
answer every one. This flow of letters generated an epistolary culture, which
ran beside and in relation to Montezuma’s newsletter. By 1920, Montezuma
received letters on a daily basis from Indian people located across the coun-
try. They were his readers. And he, as “Wassaja” (the editor), took on a
sort of “Dear Abby” role within Indian Country using his newsletter when-
ever he published responses to their queries. Within this forum, Montezuma
could listen to and address what his readers asserted in their letters. Many
of them insisted on better living conditions, more educational and work
opportunities, as well as a voice in how to shape the future of the Indian
Bureau. As a cultural space, Wassaja represented a diverse array of Native
voices. The paper was not just the vision of its creator; it became central to
the work of other Native reformers during Montezuma’s lifetime.

Epistolary Production in Relation to Print Culture

The epistolary culture networks that connected Indian leaders and white
allies depended on regular correspondence as well as printed talks and
articles. For Montezuma, these texts became the sites of political discourse
that linked these forums with the publishing work of Wassaja. On aver-
age, Montezuma received letters daily from national pan-tribal reform
groups like the SAI and the smaller and less well-known Brotherhood of
North American Indians. Overall, most of the letters he received were at
least a page long. It appears he kept up with the onslaught by writing back
within a day or two, which could mean he sent and received upwards of
fifty or more letters a year with each person who wrote to him. Within
Montezuma’s personal archive, there are three Indian cultural producers
with whom he corresponded who represent distinctive voices, geograph-
ical areas, and political positions that showcase the significance of corre-
spondence in shaping Montezuma’s political work as well as the efforts and
writings of other Indian intellectuals during the period. Like Montezuma,
Arthur C. Parker (1881–1955), John M. Oskison (1874–1947), and artist
Wa-Wa Chaw (1883–1966) succeeded in having their work published dur-
ing the early decades of the twentieth century. They also wrote letters regu-
larly to Montezuma and subscribed to Wassaja.
Parker was one of Montezuma’s primary correspondents. In 1916, Parker
published “The Civilizing Power of Language” in the Quarterly Journal of
the Society of American Indians. This essay reflects many of the topics and
128 Indigenous Intellectuals

concerns Parker and Montezuma articulated throughout their extensive cor-

respondence. Parker’s text meditates on the role language plays in culture
and civilization. He argues using English as an inter-tribal language will
help Indian people adopt “a new mental vision and new grasp of the world.”
Parker’s argument is a provocative one. In one sense he is writing against a
scientific discourse that suggested Indians had not yet evolved the skills to
properly speak English, and revises it to suggest Indian intellectuals can use
English to be the best leaders by communicating with each other and the
wider world. His article lists contemporaries, like Rev. Sherman Coolidge
and Charles Eastman, along with leaders from earlier eras like John Ross
and Alexander Posey. Parker sees these men as examples of those who have
successfully bridged the gap between savagery and civilization.67
According to Parker, language is the preeminent tool of culture and
power. He writes, “The American Indian mind ‘borrowing’ an alien tongue
uses it with all the power that civilization has given it. That tongue of a
‘civilized’ people compels a thought expression and weave consistent with
civilized ideals.” By learning to speak and write in English, Indians can har-
ness the power of American civilization, which is to be more civilized and
more American. Parker emphasizes how learning enables language acqui-
sition to function as the site where history, tradition, and culture can be
accessed: “Used to its fullest extent it brings the native mind a hold on the
literature, rhetoric, history and science of the race that evolved the language.”
Parker also remains carefully ambivalent about the hegemonic power of lan-
guage. He does not discount the possibility that an Indian’s prior knowledge
may inflect the ways he or she learns English. “But woven in the understand-
ing and in the thought fabric of the Indian is a thread and often warp all his
own, lending an embellishment that is distinctive” (emphasis mine). Relying
on the metaphor of sewing, Parker is able to refashion the trope of the warp.
Here the thought fabric of the Indian pushes against the more dominant,
white grain by remaining embedded in new ways of speaking, reading, and
thinking that have come about through learning English – a process that is
itself a critical part of the colonial legacy of the United States. Furthermore,
Parker reflects the common ground he shared with Montezuma regarding
their work as Indian intellectuals within Indian Country and the United
States. Both men used the tools of their education to reform the system that
had forced Native children to abandon their indigenous languages to be
educated only in English.68
Parker implies that the ways Indian people think are distinctive (warped,
but in a good way), and that they cannot be lost or overcome by the process
of learning English. Parker marks learning itself as a fluid and mutable pro-
cess, and therefore, it becomes possible that an Indian using English may add
a “warp all his own” to improve the language and larger (American) culture.
When Parker suggests “language is the outward expression of the thought
life of a culture” and he pulls words from that language like “savagery,”
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 129

“brutality,” “barbarism,” “civilization,” “education,” and “reason” to say

these are “but ways of thinking,” his logic balances two important notions.
One is how language (as a tool of culture) can be used to educate and uplift
an individual, and the other is how the best representatives of “the Red
race” will become “active forces in civilization” through their eloquence
and logical ways of speaking and thinking in English. Finally, the “hidden
transcript” in Parker’s message suggests English can represent the dominant
culture and practices of oppression, and still be adopted and actualized to
the benefit of those who seek to disrupt, overcome, or resist that domi-
nant culture. In fact, he argues a special position of power may be occupied
by the Indian speaker of English when he writes, “No Roman orator ever
spoke with such vigor, no senator of our Congress ever clothed his speech
with greater beauty than the orators and writers of the Red race who spoke
or wrote in English.” The direct comparison to the Roman orator and the
U.S.  senator enables Parker to frame the “orators and writers of the Red
race” in the context of American culture as well as above it. The reference to
Rome suggests Native people are the antiquity of American civilization and
also living examples of its greatness who need to be recognized. This strat-
egy is similar to Montezuma’s rewriting of the song “America,” and it seems
likely that Montezuma would have agreed with Parker’s comparison. In
many ways, this way of engaging history and language was a primary goal
of Montezuma’s newspaper and a theme in his correspondence. Montezuma
used letters to comment on current events, and he led by example. Both
Parker and Montezuma believed Native intellectual leaders needed to be
bold, eloquent, and logical in their command of English to make convinc-
ing arguments about their place in the world and their future, a notion that
John Oskison would also have supported.69
Oskison was Cherokee, a political ally, and fellow writer. However,
Oskison’s early years diverged from Montezuma’s in a number of ways that
would influence the trajectory of his writing career. Born near Tahlequah
(part of the Cherokee Nation West) as the son of John Oskison, an English
immigrant, and Rachel Connor Crittenden, part Cherokee, he went to
Willie Halsell College, where he met and became lifelong friends with Will
Rogers. His first significant publication appeared early, in 1887, as a short
story. Unlike Montezuma, Oskison was developing his writing craft before
he went to college. After graduating in 1894, Oskison went to Stanford
University, where he received a BA in 1898. A year later, while he pursued
graduate work in English at Harvard, Oskison won a writing contest spon-
sored by Century Magazine, which marked the beginning of his professional
career as a writer.
Between 1897 and 1925, Oskison published at least twenty stories,
many of which circulated in popular American magazines such as Frank
Leslie’s Monthly, McClure’s, and Collier’s. Oskison frequently wrote about
contemporary Indian affairs, although unlike Montezuma his writing
130 Indigenous Intellectuals

reached a broader and mostly white American audience through his fiction
pieces. Between 1906 and 1912, he worked as an editor for the Ossining
(New  York), The Citizen, the New  York Evening Post, and as an associ-
ate editor for Collier’s. In these positions, Oskison accessed different sorts
of networks driven by print culture that were tied to the white publish-
ing houses of the East Coast. Oskison also joined the Temporary Executive
Committee of the American Indian Association in 1911, and later played an
active role in the SAI, which may be when he first met Montezuma. Much
of Oskison’s career in journalism and creative writing was broken up by
military service during World War I. Before the war he wrote regularly to
Montezuma while he worked for Collier’s. The tone of their exchanges is
friendly and familiar, and the content is often political. Because creative
rather than polemical writing appealed to Oskison, he soon turned to writ-
ing mainly novels. These fictional works still tackled social issues facing
Native people. Before this latter part of his career, Oskison published a more
overtly political essay that reflected the ideals he and Montezuma shared on
the topic of race leadership.70
Written in 1917, Oskison’s “The New Indian Leadership” focuses on lan-
guage and the rise of Indian leaders. Unlike Parker, Oskison’s text finds the
utterance of English “halting” when “you realize that you are listening to an
alien whose tongue fumbles the language.” He also dramatizes the problem
of Indian leadership at the time, an issue that consistently occupied pages
of Wassaja and Montezuma’s letters as well as annual meetings of groups
like the SAI. In one passage, Oskison reflects on the interplay between dif-
ferent generations of Indian people as centered around the use of different
languages at an Indian meeting where “the old Indians [were] giving up
their ceremonial pipes and their right to speak the first word, and the youn-
ger people, equipped with the white man’s language and instructed in his
ways, [were] reaching forward timidly and awkwardly for the leadership.”
For Oskison, the young people “equipped” with English use it for utilitarian
purposes, rather than for uplift as Parker and Montezuma suggested.71
Oskison describes an “unsmiling interpreter” who is a young graduate of
Carlisle “with arms straight down at his sides” and a “mask-like” face. The
role of the interpreter suggests a loss of understanding separating the two
generations. A young man cannot understand the old chief without a trans-
lator, and the older generation cannot understand the necessity for these
young people to speak English. Despite this distance, Oskison imbues the
scene of translation with emotional power: “Even through the colorless ren-
dering of the young interpreter, the old man’s words get you by the throat,
and you wonder at a power of self-control which permits of quiet talk of the
day when he shall have ‘passed over the border,’ leaving a great weight of
trouble for his people behind.” We cannot know exactly what is left behind
when one generation dies and another takes over. Oskison implies ambiguity
is critical in how to read this reservation meeting as a gathering of the young
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 131

and the old. Given that Wassaja was printed in English, and Montezuma
wrote letters only in English, it seems likely that he saw himself as part of
this new generation of Indian leaders, the ones who must speak English and
might require an interpreter to speak with their elders. These young people
were Montezuma’s intended audience.72
Oskison’s emphasis on loss in the essay further departs from the ideas
of Parker and Montezuma given that both promoted the path of education
in English (and white politics and culture) as integral to a future for Indian
people in America. At the same time, Oskison’s work is very much in dia-
logue with the forum Montezuma created with Wassaja, and many of the
ideas he expresses in his personal letters. In particular, the explicit ways
Oskison challenges the U.S. federal government and his call for new leaders
are akin to the messages Montezuma conveyed to many of his correspon-
dents. Montezuma continually wrote to other Native people about the need
to increase the number of “leading Indians” among them because this had to
happen if they ever wanted to put an end to the abuses of the Indian Office
and the reservation system.73
Out of the West Coast, Montezuma found support for Wassaja from
another Indian activist, artist Wa-Wa Chaw. Both the tenor and length of
her letters demonstrate that she was also a dedicated friend. In addition,
as a fundraiser for Wassaja she planned many of Montezuma’s campaigns
and spoke out for the needs he represented. Like Montezuma, Wa-Wa
Chaw was separated from her birth parents and raised by a white woman.
Born in Valley Center, California in 1883, Wa-Wa Chaw was given by her
Luiseno mother to Miss Mary Duggan of New York City, who was travel-
ing nearby at the time of Wa-Wa’s birth. Duggan returned with the young
girl to New  York, where she raised Wa-Wa Chaw with the help of her
brother, Dr.  Cornelius Duggan. Wa-Wa Chaw developed her skills as an
artist at an early age by doing medical sketches for Dr. Duggan. Later, she
painted huge canvases in oil, some of which depict the social problems
she observed. Wa-Wa Chaw became an advocate for Indian and feminist
causes and was well known for her social writings as well as her art. She
married a Puerto Rican businessman named Manuel Carmonia-Nunez who
was active in the Cigar Workers’ Union, and who shared some of Wa-Wa
Chaw’s leftist political beliefs. She died at the age of eighty-three, in May
1966, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Although
Wa-Wa Chaw had grown up in New York City, she never lost sight of her
California roots.74
During the 1920s, Wa-Wa Chaw published poetry and other writings in
the Magazine of the Mission Indian Federation, a periodical created by an
organization of the same name, headed by a white man, Jonathan Tibbets,
of Riverside, California. This monthly magazine’s slogan was “Loyalty and
Cooperation with Our Government.” The frontpiece for the September
1922 issue features a poem by Wa-Wa Chaw titled:  “Haunted Brains.”
132 Indigenous Intellectuals

The message of “haunted brains” reappears in every stanza, reminding

readers that Indians, whether alive or dead, have “no rest” because they
have “haunted brains.” Wa-Wa Chaw’s haunting refers to the “mysteries
of unknown plans” that may visit “during the night.” Inside the magazine,
readers gain further insight into what these “unknown plans” are by read-
ing an article by an author known only as “Grizzly Bear.” This piece points
out that in California Indians are forced to live on small reservations: “not
by treaty but by simple agreement.”75 These tenuous agreements could cer-
tainly haunt one’s brain, if not also impede social and economic stability and
cultural vitality.
Wa-Wa Chaw’s efforts were well supported by this magazine because,
like the Indian Board of Cooperation, the Federation had a large body of
Indian members, even if non-Indians dominated many of their meetings.76
In addition, the reference to a piece by “Grizzly Bear” may point to another
magazine, The California Grizzly Bear, which was published by the Native
Sons of the Golden West – a group of Indians who were active in the San
Francisco area. During the first half of the 1920s, they campaigned to publi-
cize the needs of California Indians. There were many other groups active in
the cause of the California Indians, which Wa-Wa Chaw would have found
support through and made connections with, such as:  the Indian Welfare
Committee of the Federated Women’s Clubs (who Bonnin corresponded
with on a regular basis), the California Indian Rights Association, Inc.,
the Northern California Indian Association, and the Women’s Christian
Temperance Union.77 It is no coincidence that these different groups had
formed and become active in the early decades of the twentieth century. By
1909, the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco was investigating the mat-
ter of Indian rights and the lost eighteen treaties, which had come to light
in 1905 and started to sway public opinion in favor of Indian sovereignty –
over their land and culture. By maintaining correspondence with Wa-Wa
Chaw, Montezuma would be able to access the Indian reform networks of
the West Coast, which would help him publish pieces in Wassaja that would
reflect Native issues from across the United States.78
Like Wassaja, many issues of the Indian Mission Federation Magazine
focused on the future of Indian people, especially those in California and
concerns related to land and treaty rights. The magazine also featured poetry
and fiction pieces. One poem, “Courage,” by Wa-Wa Chaw represented the
Federation’s aims as well as her politics:
Joyful through hope your motto still be
“Human Rights and Home Rule.”
What glories will Mission Indian Federation unfold to you.
Be of good mind, and cheer – take courage.

Like the writings inside the magazine, Wa-Wa Chaw’s poem reminds
readers that “human rights and home rule” are intimately linked. In this
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 133

sense, California Indians were fighting not only for suffrage but also for
sovereignty, and one might speculate that readers of the magazine could
have been Wassaja readers, and vice versa. Copies of several issues among
Montezuma’s personal papers suggest he was one such reader, indicating a
print network that circulated from and between Indians living on the West
Coast and in the Midwest. In fact, the September 1922 issue features an arti-
cle by Carlos Montezuma about the “Evils of Indian Bureau System.” The
next issue (October 1922) included an article on “Indian Bureau Economy,”
where Montezuma argues the “Indian Bureau philanthropy is an econom-
ical farce.” Montezuma’s articles in the Magazine of the Mission Indian
Federation expressed political views he and Wa-Wa Chaw shared. Both
sought ways to preserve “human rights and home rule,” although he opted
for nonfiction and she poetry. Through their letters they wrote frequently to
each other about such topics.79
In many cases, the letters Montezuma exchanged with Parker, Oskison,
Wa-Wa Chaw, and other Indian activists and leaders, operated as material
ways to organize a proliferation of Indian intellectual and cultural produc-
tion during the early twentieth century that became part of broader net-
works of reform, and as a space to test out the ideas they would later make
public in published pieces. By 1920, Montezuma corresponded regularly
with the Yakima Indian Commercial Club and the American Indian Tepee
Christian Mission – both were based in the state of Washington and both
wrote about the essential role Wassaja played as a site for exposing the
“naked truth.”80 These letters connect directly to Montezuma’s newsletter
and provide evidence that he and Charles Eastman were members of the
American Indian Tepee Christian Mission’s advisory board, an organiza-
tion that functioned as an interdenominational home for Indian children
while they attended public school. The local board of trustees was also led
by Rev. Red Fox Skiuhushu and Lucullus V. McWhorter, the latter of which
would later work closely with Luther Standing Bear as an editor and polit-
ical ally for the actor’s reform work based out of Los Angeles.81 This is but
one other example of how far-reaching pan-tribal efforts were toward social
change and how political reform relied on the movement of epistolary cul-
ture across the United States. Montezuma often put himself at the center of
this production and circulation.

Private and Public Opinion

By 1916, an increasing number of influential and highly educated Indians saw
themselves as responsible for leading not only their specific tribal nations but
all Indians, as one unified race. This was no easy task. Montezuma believed
that promoting and maintaining pan-Indian organizations like the SAI was
an important part of this undertaking, and because of this the need for
continuous communication among members was critical. Using letters and
134 Indigenous Intellectuals

circulars, individual organizers reached out to each other and new members,
as well as like-minded organizations and publications. This type of circula-
tion suggests an important link activists made between correspondence and
the fight for citizenship, and better access to education as well as changes in
how the BIA managed Indian people. SAI members and leaders also worked
to maintain ties to white reformers who could be useful allies.
From 1916 to 1918, Gertrude Bonnin confirmed the need for racial unity
in the letters that she sent to Montezuma. On December 10, 1916, while
living in Fort Duchesne, Utah, Bonnin wrote to Montezuma regarding their
shared work as members of the SAI. “I know you are doing all in your
power to help our race. It saddens me, that in our earnestness for a cause,
we do not take time to study our various views and to manage some way
to unite our forces. All Indians must ultimately stand in a united body, for
their own protection.” Here Bonnin affirms a shared mission to continue the
“earnestness” of their cause to fight for citizenship and reflects on the diffi-
culties of pan-tribal organizing. Her repeated call for more unity represents
a theme within Montezuma’s own correspondence, his newsletter Wassaja,
and the rhetoric of other Native periodicals during this period.82
Bonnin’s letter also highlights the stakes of their representational poli-
tics as Indian intellectuals. She writes, “You are right about Indians standing
together, for the best interests of our race. We must work this year as we
have never worked before. . . . I am glad you have your Wassaja for October
ready. You are wise to be very cautious. Every step must be sure. Wisdom can
never be too wise.” Caution and care were critical components of the work
Montezuma, Bonnin, and other Indian intellectuals produced: articles, pam-
phlets, conferences, and public lectures had to be carefully crafted to educate
the American public about broken treaties, the failings of the Dawes Act, and
increasing poverty on reservations. At the same time, her reference to caution
and the notion that “wisdom can never be too wise” suggests an awareness
of the fine line separating an individual’s presentation from the tactics she or
he might use as an advocate for a larger pan-tribal Indian body.83
In a subsequent letter from October 1918, Bonnin again turned to issues
of representation and racial leadership. “I am glad you wrote to assure
The Tomahawk of our good will toward their interests.” The Tomahawk
Publishing Company was run by the Minnesota Chippewa from 1918
until 1926. The Tomahawk published articles about Indian citizenship, the
administration of Indian affairs, and, in particular, specific issues related
to Chippewa natural resources.84 In addition to letters, articles, and poems
by Chippewa writers like Theo H. Beaulieu and others like Leta V. Smart,
The Tomahawk published materials promoting the SAI and the Tipi Order
of America, which meant features written by Montezuma and Bonnin.85
Montezuma’s writing for The Tomahawk was a different example of his
reach and the types of networks utilized by Native activists to promote
social change during this time.
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 135

In addition to seeking and finding support from Native publications,

Montezuma, like Eastman, Bonnin, and Standing Bear, wrote regularly to
white reformers. Their time and money were critical for supporting Indian
causes. A  small handwritten note, perhaps a rough draft of a letter, from
Montezuma addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Smiley at Mohonk Lake,
New  York makes plain why he was unable to present at their upcom-
ing Lake Mohonk Conference. “As one of the members of the Society
of American Indians I  am forced by previous arrangement to forego the
pleasure of accepting your kind invitation to present.” Despite strong ties
established and maintained through extensive letter writing, Montezuma’s
correspondence also reveals ambivalence and hesitation. Here he pulls back
from becoming more involved with the Lake Mohonk Conference. This
reformer circle had been established by Smiley as a space where white, often
elite, Northeastern progressives shared strategies of “uplift” for the people
of so-called less fortunate races. Since the 1880s, the Conference addressed
the “Indian Question” by promoting assimilation through education and
policy changes, like the Dawes Act. Contemporary to such a conference
were other discussions, events, and conflicts that reflected how the “Negro”
and “Oriental” questions were addressed within American society. Perhaps
Montezuma’s choice to forego attending the conference represented a shift
in strategy and a move toward more independence from the white progres-
sive movement. Such a move would make sense given Montezuma’s dis-
trust of large bureaucracies in contrast to individual efforts and localized
approaches.86
By 1918, under the dark shadow cast by World War I  and its
hyper-patriotism, Montezuma received a letter emblematic of the strained
relations that now existed between many Indian intellectual leaders and
white progressives. Sent by Joseph K.  Dixon, on behalf of the “National
American Indian Memorial Association,” the letter called on Montezuma
and “every Indian” to manifest “a spirit of patriotism.” In it, Dixon asks
Montezuma to sign “The Patriotic Sentiment of the Indian.” His definition
of patriotism reflects his take on a Plains Indian vision, overtly heterosexist
and male-centered – a view that dominated the national imaginary during
this period. But for Dixon the hyper-masculine warrior aesthetic aimed to
encourage Montezuma and other Indian men to sign.
In olden times warriors would go out and fight for their women, their children, their
Tepees and their horses when attacked by the warriors of other tribes. . . . The warrior
[who] risked his life in defending the women, the children, the home and common
property of the tribe was “patriotic,” and the women who urged the warrior to fight
[were] “patriotic.”

Dixon links this allegorical scene to the present situation (however fraught
the connection) by calling attention to national security and World War
I.  His rhetoric seems wholly unaware of Montezuma’s life as an urban
136 Indigenous Intellectuals

Indian and the fact that his own ancestors originated in the Southwest and
would not have lived in tepees. The letter also asks if Montezuma would
dare not defend the United States as a nation defined “along the Mexican
borders, the Canadian borders, the Pacific Coast or the Atlantic Coast” or
“an invasion of your tribe or your reservation.” These references to borders
imply reservation spaces were understood as within the U.S. nation, rather
than as tribal-national sites that could refer to political boundaries based on
indigenous sovereignty.
Certainly Montezuma would have read the letter with a great deal of
skepticism. In particular, Dixon’s passage “The land is one, and the protect-
ing laws are for all, white people, Indians and negroes” would have felt
false to Montezuma given that full citizenship was still largely unavailable
to Indian people. At this time living conditions on reservations were regu-
larly “invaded” by federal bureaucrats who seemed unable or unwilling to
improve basic necessities. Despite these problems, Montezuma may have
agreed with Dixon’s letter concerning the idea of rewarding “rights” to
Indians who joined the cavalry to fight for the U.S. military. Dixon assures
Montezuma that the Wanamaker expedition was sent out “carrying the flag
to all the tribes” and not to raise money for the Wanamaker department
store, but rather to bring “freedom and prosperity to the Indian.” Although
this claim is not truthful, Dixon uses it to convince Montezuma to sign “The
Patriotic Sentiment of the Indian,” and, even more important, to work on
his behalf to have other Indians sign it as well.87 Dixon concludes his letter
with somewhat of a request for a favor, by asking Montezuma to “Tell all
my Indian friends very frankly that the signing of this document does not
mean that they are enlisted . . . but that it will be an expression to the country
of your feelings and . . . your loyalty to the Government”; one might surmise
Montezuma raised an eyebrow in suspicion and wondered why loyalty did
not cut both ways. He may have sent a response inquiring: To which Indian
friends do you refer Mr. Dixon?88
Although Montezuma wrote frequently in public about his stance against
the BIA, his private letters often reflect on a shared experience of oppression
among people of color. As private forums, Montezuma’s letters articulate
the motives behind opinions he expressed in more public venues. In 1921, he
wrote to Edward Janney, a fellow doctor, regarding his “Indian work.”89 He
took this opportunity to comment on why he continued to attack the BIA.
He also drew an unusual parallel between the Freedmen’s Bureau (estab-
lished in 1865 through the War Department to undertake post–Civil War
relief programs and social reconstruction for freed people) and the Indian
Bureau (or BIA).
You ask, why I want the Indian Bureau abolished. To give the Indians their freedom
and citizenship. Just for the same reason that the Freedmen Bureau was abolished.
That one act was the salvation of the Negro race. There is just as much hope in the
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 137

destiny of the Indians, after the abolishment of the Indian Bureau, as there was with
the black people. To-day the colored people challenge the world in their progress.90

Despite the fact that the Freedmen Bureau was responsible for and largely
successful in providing assistance to tens of thousands of former slaves and
impoverished whites in the Southern states and the District of Columbia
after the Civil War, Montezuma’s parallel offers an implicit critique of
Reconstruction in the United States. At the same time, he suggests that
despite any failures in the system to assist African Americans in achieving
the benefits of full citizenship, Montezuma was inspired by how “colored
people challenge the world in their progress” – while he failed to recognize
the reach and impact of Jim Crow.91
In addition to fellow doctors and white reformers, Montezuma wrote to
journalists, with whom he may have felt a special kinship given the chal-
lenges and opportunities available to newspaper writers. Throughout the sec-
ond decade of the twentieth century, Montezuma corresponded frequently
and at length with Southern journalist Helen Gilkison (1909–48), whose
pen name was Helen Grey. Grey’s career as a female journalist through the
1920s and into the 1940s “fell outside the social norm, for women in gen-
eral, but remained firmly within the expectations for a female journalist.”
And Grey “wrote with a particular voice, or better, two particular voices.
One was strictly informational; the second was chatty and accessible to
her reader. These voices were a bridge between the reader and the political
world.” These two types of voices are present in the letters that Grey sent to
Montezuma concerning her views on Indian affairs.92
Grey’s many letters to Montezuma address him as both a friend and
political ally. She often uses turns of phrase she may have read in Wassaja.
In one letter, she discursively aligns herself with Montezuma by posing a
rhetorical question. “Why in the world is an Indian different from any other
human being?” They did share similar struggles as writers. Both were striv-
ing to publish politically charged articles that aimed to educate and incite
Americans to action. Perhaps the frequency of their correspondence and a
shared sense of purpose helped them form a distant type of friendship.93
Grey concludes another letter by affirming this shared purpose, and strikes a
less cautious tone than the one Bonnin used. She writes, “We have only now
to keep watching and hit hard every time an opportunity offers.” Although
Grey worked primarily in Louisiana, her writing exposed corruption and
injustices Indian people suffered at the hands of the U.S.  government
throughout the Southwest and Northwest, and her letters to Montezuma
often ask for his help in these matters.94
Montezuma’s letters also recognize Grey’s efforts. One in particu-
lar discusses her work in support of the Crow and Plenty Coups. In
“Congressional Hearings:  Neglected Sources of Information on American
Indians,” Robert Staley uses the Crow as an illustrative case study regarding
138 Indigenous Intellectuals

Indian diplomacy with the United States. He notes that, beginning in 1908
and ending in 1920, the Crow sent several delegations to present at hearings
in Washington, DC in regard to living conditions on the Crow Reservation.
“The delegations included both traditional leaders like Plenty Coups as well
as representatives of a new generation of educated Crows. Allied with the
delegation were the Indian Rights Association, the Washington law firm of
Kappler and Merillat, and Helen Grey, a journalist who prompted a sepa-
rate investigation into conditions on the Crow Reservation.” A letter from
1910, from Pratt to Montezuma, fills in the picture by showing the extent
to which Montezuma understood Grey’s work on behalf of the Crow. Pratt
writes, “Mrs. Gray’s [sic] efforts have probably done more than anything
else to stop a grave wrong against the Crow people.”95 For both Pratt and
Montezuma, this is a moment of recognition regarding the power of print.
Had Grey not written stories for public consumption about the conditions
on the Crow Reservation, it is uncertain whether their delegation to DC
would have been met with as much seriousness.
The diversity of Montezuma’s writerly contacts, whether they exchanged
letters or shared drafts of articles or wrote in each other’s publications, dem-
onstrates the degree to which print culture greatly shaped his reform work
and became the central venue through which he could express his private
and more public thoughts on a range of issues affecting Indian people. In
many ways, Montezuma’s representational politics would be further tested
when he was invited to give public lectures to white groups, as a represen-
tative of the Indian race. The following section asks: How and in what par-
ticular circumstances were Montezuma’s public performances similar to and
divergent from those of other Native performers and Indian intellectuals
during the early twentieth century? And what are some important conclu-
sions that might be drawn from these similarities and differences?96

The Lecture Platform not the Show Indian

Examining how Montezuma conceived of language as performative, as he
engaged with both Americanization and Indianization discourses, requires a
discussion of how performativity, for Montezuma, was a tool of resistance
and criticism. Montezuma’s views regarding Native performance as a polit-
ical or even an economic strategy departed from and aligned with Eastman,
Bonnin, and Standing Bear in some important ways. The networks this
cohort accessed were contingent upon systems of patronage and patriarchy,
so any success Montezuma and other Native intellectuals experienced was
often the exception and not the rule for Native people in the United States.
Wassaja offers one perspective into the lives of a large proportion of indige-
nous people, on reservations and elsewhere, given the large number of Indian
readers who subscribed to the periodical. Montezuma’s other writings and
speeches also use a rhetoric that harkens back to a precontact utopia, which
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 139

became a central theme that he used to account for change over space and
time, and to argue for recognition and incorporation of Native people as
American citizens. Rather than focusing on performance spectacles created
by “Buffalo Bill” Cody, which required an “Indian play” that horrified him,
Montezuma strove to use other kinds of texts  – less showy, perhaps, but
equally performative  – to promote an ideal of “Indianness” that was not
locked in the past but rather addressed the current problems confronting
Indian peoples.97
It was through/by his own performances that Montezuma intervened
in a racialized imaginary that had been created and dominated by white
Americans. In shaping his ideal of Indianness through performance,
Montezuma confronted, appropriated, and redeployed the concept of race
to fashion his own articulation of Indian life  – like Eastman he was the
object and subject of his public talks and his written texts. Both types of
performances circulated to audiences during a time of heightened desire and
awareness of Indianness in the context of an “Indian craze,” which Elizabeth
Hutchinson dates from 1890 to 1915.98
In the early decades of the twentieth century, Indian people had in large
part been separated from Indianness, as a series of powerful literary and
visual representations of Indians had taken root in the minds of many
Americans. It materialized on the bookshelves of schoolhouses and pub-
lic libraries. It was the stuff of the Wild West shows and the ethnographic
displays at fairs and was becoming a genre in the burgeoning film industry.
Whether they saw a film, a popular entertainment show or an opera, or pur-
chased a songbook or a novel, Americans and Indians participated in repro-
ducing dominant expectations regarding what it meant to be an Indian. The
problem for Montezuma and others arose when these expectations contin-
ued to trap Indian people within particular misrepresentations based on
preexisting tropes and images, which denied them a modern presence in the
making of America and the necessary political access points to revise the
structures responsible for reproducing these misrepresentations.
During these years, Native American baskets, blankets, and bowls could
be purchased from department stores as well as “Indian stores,” dealers,
and the U.S.  government’s Indian schools. At the same time, there was
widespread enthusiasm for collecting Native American art and sponsoring
exhibits that used indigenous handicrafts as models for non-Native artists
interested in exploring formal abstraction and emerging notions of artistic
subjectivity. Hutchinson argues the Indian craze succeeded in convincing
policy makers that art was a critical aspect of “traditional” Native culture
worth preserving. The notion of traditional Indian art became intertwined
with a discourse of authenticity, which compressed Indian people into a
particular time (the past) and space (the West)  – which was reflected in
the rhetoric used in Dixon’s 1918 letter. This practice paralleled contempo-
rary expositions of ethnological display that flattened out the complexity of
140 Indigenous Intellectuals

indigenous experience when it grouped distinct aboriginal peoples together

under one derogatory category of “savagery.”99
Aspects of these arts and cultural activities were also performative, and
this troubled Montezuma. For him, the problem with both show perfor-
mances and the preservation of Indian arts and crafts stemmed from the
possibility that these activities might continue to trap Native people in
particular times and spaces, which were anachronistic at best and mythi-
cal at worst. The irony of the Indian craze for Montezuma lay in the fact
that although he condemned such performances, he also performed in all
types of positions that drew on similar expectations for authenticity defined
through Indian embodiment.
Although many Indian people contributed to the Indian craze as produc-
ers and consumers of art, there were still others, like Montezuma, who felt
the discourse of authenticity surrounding this moment undermined alterna-
tive ways Native people could be viewed, especially as thoroughly modern
citizens. Montezuma represents an Indian intellectual perspective that con-
demned popular entertainments, which exploited Indian performers. While
he promoted a political position based on the definition of Indian people as
one race, he was equally concerned about an Indian art market that relied
on nostalgic representations of Indianness. Montezuma’s views contrast
with how many progressive whites and Indians supported the preservation
of Indian culture, including Charles Eastman and Gertrude Bonnin, and to
a different extent Luther Standing Bear. They believed such preservation
could positively influence the American public and lead to widespread polit-
ical reform in Indian affairs. Instead, Montezuma thought the best way to
“awaken the public” about “the real condition and workings that are debas-
ing and not improving” life for Indians was not through pageantry, film, or
drama, but rather hinged on the power of oratorical prowess.100
To counter these damaging performances, Montezuma became a per-
former of Indianness. Throughout his lifetime, Montezuma delivered many
lectures on Indian affairs, Indian history, and his own life. As we have seen,
he began lecturing as early as 1888 while a medical student, and contin-
ued to book engagements (at least upward of three times a year) until his
death in 1923. Although he spoke in front of almost all Indian audiences
at national meetings for the SAI and would travel out of Chicago to talk
to local church groups and women’s organizations in Michigan and other
Midwestern states, he was most successful at booking local venues sponsored
by Chicago businessmen and reform groups. The impact of Montezuma’s
oratory was based both in the moment of presentation itself and (for many
cases) afterward when he published and circulated reprints of his speeches.
Read in the context of a contemporary, such as Charles Eastman,
Montezuma’s participation in a public performance of Indianness eschewed
the use of “costuming,” in a way that Eastman did not. Also, because he was
a man, audiences’ expectations turned on different fictions than those that
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 141

Figure 5.  Carlos Montezuma portrait (circa 1915). Public Domain.

Carlos Montezuma, 1896, Photo Lot 73 06702900, National Anthropological
Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

Gertrude Bonnin would have confronted (such as the ever-popular Indian

maiden or princess). Montezuma understood that an Indian speaker’s
authority was linked to a particular image of the Indian body and through
it the idea of ethnic authenticity, yet his response to this paradoxical con-
nection was to wear Western clothes (most often the tuxedo as pictured,
which Bonnin chided him for) in the hope of distinguishing his perfor-
mance from those by “show” Indians. Certainly his appearances were no
less performative.
For Montezuma, the recirculation of his speeches was as important as his
clothing in regard to his self-presentation and the reception of his ideas. For
example, in 1915 he delivered a speech, “Let My People Go,” in Lawrence,
Kansas for the Society of American Indians’ Conference, which was later
published in The American Indian Magazine (January–March 1916, Vol. 4,
No. 1), and then reprinted in various newspapers. It was also read during
the first session of the Sixty-Fourth Congress in 1916, and included in the
Congressional Record. Later editions of Wassaja depict Montezuma on the
142 Indigenous Intellectuals

front page holding up this pamphlet in one hand and pointing to the Statue
of Liberty with the other. In these ways “Let My People Go” expanded past
its original performance moment to embody Montezuma’s representational
politics within different forms of print culture. Furthermore, in this expan-
sion one can see that although Montezuma did not rely on Indian dress
as a performance tactic, he did harness another aspect of performativity,
which was the strategic repetition and redistribution of his speech to differ-
ent audiences.101
“Let My People Go” merges the genre of the sermon with that of a politi-
cal treatise, and begins with a rhetorical flourish: “From time immemorial, in
the beginning of man’s history, there come echoes and re-echoes of pleas that
are deeper than life.” The use of “re-echoes” here is suggestive. “Re-echoes”
represents the softer and perhaps more subtle reiteration Montezuma
believed was necessary for narrating a long history of “man’s inhumanity to
man.” This ethical narrative is central to how he frames the oppression of
Indian people at the hands of European imperialists and American coloniz-
ers. The relation of one inhumanity to the next and conversely the relation
of one claim for justice to those that have come before the original claim is
made are heard through echoes, and heard again through “re-echoes.” He
aims to connect this oppression, the pleas that require reechoing to be truly
heard, to a history that transcends the time and space of the United States.
This technique enables him to simultaneously engage with the ethics of pro-
gressive Christian uplift and universalism defined by cultural pluralism to
challenge strict and oppressive race and class categories defined through the
body and biology.
Montezuma’s message in “Let My People Go” quickly shifts from the
more abstract idea of “re-echoes” to argue the SAI must do more than pre-
sent papers, hear discussions, and shake hands each year to effect real social
and political change in the lives of Indian people. He moves to a material
claim to criticize the failings of the Indian Bureau.102 When he refers to
“the bloody and gloomy days of Indian history,” he uses the moment of
his speech, 1915, as one opportunity to remind his audience that “public
sentiment was against the Indians.” People had believed Indians “could not
be civilized,” nor could they be educated, because “they were somewhat
like human beings, but not quite within the line of human rights.” But, in
1915, this is no longer true. Like other Christian Indian political activists of
the period, Montezuma characterizes this earlier era as devoid of spiritual
influence because “the only hope was to let the bullets do the work, cover
up the bloody deeds and say no more” because “God and humanity were
forgotten.” He relies on the faults of this past to distinguish himself – and
his peers – as distinctly empowered, by themselves and by God, to do more
for their people in the present.103
For members of the SAI, who were the first to hear his speech, this was
a turning point in political activism among Indians from different tribes
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 143

throughout the United States. A critical tool used by SAI members and rep-
resented by Montezuma is the privileging of the word “Indian” as a racial
and political category over that of tribe/nation. Montezuma shores up his
use of the term by another reference to the past: “Patient, silent and distant
the Indian race has been these many years.” By noting that “the Indian race”
had been silent and distant before this historical moment, he suggests the
“Indian race” is now at an important crossroads in its development.
Montezuma’s strategic use of Indian as an essentialist trope highlights the
founding objective of the SAI as a pan-tribal Indian organization. Both his
titular nod to “My” people and comments throughout that make continu-
ous references to Indians as one “people” unify individual Indians against a
larger white “civilization.” He urges his audience to see that “Our position
as a race and our rights must not be questioned. . . . there is only one object
for this Society of Indians to work for, namely – ‘Freedom for our people.’ ”
Although this strategy elides cultural, linguistic, economic, and geographic
differences based on tribe and the issue of sovereignty for tribal nations,
Montezuma still addresses the system of paternalism the U.S. government
used to deal with tribes. Within this context, Indian is problematic as a
monolithic and an ahistorical term, but also useful for bringing together
distinct indigenous peoples into one group in order to guarantee citizenship
for all Native people. In addition, with his call for freedom, the speech sug-
gests a lateral connection to W. E. B. Du Bois and the work of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In this other
context, the language of race, performed by black orators, is mapped onto
the performance of Indian speakers, like Montezuma, for other purposes.104
According to Montezuma, another benefit of relying on the category of
Indian to define people into one racial group is “to tackle prejudice.” He
suggests this begins by playing “the samecard [sic] as the other fellow.” This
process is further aided by eliminating “Indian Everything” and the per-
petuation of misrepresentations of Indianness.105 Montezuma recognizes
how in order to put an end to these misrepresentations, Indian people will
need to engage with an American society that sees them as “Indians” first
and citizens second. He expresses a careful ambivalence regarding how SAI
members might strike a balance between becoming part of American soci-
ety while maintaining cultural positions as Indians when he writes: “Push
forward as one of them, be congenial and be in harmony with your envi-
ronments and make yourselves feel at home as one of the units in the big
family of America. Make good, deliver the goods and convince the world by
your character that the Indians are not as they have been misrepresented to
be.” This was a fraught strategy for many Indian intellectuals who tried to
incorporate themselves into different parts of American society. SAI secre-
tary Gertrude Bonnin’s autobiographical writings express the struggles she
encountered as an Indian and a woman traveling throughout elite circles
of white society. Not a part of the SAI but tied to performance are Luther
144 Indigenous Intellectuals

Standing Bear’s writings that recall his first experiences with white culture,
new technologies, school, and work, with a mixture of excitement and fear.
Indeed his life was necessarily performative, in that he could not escape
white discourse. He had to perform it in order to be legible, which some-
times meant wearing regalia. For Montezuma, performativity was linked
more to the politics of uplift and civilization. In each case, no matter how
an Indian intellectual presented himself or herself there was an ideology
to contend with and through which to frame their lives for their white
audiences.106
Montezuma continued to struggle with the concept of Indian as a racial
category and a discursive form in his speeches and his writings. In “What
It Is to Be an Indian,” produced around April 15, 1921, he engages with
“Indian” for rhetorical effect and as an object of analysis. Montezuma rep-
resents Indianness in the abstract and how it has changed over time. He
begins by referencing a distant, precontact utopia, and shared past, akin
to “Let My People Go,” when he writes that “the earth’s surface” was a
“wilderness prolific in all that marks the absence of civilization,” where
“an Indian” in an “untutored way, lived and loved another race of beings.”
Montezuma also refers to Columbus’s arrival and his mistake in misnaming
“these naked natives, Indians,”107 to draw on a moment other Indian writers
like Simon Pokagon and Charles Eastman used in their work. This begin-
ning enables his narrative to focus on the fraught origins of the term Indian
in ways familiar to both Indian and non-Indian readers.108
His essay does more than replay the Columbus story. Montezuma inserts
himself into the narrative directly by addressing his audience and posing a
question: “[W]‌ho in this audience tonight has looked at me without having
the thought ‘Indian’ in mind?” This shift compels Montezuma’s listeners
to recognize the present rather than the past of Indian people. His readers
can then consider how what “it [was] to be an Indian” confirmed or denied
their expectations. Unlike Simon Pokagon, Charles Eastman, and Gertrude
Bonnin, Montezuma was not dressed in “Indian costume” for any of his
public lectures given that he opted for tuxedo jackets instead, and so his
question immediately forced listeners to confront their own expectations
for Indian speakers based on gender, race, and class. Certainly, the tuxedo
is a type of formal wear and another sort of costume; one that embodied
upper-class white mobility and Americanness. By wearing this “costume,”
Montezuma conformed less to expectations regarding Indianness and was
more consistent with white expectations for elite style, even while he per-
formed a revised articulation of Indian subjectivity. Although he wore a
tuxedo, this moment of “dress up” distinguishes Montezuma from other
Indian intellectuals who wore some sort of Native “costume.” Despite his
dress, Montezuma’s speech recognizes other ways his audience still cannot
see him without having “Indian in mind.” Clearly he’s performing a differ-
ent narrative, with its own pitfalls and kinds of efficacy, given that he is still
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 145

Indian, even while clothed in the fine accoutrements of upper-class white

modernity.109
Montezuma follows this question about appearance and identity with an
important, if ambiguous, statement regarding his self-presentation, which is
similar to Du Bois’s notion of the double-consciousness. “I have the appear-
ance of the life as we have divided it for the purposes of this occasion.” The
“we” in this sentence bears a heavy burden. Given that addresses like these
were intended for diverse audiences, the “we-ness” being invoked can refer
to a shared Indian history or the “we-ness” of American society. Or per-
haps, the “we” and “this occasion” taken together serve as a bridge between
different histories separating Indian and American audience members. The
reference to “division” also lends an opaque quality to his statement given
that both Indians and white Americans had (in their writings, speeches, per-
formances, and other arenas) imagined a divide between the “untutored”
Indian of the past and the “civilized” Indian of the present. For Montezuma,
the concept of division was embodied in the figure of the educated Indian.
Because he saw himself as a representative case study, one who had been
“part of” an Indian community, but who now lived as a member of Chicago
society, Montezuma would be legible as urban, modern, and also Indian,
and his words told a story to make this clear to his listeners.110
Montezuma’s speech continues to focus on division to explicate how
Indians have been separated into two categories. He defines one as “The
Columbus Indian,” who is “highly endowed, first of all with a sense of
appreciation of kindness manifested toward him” and who is “without any
of those highly developed vicious traits and habits which mankind acquire
in civilized life as a result of the competition which naturally grows out of
the close relations the individuals sustained to one another in the social
state as the communities became thickly populated.” Montezuma defines
the second category of Indian in terms of decline: “it is necessary to con-
sider how little at this time he had advanced intellectually beyond that of a
child.” During the post-contact period, Montezuma argues, Indians can only
be understood in terms of their relation to “the civilized pale face,” and in
this context, to be an Indian is to be “a child” – and later a ward of the state
after the creation of the BIA.111
His text underscores the hierarchical relation between white and Indian
peoples in describing the “meeting point, between the North American
Indian” and the “pale face.” He recognizes how both parties were “ignorant
of the nature and character of the other,” while he examines the shortcom-
ings of the “pale face.” Montezuma’s speech shifts at this point from an
analysis of the term Indian to a critique of the white settler “with all of his
pride of ancestry and conceit of wisdom.” He emphasizes how the charac-
terization of Indians as savage was a project of colonialism whereby white
people lacked “true knowledge of the Redman, whom he called a savage
after having made him such.” Montezuma’s key phrase “having made him
146 Indigenous Intellectuals

such” unveils the discursive work being done to define the Indian in uncivi-
lized terms. Furthermore, by pointing out the constructed nature of the term
Indian, located in the figure of “the pale face” who was “dominated by his
insatiate greed and his haste to profit at the expense of the simple-minded
and unsuspicious native,” Montezuma challenges his audience to sympa-
thize with the mistreatment of Indian people because of the oppressive reach
of capitalism and colonialism.112
Montezuma further highlights how characterizing Indians as savage jus-
tified the dispossession of their rights. He underscores this point by noting
that “the selfish and unfeeling pale face pioneer” was flawed because he
“neither knew nor cared” about the “virtues which are characteristic of the
good man of civilization” and were “endowed” in “this native man.” Like
Montezuma’s other spoken and written texts, “What It Is to Be an Indian”
attacks oppressive practices associated with settler colonialism by not only
pointing to physical violence and material loss but by emphasizing how
these were buttressed by language loss and renaming. His arguments as an
Indian intellectual contribute to a larger war of words that other Indian
writers participated in during the period.113
Montezuma’s speech concludes with a direct assault on white supremacy.
He writes, “Prior rights of occupancy, or even the right to live, are not to
weigh against the wishes of the pale face.” By 1921, he argues, the Indian
has a “still keener sense of how his life is shaped and checkered by the fact
that he is known as an Indian. He is tainted with a name.” This return to
Indian as both a name (signifying a particular referent) and a word (an
abstract noun) links Indianness as a discursive formation with the material-
ity of the body, but in problematic terms: “The word carries with it a sort of
‘attainder of blood.’ It is full of meaning strongly impressed on the memory
of those who are inclined to accept the one-sided stories which make up so
much of the tales of Indian life.” Memories and the imagination are central
vectors through which an Indian person may be understood as an Indian.
Individual Indians must struggle against certain expectations and previous
representations of Indianness (however false or flawed). At the same time,
each has to contend with the corporeal and genetic stakes of being an Indian
in America.114
For Montezuma, “Indian” could be narrativized and biological. Through
the doubling of his names, he is Indian as Dr.  Montezuma and also as
“Wassaja.” Bringing these two realms of knowledge together, he works to
unseat the power of each and blur the line separating them. Importantly,
his speech emphasizes the power of an Indian subject to speak back to the
biological category of Indian (as measured and defined by blood quantum,
which was a common practice during this period, especially in the era of
eugenics), to the constructedness of the word as a container for an array of
narratives and tropes, and to the inevitability of a life lived as a performance.
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 147

For Montezuma, putting on his tuxedo to make a speech to a white audi-

ence was a choice to perform, but also to think about being Indian because
there were people watching and sitting in judgment.
Montezuma argues an Indian man is limited by the frames through which
Indian bodies become legible because he “is scarcely recognized without
his feathers, paint and warlike accoutrements,” visual markers Montezuma
chose never to use himself. In this instance, Montezuma uses recognition
in a double sense.115 On one hand, he suggests “Indianness” is recogniz-
able only if certain visual economies are put into play, and on the other, he
argues Indian and non-Indian people alike recognize the occasions when
Indians dressed in feathers and paint are performing certain representations
of Indianness that may not align with lived realities. In this sense, perfor-
mance itself becomes a strategy through which Indian people can negotiate
various expectations of Indianness. The ways performing Indianness can be
strategic calls to question the notion of ethnic authenticity as well. Indeed,
to be an authentic Indian, for Montezuma, took discursive form when the
actual bodies of Indian people served to authenticate them as representing
Indianness. What remained up for discussion was who judged and how to
judge the authenticity of Indian performances.116
Although Montezuma succeeded in constructing his own representations
of Indianness and worked to shift how both Indians and non-Indians con-
ceived of the political and social realities of Indian people in America, he
also operated within a particular historical moment. In that moment, repre-
sentations limited the definition of “Indian” because of the production and
consumption of things Indian and Indian things.
Montezuma believed the modern Indian subject (citizen) “was willing
to draw the veil between the past and present and to make the most of the
opportunities that were open for the improvement to his condition,” and yet
he could not escape “the indifference of the civilized pale face.” The veil, of
course, is integral to Du Bois’s notion of the double-consciousness, which on
the level of rhetoric acts like an echo in Montezuma’s speech. Furthermore,
the result of indifference, Montezuma suggests, leaves the Native “un placed
among men.” To be “un-placed” figuratively invokes a history based on the
dispossession of Indian land, resulting in other losses of culture, political
agency, and language. To be unplaced is to struggle for recognition regard-
ing a larger problem of access to social standing, cultural relevance, and
political freedom. What again remains at the center for Montezuma is the
issue of citizenship.117

Wassaja’s Departure
In December 1922, after living for twenty-six years near the South Side,
Carlos Montezuma left Chicago. He had witnessed the cityscape change
148 Indigenous Intellectuals

from being dominated by horses to being filled with automobiles. He had

traversed neighborhoods, interacting with immigrants from Northern
Europe, and then with people of Slavic and Mediterranean backgrounds
before his own neighborhood became populated with black migrants from
the South. In fact, during the last years of his life, the sociopolitical atmo-
sphere of Chicago was one of ethnic tension due to competition among
these different groups. One might wonder how Montezuma experienced
the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, a major racial conflict beginning on July
27 and continuing until August 3.  Dozens of people died and hundreds
were injured during what many considered the worst of approximately
twenty-five racially motivated riots during the “Red Summer of 1919”  –
so named because of the violence and fatalities across the nation. Perhaps
Montezuma’s awareness of this violence helped sharpen his critique of the
United States and the provocative parallel he had already drawn between
Kaiserism and Indian Bureauism in an article he wrote for Wassaja in
1917.118 As a large number of Indian men joined the U.S. military to fight
in World War I, despite the fact that they still faced legal and social dis-
crimination, Montezuma’s commitment to citizenship only strengthened.
As a highly educated doctor and practicing Protestant, he saw himself, in
the words of Charles Eastman, as “an Indian” and also “an American.” He
wanted others to have this same right.119
After reading through hundreds of Montezuma’s personal letters, it
is easy to recognize his handwriting and why “spurious citizenship” was
important enough for him to write down, if only on a scrap of green paper.
Both the note and the object he wrote it on serve as reminders of the some-
times fleeting but also critical battlegrounds where Indian intellectuals
honed their positions to fight for citizenship and to weigh in on debates
about cultural authenticity and Indian identity. Reading more carefully into
Montezuma’s engagement with epistolary culture reveals how Indian writ-
ers and readers were integral to this fight, and how they worked together
to change not only American policy and society, but the future of Indian
Country as well.
Decades after his death in 1923, Native people would pay tribute to
Montezuma’s voice and activism in the “Wassaja Award,” provided by the
Native American Journalists’ Association (NAJA) to individuals who make
extraordinary contributions to Indian journalism. The award was named
after Montezuma’s monthly newspaper because of “his strong editorial
stand.”120 Rupert Costo, who was known to some, if not many, of NAJA’s
founders, named his own paper “Wassaja” (published in the 1960s and
1970s) after Montezuma’s periodical.121 These forms of recognition demon-
strate Montezuma’s legacies as a leading Indian intellectual, rabble rouser,
and journalist whose contributions to print culture and political activism
were crucial during the early twentieth century.
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 149

Notes
1 Carlos Montezuma, “What It Is to Be an Indian,” in Carlos Montezuma Papers
[hereinafter CM Papers], Box 9, Folder 3, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL.
2 For two excellent histories that focus on the SAI and that include information
about white reformers’ groups, see:  Lucy Maddox, Citizen Indians:  Native
American Intellectuals, Race & Reform (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2005) and Hazel Hertzberg, The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern
Pan-Indian Movements (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1971).
3 Although relatively little has been written about Carlos Montezuma, there are two
biographies that reconstruct much of his life. See: Peter Iverson, Carlos Montezuma
and the Changing World of American Indians (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1982) and Leon Speroff, Carlos Montezuma, M.D.:  A  Yavapai
American Hero (Portland, OR: Arnica Publishing, 2004).
4 President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law on June 2,
1924, a year after Montezuma died. The Act was proposed by Representative
Homer P. Snyder (R) of New York. Although the Fourteenth Amendment guar-
antees citizenship to persons born in the United States, this does not apply to
those who are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” a clause that excluded indig-
enous peoples and made the “Snyder Act” necessary.
5 My framing of Montezuma’s writings and speeches relies on scholarship from
the history of the book and print culture; see the following. David Martinez,
ed., The American Indian Intellectual Tradition: An Anthology of Writings from
1772–1972 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Robert Warrior, The
People and the Word:  Reading Native Nonfiction (Minneapolis:  University
of Minnesota Press, 2005); Philip H. Round, Removable Type:  Histories of
the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880 (Chapel Hill:  University of North
Carolina Press, 2010); Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native
Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2008);
Maureen Konkle, Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics
of Historiography, 1827–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2006); Barry O’Connell, ed., Son of the Forest, and other Writings by William
Apess, a Pequot (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).
6 Carlos Montezuma, “The Light on the Indian Situation,” an address for the
Society of American Indians Conference, at Ohio State University, October 5,
1912, CM Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI.
7 Carlos Montezuma, Wassaja, June 1917 (microfilm) courtesy of the Newberry
Library, Chicago, IL.
8 For more on this earlier period of Native writing see the following: Brooks, The
Common Pot; Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning, eds., Transatlantic Stories
and the History of Reading: Migrant Fictions 1720–1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011); Phillip Carroll Morgan, “ ‘Who Shall Gainsay Our
Decision?’ Choctaw Literary Criticism in 1830,” in Reasoning Together:  The
Native Critics Collective, edited by Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and
Christopher B. Teuton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 126–46.
9 Michael Warner’s theorization of the poetic character of public discourse situ-
ates my reading of Montezuma’s writings and those of other Indian intellectuals
150 Indigenous Intellectuals

during this time period given that publics and counterpublics emerge through
the production of discourses that both affirm and contradict themselves.
Building on the theoretical work of Jurgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser,
Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics (Cambridge:  Zone Books, 2002) offers
a way of thinking about “the public,” especially in connection with modernity.
Warner distinguishes between audience and public, and notes that in both cases,
anonymity (the sociality of strangers) is a key component for distinguishing
between publics/counterpublics and groups/audiences that might be defined as
“private.”
10 In addition to Warner, I  refer to Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities:  Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London:  Verso Books, 1991) for how nations and nationalisms are consti-
tuted through the circulation of ideas in print and how different readers create
nationalist communities through the collective practice of reading shared texts
and discourses.
11 Carlo Gentile was an Italian photographer (b. 1835 in Naples). For a history
of captivity and exchange in the U.S. Southwest, see: James Brooks, Captives
& Cousins:  Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). A 1951 novel, Savage
Son, by Oren Arnold, presents a romanticized account of Montezuma’s early
life, his capture by the Pimas, his adoption by Carlo Gentile, and his eventual
Christianization; see:  Oren Arnold, Savage Son (Albuquerque:  University of
New Mexico Press, 1951). Also, for more on the relationship between Gentile
and Montezuma, see Speroff, Carlos Montezuma, M.D., 27, 89.
12 The School of Chemistry offered the following vocational programs: pharma-
ceutical, chemical, agricultural, and metallurgical. Montezuma emerged as a
writer during his college years. The Daily Illini printed an essay he wrote on
Aztec civilization on March 4, 1881 and another on “Our Indians” on March
10, 1884. See: Speroff, Carlos Montezuma, M.D., 87–127. This school news-
paper was named after the indigenous peoples who originally inhabited (but
were forcibly relocated out of) the state of Illinois. Since 1871, The Daily Illini
has been a mainstay on the University of Illinois campus. Today it is one of
the country’s largest student-run newspapers, and distributed free throughout
Champaign-Urbana. The University also appropriated the “Illini” as a symbol
and sports mascot beginning in 1926, and ending in 2007 when the fictional
character named “Chief Illiniwek” was retired. The state of Illinois is named for
the Illinois River, and by French explorers after the indigenous Illiniwek people,
a consortium of Algonquian tribes (also known as the Illinois Confederation
consisting of twelve to thirteen tribes from the Upper Mississippi area). Illiniwek
can be translated to mean “those who speak in the ordinary way,” although it is
often mistranslated as “tribe of superior men.” For more on symbols used by the
State of Illinois, see its Web site:  http://www2.illinois.gov/about/Pages/default
.aspx (accessed June 30, 2010).
13 The Chicago Medical College later became Northwestern University School
of Medicine. Susan La Flesche Picotte (a member of the Omaha tribe) grad-
uated from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia just
two weeks before Montezuma. Rosa Minoka Hill was another contemporary
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 151

woman physician. For more on Montezuma’s life as a medical student and doc-
tor, see: Speroff, Carlos Montezuma, M.D., 100.
14 Iverson, Carlos Montezuma and the Changing World of American Indians, 12.
15 Fort Stevenson was established on June 14, 1867 by Major Joseph N.  G.
Whistler of the 31st U.S. Infantry with troops from Fort Berthold. It served as a
supply base for Fort Totten, and to protect navigation of the Missouri River and
also to help manage Indian populations. By 1889, when Montezuma arrived, it
was no longer operating as a military fort. Fort Stevenson had been abandoned
on July 22, 1883, but a small detachment remained until August 31, 1883 to
dismantle the fort and dispose of public property. The garrison was transferred
to Fort Buford and the fort was turned over to the Fort Berthold Indian Agency
on August 7, 1883. The Interior Department took possession of the fort on
November 14, 1894. For more on this history see: Robert W. Frazer, Forts of the
West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965).
16 Montezuma was a member of the Chicago Medical Society, the Illinois State
Medical Society, and the American Medical Association. His five dollar annual
membership protected him from malpractice suits and blackmail. He subscribed
to the Illinois Medical Journal. In Chicago, the challenge was to attract patients
in a competitive environment, and so Montezuma developed a special salve,
which was a mixture of Vaseline and menthol, a preparation that later became
“Vicks VapoRub.” This tincture was popular with his patients, who often wrote
to him requesting it. For more on his work as a physician, see: Speroff, Carlos
Montezuma, M.D., 67, 68, 179, 184.
17 Carlos Montezuma to Mr. Edward Janney, September 26, 1921, Letter, CM
Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI.
18 For more on the origins of the NIA, which began as the Women’s National
Indian Association (WNIA), see:  Papers of the Women’s National Indian
Association #9237, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell
University Library.
19 Combining education and entertainment with regards to Indian history and
reform was not a new phenomenon. Throughout the nineteenth century, vari-
ous plays narrated events that featured Indian people, sometimes as peacemak-
ers and other times as warriors. Jill Lepore’s The Name of War: King Philip’s
War and the Origins of American Identity (New  York:  Knopf, 1998)  argues
that acts of war generate acts of narration and both are joined in a common
purpose:  defining the geographical, political, cultural, and sometimes racial
and national boundaries between peoples. She analyzes how different gen-
erations of Americans remembered King Philip’s War through popular per-
formances of “Metamora or The Last of the Wampanoags” in the 1830s and
1840s. These plays and later performances that featured “Hiawatha” became
popular in the late nineteenth century, prefiguring the genre of the Hollywood
Western, and existed alongside more spectacular public outdoor events that
reenacted battles between whites and Indians. For more on the history of “show
Indians” and Indian shows see: Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity,
Memory, and Popular History (New  York:  Hill and Wang, 2000) and L. G.
Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883–1933
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).
152 Indigenous Intellectuals

20 For more on specific Indian schools see the following. Robert Trennert, The
Phoenix Indian School:  Forced Assimilation in Arizona, 1891–1935 (1988);
Tsianina K. Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco
Indian School (1994); Brenda Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian
Families, 1900–1940 (1998).
21 Hertzberg, The Search for an American Indian Identity, 141–2.
22 Ephemera in Carlos Montezuma’s personal papers includes membership dues,
event announcements, and invitations from the Press Club of Chicago, the
YMCA, and other organizations, as well as evidence that he was a member of
the Chicago Medical Society and the Illinois State Medical Society. See:  CM
Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI.
23 Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 2004). Deloria focuses on the notion of expectation to critically ana-
lyze why Indians “as sports heroes” or “in automobiles” startled a public that
expected them either to disappear or to remain frozen in an earlier time. I use
this term to point out how popular culture produces political and social mean-
ings, and how expectation reflects power relations that are defined through colo-
nial and imperial relationships between Indian people and the United States.
24 For Indian policy histories see the following. Francis Paul Prucha, Indian Policy
in the United States (1981); Lawrence Kelly, The Assault on Assimilation: John
Collier and the Origins of Indian Policy Reform (1983).
25 A degree from Carlisle was equivalent in education to about two years of high
school. Curricula were augmented by half of each day being devoted to train-
ing in carpentry, shoemaking, printing, blacksmithing, tinsmithing, farming, and
other trades. By 1915 the teaching of trades was limited to blacksmith, carpen-
ter, mason, painter, and farmer. One of the more useful sites for uncovering how
Indian students responded to their education at Carlisle are the weekly school
newspapers; these polemical texts spread the message of Carlisle and confirmed
its success. Copies of these papers were sent to every member of Congress, all
Indian agencies and military posts, and to most American newspapers. Their
distribution helped engage the American public in the issue of Indian educa-
tion and encouraged Indians outside of Carlisle to track the work being done
there. For more on Montezuma and Carlisle, see: Speroff, Carlos Montezuma,
M.D., 55.
26 Elaine Goodale Eastman, Pratt, the Red Man’s Moses: The Civilization of the
American Indian (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1935), 196.
27 Some scholars have characterized Montezuma as either an assimilationist or
an accommodationist. His views are then taken as aligned with a dominant
discourse that argued for the elimination of indigenous languages and political
systems, educational and spiritual teachings, as well as cultural and economic
practices. For many whites and some Indians, indigeneity was representative of
primitivism, and Indian people who refused to “civilize” were defined as inferior
Americans because they existed outside of industrial capitalism, Christian doc-
trine, individualism, and democratic government. I argue Montezuma cannot be
framed in terms of this binary because of the complexity of assimilation itself
as a set of practices, and because of the presupposition that there is one stable
American culture to assimilate into.
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 153

28 Carlos Montezuma, “An Indian’s View of the Indian Question: Chicago Record,”

in Current Literature Vol. 23, No. 4, American Periodical Series, 1898, 370.
29 Richard H. Pratt to Carlos Montezuma, Letter, Ayer MMS Collection, Box 3,
Newberry Library, Chicago, IL.
30 Richard H.  Pratt to Carlos Montezuma, September 1899, Letter, Ayer MMS
Collection, Box 3, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL.
31 Richard H. Pratt to Carlos Montezuma, December 21, 1908, Letter, CM Papers,
Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI.
32 (July 1924): 529–32.
33 For more see:  David W. Messer, Henry Roe Cloud:  A  Biography (Lanham,
MD:  Hamilton Books, 2009). Also see:  Renya A. Ramirez, “Henry Roe
Cloud: A Granddaughter’s Native Feminist Biographical Account,” Wicazo Sa
Review Vol. 24, No. 2, Fall 2009.
34 Bernd C. Peyer, American Indian Nonfiction:  An Anthology of Writings,
1760s–1930s (Norman:  University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). For a recent
biography see: Joel Pfister, The Yale Indian: The Education of Henry Roe Cloud
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009). I refer to Henry Roe
Cloud as a “religious leader” because he was ordained as a Presbyterian minis-
ter in 1913.
35 Sherman Coolidge was a founding member of the SAI. He wrote an essay
titled “The Function of the Society of American Indians,” originally published
in The Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians Vol. 2, No. 1,
January–March 1914, 186–90. Reprinted, with a biography of the author, in
Peyer, American Indian Nonfiction. The speeches of Charles Eastman and the
writings of Gertrude Bonnin also illustrated that educated Indians could speak
as representatives for Indianness on a national scale.
36 Richard H.  Pratt to Carlos Montezuma, May 22, 1909, Letter, CM Papers,
Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI.
37 Richard H.  Pratt to Carl E.  Grammer, August 18, 1909, Letter, CM Papers,
Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI. For more on Dr.  Carl
E.  Grammer see Recollections of a Long Life by Joseph Packard, edited by
Rev. Thomas J.  Packard (Washington, DC:  Byron S.  Adams, 1902), 323. On
June 8, 1896, the New  York Times reported that Grammer gave the annual
commencement address before the YMCA of Roanoke College. See Charles
Howard Hopkins, History of the YMCA in North America (1951). The IRA
was founded in Philadelphia in 1882 as an American social activist group
dedicated to the well-being and acculturation of Native Americans. The IRA
remained influential in American Indian policy through the 1930s and involved
as an organization until 1994. The management of the IRA fell almost entirely
to: Herbert Welsh, Matthew Sniffen, Lawrence E. Lindley, Charles C. Painter,
and Samuel M. Brosius, all of whom corresponded with Montezuma. Unitarian
minister/journalist Jonathan Baxter Harrison published several books and arti-
cles regarding this reform work. See: Jonathan Baxter Harrison, The Colleges
and the Indians, and the Indian Rights Association (Philadelphia: The Indian
Rights Association, 1888) and William Thomas Hagan, The Indian Rights
Association:  The Herbert Welsh Years, 1882–1904 (Tucson:  University of
Arizona Press, 1985).
154 Indigenous Intellectuals

38 Ober was a representative for the international committee for the YMCA
and a missionary leader. He published “The American Association in Foreign
Lands  – Their Responsibility and Opportunity  – Part III” (YMCA journal,
The Watchman, 1889, 758). Jon Thares Davidann, A World of Crisis and
Progress: The American YMCA in Japan, 1890–1930 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated
University Presses, 1998); see:  Mary Ann Irwin and James F.  Brooks, eds.,
Women and Gender in the American West (Albuquerque:  University of New
Mexico Press, 2004) for references to Eastman and Ober’s correspondence. Also
see: Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers
and the Indian, 1865–1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976) and
The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, vol.
2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); Margaret Jacobs, Engendered
Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879–1934 (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1999); Bonnie Sue Lewis, Creating Christian Indians: Native
Clergy in the Presbyterian Church (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 2003).
39 For more on gender discourse with regards to manhood at the turn of the twen-
tieth century see: Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History
of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago:  University
of Chicago Press, 1995) and Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in
Victorian America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). On making
manhood and the nation, from the Revolutionary War to the 1850s, see: Dana D.
Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity
of White Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
40 Robert Berkhofer Jr., Salvation and the Savage:  An Analysis of Protestant
Missions and American Indian Response, 1787–1862 (Lexington:  University
of Kentucky Press, 1965); William McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries,
1789–1839 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Ramon Gutierrez,
When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality and Power
in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991);
Clyde Holler, Black Elk’s Religion:  The Sun Dance and Lakota Catholicism
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995).
41 Subscription lists show a rise from fifty cents to one dollar beginning in 1920, CM
Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI. For more print culture
during this period see: Cathy N. Davidson, ed., Reading in America: Literature
& Social History (Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989);
Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets and Class at the Turn
of the Century (London: Verso, 1996); James Danky and Wayne Wiegand, eds.,
Print Culture in a Diverse America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998);
Gregory M Pfitzer, Popular History and the Literary Marketplace, 1840–1920
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008).
42 Although Montezuma’s Yavapai parents named him Wassaja at birth, he was
renamed “Carlos Montezuma” by Carol Gentile after his “adoption” from
the Pimas. Posey’s persona writing has been the subject of several studies;
see:  Leona G.  Barnett, “Este Cate Emunev; Red Man Always,” Chronicle of
Oklahoma 46, Spring 1968, 20–40; Linda Hogan, “The Nineteenth Century
Native American Poets,” Wassaja/The Indian Historian 13, November 1980,
24–9; Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. and James W. Parins, “Short Fiction Writers of the
Indian Territory,” American Studies 23, Spring 1982, 23–38; Daniel F. Littlefield
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 155

Jr., Alex Posey: Creek Poet, Journalist, and Humorist (1992); Daniel F. Littlefield
Jr. “Evolution of Alex Posey’s Fus Fixico Persona,” Studies in American Indian
Literatures 4, Summer/Fall 1992, 136–44; Sam G. Riley, “Alex Posey:  Creek
Indian Editor/Humorist/Poet,” American Journalism 1, Winter 1984, 67–76;
Craig S. Womack, Red on Red:  Native American Literary Separatism
(Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Tereza M. Szeghi, “ ‘The
Injin is civilized and aint extinct no more than a rabbit’: Transformation and
Transnationalism in Alexander Posey’s Fus Fixico Letters,” Studies in American
Indian Literatures Vol. 21, No. 3, Fall 2009, 1–35.
43 Peyer, ed., American Indian Nonfiction.
44 See:  Steven Crum, “Almost Invisible:  The Brotherhood of North American
Indians (1911) and the League of North American Indians (1935),” Wicazo
Sa Review Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring 2006, 43–59. Crum usefully notes, “Native
American people established intertribal or pan-Indian organizations through-
out the twentieth century. Existing scholarship has made us familiar with sev-
eral, including the Society of American Indians (1911), the American Indian
Federation (1934), the National Congress of American Indians (1944), the
National Indian Youth Council (1961), and the American Indian Movement
(1968). On the other hand, there are others we know very little about. Two such
organizations are the Brotherhood of North American Indians (1911) and the
League of North American Indians (1935), also called the League of Nations,
Pan-American Indians” (1).
45 See March 1918 issue, Wassaja:  Freedom’s Signal for the Indians, Special
Collections, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois. For more on citizenship as an
issue for Native people during the Progressive Era see: Tom Holm, The Great
Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native Americans & Whites in the Progressive Era
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).
46 For an account of the early imperial battle for control over “Native” America
see: Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the
Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (1991). For legal history and cases effecting
sovereignty see: William McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears: The Cherokees’
Struggle for Sovereignty, 1839–1880 (1993); Sidney Harring, Crow Dog’s
Case: American Indian Sovereignty, Tribal Law, and United States Law in the
Nineteenth Century (1994); Jill Norgren, The Cherokee Cases: Two Landmark
Federal Decisions in the Fight for Sovereignty (1996); Blue Clark, Lone Wolf
v.  Hitchcock:  Treaty Rights and Indian Law at the End of the Nineteenth
Century (1999); Tim Garrison, The Legal Ideology of Removal: The Southern
Judiciary and the Sovereignty of Native American Nations (2002). Beth Piatote
shows how Native women in particular, in the case of Canada, lost property
and personal rights if they married white men. Such a marriage, according to
Canadian law, made them and any children no longer Native. They were now the
property of their white husband. See: Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship,
and Law in Native American Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2013), 17–48.
47 Speroff, Carlos Montezuma, M.D., 8.  For the history of the Dawes Act
see:  Frederick Hoxie, A Final Promise:  The Campaign to Assimilate Indians,
1880–1920 (1984); Janet McDonnell, Dispossession of the American Indians,
1883–1933 (1996). In regards to John Elk’s case see: John C. Eastman, “From
156 Indigenous Intellectuals

Feudalism to Consent: Rethinking Birthright Citizenship, Legal Memorandum

No. 18,” Heritage Foundation, Washington DC, March 30, 2006.
48 See: U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 2, available online since 1995 at www
.usconstitution.net/index.html (accessed May 27, 2011). Also see: Laurence H.
Tribe, The Invisible Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
49 Carlos Montezuma, “Life, Liberty & Citizenship,” proof, “Drafts & Galley
Proofs,” Misc. Writings, CM Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison,
WI. For more on how African Americans have appropriated “America” see: Eric
J. Sundquist, King’s Dream (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). In
­chapter 5, “Whose Country 'Tis of Thee?” he considers both the historical con-
text in which Samuel F. Smith adapted the melody of “God Save the Queen”
to a new set of lyrics in 1831, and the various interpretations, parodies, and
performances that have referenced this song in relation to African Americans
fighting against slavery, and later segregation.
50 Montezuma, “Life, Liberty & Citizenship.”
51 A moment of religious self-recognition in this text appears when he writes, “I
remember when I was christened. I saw the Father in his garb, the cross and
candles. I did not comprehend what it meant, but after years I accepted the Son
of God as my personal Savior, and the Spirit of God works within me. That is
the higher freedom that enlightens our souls from God. It teaches us to be faith-
ful to our Creator, be loyal to our country, be helpful to our neighbor and true
to ourselves. That is ‘Freedom, Liberty and Citizenship.’ ” The four main figures
in this book identified as Christians; however, this moment stands apart because
Montezuma explicitly expresses the significance of Christian belief and practice
in shaping his thinking.
52 Paul Finkelman, “Garrison’s Constitution: The Covenant with Death and How
It Was Made,” in Prologue Magazine (National Archives, Winter 2000), Vol.
32, No. 4.
53 Carlos Montezuma to Richard H. Pratt, Letter, October 4, 1922, Reel 5.
54 Nearly 400 subscribers paid to read these types of stories and well over 50 per-
cent were men, and nearly one quarter were Indian. Although it is difficult to
know for sure who may or may not have identified with a particular tribal
nation, many subscribers listed addresses that place them in a city or space
within reservation boundaries in South Dakota, Oklahoma, and Montana.
Individual subscribers also lived throughout the United States in cities like
Chicago and New York as well as in newly settled areas of Alaska and Hawaii.
CM Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI.
55 In addition to individual subscribers, Montezuma’s records indicate that news
outlets and religious organizations paid for regular subscriptions. These ranged
from: the Arizona Magazine (based in Phoenix) and the Dearborn Independent
(in Michigan) to the editors of the Daily Press and Daily Enterprise of Riverside,
California and small rural papers like the Fargo Farmer of North Dakota, the
American Christian Missionary Society (Cincinnati, Ohio), the Christian Temple
(Muskogee, Oklahoma), the Baptist Indian Mission (Lodge Grass, Montana),
and the Central Christian Church (San Diego, California). Other subscribers
include: the Commercial State Bank of Wagner, South Dakota, the Oklahoma
Historical Society, the California Women’s Club based in San Francisco, College
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 157

Library of Hillsdale, Michigan, and the Bureau of American Ethnology. CM

Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI.
56 Gertrude Bonnin to Carlos Montezuma, January 24, 1919, Letter. Also, regard-
ing the circulation of Wassaja see: two letters from Gertrude Bonnin to Carlos
Montezuma, August 26, 1918 and March 12, 1919, CM Papers, Wisconsin
State Historical Society, Madison, WI.
57 For references to Harvey Ashue see:  “Blind Tribesman Is Injured When Car
Plunges off Road Embankment,” in Ellensburg Daily, April 18, 1930, and for
Moses Archambeau see: “Indian Wills, 1911–1921: Records of the Bureau of
Indian Affairs,” by Nancy Bowen and Jeff Bowen (Baltimore, MD: Clearfield
Company, 2007), 174; and for De Forest Antelope see: The Native American
(an illustrated weekly published by Phoenix Indian School), Vol. 15, 104.
58 See:  NPS Form 10–900, page  4, description of present and historic physical
appearance:  “Chief Plenty Coups Home,” U.S. Department of the Interior,
National Park Service (1966). Also see: Glendolin Damon Wagner and William
A. Allen, Blankets and Moccasins:  Plenty Coups and His People the Crows
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1933), 276.
59 “Eulogy of Chief Plenty Coups of the Crows:  Speech of Hon. Scott Leavitt
of Montana in the House of Representatives,” Congressional Record
Seventy-second Congress, First Session (March 5, 1932). Also see:  Frederick
Hoxie, Parading through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America,
1805–1935 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially “Part
Two, Making a Nation, 1890–1920,” 167–294.
60 For John Brennan as agent see:  Richard E. Jensen, Voices of the American
West: The Settler and Soldier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).
61 For more on Dixon and Wanamaker with regards to Indianness see:  Alan
Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha:  Staging Indians, Making Americans,
1880–1930 (New  York:  Hill and Wang, 2004), c­hapter  5:  “Wanamaker
Indians,” 211–77. For Dixon’s work with Indians in collaboration (beginning
in 1920) with the Office of Indian Affairs see: Susan Applegate Krouse, North
American Indians in the Great War (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press,
2007), 13.
62 For more on Gifford Pinchot and an environmental history of land use debates
see the following. Brian Balogh, “Scientific Forestry and the Roots of the Modern
American State: Gifford Pinchot’s Path to Progressive Reform,” Environmental
History Vol. 7, No. 2, 2002, 198–225; John M. Meyer, “Gifford Pinchot, John
Muir, and the Boundaries of Politics in American Thought,” Polity Vol. 30,
No. 2, 1997, 267–84; Char Miller, Public Lands, Public Debates:  A  Century
of Controversy (Corvallis:  Oregon State University Press, 2012) and Gifford
Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Island Press, 2004);
Gifford Pinchot, Breaking New Ground (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998).
63 For more on William Bishop and Port Townsend see:  Noel V.  Bourasaw, ed.,
Skagit River Journal of History & Folklore (Sedro-Woolley, Washington, 2000
to the present), at http://www.skagitriverjournal.com/ (accessed February
22, 2015). For more on the NFAI, see:  Cesare Marino, “History of Western
Washington Since 1846,” in Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 7,
Northwest Coast (Washington, DC:  Smithsonian Institution, 1990), 169–79;
158 Indigenous Intellectuals

by David Wilma, August 8, 2000. During the 1950s, the landless tribes of the
NFAI joined forces with landed tribes in the Inter-Tribal Council of Western
Washington.
64 Henry Ford bought the Dearborn Independent (est. 1901)  from Marcus
Woodruff and added The Ford International Weekly to its banner in 1918. It
was published using a press Ford purchased and installed in a tractor plant as
part of the River Rouge. They began printing in January 1919, and attracted
notoriety in June due to coverage of a libel lawsuit between Henry Ford and
the Chicago Tribune, because stories written by reporters E.  G. Pipp and
William J.  Cameron were picked up nationally. The paper reached a circula-
tion of 900,000 by 1925 (only the New York Daily News was larger), due to
promotion by Ford dealers and a quota system. Additional lawsuits regarding
anti-Semitic material caused Ford to shut down the paper, and the last issue was
published in December 1927. For more on this history see: Richard Bak, Henry
and Edsel:  The Creation of the Ford Empire (2003); Douglas G.  Brinkley,
Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress
(2003); Robert Lacey, Ford: The Men and the Machine (1986); Henry Ford, My
Life and Work: An Autobiography of Henry Ford (Alvin, TX: Halcyon Classics,
2009, orig. published 1922).
65 Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle
City (New York: Picador, 2010).
66 Reynold M. Wik, Henry Ford and Grass-Roots America: A Fascinating Account
of the Model-T Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973).
67 There were other Indian writerly correspondents during this period. I  have
chosen three as representative examples of their intellectual work because of
their different relationships with Montezuma. There were certainly others such
as John Ross (1790–1866), a Christian Cherokee intellectual who envisioned
the annexation of the Cherokee Nation as an independent state of the union,
and Alexander Posey (1873–1908) (along with Charles Gibson), a promi-
nent and talented humorist and poet known for his “Fus Fixico Letters” pub-
lished between 1902 and 1908. See:  Peyer, ed., American Indian Nonfiction;
Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. and Carol A. Petty Hunter, eds., The Fus Fixico Letters,
Alexander Posey: A Creek Humorist in Early Oklahoma (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1993); Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live:  Native
American Literatures and Native American Community (New  York:  Oxford
University Press, 1997).
68 Originally published as “Editor’s Viewpoint: The Civilizing Power of Language,”
The Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians Vol. 4, No. 2,
April–June 1916, 126–8. For more on Parker see:  Lawrence M. Hauptman,
“The Iroquois School of Art:  Arthur C.  Parker and the Seneca Arts Project,
1935–1941,” New York History 60, July 1979, 253–312 and The Iroquois and
the New Deal (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1981); Joy Porter, To
Be Indian: The Life of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur C. Parker (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 2001).
69 James Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance:  Hidden Transcripts
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990) defines public transcript as the
open, public interactions between dominators and oppressed. He defines hid-
den transcript as an example of the critique of power that power holders do
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 159

not see or hear. Different systems of domination (political, economic, cultural,

or religious) have aspects that are not heard that go along with their public
dimensions. I argue that Parker used English, which he believed to be part of a
system of domination, to communicate a critique of that domination. Writers
like Parker published their writings in public papers, and presented their ideas
at public events. Some scholars see “hidden transcripts” in opposition to the
Gramscian notion of hegemony, as evidence that “subaltern” peoples have
not consented to their own domination. I complicate this by considering what
happens when the “hidden transcript” is published and circulated among var-
ious publics, and thus, how context constitutes it; in other words, when it
emerges as a practice that contests and defines the hegemonic system from
which it originates.
70 Daily Oklahoman (Oklahoma City), February 27, 1947. Mary Hays Marable
and Elaine Boylan, A Handbook of Oklahoma Writers (Norman:  University
of Oklahoma Press, 1939). More recently, a previously unpublished novel by
Oskison has been uncovered from university archives and reprinted. Edited by
Melinda Smith Mullikin and Timothy B. Powell with an introduction by Jace
Weaver, The Singing Bird: A Cherokee Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 2007), might be the first historical novel written by a Cherokee. Set in
the 1840s and ’50s, when conflict erupted between the Eastern and Western
Cherokees after their removal to Indian Territory, Oskison’s novel focuses on
the adventures and tangled relationships of missionaries to the Cherokees,
including the promiscuous, selfish Ellen, the “Singing Bird” of the title. Fictional
characters are intermingled with historical figures such as Sequoyah and Sam
Houston, embedding the novel in actual events.
71 John M.  Oskison, The American Indian Magazine Vol. 5, No. 2, April–June
1917, 93–100.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid. Oskison’s views foreshadow the philosophy of the National Indian Youth
Council that was founded in Gallup, New Mexico in 1961 by college-educated
Indians who sought to mend the gap between the generations by establish-
ing more connections with reservation elders. See:  Peyer, American Indian
Nonfiction. At the same time, Montezuma’s reference to “leading Indians” ech-
oes Eastman’s sentiments, and those of W.  E. B.  Du Bois, who stated:  “The
Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The
problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the
Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they
may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst,
in their own and other races.” W. E.  B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” from
The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of To-day
(New York: J. Pott and Company, 1903).
74 Stan Steiner, Spirit Woman:  The Diaries and Paintings of Benita Wa Wa
Calachaw Nunez (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1979). Wa-Wa Chaw
came in contact with many white intellectuals and leaders of the day, includ-
ing Sir Oliver Lodge and Arthur Conan Doyle. She wrote for many publica-
tions until the time of her death, and sold her paintings in sidewalk shows in
Greenwich Village. She was passionate about using art and writing to promote
equality for Indian women.
160 Indigenous Intellectuals

75 In 1848, California became a part of the United States. Under the terms of
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, California’s Native peoples were to become
citizens of the United States with their liberty and property rights given full
protection under U.S. laws. However, the government failed to live up to these
terms and Indian people suffered horrendously during the next several decades.
In 1905, Indians became more involved in matters concerning them, and
with the rediscovery of the eighteen lost treaties Indians and their supporters
began a drive for land, better education, the rights of citizenship, and settle-
ment of the unfulfilled treaty conditions. See: Alfred Louis Kroeber, Handbook
of the Indians of California (Washington, DC:  Government Printing Office,
1925); Robert F. Heizer, et al., Handbook of North American Indians: Vol. 8
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978); and “Five Views: An Ethnic
Historic Site Survey for California,” http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_
books/5views/5views1.htm (accessed June 25, 2013).
76 Heizer, et al., Handbook of North American Indians, 715.
77 Kenneth M. Johnson, K-344; or the Indians of California vs. United States (Los
Angeles, CA: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1966), 36.
78 “Five Views: An Ethnic Historic Site Survey for California.”
79 For copies of this magazine and materials related to Wa-Wa Chaw see:  CM
Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI.
80 Yakima Indian Commercial Club to Dr. Montezuma, Letter, August 30, 1920
(approximate), CM Papers, Center for Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College,
Durango, CO.
81 Rev. Red Fox to Carlos Montezuma, Letter, March 26, 1920, CM Papers,
Center for Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College, Durango, CO.
82 G. Bonnin to Montezuma, December 10, 1916, Letter, Box 3, Folder 4, CM
Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI.
83 G. Bonnin to Montezuma, October 1918, Letter, Box 4, Folder 1, CM Papers,
Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI.
84 G. Bonnin to Montezuma, October 22, 1918, Letter, CM Papers, Wisconsin State
Historical Society, Madison, WI. After 1926, The Tomahawk continued to pub-
lish some White Earth news, but dropped its pro-Indian stance and ceased pub-
lication later that year. By 1927, this paper moved to Calloway, Minnesota and
was renamed The Calloway Tomahawk edited by A. H. Lockwood. See: Daniel F.
Littlefield Jr. and James W. Parins, American Indian and Alaska Native Newspapers
and Periodicals, 1826–1924 Vol. 1 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984).
85 It is worth noting that the fraternal organization called the “Tipi Order of
America” (also spelled “Teepee”) was led by Red Fox St. James, a Montana
rancher who claimed Blackfoot ancestry. He was of concern to Bonnin and oth-
ers who doubted his Indian status. Both Cari Carpenter (Detecting Indianness,
2005)  and Hazel Hertzberg (The Search for American Indian Identity,
1971) point to Arthur C. Parker’s papers as a source for locating Red Fox as the
leader of this group.
86 Chapter 1 includes an extensive historiography for the Progressive Era, which
also defines progressivism, and progressive reform tactics, organizations and the
roles of Indians within this framework.
87 The National American Indian Memorial was proposed in 1909 as a monument
to American Indians embodied in a statue of an Indian warrior overlooking
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 161

the main entrance to New York Harbor. On December 8, 1911, Congress set

aside federal land for the project but did not provide for expenses. In 1913,
with President William H. Taft, they broke ground; approximately thirty-three
American Indian chiefs, including Red Hawk and Two Moons, were present.
Sculptor Daniel Chester French and architect Thomas Hastings came up with
a general concept for the memorial, which included a 165-foot-tall Indian
statue on an Aztec-like pyramid base atop an Egyptian Revival complex of
museums, galleries, and libraries, surrounded by a stepped plaza and formal
gardens with sculptures of bison and Indians on horseback. The project was
never completed and there are no physical remains. See: “Ends Peace Trip to the
Indians, Wanamaker Expedition Returns after Obtaining the Allegiance of All
Tribes” for more about the “ground-breaking” exercises in the New York Times
(December 1913).
88 Dixon to Montezuma, circa 1918, Letter, CM Papers, Wisconsin State Historical
Society, Madison, WI.
89 Carlos Montezuma to Mr. Edward Janney, September 26, 1921, Letter, CM
Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI.
90 Montezuma to D.  Edward Janney, regarding “Indian work,” September 26,
1921, Letter, CM Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI.
91 This private missive does important dialogic work for Montezuma because a
personal letter, unlike a newspaper article, is designed with two-way commu-
nication in mind. Montezuma may be writing about a topic that he was still
thinking through, and that he may have considered important for inclusion
or strategic exclusion from his public writings. In addition to doctors like
Janney, Montezuma wrote to fellow writers and journalists as well as other
Indian activists and white allies. Many of these letters reveal his influence on
others.
92 Angie Pitts Juban, MA Thesis:  “Insiders:  Louisiana Journalists Sallie Rhett
Roman, Helen Grey Gilkison, Iris Turner Kelso,” presented to the faculty in the
Department of History at Louisiana State University, c­ hapter  2, “Helen Grey
Gilkison:  Social Insider.” Helen Gilkison Papers, Mss. 1901, 2175, Louisiana
and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, LA (bulk
1925–48) and see: Genevieve Jackson Boughner, Women in Journalism: A Guide
to the Opportunities and a Manual of the Technique of Women’s Work for
Newspapers and Magazines (New  York:  D. Appleton and Company, 1926)
H. Gilkison was born in Louisiana and a graduate of Louisiana State University,
Baton Rouge.
93 Throughout Montezuma’s correspondence, the question of intimacy appears in
the meaning of “friend” and “friendship” that he and others use to talk about
their relationships. Certainly, the networks of reform that he was involved in
required a certain level of intimacy and trust between peers and fellow travel-
ers. See: Amy Carla Kaplan, The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist
Paradigms (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
94 Juban notes, “Helen Grey Gilkison lived and worked in a politically charged
atmosphere. Huey P. Long influenced the university she attended, and she entered
the journalistic world at the height of his power in the state of Louisiana.”
See: Juban, “Insiders,” 44. Also see H. Grey to Montezuma, Letter, CM Papers,
Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI.
162 Indigenous Intellectuals

95 Robert A. Staley, “Congressional Hearings: Neglected Sources of Information

on American Indians,” Government Information Quarterly 25, 2008, 520–40.
Available online April 18, 2008. Staley argues that over the past three decades,
discussion of government documents on American Indians has emphasized fed-
eral agency documents and archival records, despite the fact that Congress
has the ultimate authority in Indian affairs. He uses examples from early
twentieth-century legislative and oversight hearings to show that there is signifi-
cant untapped research content on American Indians in congressional hearings.
“Between 1919 and 1920 the House Committee on Indian Affairs published
25 hearings on the condition of the Indians in the Southwest and Northwest.”
The Pratt quote included in this paragraph is from Richard H. Pratt to Carlos
Montezuma, March 1, 1910, Letter, Ayer MMS Collection, Newberry Library,
Chicago, IL.
96 From Pratt to Montezuma, Letter, Ayer MMS Collection, Box 3, Newberry
Library, Chicago, IL.
97 For work in Native American studies regarding white interpretations of Indian
history, cultural practices, and the range of representations that have domi-
nated the white imaginary in terms of Indian people and Indianness, as well as
questions of performance, authenticity, and a history of representation see the
following. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1998); Robert Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian:  Images of the
American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1979);
and Brian Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian
Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1982).
98 In many ways, the “craze” for the production, consumption, and marketing
of Indian things during this period built on narratives from the 1820s and
1830s in the United States by James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child,
and Catharine Sedgwick as well as the dramas Jill Lepore studies. For more
on the modernist obsession with Indianness see:  Elizabeth Hutchinson, The
Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Carter Jones Meyer and Diana
Royer, eds., Selling the Indian:  Commercializing & Appropriating American
Indian Cultures (Tucson:  University of Arizona Press, 2001); Trachtenberg,
Shades of Hiawatha.
99 For one of the earliest texts dealing with the historical and narrative use of
savagery in regards to civilization see:  Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and
Civilization:  A  Study of the Indian and the American Mind (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953).
100 Carlos Montezuma to Mr. Edward Janney, September 26, 1921, Letter, CM
Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI. Montezuma’s title
“Let My People Go” also references the history of enslavement of African
Americans and the spiritual “Go Down Moses,” which uses “Let My People
Go” as a rallying cry. Initially, this was an anthem for the Contrabands at Fort
Monroe around 1862. The sheet music states the song is from Virginia, from
around 1853, and was published as “Oh! Let My People Go: The Song of the
Contrabands” arranged by Horace Waters. L. C. Lockwood. For more on this
song and a history of black music in America see: Eileen Southern, The Music
 Tracing Carlos Montezuma’s Politics 163

of Black Americans: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971) and Samuel

A. Floyd Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to
the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
101 See:  Congressional Record, 64th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 53, no.  123 (Friday,
May 12, 1916). Also see: Peyer, American Indian Nonfiction, which includes
a reprinted version of “Let My People Go”; See: Larner, The Papers of Carlos
Montezuma, Microfilm Ed., Reel 5, The Indian Problems from an Indian’s
Standpoint; Reel 5, An Indian’s View of the Indian Question; Reel 2, August
2, 1906, Reel 2, May 16, 1909, Reel 3, February 27, 1914. Figure 5: Carlos
Montezuma, 1896, Photo Lot 73 06702900, National Anthropological
Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
102 In this speech, Montezuma references white organizations, such as the Mohonk
Conference, Indian Rights Association, Indian Friends, and “other similar
organizations,” that he believes have evaded the issue of the Indian Bureau.
103 Carlos Montezuma, “Let My People Go” (1) in The Papers of Carlos Montezuma,
M.D. [microform]:  including the papers of Maria Keller Montezuma Moore
and the papers of Joseph W.  Latimer / edited by John William Larner Jr.,
Scholarly Resources, Inc. 1983 through the Newberry Library, Chicago, IL
(collection abbreviated as: PCM, Larner, 1983).
104 I have read through W. E. B. Du Bois letters that have been published; see: Herbert
Apthekar, ed., Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois Volume 1, Selections,
1877–1934 (Amherst:  University of Massachusetts Press, 1973). I  did not
uncover a material connection between him and Carlos Montezuma despite
the fact that Du Bois was invited to attend an SAI annual meeting. For more
on the ways discourses of race may have mapped onto each other with regards
to the political movements of both African Americans and Native Americans
during this period see the work of Heidi Ardizzone, from “Representing
Race: Activism and Public Identity in the Early Twentieth-Century,” presented
October 16, 2008 at the American Studies Association’s annual meeting.
105 See Carlos Montezuma, “Let My People Go,” where he notes, “Keep in mind
that Indian Bureau, Indian Reservations, Indian Schools, Indian College, Indian
Art, Indian Novels, Indian Music, Indian Shows, Indian Movies, and Indian
Everything creates prejudice and do not help our race.” . . . “To fight is to for-
get ourselves as Indians in the world. To think of one-self as different from the
mass is not healthy.” PCM, Larner, 1983.
106 See:  Simon Pokagon, “The Red Man’s Rebuke” (published by C.  H. Engle,
1893); Charles Eastman, The Indian To-Day: The Past and Future of the First
American (New York: Doubleday, 1915).
107 For more on the hailing and psychology of being instantiated as a brown sub-
ject through the identification of one by others as Indian see:  Frantz Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks (1952).
108 Carlos Montezuma, “What It Is to Be an Indian” (3). PCM, Larner, 1983.
109 For Figure 5, see “Photograph of Carlos Montezuma” (not dated, circa 1915),
Carlos Montezuma’s Papers as part of the Edward E.  Ayer Collection, The
Newberry Library, Chicago, IL.
110 Montezuma, “What It Is to Be an Indian” (3).
111 Ibid. (7).
164 Indigenous Intellectuals

112 Ibid.
113 Ibid. (10).
114 Ibid. (14 and 20).
115 Ibid. (21).
116 See:  Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native:  Indians in the American Cultural
Imagination (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2001) and her
chapter: “Imagining America: Race, Nation, and Imperialism at the Turn of the
Century,” which examines the displays of Indianness and the involvement of
actual Indian people at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, Illinois.
117 Montezuma, “What It Is to Be an Indian” (12).
118 Carlos Montezuma, Wassaja, June 1917 (microfilm) courtesy of the Newberry
Library, Chicago, IL.
119 Speroff, Carlos Montezuma, M.D., 174. Charles A. Eastman, From the
Deep Woods to Civilization (originally pub. Boston, MA:  Little, Brown and
Company, 1916; repr. New York: Dover, 2003), see page 109 of Dover edition
for full quotation.
120 For more see, “Awards file” (uncatalogued) of the NAJA collection, Sequoya
National Research Center, Little Rock, Arkansas. Special thanks also to Daniel
F. Littlefield for investigating this history to find an undated memorandum from
Laverne Sheppard (Shoshoni-Bannock), then executive director of NAJA, that
reads: “The Wassaja Award is named after a monthly newspaper published in
Arizona by a San Carlos Apache man Dr. Carlos Montezuma Jr.” Sheppard also
notes the name was chosen because of Montezuma’s strong editorial stand, and
although she had a few of the facts wrong, her statement verifies the source of
the award’s name.
121 Speroff, Carlos Montezuma, M.D., 382. In 2000, the New  York University
Department of Journalism nominated Wassaja for consideration as one of the
top 100 works of journalism in the United States during the twentieth century.
Even though Montezuma’s paper did not make the final list, the nomination
shows the extent to which he contributed to a history of print culture as a lead-
ing Indian intellectual from the early twentieth century.
 3

Red Bird
Gertrude Bonnin’s Representational Politics

We come from mountain fastnesses, from cheerless plains, from far-off

low-wooded streams, seeking the “White Man’s ways.”
– Gertrude Bonnin, “Side by Side”1

Introduction
Born in 1876, Gertrude Bonnin entered the world in the same year as “The
Battle of the Little Bighorn,” or as many Native people referred to it: “The
Battle of Greasy Grass.” This event was an indicator of Indian triumph fol-
lowed quickly by American military victories and the containment of most
Sioux people to reservations. This was also the era marked by systematic
violation by the U.S.  government of the 1868 Treaty of Laramie, which
established Native rights and control over the “Great Sioux Reservation,”
including parts of South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming.
The legacies of these events shaped Bonnin’s childhood and the types of
short stories she would write, as well as the political work she would do
later in her life. Known as Gertrude to family and close friends, Bonnin gave
herself the nom de plume Zitkala-Sa, meaning Red Bird, after attending
Earlham College in 1897. Although the name is Sioux in origin (Lakota),
it is not from her Native dialect (Nakota). She certainly signed some letters
with this new name, but for most of her life she went by her married name
of Bonnin.2
Bonnin grew up on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota.
Missionaries visited her family and convinced Bonnin’s mother, Ellen Tate
Iyohinwin, to send her daughter away to school. From 1884 to 1888, she
studied at White’s Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana  – a school
founded and run by Quakers. Then, from 1889 to 1890, she attended the
Santee Normal Training School – founded by the Reverend Alfred Riggs, a
Congregational missionary, in 1870 – which became a center of education

165
166 Indigenous Intellectuals

for all Sioux. After only a few brief visits home, Bonnin went away again to
Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana from 1895 to 1897.3 Although she did
not graduate because of an unexplained illness, her studies at Earlham pre-
pared Bonnin for work as an educator.4 She taught at the Carlisle Industrial
Training School in Pennsylvania from 1897 to 1899. Unfortunately, she was
soon at odds with the school’s founder and headmaster, Richard Pratt, and
by 1900 Bonnin relocated to Boston, where she was able to study violin at
the New England Conservatory.5 Many of Bonnin’s writings from 1900 to
1902 refer back to these formative educational experiences.6 In addition to
education, her work reflects on the historical consequences of changes in
U.S. Indian policy and the end of violent resistance efforts by Native people.
She focuses on an education policy that aimed to assimilate Indian people
and in the process erase the distinctive character of students’ backgrounds
with regard to culture and language. Relying on her schooling, Bonnin wrote
stories for white audiences and successfully combined literary and political
work to produce counter-narratives about Indian identity and the history of
settler-colonialism in the United States.
Higher education, fictional and polemical writing, personal correspon-
dence, and public performance all permeated Bonnin’s life choices, choices
that reflected a desire she shared with a larger cohort of Indian people. They
wanted to show how their collective story considered questions related to
citizenship, sovereignty, and performance. Her writings and political activ-
ism demonstrate the ways Indian intellectuals negotiated modernity and
worked to change policies affecting their lives and the future of Indian
Country. Bonnin sought ways to maintain the centrality of her gender and
race as a voice for Native womanhood, in the context of an ever-changing
and expanding United States. She created a dynamic public persona as an
engaging writer and speaker to become central to the cause of citizenship
that other Indian leaders fought for during this time.
Many popular and dominant representations Bonnin wrote against
worked to memorialize the white and Indian warfare that was discernible
during her childhood, but was no longer a factor as she grew up because vio-
lence against Indian people had shifted terrain from the frontier to include
boarding schools, broken treaties, and mismanagement of Native lands by
members of the Indian Office. Still, physical violence characteristic of the
western frontier remained popular within an American cultural imaginary,
especially through episodes represented in the “dime novel,” a cheap, read-
able, and easily circulated book.7 Bonnin’s work had broad appeal because
it could interest readers of dime novels as much as highly educated and
wealthy persons who counted themselves among elite sections of American
society.
In 1896, while attending Earlham College, Bonnin wrote her first essay
for public consumption:  “Side by Side.” Initially delivered as a speech, it
responded to the different ways white and Indian relations had been narrated
 Red Bird 167

during the 1890s. “Side by Side” offers an early indication of Bonnin’s

sophisticated thinking concerning major issues surrounding Indian people
and how she might engage in representational politics by working through
American cultural forms, like literature.8 Bonnin won second place in the
Indiana state oratorical contest for “Side by Side,” demonstrating her suc-
cessful debut as a public speaker. In a similar fashion to Charles Eastman,
she used this moment to teach her audience about important intercultural
themes. These themes illustrate Bonnin’s concern for Indian people’s power,
which she viewed as continually threatened by white settlements and by fed-
eral policy. At the heart of her critique of American culture were the ways
narratives had mischaracterized Indian people in telling the story of coloni-
zation. Her essay offers a rhetorical response to the literary texts, newspaper
accounts, and Wild West performances during the period that chronicled and
celebrated the Indian Wars of the nineteenth century. These dominant narra-
tives denied the harsh reality of inequality and disenfranchisement that lay
beneath colonial encounters between European powers and Indian nations.
Bonnin understood the implicit power of narrative and this denial. She was
part of a generation of Native female intellectuals like Sarah Winnemucca,
S. Alice Callahan, and E. Pauline Johnson who, unlike past generations from
the early nineteenth century, sought equality and enfranchisement given the
broken treaties they had witnessed. Bonnin and her contemporaries aimed
for “dual citizenship” and “rhetorical sovereignty” because they recognized
that indigenous spaces could be independent from the United States because
at the moment tribal nations were not necessarily being treated fairly or
viewed through the paradigm of a nation-to-nation relationship with the
United States.9
Bonnin managed, throughout her life, to navigate a fine line that divided
but also linked her criticism of American culture with her celebration of it.
Her understanding of education, policy, cultural formations, and the power
of public performance shaped the ways she would position herself, as a
Yankton woman, writer, musical performer, and political activist. In “Side
by Side,” Bonnin synthesizes rhetorical devices with political ideas and cul-
tural aesthetics in a way that is characteristic of her later work.
“Side by Side” relies on romantic symbols (“we come from mountain
fastnesses”) and paternalistic tropes (“seeking the White Man’s ways”) rem-
iniscent of James Fenimore Cooper’s narratives, so Bonnin can maneuver
these metaphors to connect stories about Indian origins and issues of cul-
tural belonging to a biting critique of the “White Man’s ways.” This rhe-
torical strategy came to dominate her literary and political writing, and
became part of a larger trend among other Indian intellectuals’ work during
the turn of the twentieth century, as Beth Piatote illustrates in Domestic
Subjects:  Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature.
Piatote examines writings by indigenous women in Canada and the United
States who were able to use literature as a forum in which to critique
168 Indigenous Intellectuals

legal systems that sought to undermine their sovereignty in personal and

tribal-national terms.10
Because Bonnin’s essay originated as a speech, she uses repetition as a
device to highlight central themes and main points. She repeats “seeking”
to draw her white audience into her rereading of American society. She also
uses “we” (in reference to Indian people) in combination with “seeking your
skill in industry and in art.” She then provides a list to define both industry
and art. She places Indians in a position of supplication, a position implying
social hierarchies of superiority and inferiority, to appeal to a largely white
audience. At first, her listeners may have taken pride in hearing this young
Indian woman celebrate how she and other Indian people were seeking labor
and knowledge as entrée into American culture and politics. A more attuned
listener may have heard something else because of Bonnin’s repeated use of
“seeking” throughout her speech.
According to Bonnin, her speech was so not well received. “There, before
that vast ocean of eyes, some college rowdies threw out a large white flag,
with a drawing of a most forlorn Indian girl on it. Under this they had
printed bold black letters words that ridiculed the college which was repre-
sented by a ‘squaw.’ Such worse than barbarian rudeness embittered me.”11
Her speech was an indictment of white society and its hypocritical uses
of Christianity, a message that may have been lost on these “college row-
dies.” Bonnin’s repeated phrasing juxtaposed two groups where the “we” of
Indian people and the “your” of American society became dialectical oppo-
sites, and were set “side by side.” Her religious critique would have been
clear given the biblical language she used in the speech.

To-day the Indian is pressed almost to the farther sea. Does that sea symbolize his
death? Does the narrow territory still left to him typify the last brief day before his
place on Earth “shall know him no more forever?” Shall might make right and the
fittest alone survive? Oh Love of God and of his “Strong Son,” thou who liftest up
the oppressed and succorest the needy, is thine ear grown heavy that it cannot hear
his cry? . . . Look with compassion down, and with thine almighty power move this
nation to the rescue of my race.12

Here Bonnin’s appeal to Christian teachings enables her to urge her white
listeners to do the rescuing that their God seems so unable to do, to quell
the spread of settler-colonialism. Her deft use of questions suggest that
death is neither the foregone conclusion for Native people, nor is further
dispossession. Her queries aim to have listeners question whether might
ought to make right concerning the issue of pressing Indian peoples to the
farther sea.13
Use of “side by side” in the essay shows how she structured it around not
one, but two tropes. Along with “seeking,” Bonnin speaks continually of
two peoples standing “side by side.” Therefore, Bonnin’s “seeking” enables
her to celebrate and criticize the nation in which these groups exist side by
 Red Bird 169

side, where her “seeking” also takes place. Her speech clearly portrays an
underlying tension in American society between social hierarchy (seeking)
and social equality (side by side), which came to the fore for Indian people
within U.S. history.
The majority of white Americans in the audience may have interpreted
and experienced the rhetorical effect of “seeking to” do this and do that in
Bonnin’s speech as congruent with a nationalist impulse to elevate America
and Americanness. Bonnin uses these phrases to reclaim and subvert an
exceptional notion of America. As much as her speech seeks the “genius
of your noble institutions,” in the same breath it seeks “a new birthright
to unite with yours our claim to a common country.” Thus Bonnin lauds
American “genius” as a strategy to lay claim to its power as part of a shared
(common) country, and something equally Indian as it is American.
As her speech links Indians and Americans together through the nation, it
also retains a necessary distance between Indian people (ours) and the rest of
America (yours), which captivated the contemporary discourse at the time
based on social evolutionary theory. By maintaining the use of “we” versus
“you,” Bonnin sidesteps one of the deepest fears in white American society –
miscegenation. At the same time, she plays with language to bring disparate
peoples together. Her speech established a rhetorical space in which Indians
and white Americans could be different, separate, and yet equal with regard
to their claim to “a common country.” This shared claim and the notion of
difference came to dominate Bonnin’s later work, as she argued for equal
protection under the law for Indian people and also their ability to maintain
sovereignty over tribal traditions, lands, and culture.14
Bonnin’s speech also positions Indian people alongside white
Americans: “We may stand side by side with you in ascribing royal honor
to our nation’s flag.” She is therefore also claiming to speak for other Indian
people, many of whom did not necessarily share a sense of “our” nation
signifying the United States. The physical proximity of white and Indian
bodies standing “side by side” indexes Bonnin’s desire for fuller inclusion
in the body politic – a position that would hopefully enable her to critique
and reshape federal Indian policy from the inside. For her audience, it may
have seemed as if we and you united to form an “our” through the patriotic
symbol of the flag. Yet Bonnin uses this coming together to displace the orig-
inal “yours” of a white, colonized America. Furthermore, by maintaining a
distance between we (Indian people) and you (everyone else) – however fic-
tional this distance was for urban Indians and white settlers living in towns
bordering reservation fence lines – Bonnin capitalizes on a racial discourse
of 1896, which demands this separation.15 At the same time, she invokes
“our nation’s flag” to push against the limits of this discourse; as a possi-
ble harbinger of U.S. imperial machinations in the Philippines, Cuba, and
Puerto Rico, three places in which the rights guaranteed by the Constitution
did not follow the flag, especially for those racialized as yellow, brown, and
170 Indigenous Intellectuals

red. This form of rhetorical resistance operated not only in this speech, but
in her published work, personal letters, and public lectures.
Later in her life, Bonnin would work more closely with tribal communities
to have their voices heard through her reform organization, The National
Council of American Indians. “Side by Side” is where Bonnin first used the
racial discourse of imperialism strategically to argue for Indian peoples’
freedoms, and when she first began promoting herself as a public intellec-
tual. In addition, in this speech and her other texts, historical events and
context remained paramount to how Bonnin, as a Native woman and politi-
cal reformer, could use cultural practices to address audiences and express
her views on Indian policy. These moments enabled her to confront racism
and patriarchy while also relying on white patronage to book appearances
and publish her work.
As cultural historian Philip Deloria has shown, an ideology that defined
Indianness in terms of violence gave way to one that focused on pacification
in the post–Wounded Knee era of U.S. history. The threat of possible vio-
lence became mutually constitutive of the impossibility of such violence by
Indian people. By the 1890s, U.S. Indian policy became linked to the increas-
ingly mismanaged and corrupt bureaucracy of the reservation system, which
was buttressed by an American culture that aimed to place Indians into
safe spaces (reservations) while simultaneously finding new ways to dis-
place them (forced acculturation through education). Following the General
Allotment Act of 1887, federal bureaucrats sought ways to define and
manage Indian people in physical space.16 At the same time, white cultural
producers focused on the closing of the western frontier as a means for
romanticizing the vanishing Indian and the end of violence along that fron-
tier. The end of the Indian Wars offered a way to redefine American empire
by imagining Indian people as permanently trapped within a primitive past
and locked out of the benefits of modernity and any need to be a part of the
U.S. nation.
This strange linkage created narratives about Americanness and
Indianness that enabled figures like Bonnin, on one hand, to claim her sep-
arateness from American society (as an inferior “seeker”), and on the other,
to assert her desire for an equal share of an American future where Indian
people could reshape society (because they could live “side by side” with
Americans). If we return, then, to Bonnin’s speech and Indian people as part
of “our claim to a common country,” we can see how she navigates a com-
plex set of expectations regarding Indian peoples’ roles in a modern(izing)
nation; a nation that viewed them, ironically, as separate (biologically infe-
rior) but also ripe for assimilation (physically adjacent by permission),
because now pacified they could live “side by side” with white settlers, many
of whom were new immigrants who found themselves similarly interpel-
lated into a system of Americanization.17
 Red Bird 171

“Side by Side” is but one example of Bonnin’s representational politics in

a written and spoken text. It was important not only because of the argu-
ments she made but because she presented them as a public speaker. This
is the earliest example of how self-promotion enabled Bonnin to assert her
own ethnic female literary identity, while gesturing toward broader catego-
ries (Indian and American) to speak for and to large groups of people. For
her, Indianness cut two ways: it was a racial or ethnic category as under-
stood by white America and also a political identity that implied certain
rights. Bonnin’s work as a lecturer was akin to her female contemporaries’,
successful and courageous activists, many of whom were African American,
such as Ida B.  Wells-Barnett, whose pamphlets exposed lynching in the
South; Anna Julia Cooper, a prominent author, educator, and speaker; and
suffragist Mary Church Terrell, a daughter of former slaves who was one of
the first African American women to earn a college degree; as well as femi-
nists from all backgrounds who participated in reform through the Women’s
Christian Temperance Union, formed in Cleveland, Ohio in 1874.18 In the
years that followed Bonnin’s participation in the oratorical contest from
1896, she worked frequently as a lecturer. She would often draw on expecta-
tions of Indianness to present her unique political insights.
In 1908, Bonnin sought to reimagine Indianness in cultural terms by
working with William Hanson to produce The Sun Dance, an opera based
on Native history and themes. This was somewhat unusual given that opera,
at the time, was most often associated with the Metropolitan Opera House
in New York City and a few newer venues in Boston and Chicago. It pre-
miered at the Orpheus Hall in Vernal, Utah in February 1913. For Hanson
and Bonnin, this debut was quite an achievement given the relative new-
ness of the genre to American audiences.19 Through opera Bonnin combined
music and performance to articulate a political vision that resisted colonial-
ist narratives and celebrated Native culture, history, and identity.20 Because
most opera audiences were from elite social circles, the genre itself guaran-
teed future possibilities for wealthy patronage in support of Indian issues.
In addition, the site of Vernal helped connect the white settler population
with the local Shoshone people, who were featured as performers in the
premiere. Three years later, Bonnin moved from Utah to Washington, DC,
and from harnessing the power of cultural aesthetics to working largely in
the realm of politics. She became the secretary for the Society of American
Indians (SAI), and through this early pan-Indian organization she found
many Native allies. While in the capital, she also worked with publish-
ers to have her earlier writings (from 1900–2) collected and published as
American Indian Stories in 1921. Bonnin lived in the city with her husband,
Raymond T. Bonnin, for the remainder of her life. Together they founded
and ran the National Council of American Indians (NCAI), with her serving
as the president and him as secretary from 1926 until her death in 1938.21
172 Indigenous Intellectuals

School Days: An Indian Teacher among Indians

Among the legends the old warriors used to tell me were many stories of evil
spirits. But I was taught to fear them no more than those who stalked about
in material guise. I never knew there was an insolent chieftain among the bad
spirits, who dared to array his forces against the Great Spirit, until I heard this
white man’s legend from a paleface woman.22
– Gertrude Bonnin, School Days

After leaving Earlham, Bonnin worked within the classroom to educate her-
self and others about the positive ways schooling might be an avenue for
change within Indian America. Her views on education appear explicitly
in her essay “An Indian Teacher among Indians,” published in 1900 by the
Atlantic Monthly. Bonnin articulated misgivings she harbored about the
American educational system that aimed to “civilize” Native children using
schools and teachers. She emphasizes feelings of loss and confusion based
on her experiences and the students she had taught at the Carlisle School.
Along with her essay “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” Bonnin created a
series of vignettes that focuses on the roles of teachers and boarding schools
to argue for changes in educational policy concerning Indian pupils.
In “School Days,” Bonnin recalls her arrival at school with a mixture
of hope and sadness. “I had arrived in the wonderful land of rosy skies,
but I was not happy,” she writes, pointing to a space of possibility because
it is ostensibly wonderful and rosy. Still, she was not happy because “My
tears were left to dry themselves in streaks, because neither my aunt nor
my mother was near to wipe them away.”23 Her sadness refers to the dis-
location experienced by Native students forced to attend boarding school.
Tsianina Lomawaima and others have emphasized the type of violence such
forced assimilation did to Indian children and their families.24 Bonnin was
right to focus on the pain associated with boarding school. These schools
had been designed to work in tandem with settler-colonial policies, as Beth
Piatote and other scholars have shown. Piatote writes, “The restructuring
of Indian economies, reassignment of labor, and reshaping of gender roles
extended from the paired workings of allotment and boarding schools.”
Reading in the context of this fraught history, and of Bonnin’s references
to longing for family and “home,” white readers of the Atlantic Monthly
piece may have found it appealing because of its sentimental tone. Bonnin’s
longing also signaled to Indian readers that educational policies could be
as harmful to their existence as a Hotchiss gun. Closer examination of
vignettes from “School Days” and “An Indian Teacher among Indians”
reveals how Bonnin engaged with sentimentality and nationalism to argue
that Indian children are left out of the nation that supposedly aims to edu-
cate them into it.
Bonnin’s narrative in “An Indian Teacher among Indians” is driven by
a thematic tension between her views of “the East” and “the West.” These
 Red Bird 173

regions of the United States operate as important figurative and material

vectors in this series of stories, especially when she begins by chronicling her
travels in terms of a return to the land of “red apples.” This return functions
within a post–Dawes Act reality where Bonnin must go to the East in order
to reshape Indian Country in the West. Unlike the westward movement of
white settlers, Indians moved eastward to reshape the possibilities open to
them in the West. Bonnin writes, “there had been no doubt about the direc-
tion in which I wished to go to spend my energies in a work for the Indian
race.”25 Bonnin’s recognition that she may be more influential if she lives in
the East reflects her awareness of Northeastern white progressive political
reform circuits. Given the vanishing Indian myth that had become popular
in the East, especially under the influence of narratives like Cooper’s Last
of the Mohicans, Bonnin may also have recognized that a Native presence
in the East was especially warranted and helpful to refute the familiar sto-
ries of disappearance. Bonnin constructs “an Eastern Indian school” as a
site of possibility, despite the fact that this school, and many others, under-
mined Native identity formation and cultural preservation. The schoolhouse
then becomes a “both/and” site, one in which Native students feel threat-
ened while they are taught new tools, and yet many, like Bonnin, use these
same tools to produce new cultural understandings for the future of Indian
Country and the United States.
Bonnin’s story about the “land of red apples” (from “School Days”)
describes the place where she will be educated as one of strange sights and
sounds. The title recalls the familiar folktale about Johnny Appleseed work-
ing his way across the Midwest planting apple trees as a symbol of national
unity, but Bonnin relies on this familiarity to invert the popular narrative.
For her, this land is where her long hair will be cut; it is a place marked
by bedlam where “my spirit tore itself in struggling for its lost freedom.”26
Bonnin’s spirit stands in for nationalist fervor, and suggests the Indian
boarding school was an ambivalent and harmful cultural space that could
not represent freedom. Readers could look to this childhood story and sym-
pathize with the challenges Bonnin faced, and those still being faced by
Indian children who were forced to live according to the rules of an unfa-
miliar and unforgiving white society.
Because Bonnin’s vignettes set up a critical tension between the East and
the West, we might read these spaces not necessarily through the well-worn
tropes of civilization and savagery, but rather as cultural spaces that Bonnin
feels she has less or more control over. For her, the East is a space of insti-
tutional control and misunderstanding in which “paleface” women teach
Indian children how to assimilate into American society. The West embodies
not the free and untamed frontier imagined by white writers and readers but
a real place of return where Bonnin can visit with her family. But Bonnin
also romanticizes the West as a place that she unfortunately cannot actually
visit except in her “happy dreams of Western rolling lands and un-lassoed
174 Indigenous Intellectuals

freedom,” which in turn enables her to write against the trope of domestica-
tion of Indian people.27 The idea of “un-lassoed freedom” in the West partly
aligns with a dominant understanding from a white American imaginary,
but her longing points to the ongoing process of settler-colonialism that
forecloses her ability to return home, except in her dreams.
Through the contrast Bonnin creates between East and West in “School
Days,” she is able to highlight what she has lost and gained by her studies
in the East. In the sixth chapter, Bonnin describes how “after my first three
years of school” she finally returns to “Western country,” which unfortu-
nately results in “four strange summers.” The strangeness is due to her pain,
a feeling of dislocation within the site of the familiar, as she finds a brother
who “did not quite understand my feelings” and a mother who “had never
gone inside a schoolhouse, and so she was not capable of comforting her
daughter who could read and write.” Her experience, of loss, of lack of com-
fort and understanding, is important because it is not unique to Bonnin.28
A large number of Indian people who had attended boarding schools
found it difficult to return home to families who still lived on reservations
and who may not have had the same sort of access to white education.
Charles Eastman wrote about the struggle to define himself while visiting
relatives or traveling in Indian Country as an educated Indian and a physi-
cian. Certainly, there was a growing divide between generations of Indian
people due to different educational experiences as well as changes brought
about by new technologies and economies. Indian cultures were as fluid
and changeable as any other, and the embrace or resistance to change often
resulted in diverse worldviews and loaded interactions. Eastman, Bonnin,
and others who attended schools far from home and those who went to col-
lege found that they did not necessarily speak the same cultural language as
the Indian people who did not share in these types of experiences.
By 1900, when Bonnin first published in the Atlantic Monthly, the
Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) had increasingly intruded into the lives of
Indian peoples. Communally managed reservation lands were divided up
into smaller parcels designed to be owned by individual families. Both the
Dawes Act and later the Curtis Act aimed to use this sort of division to open
up supposedly “surplus” lands to white settlement. Along with allotment,
large-scale armed resistance by Indian nations against the encroachment of
white settlers and the U.S. military was no longer possible. These concur-
rent factors also deepened generational divides among many Indian people.
As land ownership became less tribally rooted, Indian leaders, who traveled
between rural and urban and Indian and non-Indian spaces, were forced to
imagine new possibilities for how Indian people could engage in the making
of Indian Country in America.29
As an autobiographer and a narrator, Bonnin embodied the position of
a traveler. She also played the role of trickster as she described a struggle
to redefine Indian agency and sovereignty in “School Days.” Through her
 Red Bird 175

invocation of the familiar image of the wild Indian, Indian readers might
have recognized that she was writing herself into the trickster’s role. Writing
as an Indian woman traveling between different cultural spaces, Bonnin
describes herself thusly: “I was neither a wee girl nor a tall one; neither a
wild Indian nor a tame one. This deplorable situation was the effect of my
brief course in the East, and the unsatisfactory ‘teenth’ in a girl’s years.”30
Bonnin’s trickster operates on two levels in this example. She recognizes
the implicit power of colonial oppression through the notion that Indians
could only exist within an either/or binary, but then actually twists this into
a neither/nor situation, that is because of her “brief course in the East.” The
fact that she is “neither” but also “both” allows Bonnin to frame her “brief
course in the East” in both affirmative and critical terms to create a new
intercultural space. Hers is not a class gender trickster identity (like a war-
rior woman), but instead one that identifies with her family, her home, and
the new places she encounters while remaining critical of the shortcomings
of all three. Indeed, her trickster is not purely an either/or position, but a
both/and one that enables Bonnin’s text to convey the fluidity, mutability,
and contingency of a modern subject, thus offering readers a glimpse into
how this text is part of a self-fashioning project.31
This fluidity is productive because it allows Bonnin to critique the “deplor-
able situation” that might force an Indian person to feel pulled between two
extremes: one of wildness and the other of tameness, and by extension one
defined by the reservation and the other by the city. Certainly these are cat-
egories that are produced by her colonial education, and in either one, she
is seemingly figured as an animal. At the same time, because Bonnin can
articulate an unfixed position read through lenses of biology and culture,
her use of ambiguity connects schooling with coming of age in some pro-
ductive ways. At this moment in her essay, as in her other stories, Bonnin
makes repeated references to the particular pitfalls that befell her because
she was an Indian and because she was an educated young woman. She is
determined to write past the extremes of wildness and tameness that others
would associate with her race, gender, and age.32
The school operates as a foundational site for the self-making that
Bonnin critiques. Narrating an encounter between herself, as a teacher, and
the school’s headmaster, “the imposing figure of a stately gray-haired man”
(that likely represents Pratt from Carlisle), the new teacher is framed in
patriarchal terms. For it is the headmaster who introduces her to the reader
by his exclamation that “you must be the little Indian girl who created the
excitement among the college orators!” This statement at once celebrates
Bonnin as an orator but also forces her into the diminutive role of a child
as “the little Indian girl.” Further confirming the difference in their roles
with regards to power, the headmaster orders Bonnin back West “to gather
Indian pupils for the school.” In this instance, the male headmaster acts
as the father figure of the school and the embodiment of the paternalism
176 Indigenous Intellectuals

underpinning a long history of colonization, which had been put into prac-
tice through missionaries who went West. Bonnin’s depiction of these events
enables her to use his character to link the Indian education system directly
to a larger project of highly gendered colonialism. The Indian Teacher is a
figure through which Bonnin can showcase the complicated, even paradoxi-
cal, roles educated Indian women played within the changing cultural land-
scape of American society and Indian Country.
As an Indian Teacher who makes return trips to visit her family, Bonnin
showcases in her narrative the gulf of misunderstanding that was created
between her and her family because of practices like forced education
and allotment. When she recalls a visit home and her mother’s caution to
“beware of the paleface” because they are the source of death “of your sister
and your uncle,” one gains more insights into the costs of forced assimila-
tion. In this same story, Bonnin appears unsure about how to interpret her
mother’s concerns. She describes how her mother’s “outstretched fingers”
pointed toward “the settler’s lodge, as if an invisible power passed from
them to the evil at which she aimed.”33 Her mother seems almost to play the
role of superstitious older woman and spiritual soothsayer. Following this
depiction, Bonnin herself comes to terms with the possibility that “the large
army of white teachers in Indian schools” might not be as benevolent as she
once thought. The settler’s lodge and the school become linked as cultural
and physical symbols of westward expansion. They stand in for the intima-
cies of colonial contact and cultural interaction, not unlike the marriages
between white men and Indian women and the indoctrination of Indian
children by Christian missionaries, again highlighting gender and nation as
critical themes in her writing.
Bonnin’s mother, and the generation of Indian people that she represents,
oppose the Eastern world of “white teachers” in both a literal and figura-
tive sense, whereas Bonnin and the next generation can recognize that these
teachers “had a larger missionary creed than I had suspected.” Her position
as a teacher is a contradictory and unstable one. She articulates a subjec-
tivity that has been shaped by teaching and yet does not perceive herself as
having taken on all the aspects of the white system that her mother finds
so threatening. Her story augurs a future full of dislocation (because she
cannot remain with her people) and possibility given the new political and
cultural places that she will soon be able to travel to as an Indian activist.34
Throughout these stories, Bonnin moves between physical and metaphor-
ical spaces. Ultimately, she leaves her white readers with a feeling of uneas-
iness regarding the future of boarding schools and a gendered history of
education where white, female teachers and male schoolmasters attempted
to assimilate both Indian teachers and children. Bonnin is able to use the
site of the schoolhouse to bring into relief the power of misunderstand-
ing when Christian “palefaces” observe her classroom. She writes that these
people were “astounded at seeing the children of savage warriors so docile
 Red Bird 177

and industrious.”35 Her depiction of these visitors mocks their progressivist

logic, a key theme that underpinned many of her writings, which gave her
reason to question the motives of any white allies.
Given that a large portion of her white readers may have seen themselves
as reformers “cut from the same cloth” as the visitors in the classroom scene,
we might speculate how they understood descriptions like this one.36

Examining the neatly figured pages, and gazing upon the Indian girls and boys
bending over their books, the white visitors walked out of the schoolhouse well
satisfied: they were educating the children of the red man! They were paying a lib-
eral fee to the government employees in whose able hands lay the small forest of
Indian timber.37

Bonnin continues by expanding the picture to illuminate flaws in the larger

system of Indian education: “In this fashion many have passed idly through
the Indian schools during the last decade, afterward to boast of their char-
ity to the North American Indian. But few there are who have paused to
question whether real life or long-lasting death lies beneath this semblance
of civilization.”38 Bonnin’s assertion that “few . . . have paused to question”
what will happen to Indian children educated in this fashion leaves open
the possibility of both death and life. In this moment, she hints at her own
troubled subjectivity, as an Indian Teacher who understands the progressive
vision regarding education and yet worries about how effective it is for all
Indian people. On another level, these statements reflect the intermittent
friction that occurred between Bonnin and Pratt – one of the leading figures
in Indian education.39
Pratt responded to “School Days of an Indian Girl” and “An Indian
Teacher among Indians” by publishing an anonymous review (although
Bonnin would have known it was him), in The Red Man, one of Carlisle’s
school newspapers. His reviews suggest Bonnin created a misleading por-
trayal of Indian schools. Despite the disagreement between these two fig-
ures, they maintained a strained relationship for a time. Not long after
Bonnin worked as a teacher at Carlisle, Pratt asked her to play with
the school’s band. According to one scholar, Pratt’s rationale behind
Bonnin’s participation was to capture her and keep her “on our side”  –
the pro-assimilation, allotment, and progressive white reformers’ agenda.
Bonnin’s performance as “Zitkala-Sa” with the Carlisle Indian School
Band kept her close enough to Carlisle that it appeared she could be cap-
tured and contained.40
It is equally likely that Bonnin had strategic reasons for traveling with the
Carlisle Indian School Band. Her choice to maintain a connection with Pratt
enabled her in the short term to perform for large audiences, which helped
her develop as a professional musician. In the long term, Bonnin’s political
work benefited from contact with Pratt given his influence on federal policy
and his personal contacts. The Carlisle Indian School Band was not wholly
178 Indigenous Intellectuals

bad for Bonnin because she continued to study music and pursue perfor-
mance as a helpful avenue for self-promotion and political activism.
Bonnin’s formal training for her musical career began in 1899, after
she left her teaching post at the Carlisle School and moved to Boston,
Massachusetts. There she met Ho-Chunk artist Angel De Cora. Their friend-
ship offered both Native women support as fellow artists. By 1899, De
Cora, who had recently graduated from the School of Art at Smith College
in Northampton, had already established an art studio for herself at 62
Rutland Square, conveniently located within a mile of her art school and the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. For De Cora, the decision to live in Boston
at the turn of the century “meant she wanted to paint to the pulse of her
generation.”41 For Bonnin, the decision to study music at the New England
Conservatory demonstrated a similar desire to explore new places and make
new contacts. Like writing, music provided Bonnin with an artistic outlet to
express some of her deepest desires. It seems extraordinary that this young
Yankton woman would be able to pursue studying the violin in Boston, and
yet the city made a lot of sense for her as a writer. It seems likely that her
decision to live in one of the publishing centers of the United States was a
strategic move as well, because it was a helpful place for her to further her
writing career.
By 1901, De Cora and Bonnin partnered together to publish Old Indian
Legends, with Bonnin writing the text and De Cora creating the illustra-
tions to accompany it. This was part of De Cora’s career as an illustrator for
Native authored texts. She had already created the frontispiece for Francis
La Flesche’s The Middle Five: Indian Boys at School, which had been pub-
lished by Small, Maynard and Company out of Boston in 1900. De Cora
would later work with her husband, William “Lone Star” Dietz, to do the
illustrations for Elaine Goodale Eastman’s Yellow Star: A Story of East and
West, which was also published in Boston, by Little, Brown and Company
in 1911. Both Bonnin and De Cora were encouraged by Bostonian Joseph
Edgar Chamberlain and his wife. Chamberlain was a columnist for the
Boston Evening Transcript and editor of the Youth’s Companion. He was
widely recognized in the city as a leading journalist. In fact, Bonnin did
much of her early writing in the summer of 1899 at Chamberlin’s summer
home in Wrentham, Massachusetts. Chamberlin even wrote to the editors of
the Atlantic Monthly, urging them to publish Bonnin’s pieces.
These formative years in Boston fostered a personal friendship between
the two women that yielded professional results due to important networks
in the city and the artistic achievements of both Bonnin and De Cora. Their
collaboration, and others between De Cora and La Flesche, demonstrate
the degree to which Native artists were able to help one another in support
of their careers. These professional relationships fostered opportunities for
Native intellectuals to discuss a host of political concerns as well. Soon De
Cora would leave Boston to teach art at the Carlisle School for nine years,
 Red Bird 179

from 1906 to 1915, where her autobiography appeared in an issue of the Red
Man in 1911. In it, De Cora asserted a position on Native art that, as Anne
Ruggles Gere has shown, was repeated in speeches she gave to the National
Education Association, the SAI, the Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends
of the Indian, and Quebec’s International Congress of Americanists. As Gere
further argues, “Operating from a constrained racial and gendered position,
this artist-teacher engaged with white-dominated approaches to Indian art
to transform them for her own and future generations.”42 The two women
would collaborate again, and for an expressly political purpose, in 1919,
when the spring volume of the SAI’s journal featured Angel De Cora Dietz
on the cover and Bonnin as editor. Bonnin had left teaching to try her hand
at music and writing, with the hope of circulating her work to a wide range
of audiences. In Boston, she succeeded in cultivating a more national pro-
file, one made possible through publishing in periodicals like the Atlantic
Monthly.

Sioux Indian Woman: Author and Lecturer

The first Boston-based publishing house to promote Bonnin as a writer
was Ginn and Company.43 Ginn published Bonnin’s first book, Old Indian
Legends, in 1901. A  year later, the Atlantic Monthly published her essay
“Why I Am a Pagan.” Soon other pieces followed, circulating in Harper’s
and Everybody’s Magazine as well as journals distributed in various Indian
communities across the United States, including the SAI’s American Indian
Magazine. The stories serialized by the Atlantic Monthly were later collected
and printed together in 1921 by Hayworth in Washington, DC; all told
Bonnin produced an impressive array of literary and political texts from
“Side by Side” in 1896 to Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft,
Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes, Legalized Robbery in 1924.
Given the content of her autobiographical writings, Sioux Indian sto-
ries, and her later political writings, it is a challenge to position Bonnin’s
work with regards to genre. She was a writer with a well-cultivated liter-
ary talent.44 She was also a political activist who sought and maintained
connections to powerful networks. Her literary art became necessarily
entangled with a desire to protest elements in American society that con-
tinued to oppress Native peoples. Many of Bonnin’s writings suggest the
fight for Indian political rights should be linked to the preservation of
distinctive cultural identities – an idea that arose with nineteenth-century
ethnography. Her upbringing contributed to producing an individual
with a mix of beliefs that although internally consistent, could appear
contradictory to outside observers. She favored American citizenship
for Native peoples, for example, but was also committed to promoting
Native sovereignty regarding writing practices, artistic expression, and
musical traditions.
180 Indigenous Intellectuals

Read as social reform, Bonnin’s work addressed themes from her own
life that she saw as applicable to other Indian people, including the tension
between indigenous spirituality and Christian theology, and the manage-
ment of intergenerational and intertribal differences that were based on var-
ied educational and social experiences. As a writer, she borrowed romantic
language and tropes from sentimentality that were recognizable to many
readers of American literature.45 Some scholars have argued that Native
women engaged with sentimentality in their work to varying degrees. Cari
Carpenter notes that while anger is a neglected element in a variety of sen-
timental texts, it should be recognized as a salient subject in the early liter-
ature of Native American women.46 Any anger Bonnin expressed was based
on personal experience, and many of her characters were similarly based on
real events. These figures often represented white and Indian worldviews.
As a folklorist, Bonnin celebrated certain aspects of Sioux culture. Although
she openly criticized the work of Christian missionaries in her writing, she
was well versed in a number of faiths. She read The Book of Mormon,
and Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy, and no doubt a number of
other religious texts.47 She remained overtly critical of Christian conver-
sion as a means of assimilating Native people into American society – even
as she fought against the right of Native people to use Peyote for religious
purposes. The different genres Bonnin used and certain contradictions she
articulated demonstrate that her written work dealt with conflicts between
literature and politics, as well as tradition and assimilation.
Although some scholars have labeled her a “transitional” writer, for
Bonnin, such a label eschews the possibility for fluidity within her work.48
Categories of identity – race, class, gender, religion – intersect to mutually
shape one another.49 In this case, ambiguity and ambivalence in Bonnin’s
work are productive in that she allows for various categories to remain
unfixed. For her and other Indian intellectuals, the idea of “tradition” itself
was up for debate at the turn of the twentieth century. One might be tempted
to locate her in a liminal space, trapped somewhere between aesthetic crea-
tion and political commitment or between the supposedly separate worlds
of Christianity and Native American religion. But it makes more sense to
consider her literary writings as always contingent, in dialogue with her
political projects. For many Indian readers, Bonnin’s ability to express con-
fusion about how to find a cultural home while she fights for political free-
dom might have been familiar and reflected shared concerns. This sort of
apparent confusion could exist alongside a story that asserted a worldview
as entirely coherent and at least internally consistent enough for her.50
Bonnin had enough professional and personal space to imagine her own
political goals and because of the support of friends, colleagues, and her hus-
band, Raymond T. Bonnin. They met in 1902, when Gertrude Simmons was
working as a teacher at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota.
They married that same year, and then moved to the Uintah and Ouray
 Red Bird 181

reservation in Utah. They lived there until 1916, after which they relocated
to Washington, DC. From 1916 until Gertrude’s death in 1938, the Bonnins
lived in the capital, where they were well positioned to direct their energies
toward Indian reform. One of Bonnin’s greatest achievements as an activist
with the SAI was editing the organization’s journal. Beginning in the fall of
1918, she edited four issues of the American Indian Magazine: A Journal of
Race Progress, published by SAI members.51 Meanwhile, Raymond Bonnin
went to work as a law clerk while Gertrude acted as a lobbyist in support
of Indian citizenship. By 1926, Gertrude Bonnin had made political contacts
and reshaped Indian policy in order to found her own political organization,
the NCAI. Writing and speaking proved integral to this type of political
work, and Raymond nurtured his wife’s efforts by becoming the secretary
for the NCAI during her presidency.52
In addition to her marriage, Bonnin found encouragement for her efforts
from various all-female reform groups. In 1920, she was an active member
of the League of American Pen Women. Her association with this organi-
zation makes sense because Marian Longfellow O’Donoghue, who had ties
to both Boston and Washington, DC, had established the League in 1897
as a “progressive press union” for female writers. Other white journalists,
like Margaret Sullivan Burke and Anna Sanborn Hamilton, were involved
in promoting the League to recruit not only members of the press but art-
ists and composers as well. By September 1898, the League boasted over
fifty members from Maine to Texas and New York to California. By 1921,
the association had officially become the National League of American Pen
Women with thirty-five local branches across a number of states. Its mem-
bership increased during the 1920s and 1930s. No doubt Bonnin was com-
pelled by the activist origins of the association because its first members
believed women writers should always be compensated for their work.53
Bonnin’s work found support from the professional connections she
made as a member of not only the League of American Pen Women, but a
myriad of other all-female organizations. Through her correspondence with
women involved in these sorts of groups and other Native writers, artists,
and activists, like De Cora, Bonnin worked to promote both her political
ideals and sales of her books. Writing from New York City in April 1922,
fellow author Princess Blue Feather inquired about how she might obtain
a copy of Bonnin’s American Indian Stories. Blue Feather also wrote about
her own work, which consisted of “many poems of our race, but as yet [I]‌
have not had them published.” This statement was not wholly true given
that several of Blue Feather’s pieces had already appeared in Montezuma’s
newsletter, Wassaja, which was “a great compliment” because his paper “is
such a vitally important medium to reach those who are ignorant of the
conditions regarding our race.”54
Bonnin’s reply to Blue Feather on May 2, 1922, offers a glimpse into how
candid she was when writing to other Indian women about how to defend
182 Indigenous Intellectuals

the good name of “our people.” These types of exchanges were as impor-
tant to the creation and maintenance of Indian political reform networks as
much as Indian publications and artistic creations. Bonnin’s postscript refers
to a newspaper clipping Blue Feather had enclosed, and reveals something
critical to both of them. She writes, “The clipping only shows how ignorant
many White Americans are about the real Indian people of our country. They
have much to learn!” This remark demonstrates Bonnin’s openness to a new
friend and her strategic inversion of the “real Indian” discourse that perme-
ated news reports during this period, especially with regard to Eastman’s
work as a public speaker. In many cases, these reports supported an ethnic
authenticity discourse built on white expectations for Indianness. Bonnin’s
use of “real Indian” here refers instead to an understanding she and Blue
Feather share regarding who they are versus how others might see them.55
In addition to Native women like Blue Feather, there were several
long-time white supporters of Bonnin’s publishing career. Principal among
them was Marianna Burgess. Scholarship on the Carlisle School has
pointed to Burgess as central to the regime of surveillance there given that
she used her editorship of the school’s paper to exert control over Indian
students. It seems likely she and Bonnin became acquainted through their
time at Carlisle. As Jacqueline Fear-Segal argues, Burgess adopted a fic-
tional persona as the “man-on-the-band-stand,” enabling her to construct
a panopticon-like power mechanism designed to intimidate and subdue
Carlisle’s students through the columns of the newspaper.56 Burgess also
authored Stiya:  A  Carlisle Indian Girl at Home, a deeply offensive novel
portraying Native people and Native communities as filthy and backward.
But despite this history and Burgess’s earlier experiences and views, Bonnin
and Burgess regularly exchanged letters throughout the early decades of
the twentieth century on the topic of Indian uplift. Perhaps Burgess had a
change of heart. Her friendship with Bonnin may have been integral to a
shift in Burgess’s politics.
On May 6, 1922, Burgess wrote to Bonnin from Los Angeles regarding the
California State Federation of Women’s Clubs (CSFW). This group had sup-
ported John Collier’s work with the American Indian Defense Association
(AIDA), another reform organization that emerged out of the Southwest
during this period. According to Burgess, the CSFW was important and use-
ful because it was trying “to keep the Indian to the front.” In particular, one
of the ways the CSFW aimed to educate the public about Indian reform
was through dramatic performance. However fraught this forum might be,
Burgess wanted to share this strategy with Bonnin.57
Virginia Calhoun tried so loyally to present in out-door drama an archaic story of
the true character of the primitive Indian. She is a playwright of considerable prom-
inence. There were actual trees set out for a forest background. The scheme was
grand. The whole Indian program shows your work in Salt Lake. But dear oh me,
how ignorant the educated are!58
 Red Bird 183

The way Burgess reconstructs the performance space as the arena in which
to highlight “the true character of the primitive Indian” fits well within the
realm of dominant expectations regarding spectacular displays of Indianness.
These performances reproduced “reality” so that audiences might crave the
spectacle again and again, rather than learn more about the rights and situ-
ations of actual Indian people. Still, Burgess knows enough to also note that
despite using “actual trees,” these sorts of primitivist displays may not have
been that accurate when she says: “how ignorant the educated are!” How
true. In addition, Burgess’s remarks on Bonnin’s own foray into dramatic
performance through her “work in Salt Lake,” a reference to the 1913 per-
formance of The Sun Dance there, suggests she may be writing to Bonnin
in search of expertise regarding Native-themed performances. However, the
main aim of Burgess’s letter is not about performance but rather to pro-
mote the sale of Bonnin’s books. Burgess writes, there is “a fine display of
your books in one of the best book-stores in town”; it seems possible that
“this display” will result in “good sales.” The success of Bonnin’s books
certainly had something to do with white desires to see Indianized perfor-
mances. Bonnin recognized that she could work within dominant, mostly
white expectations regarding Indian performance in order to ultimately
change them.
The collaboration between Bonnin and Burgess is not wholly dissimilar
from the patronage relationships of the nineteenth century between aboli-
tionists and freed slaves in sponsoring slave narratives, as well as the “as told
to” genre created by white writers, especially anthropologists, who recorded
and published the life stories of Native informants.59 The partnership of
these women, to promote and sell a Native author’s books, was not unusual
by the early twentieth century. Many white writers supported Indian policy
reform and paired up with Native authors to promote their careers. Luther
Standing Bear worked closely with Earl Alonzo Brininstool and Christine
Quintasket collaborated with Lucullus McWhorter to produce and pro-
mote their books in the late 1920s. Both McWhorter and Brininstool were
eager to support Indian people beyond the realm of culture by becoming
members of political reform groups, such as the National League for Justice
to American Indians. Similarly, Eastman traveled widely during this period
to give public lectures about Indian history, and to promote himself as an
author; his success hinged on an ability to tap into white expectations and
cultural networks, and to work closely with white progressive reformers.
As writers, Eastman and Bonnin had in common their connection to
the Boston publishing world. Eastman, for example, found support from
Little, Brown and Company, which was clearly interested in promoting
the work of Indian writers given that it had begun publishing legal docu-
ments related to the United States during the first half of the nineteenth
century. Many of these documents concerned treaties, court cases, and con-
flicts between Indian people and the United States. By 1925, the company
184 Indigenous Intellectuals

agreed to publish all Atlantic Monthly books; with this agreement came
an opportunity to publish work by, not just about, Indian people. Through
publishing Eastman and Bonnin traveled along similar if not also overlap-
ping writing circuits. Bonnin’s Old Indian Legends (1901), with illustrations
by Ho-Chunk artist Angel De Cora, was published by the Boston-based firm
Ginn and Company.60
This publishing house was established by Edwin Ginn, a graduate of Tufts
University. Ginn had created the company with textbooks in mind and he
saw an opening with the establishment of the Federal Bureau of Education
to begin creating schoolbooks on a range of topics. The company sought
out work by Native authors like Bonnin. Her autobiographical essays and
folktales fit neatly into Ginn’s ideology of education. Ginn “saw millions of
children trooping to elementary schools throughout the land and the tens
of thousands of earnest students who would be enrolled in the high schools
and in state and private colleges” with books provided by his company.61
Ginn’s beliefs grew out of a discourse common during the nineteenth century
that tied literacy and literature to nation building and market capitalism.
His choice to include Native authors in such a project helped to promote
their histories, ideas, and stylistic choices as integral to the United States
rather than locating them solely in the past or in the imaginaries produced
by white authors. Ginn was also a supporter of the International Congress
on Race, which had featured Charles Eastman on the American panel with
W. E. B. Du Bois and Franz Boas. Ginn’s interest in Native American issues
is most explicit in his support of both Eastman and Bonnin.
When Ginn and Company published Old Indian Legends in 1901, it
represented the ideals of a publishing house interested in “building up the
list of elementary, high-school, college, and technical books.”62 The book
became part of the company’s legacy of promoting English-language texts
as part of a uniquely American literary history as it turned toward publish-
ing modern language books. This move was important for Ginn and for
Bonnin in that the company started marketing books outside of the United
States. It was probably no surprise to Bonnin when she received a letter on
June 8, 1926 from Ginn that stated, “A German lady desires to translate
Old Indian Legends into German. Are you willing that she should do so?”
Bonnin responded promptly by June 11, noting that she had “no objections
whatever to the translation” because indeed such a request “indicates the
growing interest in the American Indian generally and in a measure encour-
ages me to write other Indian Legends of which I have sometime ago writ-
ten you.”63 The educational and political reach of Old Indian Legends was
celebrated by Bonnin and her publishing house. In 1930, she wrote to the
company again to inquire about a school reader, which had been produced
to include her stories. In this instance, Bonnin’s remarks showcase that it
was not only white progressives and adults who were interested in read-
ing her work, but children as well. She writes, “It has been my pleasure to
 Red Bird 185

be told by children here in Washington, and others in Virginia that one of

my stories is in the School reader they are using today.”64 These comments
reflect an important cultural shift from the nineteenth century when Native
authors were mostly publishing “legends” for children because by this time
Bonnin referred to her work specifically as “stories.”
Bonnin’s books were not only marketed to schools and libraries, but to
wider reading publics as her publisher advertised her texts in national peri-
odicals. At the same time, Bonnin remained committed to circulating her
work among an Indian reading community that crisscrossed tribal-national
boundaries and America’s political geography. In 1919, while working as
the general editor for American Indian Magazine, Bonnin published a short
but timely and provocative article titled “America, Home of the Red Man.”
The title itself signaled a shift in this period to the singular and the racial.
The notion of home in the piece provided several meanings for Indian read-
ers to wrestle with.
In “America, Home of the Red Man,” Bonnin plays with the association
between home and nation to make a larger claim regarding citizenship. As
Piatote argues, from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth,
conflicts between Native people and the “settler-national” state had shifted
to the space of the Indian home:  “A turn to the domestic front, even as
the last shots at Wounded Knee echoed in America’s collective ear, marked
not the end of conquest but rather its renewal.”65 For Bonnin, home must
be contested when considering the experiences of Native soldiers who had
fought in the First World War. She provides them as an example for whom
“home” resonated on a number of levels. Bonnin’s article also uses allegories
to enliven and inspire fellow Indians to reconsider what home means to them
as Native people living always under the threat of U.S. settler-nationalism.66
Bonnin’s essay deftly shifts between third and first person narration, as
she describes a chance encounter with another traveler. Bonnin, as a char-
acter (and also as narrator) is “en route West” to assist with the SAI annual
conference in Pierre, South Dakota. While traveling, she meets a white
stranger who looks at the service pin she wears and asks, “You have a rela-
tive in the war?”67 This question and Bonnin’s response in the story is per-
sonal and direct, but underlying the exchange is the issue of patriotism and
the tension between Native veterans who have fought a war on behalf of a
nation that still does not consider them citizens, but rather domestic sub-
jects.68 Bonnin’s response is as follows: “the star is for my husband, a mem-
ber of the great Sioux Nation, who is a volunteer in Uncle Sam’s Army.”69
By framing her husband’s citizenship through the Sioux Nation first and
then gesturing to his service to the United States (Uncle Sam), Bonnin raises
a specter that haunted Indian Country during this period: how to reconcile
military service with continued practices of oppression by the federal gov-
ernment toward Native people. Her use of the word “nation” here also does
important dialogic work in terms of Indian treaties through the implication
186 Indigenous Intellectuals

of citizenship in the Sioux Nation and not yet the United States for Native
soldiers.
Bonnin’s response also strategically positions the Sioux Nation on equal
footing with the United States by referring to the army in familial and
familiar terms rather than purely nationalist ones. Yet the moment seems
uncanny because the traveler is struck by Bonnin’s assertion. She describes
him thus: “A light spread over the countenance of the pale-faced stranger.
‘Oh! Yes! You are an Indian! Well, I  knew when I  first saw you that you
must be a foreigner.’ ”70 Such a remark urges readers to recognize issues of
containment and racialization that Native people had to confront. That he
is unnamed and only signified through race and strangeness enables Bonnin
to offer a subtle critique of settler-nationalism given that although he labels
her a foreigner, he is a stranger to her and by extension the space they both
occupy. With these remarks, spoken thoughtlessly, the stranger disappears.
He vanishes rather than staying to debate with her, “dropped like a sud-
den curtain behind which the speaker faded instantly from my vision.”71
The disappearance of the stranger and his remarks regarding her foreign-
ness perpetuate the feeling of the uncanny in this moment. Bonnin uses this
strangeness as part of an abrupt transition to actual foreign places from the
First World War.
Readers are jolted into another reality as the narrative suddenly shifts
to European battlefields, where “ten thousand Indian soldiers are swaying
to and fro . . . [so] that democracy might live.”72 Here Bonnin uses the war
in Europe and the fact of Native service, to such a grand degree too (ten
thousand!), in order that Indian readers might consider a different battle-
field. Indeed, the image of Indian soldiers “swaying to and fro” in defense
of democracy enables Bonnin to move from Europe to the home front in
the United States, and the war over citizenship she wishes to fight. Bonnin
highlights the sacrifices Indian soldiers made on behalf of a nation where
many Indian people are recognized as foreigners, as she is by the “pale-faced
stranger,” to debate the terms of their military service, and by extension the
terms of their service to American culture and politics.73
Her article then pointedly argues that “The Red Man of America loves
democracy and hates mutilated treaties.” By drawing on the sentimental and
making overtly political comments, following her encounter with a curious
stranger and an almost dreamlike scene of European battlefields, Bonnin
sets the stage for criticizing U.S. democracy, on which these moments turn.
She writes:
Time and distance were eliminated by the fast succession of pictures crowding before
me. The dome of our nation’s Capital appeared. A  great senator of Indian blood
introduced upon the floor of the United States Senate a resolution that all Indian
funds in the United States Treasury be available to our government, if need be, for
the prosecution of the war. From coast to coast throughout our broad land not a
single voice of the Red Man was raised to protest against it.74
 Red Bird 187

Not every reader would have had access to the same education, nor would
he or she have the same cultural or political commitments to Indian rights
as Bonnin defines them. However, her rhetoric aims to unify Indian peo-
ple under the banner of “America” as a shared “Home.” Moreover, her
reference to “a great senator of Indian blood” may be both a reference
to Cherokee senator Robert Latham Owen, Jr. from Oklahoma,75 who
served in the U.S.  senate from 1907 to 1925, and her pride in how far
Native people had come as participants and shapers of American democ-
racy. Bonnin makes the connection between America and home explicit
by defining America as the Home of the Red Man and the Home of
Democracy. Her use of “and” seems strategic here, as an attempt to sug-
gest these two homes exist side by side and may also overlap, at least
through the space of the home. In this instance, she is challenging the
concept of Indian fidelity and allegiance to democracy unless it is also a
part of their home. In addition, in this context, Bonnin urges her Indian
readers to raise their voices in protest. She calls for a response to the
injustice of using Indian funds to prosecute a war in Europe by asking an
important question: “When shall the Red Man be deemed worthy of full
citizenship if not now?” In other words, why fight a war on behalf of a
home that is not fully ours to use as we please? This question, of course, is
doubly ironic when reading World War I as an imperialist endeavor rather
than a democratic one.76
In the context of a world war that had affected many people in Indian
Country, Bonnin urges former soldiers and their supporters to fight for
“home” within the political arena of the United States. Her text mobilizes
loaded feelings of patriotism to ask for a renewed commitment to citizen-
ship. This story illustrates Native peoples’ beliefs in and support of America,
but also how they must fight for their rights within and against it. In this
case, Bonnin’s call for citizenship aims to be heard throughout Indian
Country and the United States.77
Bonnin’s narrative ends with a return to the paleface stranger. In what
seems like a fantastic encounter, she highlights the quotidian and American
aspects of their exchange, using the frame of the book market. “From the
questions with which I  plied him, he probably guessed I  was a traveling
book agent. . . . Slowly shaking his head, the stranger withdrew cautiously,
lest he be snared into subscribing for one or all of these publications.”78 This
framing is significant given Bonnin’s identity as an author and her status as
an educated Indian who knew this market all too well, even if she did not
sell books herself. Keeping this denouement in mind, one can imagine that
Indian readers followed the unusual workings of this story to their logical
conclusion: that America was indeed theirs for the taking, but the question
remained as to how the Indian could engage the paleface in this project.
Bonnin looked to the many letters that came across her desk on a daily basis
in order to answer such a question.
188 Indigenous Intellectuals

Epistolary Culture Networks

Interspersed throughout memoranda, letters, and writings that would have
occupied Bonnin’s office are materials that reflect her intimate relationship
with the inner workings of the Office of Indian Affairs, white progressives,
and other Indian intellectuals. Her success as a writer and public speaker,
for example, did not go unnoticed by members of the Department of the
Interior.
In September 1922, Chief Clerk C. F. Hauke sent Bonnin a letter regard-
ing a new edition of Indian Legends, which he wanted to include in the office
library. According to Hauke, “This library is maintained, with the exception
of the purchase of a few law books, by contributions of various authors
and publishers, and it has been thought that you may desire to have a copy
of your publication upon the Library shelves.”79 How would Bonnin have
reacted to the clerk’s letter? At first she may have been surprised and even
laughed to express mixed feelings of frustration and bemusement. Certainly,
there were any number of reasons the Office of Indian Affairs might write
to her. Without a copy of her response it is impossible to know for sure
how she met Hauke’s inquiry. This particular letter is important, however,
because it acknowledges Bonnin’s work and expertise while it maintains a
careful distance that suggests politics and culture should not necessarily be
connected, at least within the Office of Indian Affairs.
Hauke’s letter explains that the library may serve political and public
interest regarding Indian affairs when he writes:

In connection with the library work a miscellaneous correspondence desk is main-

tained, where numerous inquiries relative to Indian customs, history, legends, etc.,
are answered, and it is often advisable to refer the correspondent to various publica-
tions on the subjects concerning which inquiry is made, quoting, where available,
price and publisher.80

Hauke’s request points to Bonnin’s cultural work as a useful reference tool,

and his reference to “miscellaneous correspondence” that is “relative to
Indian customs” and so forth seems to suggest some ethnographic projects
sponsored by the Office of Indian Affairs that might be under way. His letter
also suggests that Bonnin might be able to sell a few books through her asso-
ciation with their library. Hauke’s letter also connects Bonnin to an impor-
tant social reform network, which many Indian intellectuals of this period
participated in as interlocutors with or employees of the Indian Service,
which was a part of the Office of Indian Affairs. This was one of several
reform-based networks that Bonnin worked through during her lifetime.
Six years later, on September 24, 1928, Bonnin sent a six-page letter to
Miss Vera Connolly of New York about the “present Indian movement.”
Bonnin wrote, “My whole life has been devoted to the Indian cause, but
more ostensibly my relationship with the  . . . movement” began in 1921,
 Red Bird 189

when “at my plea” the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC)

took up the cause of Indian welfare.81 Indeed, her work with the GFWC
enabled Bonnin to give a series of public talks to women’s clubs across the
United States for several years. However, Bonnin’s ability to participate in
these public lectures decreased as she gave more “attention to legislation
of Congress on Indian affairs.” By this time in her life, Bonnin was married
with one son, and had already published sets of short stories and nonfic-
tion pieces. All the while, she continued to build personal and professional
relationships bolstered by letter writing. In this particular letter, Bonnin
includes a biographical sketch of her life and a copy of the “Constitution
and By-Laws for the National Council of American Indians.” She notes
that “Our letterhead symbolizes the reunion of the tribes pitching their
lodges in the circular camp ground.” This excerpt embodies the central-
ity of correspondence in creating and strengthening pan-tribal networks
throughout this decade and demonstrates the leading role Bonnin played in
creating and maintaining these connections through her work with white
reformers.82
Examining a few representative letters from Bonnin’s extensive personal
collection reveals the types of networks she accessed to benefit her career
and to promote Indian activism. Following the letter from Hauke and
the one Bonnin sent to Connolly, exchange with Carlos Montezuma and
Bonnin’s white female friends and supporters, Marianna Burgess and Stella
Atwood, illustrate the ways women’s organizations were essential to the
work Bonnin sought to accomplish. Ultimately, she emerges as one among a
cohort of Indian intellectuals, unique but not solitary in her aims, one who
relied on alliances with white progressive organizations to gain widespread
support for reforming Indian policy.83
In the winter of 1915, as Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin prepared to
leave Utah and move to DC, Gertrude found herself “under a big load of
correspondence” that had accumulated and needed her immediate atten-
tion. Drawing a letter out of the pile, Bonnin began writing to “Monte,” a
term of affection she used to refer to her friend and fellow Indian reformer
Carlos Montezuma. Bonnin wrote about the development of the SAI,
which was nearly five years old at the time. Monte and Gertrude had been
engaged several years before. During this time they exchanged many letters
that reveal both their romantic relationship and their shared interest in
promoting Indian citizenship. In several letters, she teases him, using a list
of attributes that he does not possess and explaining why she is therefore
better off without him. Overall, these letters reveal a relationship based on
mutual respect and understanding that survived despite a broken engage-
ment. My interest, however, is with the specific instances in which Bonnin
and Montezuma wrote about politics rather than romance. Therefore,
I focus on the letters written after they broke off their engagement and had
each married other people.
190 Indigenous Intellectuals

The SAI reached the zenith of its influence in the world of Indian affairs
and the history of American Indian writing as Bonnin began her tenure as
secretary. In many ways, this work enabled her to act as a critical interlocu-
tor for SAI members and as a voice for then President Charles Eastman. She
also became a memorable and fashionable public face for Indian woman-
hood through the SAI. When she wrote to Montezuma, she wanted to dis-
cuss ways they could strengthen the efforts of this pan-tribal organization.
In 1915, Bonnin was reaching out to political activists in DC who were
interested in Indian issues. She was especially focused on increasing the
membership and influence of the SAI. She calls on Montezuma to be strate-
gic, and applauds him, saying, “I am glad you have been writing some good
letters.”84 She writes again in 1918 about the importance of content and
style for any correspondence related to the SAI.
Dr. Eastman, like you, is planing [sic] a letter to his friends, both Indian and White,
asking them to take interest in our society and become members. Why don’t you
write two letters, one to Indians and one to the Whites and have these letters multi-
graphed; send them out by the hundreds! They will bring results.85

Within Bonnin’s plea for activity is strategic planning and the enthusiasm
that Indian intellectuals felt with regards to using emergent technologies to
reach multiple reading publics. The multigraphing process demonstrates her
awareness of a useful connection between epistolary culture and newsletter
production. During this same time, Montezuma was circulating Wassaja,
which aimed to reach Indian audiences interested in political reform and
to respond to a white-dominated press. Montezuma could have easily put
Bonnin’s suggestions into immediate practice.
Like other members of the SAI, Bonnin and Montezuma understood the
power of rhetorical effect and the necessity of crafting different messages for
different audiences. And, unlike other members, Bonnin and Montezuma
shared an emotional intimacy because the two had once been engaged to be
married. By the time they were both active in the SAI, however, their court-
ship had ended, with Bonnin breaking the engagement because she found
Montezuma unsuitable as a romantic partner. Now, as friends and political
allies, they corresponded more about their lives as writers and readers living
in urban settings. Both had easy access to an array of periodicals, which may
have served as models for ways to engage white readers. Curiously, jotted at
the bottom of a typed letter she sent to Monte is a handwritten afterthought,
revealing another expression of intimacy where Bonnin urges him to “Read
‘Drifting Cloud’ in November Cosmopolitan!”86
Bonnin’s note reveals the eye of a well-trained writer and avid reader,
someone who recognizes the relationship and political potential within let-
ters and publications. It is not surprising that both she and Montezuma
read magazines like Cosmopolitan and other national periodicals.87 In
1918, Bonnin would have paid two dollars for her yearly subscription, if
 Red Bird 191

she did not happen to stop by a local newsstand to buy an issue of the mag-
azine for twenty-five cents. The article, briefly referenced in her postscript,
was actually titled “Drifting Smoke.” Written by Gouverneur Morris, with
illustrations by Lejaren A.  Hiller, it appeared alongside pieces by writers
like Jack London in that month’s Cosmopolitan. The title refers to protago-
nist Oliver Pigeon, a Harvard-“educated Indian” with a “very tender” heart,
which seemed to appeal to Bonnin (and she imagined it might appeal to
Montezuma too).88
The representation of Oliver Pigeon is contrasted with that of his grand-
father, a man who bore a heavy burden because he “was a connecting link
between the Kansas prairies of 1900 and the Atlantic seaboard before the
white men came.”89 Although Oliver is the hero of this story because of his
educational achievements and athletic prowess, Morris emphasizes Oliver’s
one weakness, which is his “hatred” for an Indian agent named Mr. Ross.
Ross is cruel and corrupt, a man who has “bled the Indians under his care
in every conceivable way . . . All the Indians knew it; but they couldn’t prove
it.” Both men are ultimately undone by the corrupt behavior of this agent.90
The climax of this story about contagion and the pitfalls of contact fea-
tures a now “sickened” Oliver paying a nighttime visit to Ross’s daughter.
He creeps into her bedroom while she is asleep, planning to scalp her. Oliver
is described ambivalently, “at once a figure dreadful and ludicrous” when
some “curious and wonderful thing happened.”91 Ross’s daughter is a sym-
bol of white womanhood indicated by the purity of her face, the only hint
of color coming from her rosy cheeks. As Oliver gazes on the sweetness of
her countenance, she reaches out for his hand. In this instance, the young
woman’s hand becomes a metaphor for the outreach of civilization, sal-
vation, and the type of reform Bonnin both sought and questioned when
she worked with white female reformers. With this gesture Oliver’s fate is
changed. He cannot scalp the girl after having received the “gift” of her
touch; and by extension, Indian people can no longer resist the encroach-
ment of U.S. society into their lands and cultures. Oliver retreats from the
girl’s bedroom, drifting like smoke into the night air.
The story ends with Oliver sitting in the front yard of the Ross house: “A
naked Indian, his legs stretched out, sat under the tree, his back against
the tremendous stem. Across his knees was a bow and quiver of arrows.
Upon his head a crown of eagle-feathers. His cheeks were streaked with
dead white and vermilion.”92 Oliver’s appearance, especially the war paint,
represents a futile attempt to reunite with his Indian culture, which he has
lost by going east and attending Harvard. Agent Ross, kept awake night
after night by Oliver’s distant coughs outside his home, then approaches
the tree to see Oliver. Both men seem plagued by the reality of each other.
Oliver’s “sickness” in the story makes him mad, so that he leaves his family
to live in the woods, where he plots to kill Ross and his daughter; an Indian
desire to destroy a white future, perhaps. While Ross cannot escape the fact
192 Indigenous Intellectuals

of Oliver’s distant coughs, he is haunted by the omnipresent ghostliness of

Indians and cannot sleep. Their proximity throughout the story and at the
end offers an implicit critique of the uneasy relationship between Indian
agents and their wards. The paternal nature of such a relationship is further
emphasized by the fact that Oliver is a young man and Ross a father.
When at last Oliver dies from his mysterious sickness, lying beneath a
tree by the Rosses’ house, Agent Ross approaches and he too falls ill and
dies. However, the story does not end there. The final image that we are left
with, and that may have captured Bonnin’s attention, is of Ross’s daughter
and her fiancé, Mr. Gilroy. Together they make breakfast and discuss where
Mr. Ross might be. They will soon be married and become a family, a poten-
tial metonym for the U.S. nation. The fact that the young white couple is
blissfully ignorant of two dead men (one white, and one Indian), whose
bodies lie just beyond the home’s kitchen, further suggests the nation must
remain ignorant of the violence that has accompanied colonialism and racial
conflict, resulting in the dispossession of so many Indian people, incidents
that were never far from the supposed tranquility of domestic spaces.93
What might Bonnin have thought about this story’s fallen Indian man,
who seems at first to occupy a position not unlike her own? Oliver is “one
member of his race” who “might enjoy an equally glorious future” and yet,
perhaps because of his education in the East, he ends up as an “emaciated
body.” The negative portrayal of Ross, the corrupt Indian agent, would have
appealed to both Bonnin and Montezuma given their criticism of the mis-
management of Native lands by the Office of Indian Affairs. The sentimental
depiction of Oliver as “a full-blooded Indian descended from chieftains”
may also have appealed to Bonnin as an author who drew on similar imag-
ery. It is likely she saw the tragedy of his death as a useful allegory for his
failure to fully return to “the land and the ways of his people” because of
his education. She would have bristled at the white author’s suggestion that
the future domestic space of the United States could only lie with the young
white couple.94 The depiction of the agent as a transitional figure helping
shape the nation, like Natty Bumpo in Cooper’s tales, who must die or fade
into the past signals the successful destruction and assimilation of Native
people. Bonnin’s recommendation of this story to Montezuma demonstrates
the variety of texts Indian intellectuals read and how they engaged with dif-
ferent discourses and representations of Indianness circulating around them.
Bonnin’s other letters communicated more mundane business, the highs
and lows of personal life. Looking at these exchanges reveals the ways
Indian activists criticized and disagreed with one another. On June 30,
1919, Bonnin expressed a mixture of concern and excitement in a letter she
sent to Montezuma about federal legislation and an Indian appropriation
bill. Central to her concern was the problem of not having enough activists
to aid in the fight. “Right now, I  have been too tired to relax; and suffer
from sleeplessness. . . . I hope for the day to come when we shall have more
 Red Bird 193

workers; when the work may be divided and not have it hung too heavily
upon any one.”95 This hope for more hands to share the burden of political
reform remained central to Bonnin’s life.
Throughout her work as SAI secretary Bonnin promoted messages of
solidarity and unity in order to lighten the load of political reform that she
must have felt. She also promoted unity to ameliorate personality clashes
and disagreements over political tactics among members of the SAI. This
was around the same time that Montezuma was advocating getting rid of
the BIA entirely, a topic for debate within the organization over whether
change “from within” could be most effective. In writing to Montezuma, she
responds to his dismissal of the work of Indians in Washington, whom he
sees as just sitting around in offices, rather than doing more overtly political
work. She writes, “I am sure that you never meant to charge me with ‘sitting
in my office’ indifferent to Congressional Acts.”96 This retort both pushes
back against Montezuma’s idea of what Indian reform work can look like
and also uses a friendly tone to remind him that “we’re in this together”
after all. This sort of building and maintaining of alliances may have fallen
more on Bonnin than other members of the SAI not merely because she was
the secretary for the group but also because she was a woman. She is never
explicit about the challenges she faced that may have differed from those
faced by men like Eastman and Montezuma, but one can imagine that she
managed patronage and patriarchy because of her gender. Apart from gen-
der, Montezuma’s work as a physician in Chicago brought him into contact
with different sorts of personal and political issues than those Bonnin was
familiar with. In this context, one can see how they had to negotiate diverse
points of view because of their unique positions due to class, as well as gen-
der and race. Because Bonnin was based out of Washington, DC, she had
better access than Montezuma to certain political networks, and her note
aims to keep him in the fold of SAI activities originating out of DC, not
Chicago. She makes her alliance plain to him: “Let us not blame the Society
of American Indians for failure to dictate to the American Congress.”97
Bonnin is aware they must collaborate in their efforts to gain more Indian
and non-Indian supporters for their efforts. She emphasizes this point when
she writes, “You tell me to gather up ‘forces’ that are not in existence unless
they are spirits!”98 Her phrasing throughout the letter represents a prag-
matic and emphatic approach to dealing with the negative aspects of failed
policies, like allotment, and how to amend a failing educational system
that might have partially succeeded in educating Native children, even as it
attempted to strip them of their languages and cultures by forcing them into
white society. These political goals, Bonnin asserted, required regular main-
tenance of the bonds uniting Indian activists.99
Not only did Bonnin delicately suture together opinionated figures, like
Montezuma, with other Indian activists, she also found ways to access other
political networks based on her friendships with white female reformers;
194 Indigenous Intellectuals

perhaps most useful among them was Marianna Burgess.100 Burgess’s com-
mitment to Indian reform, however fraught, began while she worked at the
Carlisle School. By the 1920s, however, Burgess was living “all alone” and
working in downtown Los Angeles, in an area later known as Westlake.
Burgess had done well for herself in the “gold selling game,”101 and she
aimed to use any free time or resources to help Native people in California.
Burgess was just one of a large number of white female reformers active in
Southern California during this period. Burgess openly favored “the abol-
ishment of the Bureau” of Indian Affairs; perhaps she was a subscriber to
Montezuma’s Wassaja.
Throughout most of 1921, while Bonnin wrote to Burgess, she lived
a transient life on the road. Bonnin was busy surveying living conditions
among Indian people across the Plains and Southwest, gathering data to
provide Congress with concrete examples of the suffering and abuse that
resulted from poor living conditions created by the General Allotment Act
of 1887 and the Curtis Act of 1898.102 She gathered this evidence in order
to advocate for changes in federal Indian policy when it came to who could
own and sell land and how to acquire U.S. citizenship. The correspondence
of Burgess and Bonnin focused on the political goals Bonnin wanted to
accomplish, and the inspirational role Burgess believed Bonnin should play.
Glad you are going to find your RIGHT place. Opportunities will be plenty, and you
are going to be the intellectual and spiritual Joan of Arc of your people, not in a sen-
sational way, but a way that will TELL for their good.103

Bonnin’s “RIGHT” place, according to Burgess, positioned her at a critical

juncture between leading Indian people and representing them to the larger
world. Comparing her to Joan of Arc suggests there is something revolution-
ary and inherently powerful embodied within Bonnin’s public profile at this
moment. And at the same time such a comparison was also a warning – must
Bonnin become a martyr for her cause? Was that always already the fate of
an outspoken woman? Moreover, the bringing together of the intellectual
with the spiritual recognizes Bonnin as a Christian and successful writer.
Despite the drama, Burgess seems intent on moving away from sensational-
ism and toward the facts that enabled Bonnin to search for steady streams
of income in support of her activist work. While the two women exchanged
letters, Bonnin was constantly traveling as a lecturer to promote the “Indian
cause,” maintaining her writing career while also pursuing research to lobby
for policy reform. She also sought new ways to increase sales for her books
and to have her older works reprinted. Burgess understood the financial
costs of activist work for someone like Bonnin, becoming one of the writer’s
benefactresses.
Burgess promoted Bonnin as an “intellectual and spiritual Joan of Arc”
for Indian people among white networks of power. Such networks grew
out of a plethora of local and national women’s organizations, created to
 Red Bird 195

address social ills. In letters to her Indian allies, Bonnin often expresses skep-
ticism and resignation regarding the support of these white women’s groups.
Still, she understood that nonwhite women needed to tap into a range of
networks and harness various representational strategies to produce last-
ing political change. She relied on the financial and public support of white
women’s organizations to further her career as an author, Indian spokesper-
son, and lobbyist. In November 1921, Burgess encouraged Bonnin to make
a trip to California, where she “could arrange for ten lectures at $50.00
[each]” as much as $600 today.104 Such alliances between Native and white
women could be both politically and financially advantageous.105
Relying on the strength of her relationship with Marianna Burgess,
Bonnin sent a letter to Marianna’s brother, Dr.  C.  A. Burgess, who lived
in Chicago. Bonnin was set to speak at the Chicago Culture Club, Rogers
Park Woman’s Club, the Arche Club, and the Tenth District meeting, from
January 9 through 16, 1921. Her letter asks if Dr. Burgess might arrange
for her to speak at his “Church of Spirit Healing.” She broaches the mat-
ter by referring explicitly to Marianna, who “suggested that arrangements
might be made for me to speak in your Church.” Bonnin’s letter draws on a
personal connection between herself and Marianna and that of a sister and
brother.
In her letter to Dr. Burgess, Bonnin writes both within and against prim-
itivism as an ideology defined in opposition to modernity. She casts it as
both positive and negative. Bonnin does this by framing herself and her talk
in racialized terms that rely on the oppositional relationship between the
primitive and the modern. She writes: “I am an Indian (Sioux) and my sub-
ject is the Indian.”106 Bonnin is clearly self-conscious about how to represent
Indianness according to white expectations. She adds this important detail
concerning her appearance for the talk: “I usually speak in my Native cos-
tume, unless otherwise requested.”107 For Bonnin, this meant purposefully
wearing a Yankton buckskin dress.108 This comment on costuming and per-
formance worked within the logic of cultural practices embodied by Indian
women who were performers during the early twentieth century. Other
scholars, like Beth Piatote and Frederick Hoxie, have written about the dif-
ferent literary and political strategies Native female writers like E. Pauline
Johnson and Sarah Winnemucca used to critique white civilization. In this
sense, Bonnin is building on a preexisting network of Native female per-
formance, much of it literary, to draw the attention of white reformers and
benefactors.109
In terms of staged performance, Bonnin was also not alone in her ability to
self-consciously represent Indian womanhood for a white audience. Tsianina
Redfeather, Creek/Cherokee (ca. 1882–1985), listed on the Creek rolls as
Florence Evans, enjoyed a successful career as a professional singer and enter-
tainer that enabled her to participate in Charles Wakefield Cadman’s opera
Shanewis. “Princess Watawaso,” also known as Lucy Nicolar, Penobscot
196 Indigenous Intellectuals

(1882–1969), was employed by the “Redpath Chautauqua Circuit,” where

she performed generic “Indian” entertainments. These two women were
well known to white audiences for their musical talents and their ability to
embody characteristics of an imaginary Indian princess. Like Bonnin, they
were strategic about when and how to promote themselves in relation to their
talent or in relation to their Indianness. As performers on the operatic stage
who also participated in public speaking tours, Redfeather and Watawaso
had to navigate different understandings about Indian womanhood. They
played Indian in ways that aligned with what other Indian performers were
doing with nostalgia and the reenactment of historical events that were pop-
ularized through Wild West shows and appealed to white audiences because
of the romances written during the nineteenth century. They certainly had to
make choices about what clothes to wear and how to embody Indian wom-
anhood whether they were performing in a musical or giving a public lec-
ture. Indian women were most often narrated as savage exotics who existed
outside normative ideals of white womanhood, and genres of sentimentality
and the romance of late nineteenth-century womanhood.110 Ideas regarding
a savage Indian woman or Native princess were created and popularized by
non-Indian actors and actresses who “played Indian.” Even more damaging,
perhaps, was that these ideas were recirculated by actual Indian performers
who reenacted nostalgic historical conflicts as part of a Wild West frontier
fantasy. It is difficult to calculate the degree to which the reenactment of
historical violence by Indian people may have perpetrated cultural violence
against Indian people given that these performances maintained a flawed
national imaginary that stripped Native people of their cultural specificity,
personhood, and agency.111
All three of these women relied on and to some extent were able to
reshape the market for Indianness as a performance. Within this market
the real and imagined came together. When Bonnin references wearing
“my native costume,” she suggests the performative nature of her talk and
mobilizes a particular politics of representation. She also recognizes that
her costume was not that of an imaginary Indian princess. Regardless of the
imagined Indianness on which lecture success hinged, the material reality
for Bonnin lay in the fact that she was well paid for these performances and
put her earnings toward “support of the cause.”112
Through participating in this market, Native women became increasingly
attuned to balancing cultural performance opportunities with their politi-
cal reform work. Ella Deloria, Yankton Sioux (1888–1971), worked as a
“national field representative” from 1919 to 1925 for the YWCA’s Indian
Bureau, and several years later, in 1940 and 1941, produced a community
pageant for the Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina. Like Deloria
and Bonnin, Ruth Muskrat Bronson, Cherokee (1897–1981), educated at
Mount Holyoke College in 1925, later worked as a guidance and place-
ment officer for the BIA’s Education Division in 1930, and became active
 Red Bird 197

in the National Congress of American Indians, founded out of Chicago in

1944. Deloria and Bronson were not exactly the cultural performers that
Redfeather and Watawaso were, and yet these women’s activities illustrate
the different networks Native women accessed and shaped. Politics and per-
formance operated at the center of what they aimed to do and what they
could do. These networks of Native women were often intimately tied to
white women’s reform work, as we have seen with Burgess and Bonnin.113
Indeed, as Burgess helped Bonnin make contacts in Chicago that would
add to her work as a public lecturer, she also connected Bonnin to a network
of women’s organizations that emerged out of the West Coast. Together,
Bonnin and Burgess promoted a pan-Indianist cause by selling Bonnin’s
books and arranging speaking engagements for her in Los Angeles, San
Francisco, and Pasadena, as well as Portland and Seattle.114 The combina-
tion of writing and speaking was critical to Bonnin’s success as an inter-
locutor between pan-Indian reform groups and those of white women.
Stella Atwood, also out of California, worked as the state chairman of the
Division of Indian Welfare, a part of the Department of Welfare under the
aegis of the California Federation of Women’s Clubs out of Riverside, and
she helped Bonnin pursue shared reform goals.115 Atwood and Bonnin were
similar in that they each became known as social and political brokers for
Indian people. Of course an important distinction resides in Atwood’s status
as a white woman.116
The friendship and political alliance between Bonnin and Atwood was no
coincidence. Because Atwood had worked as a “clubwoman” in California
for some time, she drew on her relationships with Indian activists to influ-
ence other women in these clubs, as well as reformers like John Collier.
As historian Karin Huebner has shown, alliances that formed between
California clubwomen, Collier, and the Indians of the Southwest from
1917 to 1934 were based on a mutual interest in Indian reform despite
differences in gender, class, and ethnicity. Huebner also shows the extent to
which California clubwomen effectively waged political campaigns aimed
at supporting Indian religious freedom, protecting tribal lands, and Native
self-determination. As historian Margaret D.  Jacobs has argued, impor-
tant parallels existed between clubwomen’s philosophy and work in Indian
reform with the ideas expressed by antimodern feminists such as Mabel
Dodge Luhan. These women sought out Native cultural ideals and practices
in their quest for personal redemption; in effect they celebrated Indian prim-
itivism as defined by communalism, spiritualism, and a close relationship
to the land as the antidote to the moral decay and corruption they believed
necessarily accompanied modernity.117
Many Indian people did not miss out on opportunities to form alliances
with white supporters when threatened by federal legislation that sought to
undermine their claims to land. During the early 1920s, Bonnin and Atwood
exchanged letters focused on two main goals. The first was to promote the
198 Indigenous Intellectuals

use of Bonnin’s writings, especially American Indian Stories, in club pro-

grams, an activity that worked in tandem with their second goal, which was
to gain club members in support of Indian reform efforts. On December 30,
1921, Atwood wrote to Bonnin to convey that she was “anxious to have
a fine Indian Exhibit and if this Indian Arts and Crafts Society is what it
should be, it will be a great opportunity for them also” at the biennial meet-
ing of the California Federation of Women’s Clubs (CFWC) in Chautauqua,
New York to be held in June 1922. Bonnin and Atwood’s twin goals came
together when club members and Indian activists united for this meeting.118
In 1922 and 1923, two pieces of legislation, the Bursum and Lenroot
bills, were put before Congress; these bills aimed to settle disputes regard-
ing land titles and water rights between Pueblos and non-Indian claim-
ants. In effect, the Bursum bill would dispossess Pueblos of land without
legal recourse to fight non-Indian claimants. Atwood and Collier worked
together with Indian reform organizations and the Pueblo Indians to cam-
paign against the Bursum bill. Testimonies before the House Committee on
Indian Affairs on January 15, 1923 succeeded in stopping the bill’s passage.
As Huebner shows, the GFWC, with Atwood as chairwoman, was a critical
force in defeating this type of legislation. In addition, Tisa Wenger notes that
the organization of Indian people of the Southwest, through the Council of
All of the New Mexico Pueblos, was also critical in protesting and stopping
the Bursum bill.119
A year after the defeat of the Bursum bill, John Collier formed the AIDA.
Atwood, along with other officers and members from the CFWC, served on
the executive board. This alliance was timely given that 1923 was devoted
to the defeat of the Lenroot bill. This bill aimed to correct major flaws in the
Bursum bill, but it was not one Collier supported because he believed any
non-Indian encroachment onto Indian lands since 1848 (in the Southwest)
had been illegal.120 Although the Lenroot bill promised to create a three-man
Pueblo land board that would deal with contested land claims and bring any
disputes over title to federal court, this was not a bill that most Indian people
supported. In fact, members of the All Pueblo Council actively opposed the
Lenroot bill. Unfortunately, representatives from the New Mexico branch of
the Indian Rights Association (IRA), which was a white reform organization
familiar to Bonnin, argued in support of the Lenroot bill. Apparently set-
tlers’ advocates in New Mexico had convinced the IRA to “tacitly” endorse
the bill.121
Early on the morning of January 3, 1924, Stella Atwood sent an urgent
telegram to Gertrude Bonnin asking for her help to defeat the Lenroot bill.
It read:  “I am sending you special delivery letter which will explain why
I want you to attend a board meeting at headquarters please plan to dress
in costume and be there as much as possible I am worried as to outcome
if you aren’t here.” The aforementioned letter, which Atwood surely must
have sent in haste, urges Bonnin to visit with members of the Board because
 Red Bird 199

the “New Mexico group have been perniciously busy poisoning the minds
of everyone possible.” Although neither the telegram nor the letter make
specific mention of the effort to stop the Lenroot bill, it seems likely that
Atwood enlisted Bonnin to help convince Board members to oppose this
bill alongside members of the AIDA and the All Pueblo Council. The “New
Mexico group” that was “poisoning” people’s minds may be a coded refer-
ence to a branch of the IRA. Atwood’s letter further suggests that Bonnin
could best represent Indian people at the meeting if she would “dress up in
your costume and go over to Headquarters the day before the meeting and
see what you can find out.”122 With this request, Atwood appealed to Bonnin
as a successful political organizer and a representative for Indian people
in general, and specifically because of her ability to perform Indianness in
strategic ways.
Another letter, sent to Raymond Bonnin from Mrs. Felix T. McWhirter,
president of Woman’s Department Club (1922–4), also emphasizes Bonnin’s
ability to win over the hearts of clubwomen “by her charming personal-
ity, her appealing voice and her sincere message for her people.”123 Like
so many of Bonnin’s letters and public performances we see a mixing of
method and message in this compliment. Surely Bonnin was successful
because she was an Indian woman advocating for “her people.” At the same
time, it was equally likely that she captivated audiences because she pos-
sessed well-honed performance skills.

Performance Opportunities: Photography, Music,

and Indian Play
Bonnin engaged with performativity as an avenue through which she might
not only represent herself, but also Indianness writ large. In two 1898 pho-
tographs taken by Gertrude Kasebier (1852–1934), Bonnin appears not in
the garb of an opera performer or a Wild West show entertainer, but in
modest, sometimes Edwardian, dresses with her hair loosely tied at the back
(Figures 6 and 7). In one she holds a violin, and in the other a book rests
lightly in her lap. Kasebier aimed to create an alternative archive of images.
She wanted to portray Bonnin and other Indian subjects in contemporary
frames, wearing clothes and holding objects that depicted their interests and
aptitudes, as opposed to the vast majority of publicity materials and photo-
graphs taken during this time to promote the careers of Indian actors and
performers – images that largely relied on costuming meant to reify a prim-
itivist aesthetic.
Bonnin and Kasebier met when Bonnin was just beginning to pro-
mote herself as “Zitkala-Sa,” an Indian author, while she was busy travel-
ing between Boston and New  York. The image with the violin represents
Bonnin’s love of music and her recent course of study at the New England
Conservatory. It reveals a young, yet savvy woman who is keenly aware of
200 Indigenous Intellectuals

Figure  6. Gertrude Bonnin portrait by Gertrude Kasebier (circa 1898)  –

Smithsonian, Washington, DC.
Gertrude Kasebier Photograph Collection, Division of Culture & the Arts,
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

the power of her representation. Holding her violin with a penetrating gaze
and slightly turned head, Bonnin looks right into the eye of the camera.
Her straight gaze, tilted head, and slouching body convey a subtle desire to
engage the viewer. As she draws us in to consider her pose, the more relaxed
position of her body calls into question some of the strict conventions of
portrait photography from this period.124
 Red Bird 201

Figure  7. Gertrude Bonnin portrait by Gertrude Kasebier (circa 1898)  –

Smithsonian, Washington, DC.
Gertrude Kasebier Photograph Collection, Division of Culture & the Arts,
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

Most portraits aimed to define their subjects according to class and gen-
der norms. Women, regardless of race or actual legal status (like Native
people and colonial populations such as Puerto Ricans), were encouraged to
represent themselves as proper citizens whose virtue was defined by accept-
able forms of deportment. Bonnin also succeeds in drawing in the viewer
without relying on any Indian topos. The violin and bow appear as framing
devices, creating a V that is echoed in the lines of her dress and perhaps
202 Indigenous Intellectuals

even her hair, which, because of the turn and slouch, hangs to her left side;
her head then looks somewhat out of proportion to the rest of her body.
Considering these aspects and the lack of smile I wonder: To what extent
was she aware of or did she seek to control this representation of her self?
Did she choose the dress, the violin, and the posture? How might this por-
trait exemplify self-determination?125
Regardless of her choices, Bonnin (and Kasebier) had to work within a
medium, which during the late nineteenth century was “understood to repre-
sent the world objectively,” that helped “stabilize cultural notions of race,”
which this photograph disrupts.126 The indexicality of photography further
suggests that these images speak to the experiences of the person in front of
the camera. Portraiture in particular is open to multiple readings given that
there is both the intention of the sitter and the photographer to consider.
As art historian Elizabeth Hutchinson asserts, Bonnin was familiar with
the popular visual culture of her day, and for her, visual self-presentation,
especially using clothing, “was an important means of communicating cul-
tural identity in both Native and mainstream American society.”127 Because
these photographs were created during a period in which photography was
used to fix rather than blur racial categories, Bonnin and Kasebier destabi-
lized the concept of race as biologically determined to contradict race-based
expectations for Indian women. The image of Bonnin with the violin denotes
an interest in music as an elevated Western art form (although violins were
also fiddles, and the most common instrument among settlers living along
the frontier lines of white civilization), conveying a commitment to high cul-
ture marking her as a “civilized” and a specially educated Indian. The two
images here are from a set of nine; each portrait is simple. Bonnin is either
sitting or standing, her hair sometimes loose and other times bound with
wide ribbon or beads. She holds a violin in four and reads a book in two of
the images, while clasping a basket to her chest in one and empty-handed
in the rest. Both Bonnin and Kasebier were at the beginning of their careers,
the former about to make a name for herself through music and writing
(thus the prominence of the violin and the book as props) and the latter a
recent art school graduate now running her own commercial portrait studio
in lower Manhattan.
The second image shows Bonnin holding a book. This object seems to
represent her commitment to writing and to reading. Her Edwardian dress
allows Bonnin to embody femininity, culture, and success on her own Indian
and modern terms. These two portraits may represent Bonnin’s sense of her-
self as much as they reveal Kasebier’s commitment to photographing Native
people neither in costume nor with surroundings that might romanticize or
sentimentalize them.128 Taken out of these cultural ideologies Bonnin’s por-
traits reflect modernity and individuality and the future not the past of its
Native sitter. Indeed, close looking at the shadowing produced for viewers a
racial ambiguity that points to fluid thinking regarding womanhood, while
 Red Bird 203

the floral prints float in the background and suggest more Victorian gender
conventions.
For Kasebier, and also Bonnin, Indianness was fluid and not necessar-
ily tied to the scripts of either the Wild West or the well-worn tropes of
James Fenimore Cooper’s (1789–1851) narratives and George Catlin’s
(1796–1872) paintings. Still, the messages Kasebier’s images conveyed
have been occluded by later experiences and accounts Bonnin and others
gave regarding the occasions when she seemed to have no choice but to
appear dressed in “full Indian regalia.” At this time, regalia had become a
marker not only of fixed racial categories but also a certain understand-
ing of ethnic authenticity, which Kasebier’s images seem to work against,
offering more authentic self-representation. These accounts suggest that
Bonnin understood, in complicated ways, the how, when, and why of audi-
ences and the possibilities she had for controlling the ways she represented
herself to them.129
Returning to the portrait of Bonnin with the book in her lap, with her face
half hidden by shadows, the darkness seems to, at least partially, obscure her
beauty as well as her expression.130 This ambiguity produces a gap to be
filled in by the imaginative eye of the viewer. There is an ease to her posture,
which reminds us of the constructed nature of a photograph. The book on
her lap indicates leisure and literacy rather than domestic labor, although
she may be read as the ideal wife and homemaker ready to perform tasks
identified as intrinsically female, or as something else.131
The handkerchief she grasps in her left hand produces associations with
sentimentality that position Bonnin within normative discourses based on
whiteness, womanhood, and middle-class American values, subordinating
the truth to desire emotional effect. Thus, one way of reading her holding
the handkerchief is as cynical; the actual significance is not with the object
but with the emotional impact of that on oneself. It would suggest a col-
laboration between Bonnin and Kasebier to push back against an oppres-
sive cultural system that linked properly empowered womanhood always
to whiteness. The floral backdrop evokes a domestic home scene and simul-
taneously alludes to the natural wilderness that exists in opposition to the
space of the home. Taking the dress and the wallpaper together, Bonnin is
linked to white, middle-class American cultural frames for defining her iden-
tity, which elide her Yankton Sioux heritage.
Reading the image within a literary realist framework produced by
authors like Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, the
photograph becomes unremarkable, just a simple portrait of the quotid-
ian, contemporary, and true reality of banal middle-class womanhood.132
Viewed as a mundane representation of a domestic space or read more ideo-
logically as a reflection of reality, the book in her lap seems an apt symbol
for Bonnin’s intellectual work as a teacher and writer. The photograph is
remarkable because it has a racialized indigenous woman at the frame’s
204 Indigenous Intellectuals

center. Together, Bonnin and Kasebier created an ambivalent, yet powerful

image. Bonnin is presented within her historical moment as the embodiment
of Indian womanhood. Indianness appears cloaked considering the power
of representations produced by popular narratives that defined Indian
people in terms of ahistorical settings, primitive clothing, and often cul-
turally inappropriate objects and make-up. Such representations of “Wild
West-ness” were intended to be spectacular and out of the ordinary, whereas
Kasebier’s portraits were designed to be realistic, if also personal and inti-
mate. Looking at these particular images of Bonnin, one can peer into the
past and see a moment of possibility regarding her self-representation.
In these instances, Bonnin challenges dominant narratives about Indian
women. For Euro-American viewers, these portraits are a departure from
the types they would have seen in public venues, depicting educated Indians
“contrived to portray a mixture of ‘savagery’ and ‘civilization’ that would
communicate their status.”133
The time and care put into constructing and designing these images is
useful for highlighting Bonnin’s recognition of the possibilities of a par-
ticular kind of representation, and how she built on these sorts of expe-
riences to complicate the stage performance brand of self-representation.
Looking at her career, as one that required public presentations (both writ-
ten and spoken), it is possible to point to several important vectors of per-
formance. Indeed, the ways Bonnin represented her Native and feminine
“self” responded to white ideological expectations for Indian people, the
marketing of primitivist desire in the form of commodities and fashion, as
well as civilization and gender discourses, all of which fed into the question
of recognition by audiences.
In concert halls and on lecture platforms, Bonnin spoke about her ideas
regarding public debates surrounding the “Indian Question.” During these
talks, Bonnin often wore clothing that embodied a “primitivist” aesthetic,
one embraced by cosmopolitan whites who sought ways to nostalgically
avoid and culturally reform the modern world they lived in. Within these
contexts, Bonnin’s long, beaded dresses made of animal skin and her jew-
eled necklaces made by Indian hands were deemed by most audiences as
“traditional” and authentically Indian. In a quotidian sense, these were not
Bonnin’s typical clothes. Although Bonnin may have been read as more
exotic and more Indian because of such costumed appearances, more and
more Americans were able to purchase these items from local crafts dealers
and through mail-order catalogs. Thus, Bonnin’s “Yankton dress” reflected
not only a particular expression of Indian culture but reinforced (perhaps
accidentally) a market system structured by the desire to see, produce, and
consume the aesthetics of this culture and to reify a generic Indian in the
national imaginary.134
While Bonnin’s costume reinforced certain white expectations regard-
ing “traditional” Native clothing, it also enabled her to become a living
 Red Bird 205

advertisement for the marketing of Indianness. In addition, it ran against

the grain of the representational politics she seemed to have established
when working with Kasebier. In these later instances, performance itself
became a meaning-laden arena. On stage Bonnin might find herself in a
double-bind:  trapped within certain representations of femininity and
Indianness. Yet within this predicament she found ways to participate in
and also revise discourses of American civilization. As a performer, not
unlike Eastman and other Indian intellectuals at the time, Bonnin developed
important strategies for how to be recognizable as an Indian writer and
activist, so that she might rewrite what it meant to be an Indian woman.
Bonnin remarked in several personal letters that she recognized the
necessity, if also the danger, of having to dress in costume to “play Indian,”
especially in her letters concerning “Princess Chinquilla” and “Red Fox St.
James.” No doubt, her brief career as a violinist exposed Bonnin to the oppor-
tunities and the limits that accompanied any public Indian performance.
After she trained with Austrian violinist Eugene Gruenberg (1854–1928)
at the New England Conservatory in Boston (1899–1900),135 Bonnin made
memorable appearances as a soloist with the Carlisle Indian School Band.
In March 1900, she received a warm reception at Philadelphia’s Association
Hall and again when the band performed at Carnegie Hall in New  York
City. Advertisements for this concert promised audiences a mix of high art
and Indian spectacle: “Zitkala Sa, the Indian Girl Violinist from the Boston
Conservatory.” This popular tour culminated with performances at the Paris
Exposition. These sorts of moments showcase Bonnin’s accomplishments as
much as they demonstrate how her ethnic identity became entangled with
her cultural work. In the years that followed, the two became mutually con-
stitutive as she took on the name “Zitkala Sa” to promote herself as an
author, and later as a political activist. Another photograph from later in
Bonnin’s career exemplifies how complicated performance was for Native
activists.136
On March 9, 1926, members of the NCAI assembled in Washington, DC
to take part in a ceremony for unveiling a statue of Sitting Bull. The statue
was made for the Wyoming Historical Society and paid for by contribu-
tions from white schoolchildren in Pennsylvania. NCAI members gathered
around the statue’s sculptor, Mr. U. S. J. Dunbar, with their president and
NCAI founder, Gertrude Bonnin, on Dunbar’s left. A photographer snapped
away to document all who were present. In the process, a range of Native
costumes was captured, from all different nations, including Bonnin in her
Yankton buckskin dress.137
There is a double monument to Indianness present in the image cap-
tured that day. It suggests the productive potential of representations by and
about Indian people, and the underlying performative nature of such rep-
resentations. Sitting Bull himself is an apt symbol to embody the changing
relationship between Indian people and mediated forms of representation,
206 Indigenous Intellectuals

which centered on them in public performances. His short-lived alliance

with William F.  Cody as a member of “Buffalo Bill’s” Wild West touring
company enabled both men to improve their financial and political futures.
The contract that Sitting Bull negotiated with Cody also demonstrated the
Indian leader’s awareness of the power and influence show business and
celebrity could bring to Indian participants. Unlike many Indian performers,
Sitting Bull’s notoriety among American audiences, the government, and the
military enabled him to simply “play himself” as a part of Cody’s enterprise.
Furthermore, his involvement with Cody’s company allowed Sitting Bull to
improve the material circumstances of himself and members of his tribe.
This was especially crucial given that Sitting Bull was imprisoned under
the supervision of James McLaughlin (the agent in charge of the Standing
Rock Reservation), and yet Sitting Bull managed to use his affiliation with
Cody to make diplomatic visits to Washington, DC, consequently frustrat-
ing McLaughlin.138
The image’s caption lists the tribesmen of the Sioux, Assiniboine, Yakima,
Miami, Kiowa, Apache, and Osage who were present at the unveiling of the
statue to honor Sitting Bull – we might further assume that those in “Native
costume” were representing their individual tribal nations. A handwritten
note adds another level of context for those who might have viewed and cir-
culated such a photograph. Bonnin writes, “To Miss Julia A. Thomas, With
Love, Zitkala Sa (Gertrude Bonnin).” The photograph and Bonnin’s signa-
ture, followed by a parenthetical reference to herself as Gertrude Bonnin,
point to her understanding of key discourses that authenticated Indian per-
formance. In this case, her choice to use “Zitkala Sa” first and then Bonnin
highlights her role as an author first and an activist second. Bonnin’s Sioux
regalia matched the tribally specific dress of the other female members of the
NCAI. Their clothing would have appealed to white primitivist aesthetics
and could generate more attention to support their work. Bonnin’s costum-
ing and the use of Zitkala-Sa represent her strategic choices to be associ-
ated with Sioux culture and heritage. In addition, her use of parentheses in
writing to Julia Thomas demonstrates an awareness of multiple publics that
could read her as either Zitkala-Sa (Indian author and performer) and/or
Gertrude Bonnin (political activist, wife, and mother). Moreover, her use of
parentheses seems more strategic than ambivalent and less a matter of con-
fusion about her identity than a matter of recognition regarding the multiple
ways Indian intellectuals could be visible.139
Bonnin was not alone in using parentheses in strategic ways. Eastman,
for example, often signed his letters as Ohiyesa, and his publishers would
name him as the author Charles (Ohiyesa) Eastman. In a similar way, Carlos
Montezuma produced a newsletter and editorial alter ego using the name
“Wassaja.” Renaming oneself and when and how to use certain names par-
allels the ways Indian intellectuals performed public identities, and wore
more or less “authentic” clothing representing Indianness. For Bonnin,
 Red Bird 207

performances could be manipulated and mobilized to play off nostalgic

tropes and (anti)modernist longings for primitivism. She could then open up
spaces to argue for wider recognition of Indian people as cultural and politi-
cal participants in shaping American society, as she reshaped it herself.140
One arena in which Bonnin first attempted to rework how white
Americans imagined Indian history, people, and culture was through her
collaboration with music professor William Hanson to produce The Sun
Dance opera. The name Sun Dance derives from the Sioux identification of
it as Wi wanyang wacipi, translated as “sun gazing dance.” The ceremony is
highly variable because its performance is intimately connected to the guid-
ance of visions or dreams that establish an individual relationship between
one or more of the central participants and one or more spirit persons. In all
cases, however, the primary meaning is understood to be the performance of
acts of sacrifice in ritual reciprocity with spiritual powers, so the welfare of
friends, family, and the whole people is enhanced. The Arapaho, Cheyenne,
Blackfoot, and Sioux nations all practiced sacrificial acts of piercing the
flesh. Others, such as the Ute, Shoshone, and Crow nations, performed sacri-
ficial acts of embodying their spiritual intentions through fasting and intense
dancing, but not through piercing. The central concern of the Sun Dance
was to establish and maintain kinship with all peoples, including animals,
and plants.141
In 1912, Bonnin and Hanson set to work on designing a story, sets, and
costumes to produce an opera loosely based on the Plains Sun Dance rit-
ual. The opera debuted on February 20, 1913, in Vernal, Utah, and later
was performed with two separate productions at Brigham Young University
in Provo in May and December 1914.142 These later productions featured
mostly undergraduates of the University, where Hanson was employed.
Bonnin wrote the libretto and also made many public costumed appear-
ances in Utah to advertise it. Her participation in making and promoting
this show was one way to advance politics, which traded heavily on the
work of culture. Despite her efforts, the Sun Dance remained relatively
obscure, although it was popular among Utah audiences.143
One May 26, 1914 review from the Deseret Evening News notes that
“the libretto is by Zikala Sa (Mrs. R. T. Bonnin) a highly educated Sioux
woman, and the music is by William F.  Hanson, a young man of Vernal,
and instructor in the Uinta Stake Academy of that place.” This same article
describes the opera as “one of the most melodious and interesting represen-
tations of western aboriginal life ever seen on the local stage . . . in the Salt
Lake theater.” Other reviews highlight the collaboration between Bonnin
and Hanson, while also placing Indianness itself at the center of their anal-
yses of the opera. This same review comments on how “weird Indian mel-
odies” are arranged by a production that features both white and Indian
singers and dancers. As P. Jane Hafen illustrates: “Part of the success of The
Sun Dance Opera was the incorporation of local Ute performers. At various
208 Indigenous Intellectuals

times, the opera would come to a dead halt as the Native performers entered
the stage to sing and dance. Because the Utes practiced the Sun Dance, it is
easy to draw the conclusion that, knowing the topic, they performed their
own ritualistic songs and dances.”144
The opera could be read on multiple levels. It played to audiences who
expected and embraced romantic tropes and nostalgic narratives about
Indian people, and who would be entertained by a love story about two
young braves competing to court Winona, “a lovely Shoshone maiden.” The
opera also provided little in the way of action and instead sought to teach
white audiences about the local Ute population. As one review noted, “the
chief value of the tale lies in the opportunity it offers for emphasis on Indian
customs and superstitions, and for the use of authentic aboriginal tunes.”
As Hafen further points out, the Ute songs and dances were not part of the
score of the opera even though they were integral to the performances.145
Another review framed the educational impact of the performance
through the body of Bonnin herself, noting how she “in a pretty five-minute
address, explained the Indian customs and legends incorporated in the
opera.” Despite Bonnin’s accomplishments in writing the libretto, her musi-
cal training at the New England Conservatory, and her work as an author,
she could not (and would not) escape being framed within a discourse of
ethnic authenticity that defined her and Indianness as invoking a necessary
realism for the opera. Reporters framed Hanson as authentic as well because
he had visited the Ute and studied their ceremonies and melodies. Together
they worked within a sphere of understanding Native performance that was
not wholly dissimilar from the productions of Wild West touring compa-
nies. Except, by using opera as their genre, Hanson and Bonnin appealed
to middle- and upper-class audiences, as opposed to the Wild West, which
relied on the humor, fast pace, and spectacle traditions of Vaudeville cou-
pled with the fact of real Indians’ participation to authenticate the stories
and rituals that were used. Despite its pretention toward high society, The
Sun Dance opera was celebrated for being both “instructive” and “at times
dramatic” because of the representations about and by the Ute people. As an
American opera, sung entirely in English, with mostly Native cast members,
it was a genre unto its own.
As a form of political resistance, the opera was an ingenious creation
given that there had been U.S. laws from the 1880s that prohibited the per-
formance of the Sun Dance. It seems likely that Bonnin might have intended
to make a political statement in naming the opera The Sun Dance given her
Yankton background. Mark Rifkin argues in his reading of Ella Deloria’s
novel Waterlily, written during the early 1940s but published in 1988, that
Deloria recognizes her political context of post-IRA policy and Collierian
discourse by acknowledging the earlier era’s restrictions on Native practices.
“However, in what seems to me impossible to construe as merely coinci-
dence, the novel addresses all the practices targeted by the code of Indian
 Red Bird 209

offenses in the 1880s – the Sun Dance, polygamy, the presence of medicine
men, giving away property as part of a mourning ritual, and traveling away
from one’s reservation – weaving its story in and through these elements in
Dakota sociality.”146 It is not an understatement to say that the ritual of the
Sun Dance is an important centerpiece for Deloria’s novel. Furthermore, the
fact that polygamy, as practiced by both Natives and Mormons, was under
attack and still illegal when Bonnin was working with Hanson in the heart
of Mormon and Native areas in Utah, suggests other forms of resistance
may have been at play in the opera they made together.
A December 21, 1914 publicity photo of Hanson and Bonnin and her
subsequent talks that explained the customs and legends incorporated into
The Sun Dance show the ways that Bonnin used the opera as a platform to
educate white audiences about Ute life, even if she embraced certain prim-
itivist tropes. The publicity shot features both opera producers dressed in
costumes that place them into the narrative they imagined for their opera.
Indeed, the dress that Bonnin is wearing in the photo is quite similar to what
she would wear several years later as the president of the NCAI witnessing
the unveiling of Sitting Bull’s statue. This publicity photo and reviews fol-
lowing the first performances of the opera served to celebrate and authenti-
cate it as a cultural work because of Hanson’s close association with Indian
people and Bonnin’s identity and performance as a “full-blooded Sioux.”147
Following the modest success of The Sun Dance in Utah, the Bonnins
relocated to Washington, DC and Hanson set to work on other cultural
productions that capitalized on the Indian representations he and Bonnin
had put into their opera. He created The Bear Dance, which claimed to
feature “medicine songs, scalp dance songs and burial songs” from the Ute.
Throughout the 1920s, newspapers reported that Hanson traveled with
Utah Indians around the state to affirm the authenticity of their perfor-
mances. With the support of local Indian people and public interest in see-
ing these performances, Hanson formed the Hanson Wigwam Company.
According to the company’s promotional materials they created composi-
tions that aimed to transport listeners “back one hundred years” so that
they might “get a picture of those original roamers of western hills and val-
leys, and see more than books of history ever tell.”148 The educational impe-
tus behind the original collaboration between Bonnin and Hanson seemed
to be carried on in these later productions.
Although Bonnin was no longer involved with the promotion of The
Sun Dance after she left Utah in 1916, Hanson remained active in produc-
ing Indian-themed works. In fact, he worked to revive their opera, making
some alterations to the score in the process.149 By 1938, after Bonnin had
died, Hanson brought a new company to present The Sun Dance for its
New York premiere at a Broadway theater. This new version of the opera
featured Yakima actor and singer “Chief Yowlachie,” also known as Daniel
Simmons, whose career in film would bring him into close contact with
210 Indigenous Intellectuals

Luther Standing Bear’s political activities based in Los Angeles during this
same time.150 A  May 15, 1938 article in Musical Courier celebrated the
work as “a new romantic American Indian opera.”151 By this time there was
nothing new about the use of Indian themes in operatic productions, espe-
cially because Charles Wakefield Cadman’s Indian-themed opera Shanewis
(The Robin Woman) had premiered as the first American opera to play two
seasons at the Metropolitan Opera house in New  York City in 1918.152
Still, the article refers to these “typical themes” and their “racial flavor” as
central to the opera’s appeal, and attributes them to Hanson rather than
Bonnin. Despite her erasure from the review, the opera’s message, which
was also hers, of “the heart throbs, the National Voice of the Indians of the
mountains” could now reach a new white audience, and be celebrated as the
American opera of the year.153
After relocating to Washington, DC to pursue political work, Bonnin left
behind many of the Indianized themes that would make Hanson famous
to present a different sort of national voice for Indian people in the United
States. As an author and activist, she was constantly aware of the power of
representation and how best to appeal to different sorts of audiences. Over
the next two decades, Bonnin was invited to give public talks on “Indian
Affairs” throughout the United States because of her work as secretary for
the SAI and because of the alliances that she made with white women’s
groups. Bonnin was able to connect to a range of different networks be they
local or national, overtly political, or more cultural in their focus. Bonnin
was repeatedly applauded for her presentation style and her appearance at
these gatherings. In 1927, at the Nation Dinner in New York City, newspa-
per reporters commented on her “Indian dress,” which was as forceful in
making an argument about the validity of Native concerns as the tone of
Bonnin’s voice. She and her attire made a statement. Although Bonnin no
longer took to the musical stage as a venue to educate American audiences,
she did not entirely give up the use of a costume or cadence to make a point.
Bonnin became, especially as the president of the NCAI, a representa-
tive figure of Indianness and voice for Indian affairs. The NCAI was cre-
ated in February 1926  “to establish Local Lodges in Indian country for
self-help and study” among Indians “to use their new citizenship,” so that
“the Indian may become a producer and not a consumer only” in American
society. As the “Constitution and By-Laws” notes in article 3, the NCAI will
be headquartered in Washington, DC along with “various branches” that
“shall be located in the respective communities wherein they are created.”154
As president of the NCAI, Bonnin’s duties were also outlined in this docu-
ment. “It shall be the duty of the President to preside over all meetings of
the National Council of American Indians and meetings of the Board of
Directors or Advisory Board.” In addition to these meetings, the “By-Laws”
is explicit that Bonnin would also sign and execute any documents required
and authorized by the Board of Directors, she would require all officers and
 Red Bird 211

Figure 8.  NCAI: Constitution and by-laws (circa 1926).

Archives and Special Collections, Frost Library, Amherst College, Amherst, MA.

committees to make reports on an annual basis, she would maintain regular

and proper means of communications between the various officers, boards,
and committees, and “from time to time cause the issuance of bulletins or
other notices to all members whereby information on important matters
will be given to the members of the organization.”155 As president, Bonnin
did all of these things, and from the extant letters and memoranda in her
212 Indigenous Intellectuals

personal papers, it is clear she probably did even more. As president of the
NCAI she was still a writer, but with a much different purpose and a much
different audience.156
Bonnin’s work with the NCAI – smaller in national scope and influence
in Indian affairs than the SAI – gave her ample opportunities to work with
other Native activists “to help our Indian people find their rightful place in
American life.”157 Throughout her work as a public face for Indian people,
Bonnin confronted a new sort of issue that was connected to expectations
for Indian performances and performers. She started to be on the look-
out for individuals who were making public presentations, while “playing
Indian,” but whom she believed were not Indian at all.
As she traveled to promote the NCAI, Bonnin worried, privately in her
letters, about the negative influence that imposter Indians would pose to her
efforts. This worry came from her own practice – dressing up to make her
Indianness visible could encourage imposters to “play” Indian using similar
methods. On April 18, 1927, she wrote to friend and former SAI president
Reverend Philip Gordon about her concerns related to these “inauthentic”
Indians.

During the time I served the Society of American Indians as Secretary, I had some
correspondence with Dr. Montezuma about Red Fox and his workers. Arthur Parker,
previous to our activities in the SAI, had written Red Fox up quite to his utter expo-
sure as an imposter; so I mentioned that to Dr. Montezuma; Red Fox naturally did
not relish my attitude; and when later he was in Washington, D.C. for a short time,
he FAILED to call at the SAI office.

Bonnin points out how pan-Indianist groups like the SAI, and probably to
a lesser extent the NCAI, could manipulate public expectations regarding
Indianness while at the same time fearing their own legitimacy might be
threatened by charlatans who adopted their practice by posing as Indians.
These sorts of exchanges showcase the ways Indian intellectual leaders saw
themselves uniquely positioned to not only speak on behalf of Indian people
in general, but also to act (however dangerous and fraught this may be) as
“culture cops” to police the boundaries of what proper Indianness looked
and sounded like. For Bonnin, the issue was largely about what the political
consequences of these deviations might mean for their activist work.158
Bonnin writes more to Rev. Gordon with details regarding the problem
of Red Fox.159 Apparently, Red Fox had collected money from the general
public “for Indian work” and then a white man named “Black Hawk” dis-
appeared with the money. Bonnin also mentions that concerns about Red
Fox have extended to include various Indian figures involved with the
SAI. For her, a particular concern arose regarding “Princess Chinquilla,”
whom Bonnin met in New York City. After that meeting, she wrote again
to Gordon that “a clipping was sent me,” and it read: “ ‘Princess Chinquilla
and Dr.  Skiuhushu a Blackfoot, organized the club under the auspices of
 Red Bird 213

the American Indian Association for the benefit of the 200 Indians living
in New  York.’ ” Bonnin apparently dropped the matter after writing to
Chinquilla and receiving a reply that stated the “Princess” had not started
any such organization, but rather thought it was a continuation of the SAI.
At best, Red Fox and Chinquilla are problematic examples of Indians “play-
ing Indian.” At worst, they are con artists, scammers, and grafters who bring
other Indian people down with them. In either case, all of these figures oper-
ated within influential cultural networks, which often relied on white people
“going Native.”160
Bonnin’s concerns regarding Indian Play seem firmly rooted in suspicions
surrounding imposter Indians who used Indianness for the express purpose
of making money. In fact, she maintained professional relationships with
white organizations like the IRA, despite their own practices of Indian Play.
This all-white and male political reform group had members that supported
and celebrated fraternal clubs and childrearing organizations, like the Boy
Scouts, which gave American men opportunities to “Play Indian” when
they were young, so that they might become better Americans as they grew
up. Bonnin’s concerns regarding the “American Indian Order, Inc.” that
listed among its principal officers “Dr. Red Fox St James” and “Skinhushu,
Wampum Keeper” with Rev. Red Fox (Skinhushu) Executive Chief, etc.”
was that they might succeed in tarnishing the reputation of legitimate orga-
nizations like the SAI and the NCAI.
Additional correspondence with other friends, among them Charlotte
Jones, a new member of the NCAI, confirm that Bonnin’s suspicions were
correct. Princess Chinquilla, et al. were not necessarily Indians per se and
were indeed using “Indian Play” for the purposes of fame and financial
gain. Throughout Bonnin’s correspondence she expresses concerns regard-
ing “false Indian” figures who threatened to undermine her ability to “play
Indian.” As Cari Carpenter, Ruth Spack, Dorothea M.  Susag, and P.  Jane
Hafen have shown, Bonnin was a figure who could manipulate genres and
identities available to her. In particular, Carpenter argues, “Bonnin’s cor-
respondence with Charlotte Jones gives us insight  . . . into the ways that
such prominent American Indians were producing and revising their public
Indianness in the 1920s.”161 Rev. Gordon’s reply to Bonnin’s original inquiry
validates her worst fears:  “I had occasion to meet Princess Chinquilla a
while back. Somehow or other, she does not ring quite true to me and I am
inclined to ‘hae ma doots’ in regard to her.” As Gordon plays Irish he mocks
and questions the authenticity of Chinquilla’s ethnicity. He goes on to argue
that she is also guilty by association. “In the first place she is tied up with
Red Fox St. James who, I am convinced is a fake, as are also a great many of
the people he has with him.”162 The strength of white imaginaries that asso-
ciated Indian women with images of princesses, like the one that Chinquilla
was performing, remained critical to the political work Bonnin did because
she had to negotiate these troubling cultural frameworks. Bonnin managed
214 Indigenous Intellectuals

to embody Indian femininity in different ways at different times. No doubt

deciding which network to tap into influenced how she would represent
herself and her politics.

After 1924 and the Indian Citizenship Act

Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Bonnin remained active as a writer.
She wrote speeches to give at public events organized by philanthropic
groups and white reformers. In these public venues, she drew on work as
a pan-tribal activist that had begun with the SAI and continued with the
NCAI.163 Like Eastman and Montezuma, Bonnin allied with white reform-
ers committed to Indian issues in order to expand the networks of influence
she saw as necessary to nourishing pan-Indian political activity. Not unlike
Luther Standing Bear, Bonnin was able to find allies for her political concerns
in a range of places. Along with women’s clubs, she maintained ties to white
fraternal groups like the IRA because many of their members held sway
in Washington. In turning to the IRA and its leader, Matthew K.  Sniffen,
as well as Charles Faben (one of the heads of Collier’s AIDA), Bonnin set
to work on an important political piece. In 1924, the three of them pub-
lished Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation
of the Five Civilized Tribes – Legalized Robbery.164 This became an influen-
tial political treatise that led to the formation of the Meriam Commission
and the appointment of IRA leaders to the top two positions in the BIA by
President Herbert Hoover.
For Bonnin, Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians represented a departure from
her more literary work and an example of how she could directly influence
federal policy. In that same year, all Native Americans were incorporated
into the United States as full citizens, while the Johnson-Reed Immigration
Act became federal law and limited the annual number of immigrants who
could be admitted to the country, further restricting entry by Southern and
Eastern Europeans and East Asians and Asian Indians. Ironically as the
United States sought to stop the influx of certain types of immigrants, fed-
eral law finally recognized the original inhabitants of the Americas as citi-
zens.165 Although the Indian Citizenship Act was an important turning point
in federal Indian policy, it remained a thorny issue in relation to tribal sover-
eignty. For Bonnin, 1924 marked a turning point in her quest for citizenship
and the culmination of her research for Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians, and
yet she was not fully satisfied with these achievements. During the remain-
der of her life, Bonnin remained committed to turning changes in policy into
changes in material circumstances.
From 1926 until her death in 1938, the best way for Bonnin to remain
politically active was through her role as president of the NCAI. This type
of commitment makes sense given that the first three decades of the twen-
tieth century were marked by critical changes in federal Indian policy as
 Red Bird 215

well as a significant increase in public interest regarding Indian arts and

crafts and Indian performances. Like her contemporaries, Bonnin navigated
the intersections of art and policy as an author, a performer, and an activ-
ist. The power of her representational politics shifted in different contexts,
from when she was a college student to a teacher, and as she managed her
public persona within a literary marketplace and different performance
venues, ranging from concert halls to political organizing meetings. Within
these specific areas Bonnin mobilized a range of strategies to position herself
within established reform networks, as she worked to create new ones. She
succeeded in refashioning a public image that could represent Indianness
in ways that were legible to white, middle-class society. As a writer and an
advocate for Indian people, she spoke the languages of literature, music, and
policy. Given her many achievements Bonnin may seem unusual, but she was
not alone. There were others: Native women and men who aligned them-
selves with Indian causes while strategically cultivating tenuous relationships
with white progressives. The legacy Bonnin left in relation to literature and
politics creates a compelling window through which to examine the past of
Indian Country and America. Her story told in the context of a larger cohort
of Indian intellectuals offers a new understanding of early twentieth-century
cultural history and the central role Native women played in it.

Notes
1 Gertrude Bonnin, “Side by Side,” The Earlhamite 2, March 16, 1896, 178–9.
MSS 1704, Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin Collection, 20th–21st Century
Western and Mormon Americana, L.  Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold
B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University.
2 I use Bonnin rather than Zitkala-Sa (or both) throughout this chapter for
consistency.
3 Roy W. Meyer, History of the Santee Sioux (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska
Press, 1993).
4 See: P. Jane Hafen, ed., Zitkala-Sa, Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and the
Sun Dance Opera (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), xvii.
5 “Class Card” for Gertrude E. Simmons, New England Conservatory Archives,
Boston, MA.
6 Several sources focus on Gertrude Bonnin. I  have consulted:  Betty Louise
Bell, “If This Is Paganism . . .’: Zitkala-Sa and the Devil’s Language,” in Native
American Religious Identity:  Unforgotten Gods, edited by Jace Weaver
(Maryknoll, NY:  Orbis, 1998), 61–8; Dexter Fisher, “The Transformation of
Tradition: A Study of Zitkala-Sa and Mourning Dove, Two Transitional American
Indian Writers” (Diss., City University of New York, 1979); Lisa Laurie, “The
Life Story of Zitkala-Sa/Gertrude Simmons Bonnin:  Writing and Creating a
Public Image” (Diss., Arizona State University, 1996); Ruth Spack, “Revisioning
American Indian Women: Zitkala-Sa’s Revolutionary American Indian Stories,”
Legacy Vol. 14, No. 1, 1997, 25–43, and “Zitkala-Sa, The Song of Hiawatha,
and the Carlisle Indian School Band: A Captivity Tale,” LEGACY Vol. 25, No.
216 Indigenous Intellectuals

2, 210–24; Margaret A. Lukens, “The American Story of Zitkala-Sa,” in In Her

Own Voice: Nineteenth-Century American Women Essayists, edited by Sherry
Lee Linkon (New York: Garland, 1997), 141–55.
7 Many agree that the term dime novel originated with the first book in Beadle
& Adam’s Beadle’s Dime Novel series, Maleaska, the Indian Wife of the White
Hunter, by Ann S. Stephens, dated June 9, 1860. This series ran for 321 issues,
establishing many of the conventions for the genre, from the lurid and outland-
ish storylines to melodramatic double titling that were used into the 1920s.
For more on this print culture history see:  Helen C.  Nelson, “Navigating
Nineteenth Century Novels:  Linking Historical and Literary Perspectives to
Explore the influence of Dime Novels in Nineteenth Century America” (MA
Thesis, Humboldt State University, 2005).
8 Cari Carpenter, Seeing Red:  Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008); Dorothea M. Susag, “Zitkala-Sa
(Gertrude Simmons Bonnin): A Power(ful) Literary Voice,” Studies in American
Indian Literatures Vol. 5., No. 4, Winter 1993, 3–24.
9 For more on “rhetorical sovereignty” see:  Scott Lyons, X-Marks:  Native
Signatures of Assent (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2010),
449–50.
10 Beth Piatote, Domestic Subjects:  Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native
American Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); A. Lavonne
Brown Ruoff, “Early American Women Authors:  Jane Johnston Schoolcraft,
Sarah Winnemucca, S.  Alice Callahan, E.  Pauline Johnson, and Zitkala-Sa”
in Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers:  A  Critical Reader, edited
by Karen L. Kilcup (Malden, MA:  Blackwell, 1998); Susan Bernardin, “The
Lessons of a Sentimental Education: Zitkala-Sa’s Autobiographical Narratives,”
Western American Literature Vol. 32, No. 3, November 1997, 212–38; Martha
J. Cutter, “Zitkala-Sa’s Autobiographical Writings: The Problems of a Canonical
Search for Language and Identity,” MELUS Vol. 19, No. 1, Spring 1994, 31–45;
P. Jane Hafen, “Zitkala-Sa: Sentimentality and Sovereignty,” Wicazo Sa Review
Vol. 12, No. 2, Fall 1997, 31–42; Roseanne Hoefel, “Writings, Performance,
Activism:  Zitkala-Sa and Pauline Johnson” in Native American Women in
Literature and Culture, edited by Susan Castillo and Victor M.  P. DaRosa
(Porto, Portugal: Fernando Pessoa University Press, 1997), 107–18.
11 Gertrude Bonnin, American Indian Stories (London and Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1985), 79.
12 The Earlhamite, MSS 1704, LTPSC.
13 Hafen, ed., Dreams and Thunder, xvi. Tom Hamm, “Side by Side: Zitkala-Sa
at Earlham 1895–1897:  From Campus to the Center of American Indian
Activism,” The Earlhamite (winter 1998).
14 My reading of “side by side” and “seeking” here draws on Jacques Derrida’s
theorization of difference, in particular, his usage of différance (as a neologism)
to signal to the reader multiple meanings and intentions. Among these is the
possibility for multiple signifiers that take into account how both difference and
deferral can be at play at once. In Bonnin’s speech, I see a similar logic in her
rhetorical choices. She uses seeking and side by side to critique the structures of
power within the United States that delimit who is or is not a part of the nation;
at the same time, she strategically plays with these words within the logics of
 Red Bird 217

this structure to position herself as legitimately within (seeking) and distant

from (side by side) the nation. See:  Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), translated by Alan Bass.
15 The year 1896 stands out in terms of public discourse regarding race, racializa-
tion, and political rights given the “separate but equal” doctrine set forth by
the ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537. “Separate but equal” remained
standard doctrine in U.S. law until its repudiation in the 1954 Supreme Court
decision Brown v. Board of Education.
16 Piatote, Domestic Subjects.
17 Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence:  University Press
of Kansas, 2004); Tom Holm, The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native
Americans and Whites in the Progressive Era (2005); Frederick Hoxie, A Final
Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate Indians, 1880–1920 (1984).
18 For more on a literary history of female ethnic identity and the connections
made by women during this period with regard to authenticity and author-
ship see Mary V. Dearborn, Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in
American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
19 Although opera had been popular in Europe since its debut in the sixteenth
century, in turn-of-the-century America it was still relatively new to most
audiences. Dramas composed of vocal pieces with orchestral accompaniment,
overtures, and interludes, opera reached the United States in the era of vaude-
ville, Tin Pan Alley, and ragtime, all of which were far more popular. However,
with the patronage of New York high society, eager to experience this elegant
European import firsthand, the first fully staged opera performance took place
in New York in 1825. An Italian opera troupe was imported for the premiere of
Rossini’s The Barber of Seville.
20 The Sun Dance was a collaborative project between Gertrude Bonnin and
William Hanson. See: P. Jane Hafen, “A Cultural Duet: Zitkala Sa and The Sun
Dance Opera,” Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, 1998, 102–11.
21 Although the NCAI disappeared after Bonnin’s death, a similar organization,
the National Congress of American Indians, was founded in 1944. This later
group responded to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and the termination
policies of the 1940s and 1950s.
22 In 1900, the Atlantic Monthly published several essays by “Zitkala-Sa.” Among
them were “The School Days of an Indian Girl” and “An Indian Teacher
among Indians.” For more on two other Indian intellectuals who achieved
public success during this period see:  Linda A. Waggoner, Fire Light:  The
Life of Angel De Cora, Winnebago Artist (Norman:  University of Oklahoma
Press, 2008) and Joel Pfitzer, The Yale Indian:  The Education of Henry Roe
Cloud (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). Also see: Charles Hannon,
“Zitkala-Sa and the Commercial Magazine Apparatus,” in “The Only Efficient
Instrument”: American Women Writers and the Periodical, 1837–1916, edited
by Aleta Feinsod Cane and Susan Alves (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,
2001), 179–201.
23 Gertrude Bonnin, “The School Days of an Indian Girl” in American Indian
Stories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 47–80. Originally pub-
lished: Washington, DC: Hayworth Publishing House, 1921. In this narrative,
Bonnin combines sentimentality and anger in ways that mirror the work of
218 Indigenous Intellectuals

her predecessor Sarah Winnemucca (1844–91) in Life among the Piutes: Their

Wrongs and Claims (1883), and the later modernist work of Cogewea the
Half-Blood:  A  Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range (1927) by
Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket) (1888–1936).
24 Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light:  The Story of Chilocco
Indian School (Lincoln and London:  University of Nebraska Press, 1994),
99. For more on Indian education in the United States see also: Brenda Child,
Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (1998); Devon
Mihesuah, Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee
Female Seminary, 1851–1909 (1993); Robet Trennert, The Phoenix Indian
School:  Forced Assimilation in Arizona, 1891–1935 (1988); and Penelope
Kelsey, “Narratives of the Boarding School Era from Victimry to Resistance,”
Atenea Vol. 23, No. 2, 2003, 123–37.
25 Bonnin, “An Indian Teacher among Indians,” in American Indian Stories
(London and Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 81.
26 Bonnin, “School Days,” 52.
27 Ibid., 65.
28 Ibid., 69. Scholars in critical race and ethnic studies have engaged with Lacanian
psychoanalytic theory to potentially rectify the flawed ways ethnic and racial-
ized subjects have been conceptualized in North America since the mid-twentieth
century. For more see: Antonio Viego, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss
in Latino Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Also influenc-
ing how I read the loss Bonnin suffers after leaving home to receive a boarding
school education is Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis,
Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Cheng
considers race a melancholic construction that has the power to imprison both
dominant and marginal subjects in haunted relations of identification and loss.
Cheng also examines the social and psychological costs of racism that is imagi-
native and uncompromising.
29 For more about the Dawes Act era see: Leonard Carlson, Indians, Bureaucrats,
and Land:  The Dawes Act and the Decline of Indian Farming (1981); Emily
Greenwald, Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, Jicarilla Apaches,
and the Dawes Act (2002); Frederick Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to
Assimilate Indians, 1880–1920 (1984).
30 Bonnin, “School Days,” 69.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Bonnin, “An Indian Teacher among Indians,” 93.
34 Ibid., 93, 94–5.
35 Ibid., 98.
36 Ibid., 98.
37 Ibid., 98.
38 Ibid., 99.
39 The Carlisle Indian Industrial School produced a variety of newspapers and
magazines, which provided Pratt with a platform from which to publicize his
experiment and perpetuate his views on education. These newspapers were pop-
ular among locals, available at the post office and by subscription through-
out the country; they became a small source of income to supplement funding
 Red Bird 219

by the government. News of former students, often in the form of letters to

“Dear Old Carlisle,” made its way into these papers on a regular basis. For more
see:  Records of the Cumberland County Historical Society, and the Richard
Henry Pratt Papers, WA MSS S-1174, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
40 For more about Pratt and Bonnin with regards to a the notion of captiv-
ity see:  Spack, “Zitkala-Sa, The Song of Hiawatha, and the Carlisle Indian
School Band.”
41 Waggoner, Fire Light, 91. For more about Angel De Cora and her relationship
to Smith College see: “Paying Tribute to Smith’s First Known Native American
Graduate,” Jan McCoy Ebbets, http://www.smith.edu/newssmith/fall2003/
decora.php (accessed September 26, 2014).
42 Anne Ruggles Gere, “An Art of Survivance: Angel De Cora at Carlisle,” American
Indian Quarterly Vol. 28, No. 3 & 4, Summer/Fall 2004, 649–84.
43 This section heading refers to an advertisement, most likely produced by Ginn
and Company, to promote Bonnin as the author of “American Indian Stories,”
“Americanize the First Americans,” and “Old Indian Legends.” From:  MSS
1704; Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin Collection, 20th–21st Century Western
and Mormon Americana, L.  Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B.  Lee
Library, Brigham Young University [hereinafter MSS 1704, LTPSC].Thomas
Bonaventure Lawler, Seventy Years of Textbook Publishing: A History of Ginn
and Company (Boston, MA: Ginn and Company, 1938).
44 Bonnin, “An Indian Teacher among Indians”; ”Impressions of an Indian
Childhood,” Atlantic Monthly 85, 1900, 37–47; “School Days of an Indian
Girl,” Atlantic Monthly 85, 1900, 185–94; Old Indian Legends (Boston,
MA:  Ginn and Company, 1901); ”Soft Hearted Sioux,” Harper’s Monthly,
New York (1901); “The Trial Path,” Harper’s Monthly Vol. 103, October 1901;
“A Warrior’s Daughter,” Everybody’s Magazine (1902); ”Why I Am a Pagan,”
Atlantic Monthly 90, 1902, 801–3; American Indian Stories (Washington,
DC: Hayworth Publishing House, 1921).
45 By “romantic language,” I refer to romanticism as it emerged and took shape in
England and the United States from the 1830s to the 1860s, which was char-
acterized by: sensibility; primitivism; love of nature; sympathetic interest in the
past, especially the medieval; mysticism; individualism; and figured in opposi-
tion to neoclassicism. The romantic period in American literature coincided/
emerged out of the Jacksonian Era and the Civil War as the United States sought
to redefine itself as a nation embroiled in debates over Indian removal and slav-
ery. Three major literary figures exemplified this Romantic movement: William
Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper. Overlapping
with this sort of literary production was the emergence of the sentimental novel.
This form deviated from realist writings produced by Herman Melville, Henry
David Thoreau, and Mark Twain. Whether understood in terms of sympathetic
relations or of manipulative influence, sentimentality was mobilized by several
women writers for political and personal reasons. Sentimentality also became
linked to the intimate details of women’s private lives. Although this form was
most popular in early and mid-nineteenth-century America, it has often been
overlooked in literary histories until recently.
46 Carpenter, Seeing Red.
220 Indigenous Intellectuals

47 Esther Whitmore (?)  to Zitkala-Sa, June 3, 1930, Letter, MSS 1704, LTPSC.
Whitmore notes, “I am sure you are studying Science and Health, you are gain-
ing new and better views than ever of God,” and links another Indian figure to
Christian Science – “I have just written Tsianina. She tells me that she is earnestly
studying Christian Science.” This refers to Tsianina Redfeather, the great singer,
who we can see is part of Bonnin’s network of Native women artists, activists,
writers, and performers. Redfeather remained a devoted Christian Scientist for
her entire life. Also in a letter (July 9, 1921) sent to Bonnin by Adam Bennion,
the superintendent of the Commission of Education of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter Day Saints notes, “I am happy in the thought that you are read-
ing the The Book of Mormon, and trust that you will enjoy it.” Bonnin wrote
critically about the negative effects of forced Christianization on Indian people,
especially schoolchildren, and yet she distinguished between positive aspects
of Christian reformers and the problems perpetuated by “so-called Christian
Americans.”
48 There has been ample scholarship about Gertrude Bonnin’s literary work.
What follows is a selective bibliography. Susan Bernandin, “The Lessons of a
Sentimental Education:  Zitkala-Sa’s Autobiographical Narratives,” Western
American Literature Vol. 32, No. 3, 1997, 212–38; Vanessa Holford Diana,
“ ‘Hanging in the Heart of Chaos’:  Bi-Cultural Limbo, Self-(Re)Presentation,
and the White Audience in Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories,” Cimarron
Review 121, 1997, 154–72; Jessica Enoch, “Resisting the Script of Indian
Education:  Zitkala-Sa and the Carlisle Indian School,” College English Vol.
65, No. 2, 2002, 117–41; Cutter, “Zitkala-Sa’s Autobiographical Writings”;
Robert Allen Warrior, “Reading American Indian Intellectual Traditions,”
World Literature Today 66, 1992, 236–40; Dexter Fischer, “Zitkala-Sa:  The
Evolution of a Writer,” American Indian Quarterly 5, 1979, 229–38; Lukens,
“The American Story of Zitkala-Sa”; D. K. Mesenheimer Jr., “Regionalist
Bodies/Embodied Regions:  Sarah Orne Jewett and Zitkala-Sa,” in Breaking
Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing, edited by Sherrie
A. Inness and Diana Royer (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), 109–23;
Julianne Newmark, “ ‘Writing (and Speaking) in Tongues’ Zikala-Sa’s American
Indian Stories,” Western American Literature Vol. 37, No. 3, 2002, 335–58.
49 For more on the feminist sociological approach to theorizing intersectional-
ity see: Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity
Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, 1992,
1241–2.
50 Kristin Herzog, “Gertrude Bonnin,” in The Heath Anthology of American
Literature (fifth edition), edited by Paul Lauter.
51 Arthur C. Parker was the editor of the SAI’s journal from the summer of 1916
until the summer of 1918. The look and feel of the journal changed markedly
between 1916 and 1917, from matte paper to a more glossy cover that often
featured a photographic portrait of a prominent Indian member, such as that of
Angel De Cora in 1919 under Bonnin’s editorship.
52 Bonnin was not alone in gaining support from organizations that were run
by white women and in working with Native organizations. Laura Cornelius
Kellogg (1880–1947) was a founding member of the SAI who was committed
to self-sustaining economic development on Native reservations. Ruth Muskrat
 Red Bird 221

Bronson (1897–1982) was the first Indian woman to graduate from Mount
Holyoke College (MA) in 1925. Bronson received national attention when
she became the first American Indian student delegate at the World Student
Christian Federation’s annual conference, in 1922 in Beijing, China. A year later,
she presented her views on Indian affairs to the Committee of 100 meeting in
Washington, DC, and in 1930, Bronson accepted an offer to fill the newly cre-
ated position of guidance and placement officer for the BIA. In 1944, Bronson
published Indians Are People Too (New  York:  Friendship Press). Charles
Eastman also worked with the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA,
founded in 1879), which had formed to fight the encroachment of white set-
tlements onto Indian lands. Less politically oriented groups also arose out of
artistic communities. Mabel Dodge Luhan, for example, moved to Taos, New
Mexico (1919) to start a literary colony inspired by (and supportive of) nearby
indigenous peoples’ cultural traditions and practices. An outgrowth of this col-
ony was the formation of the AIDA by John Collier in 1923 to fight to protect
religious freedom and tribal property rights for Native Americans in the United
States. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), founded in 1868
by Jane Cunningham Croly (1829–1901), was also devoted to Indian issues. In
1921, the GFWC created the Indian Welfare Committee, which worked toward
improving both education and health facilities on reservations, as well as pre-
serving Native American culture. In addition, other Indian and non-Indian
women activists became involved with reformist agendas by becoming active in
the YWCA.
53 On March 8, 1920, Bonnin received a receipt from the League of American Pen
Women for her yearly dues; for the receipt see: Box 2, Folder 11, MSS 1704,
LTPSC. For more about the National League of American Pen Women see:
http://www.americanpenwomen.org/history/history.cfm (accessed September
26, 2014). There is little within Bonnin’s personal papers to show the concrete
connections that she may have formed with other members of the League,
although it is likely that members who lived in DC might have found occasions
to meet, at least informally.
54 Princess Blue Feather to Gertrude Bonnin, April 1922, Letter, MSS 1704, LTPSC.
55 Gertrude Bonnin to Princess Blue Feather, May 2, 1922, Letter, MSS
1704, LTPSC.
56 See:  Patricia Okker, Our Sister Editors:  Sarah J.  Hale and the Tradition of
Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1995).
57 In the 1920s, Antonio Luhan, a member of the Taos Pueblo, showed John Collier
the living conditions among American Indian communities in the surrounding
area, which provided evidence necessary for Collier to found the AIDA. In 1933,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Collier as the new commissioner of
Indian affairs, which almost immediately led to the Indian Reorganization Act
(1934). For more on the AIDA and John Collier see: John Collier Papers (MS
146), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. Also see: Ken R. Philp,
John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920–1954 (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 1977) and Lawrence C. Kelly, The Assault on Assimilation: John
Collier and the Origins of Indian Policy Reform (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1963).
222 Indigenous Intellectuals

58 Marianna Burgess to Zitkala-Sa, May 6, 1922, Letter, MSS 1704, LTPSC.

59 Arnold Krupat, For Those Who Come After:  A  Study of Native American
Autobiography (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1985); John Sekora,
“Black Message/White Envelope:  Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the
Antebellum Slave Narrative,” Callaloo No. 32, Summer 1987, 482–515;
Winifred Morgan, “Gender-Related Difference in the Slave Narratives of
Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass,” American Studies Vol. 35, No. 2, Fall
1994, 73–94.
60 Lawler, Seventy Years of Textbook Publishing, 10.
61 Ibid., 150.
62 Ibid., 150.
63 Ginn and Company to Gertrude Bonnin, June 8, 1926, Letter, and Gertrude
Bonnin to Ginn and Company, June 11, 1926, Letter, MSS 1704, LTPSC.
64 Gertrude Bonnin to Ginn and Company, June 19, 1930, Letter, MSS
1704, LTPSC.
65 Piatote, Domestic Subjects, 3.
66 For more on settler-nationalism in connection with domesticity see ibid., 4.
67 Gertrude Bonnin, “America, Home of the Red Man,” in The American Indian
Magazine Vol. 4, No. 4, 165.
68 For more discussion and theorization of the historical situations where Native
people are not quite citizens yet find themselves defined within the boundar-
ies of the United States as a nation see: Piatote, Domestic Subjects and Mark
Rifkin, Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
69 Bonnin, “America, Home of the Red Man,” 165.
70 Ibid., 165.
71 Ibid., 165.
72 Ibid., 165.
73 Ibid., 165.
74 Ibid., 166.
75 For more about Robert Latham Owen Jr. see:  Wyatt W. Belcher, “Political
Leadership of Robert L. Owen,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 31, Winter 1953–4,
361–71. Kenny L. Brown, “A Progressive from Oklahoma:  Senator Robert
Latham Owen, Jr.,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 62, Fall 1984, 232–65, and “Robert
Latham Owen, Jr.:  His Careers as Indian Attorney and Progressive Senator.”
PhD dissertation (Oklahoma State University, 1985). Edward Elmer Keso, The
Senatorial Career of Robert Latham Owen (Gardenvale P.Q., Canada: Garden
City Press, 1938). As well as the following written by Owen. Robert Latham
Owen, The Federal Reserve Act (New York: Century Co., 1919); “The Origin,
Plan, and Purpose of the Currency Bill,” North American Review 19, October
1913, 556–69; The Russian Imperial Conspiracy, 1892–1914:  The Most
Gigantic Intrigue of All Time (Baltimore, MD: Sun Book & Job Printing Office,
1926); “What Congress Should Do to Develop an American Mercantile Marine,”
Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 6, October 1915, 48–60; and
Where Is God in the European War? (New York: Century Company, 1919).
76 Rather than offer an extensive historiography of World War I, I  want to
acknowledge changes in historical scholarship following World War II. By the
1950s, many historians (American, but European as well) viewed World War
 Red Bird 223

I as caused by powerful forces that were pushing Europe into war: nationalism,
imperialism, militarism, and the system of alliances. However, other scholars
returned to an older idea that German imperial ambitions were to blame  –
”[The German] bid for continental supremacy was certainly decisive in bring-
ing on the European War.” See British historian A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for
Mastery in Europe (1954). In this latter sense, the causes behind World War
I were certainly imperial in nature while U.S. rhetoric claimed to fight in defense
of democracy.
77 Bonnin, “America, Home of the Red Man,” 166.
78 Ibid., 167.
79 C. F. Hauke to Gertrude Bonnin, September 1922, Letter, MSS 1704, LTPSC.
80 Ibid.
81 Gertrude Bonnin to Vera Connolly, Letter, September 24, 1928, MSS
1704, LTPSC.
82 Ibid. For a detailed discussion of the letterhead also see: Ada Mahasti Norris,
“Zitkala-Sa and National Indian Pedagogy:  Storytelling, Activism, and the
Project of Assimilation,” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A:  The
Humanities and Social Sciences Vol. 65, No. 1, 2004, 147.
83 Harry C. James to Gertrude Bonnin, Letter, July 6, 1921, MSS 1704, LTPSC.
James writes on behalf of the National Association to Help the Indian
(Headquarters:  Dark Cloud Lodge, Los Angeles, CA). This inquiry relates
to H.R. Bill 2432 and “this little Association of ours” that “is to form an
Association of influential people interested in helping the American Indian . . . to
secure absolute religious liberty for the Indian, citizenship and economic inde-
pendence . . . I would like very much to have your ideas about the Association.”
84 Gertrude Bonnin to Carlos Montezuma, December 27, 1915, Letter. In another
letter (December 6, 1918), Bonnin writes extensively about the need to use tele-
grams rather than letters to conduct business. “That wire to the President was
simply one of many ways in which this matter must be pressed for consideration
and action by the American people.” For more on the confusion and tension
white Americans expressed regarding Indian people using technology see Philip
Deloria’s chapter on “Technology” in Indians in Unexpected Places.
85 G. Bonnin to C. Montezuma, October 26, 1918, Letter, see: Carlos Montezuma
Papers (CMP), Center for Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College, Durango, CO.
86 G. Bonnin to C.  Montezuma, December 27, 1915, Letter. G.  Bonnin to
C.  Montezuma, October 26, 1918, Letter; see:  CMP, Center for Southwest
Studies, Fort Lewis College, Durango, CO.
87 For more on literary historical examines of the context in which Bonnin
would have been part of wider readerly and writerly communities during
the turn of the century see the following:  Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures
of Letters:  Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America
(Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1993); George Shumway, Creating
American Civilization:  A  Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic
Discipline (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Anne E. Boyd,
Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture
in America (Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Susan
Mizruchi, The Rise of Multicultural America:  Economy and Print Culture,
1865–1915 (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
224 Indigenous Intellectuals

88 Cosmopolitan Vol. 65, No. 6, November 1918, Hatcher Graduate Library,

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
89 Gouverneur Morris, “Drifting Smoke,” Cosmopolitan, November 1918, 63.
90 Ibid., 64.
91 Ibid., 118.
92 Ibid., 119.
93 This story also echoes James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers:  The Sources
of the Susquehanna (1823). Also see:  Susan Scheckel, The Insistence of the
Indian:  Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
(Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1999). Scheckel examines the
Supreme Court’s decision on Indian land rights and Cooper’s frontier romance
The Pioneers to argue that both worked to legitimate American ownership
claims over indigenous lands while also seeking to diminish any guilt related to
violent conquest by attempting to incorporate Indians into America’s political
“family.”
94 Morris, “Drifting Smoke,” 67.
95 Gertrude Bonnin to Carlos Montezuma, June 30, 1919, Letter, CMP, Center for
Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College, Durango, CO.
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid.
98 Ibid.
99 “The earliest appropriations bills were written by select committees on instruc-
tion from the Committee of the Whole House, and later ones by the stand-
ing Committee on Ways and Means. As the appropriation requirements of the
government became more complex, the number of separate appropriation bills
prepared each year grew from one in 1789 to as many as 21 during the 1850s”
(3.2). “Between 1877 and 1885 eight appropriations bills were transferred from
the jurisdiction of the Appropriations Committee to the committees with legis-
lative jurisdiction. The agriculture bill, army bill, navy bill, Indian bill, District
of Columbia bill, post office bill, rivers and harbors bill, and diplomatic and
consular bill were given to the appropriate authorizing committees, while the
Appropriations Committee retained jurisdiction of the fortification, legislative,
executive and judicial, pension, sundry civil, and deficiency bills only” (3.4).
“Petitions from the 1890s and into the 20th century primarily concern the
education of young Indians and call for the reorganization of the Government’s
less-than-successful efforts to provide services to the Indian tribes. . . . The
number of petitions among the records of the committee diminishes dramati-
cally after the late 1920s, and, for some Congresses, no petitions are pres-
ent”(13.32). From: “Chapter 3. Records of the Committee on Appropriations,”
in The Guide to Records of the U.S. House of Representatives at the National
Archives, 1789–1989 (Record Group 233).
100 For more on the formation of race, sexuality, and gender with regards to
imperial practices and colonial ideology see:  Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial
Eyes:  Travel Writing and Transculturation (New  York:  Routledge, 1992);
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather:  Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the
Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Margaret Jacobs, Engendered
Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879–1934 (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1999); Laura Wexler, Tender Violence:  Domestic Visions
 Red Bird 225

in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina

Press, 2000).
101 For more on California in relation to “Club Women” like Burgess see: Kevin Starr,
Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986); Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in
Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992); Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys
to Los Angeles and other Real and Imagined Places (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1996); Norman Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure
of Memory (New York: Verso, 1997).
102 The Curtis Act of 1898 aimed to amend the Dawes Act by extending allotment
policies, whether they wanted it or not, to the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee,
Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, and Seminole) in the Indian Territory
(present-day Oklahoma), For more on this policy history see:  Francis Paul
Prucha, Indian Policy in the United States (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska
Press, 1981).
103 Marianna Burgess to Gertrude Bonnin, October 20, 1921 and November 8,
1921, Letters, MSS 1704, LTPSC. Membership records from Chicago Monthly
Meeting show Mariana Burgess was present. Quaker Monthly Meeting
Minutes (May 10, 1914).
104 Gertrude Bonnin to Marianna Burgess, December 1921, Letter, MSS 1704, LTPSC.
105 In 1921, $200 had the same buying power as approximately $2,400 has in
2009. Fifty dollars in 1921 would amount to $599 today, suggesting that
Bonnin and other speakers had to hustle to supplement their earnings from
publishing and elsewhere with speaking engagements.
106 Gertrude Bonnin to Dr.  C.  A. Burgess, December 30, 1921, Letter, MSS
1704, LTPSC.
107 Ibid.
108 Carol Kort, “Zitkala-Sa,” A to Z of American Women Writers, Revised Edition,
A to Z of Women (New York: Infobase Publishing, Jan. 1, 2007), 364. Also
see: P. Jane Hafen, “Zitkala Sa,” in Encyclopedia of North American Indians,
edited by Frederick E. Hoxie (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 708–10;
Renee Melissa Henderson, “Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, Zitkala-Sa,” Voices
from the Gaps. http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/bonnin_gertrude_
simmons_zitkalasa.html (accessed January 24, 2007); Liz Sonneborn,
“Gertrude Simmons Bonnin,” A to Z of American Indian Women, Revised
Edition, 20–4. New York: Facts On File, 2007.
109 Piatote, Domestic Subjects and Frederick E.  Hoxie, This Indian Country:
American Indian Activists and the Place They Made (New  York:  Penguin
Press, 2012).
110 See note 8 for sources on sentimentality, and see note 45 for more on
romance and sentimentality in relation to the discourses pertaining to late
nineteenth-century womanhood.
111 Philip J. Deloria on “Music” in Indians in Unexpected Places points to how
promotional materials for Tsianina’s performances turned on her authentic-
ity. “Tsianina, one brochure proclaimed, was not a made-up Indian. Rather,
she was ‘full blooded’ and a Native ‘aristocrat’ (a descendent of Tecumseh,
no less)” (213). Michael V.  Pisani also connects playing Indian with music
and the stage in “ ‘I’m an Indian Too’:  Playing Indian in Song and on Stage,
226 Indigenous Intellectuals

1900–1946,” in Imagining Native America in Music (New Haven, CT:  Yale

University Press, 2005). Also see: Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernandez, Unspeakable
Violence:  Remapping U.S.  and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2011) for more on examining notions of citizenship,
silence, violence, and discipline by revisiting histories where nonwhites partici-
pated in violence against indigenous peoples. Although Guidotti-Hernandez is
referring to actual battles, it seems logical to consider the way cultural violence
was committed through the perpetuation of a national imaginary that distorted
Native history and agency.
112 Gertrude Bonnin to Dr.  C.  A. Burgess, December 30, 1921, Letter, MSS
1704, LTPSC.
113 My brief references to the work of Ella Deloria and Ruth Bronson rely on
David L.  Moore’s excellent overview of critical archival sources. See:  David
L. Moore, “ ‘The Literature of this Nation’: LaVonne Ruoff and the Redefinition
of American Literary Studies,” in Studies in American Indian Literatures Vol.
17, Iss. 2, New  York, Summer 2005, 63–70, 113. For more on Ella Deloria
in a comparative context see:  Maria Eugenia Cotera, Native Speakers:  Ella
Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture
(Austin:  University of Texas Press, 2008). For a brief biography of Ruth
Muskrat Bronson see: Mount Holyoke Historical Atlas Research Project; also
for more on Bronson and other Native students at Mount Holyoke see: Mount
Holyoke College. Students and Alumnae Profiles and Statistics Collection,
Archives and Special Collections, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA.
114 M. Burgess to G. Bonnin, December 20, 1921, Letter, MSS 1704, LTPSC.
115 Other committees operating under Public Welfare by this club included: Child
Welfare, Public Health, and Industrial and Social Conditions.
116 For more on the complicated history of all-female organizations’ activist
work see: Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American
History (Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 1992); Lori D. Ginzberg,
Women and the Work of Benevolence:  Morality, Politics, and Class in the
Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press,
1992); Ellen Carol Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage:  The Emergence of an
Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1999).
117 For more on Stella Atwood and John Collier as cultural relativists who
aimed to revise assimilation ideology and were critical to implementing ele-
ments of white culture that they viewed as positively shaping Indian policy
see: Karin L. Huebner, “An Unexpected Alliance: Stella Atwood, the California
Clubwomen, John Collier, and the Indians of the Southwest, 1917–1934,” in
Pacific Historical Review Vol. 78, No. 3, 2009, 337–66.
118 For more on reform activities in California and the Indian New Deal
see: Kenneth R. Philp, Termination Revisited: American Indians on the Trail to
Self-Determination, 1933–1953 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
Also see Lawrence C. Kelly, The Assault on Assimilation: John Collier and the
Origins of Indian Policy Reform (University of New Mexico, 1983).
119 Tisa Wenger, “Land, Culture, and Sovereignty in the Pueblo Dance Controversy,”
in Journal of the Southwest, Summer 2004, 381.
 Red Bird 227

120 For more about the Lenroot bill in the context of the Bursum bill and the
Omnibus bill and regarding Collier’s perspective see:  Donald Lee Parman,
Indians in the American West in the Twentieth Century (Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1994), 79.
121 Tisa Joy Wenger, We Have a Religion:  The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance
Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill:  University of
North Carolina Press, 2009), 131.
122 Stella Atwood to Gertrude Bonnin, January 2, 1924, Letter, MSS 1704, LTPSC.
123 Mrs. Felix T. McWhirter to Major R. T. Bonnin, March 6, 1924, Letter, MSS
1704, LTPSC.
124 Figure  6:  Photograph by Gertrude Kasebier (ca. 1898); “Gum-bichromate:
‘Zitkala-Sa’ holding a violin” (Kasebier Collection, Smithsonian Images,
no. 2004–57782). Important to note is Laura Wexler’s work in Tender Violence:
Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill:  University of
North Carolina Press, 2000), in which she reads some of Gertrude Kasebier’s
photographs. Her reading implicates Kasebier, as it does other white female
photographers, in reproducing a middle-class white cultural logic regarding
presentation that is meant to signify America and imperialism. For Wexler,
Native American subjects who sat for these photographs were part of
U.S.  imperialism because of efforts to assimilate and misappropriate them,
regardless of their agency. My reading runs against this grain a little to sug-
gest that Bonnin’s familiarity with Kasebier, and other white women like her,
enabled Bonnin to have a hand in the types of images created to portray her.
I  also read Kasebier’s portraits of Bonnin as attempting to position Bonnin
in opposition to, or as an alternative to, the type of imagery that was being
created to market Indian actors who performed with shows like Buffalo Bill
Cody’s Wild West. Also, given that Bonnin performs the role of an “Indian
maiden” in a play at the Carlisle School’s commencement ceremonies in
1899, just a year after she sat for Kasebier, one can see the extent to which
Bonnin uses different modes of dress to appeal to different audiences for spe-
cific occasions. Also see: Elizabeth Hutchinson, “Native American Identity in
the Making: Gertrude Käsebier’s ‘Girl with the Violin,’ Exposure,” Exposure
Special Issue on Photography, Race and American Society Vol. 33, No. 1/2,
Fall 2000, 21–32.
125 For conventions regarding photographic portraits see:  Alan Trachtenberg,
Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker
Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990).
126 Hutchinson, “Native American Identity in the Making.”
127 Ibid.
128 Early American writers, heavily influenced by Chateaubriand and Rousseau’s
ideas, brought sentimentality and romance together to do ideological work
in their treatment of “the noble savage.” For more about how this idea devel-
oped and spread see: Robert Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the
American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New  York:  Vintage, 1979)
and my discussion in note 46.
129 Photographer and critic Joseph T. Keiley (1869–1914) also took photographic
portraits of Gertrude Bonnin in 1898, which were first exhibited in Philadelphia
228 Indigenous Intellectuals

and later became part of Alfred Stieglitz’s (1864–1946) collection. In July 1899,
Alfred Stieglitz published five of Kasebier’s photographs in Camera Notes,
declaring her “beyond dispute, the leading artistic portrait photographer of
the day.” Alfred Stieglitz, “Our Illustrations,” Camera Notes Vol. 3, No. 1, July
1899, 24. Keiley celebrated her rise to fame: “a year ago Käsebier’s name was
practically unknown in the photographic world . . . Today that name stands first
and unrivaled.” “The Philadelphia Salon:  Its Origin and Influence,” Camera
Notes Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1899, 126. I  use Kasebier’s portraits given her
interest in presenting Indian people as they lived versus the images created by
photographers like Edward Curtis (1868–1952), who sought to memorialize
Indian people by framing them within a “vanishing American” narrative. For
more on the problematics of this narrative see:  Brian Dippie, The Vanishing
American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Lawrence: University Press
of Kansas, 1982).
130 Figure 7: “Platinotype: Sioux girl, ‘Zitkala-Sa,’ with book in her lap; floral wall-
paper in background,” by Gertrude Kasebier (ca. 1898) (Kasebier Collection,
Smithsonian Images, no. 2004–57783).
131 Most middle-class American women of the late nineteenth century lived in the
domestic realm caring for small children, tending to ill or aged adults, and
managing the daily chores of the household. As Angel Kwolek-Folland has
shown, domesticity itself became idealized such that it could be moved (via
objects) from place to place vis-à-vis the materiality of the home. A desire to
stabilize and standardize American social institutions played out within late
Victorian home culture that was physically and spiritually designed and guided
by women. See: Angel Kwolek-Folland, “The Elegant Dugout: Domesticity and
Moveable Culture in the United States, 1870–1900,” American Studies Vol. 25,
No. 2, Fall 1984, 21–37.
132 For American literary realism see:  Patricia Okker, “Native American
Literatures and the Canon: The Case of Zitkala-Sa,” in American Realism and
the Canon, edited by Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst (Newark: University
of Delaware Press, 1994), 87–101; Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of
American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). For the dis-
tinction between realism and naturalism see: June Howard, Form and History
in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1985).
133 Hutchinson, “Native American Identity in the Making,” 27.
134 Elizabeth Hutchinson, The Indian Craze:  Primitivism, Modernism, and
Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915 (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2009).
135 Eugene Gruenberg was a graduate of the Vienna Conservatory, where he was a
close friend of conductor Arthur Nikisch (1855–1922). In 1878 he joined the
orchestra of the Leipzig Opera under Nikisch. In 1889, Gruenberg left to play
in the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) now under Nikisch. When Nikisch
left the BSO to return to Germany in 1895, Gruenberg became head of the vio-
lin department at the New England Conservatory of Music, where he remained
for the rest of his life. In 1897, Gruenberg published The Violinist’s Manual,
which was revised in 1919 under the title Violin Teaching and Violin Studies
 Red Bird 229

with a preface by Fritz Kreisler. For more on Gruenberg see: Eugene Gruenberg

Papers (MS Mus 234.2). Houghton Library, Harvard University.
136 The Sun, March 25, 1900 (New  York), Library of Congress:  www.loc.gov/
chroniclingamerica (accessed September 26, 2014).
137 In regards to the fashion history of Native Americans I  consulted the fol-
lowing: Theodore Brasser, Native American Clothing: An Illustrated History
(Firefly Books, 2009); Josephine Paterek, Encyclopedia of American Indian
Costume (New  York:  Norton, 1994); Smithsonian Institution, Identity by
Design:  Tradition, Change, and Celebration in Native Women’s Dresses
(Washington, DC, 2007). The aforementioned photograph was printed by
Underwood & Underwood, MSS 1704, LTPSC.
138 For more about the life of Sitting Bull see: Robert M. Utley, Sitting Bull: The
Life and Times of an American Patriot (New York: Holt, 1993); Stanley Vestal,
Sitting Bull: Champion of the Sioux (1931, reprinted 1989); Ernie LaPointe,
Sitting Bull: His Life and Legacy (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2009). For more
details regarding the professional relationship between Cody and Sitting Bull
see:  Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America:  William Cody and the Wild
West Show (New  York:  Knopf Doubleday Publishing, 2005). Also see:  Joy
S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History
(New  York:  Hill and Wang, 2000) and L. G. Moses, Wild West Shows and
the Images of American Indians, 1883–1933 (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1996).
139 It seems likely that this photograph was given as a token of friendship by
Bonnin to Miss Julia Thomas, MSS 1704, LTPSC.
140 For more on costuming in Bonnin’s life as well as that of her contemporar-
ies, see:  Waggoner, Fire Light:  “Wearing inappropriate Indian dress came
back to haunt Gertrude Simmons Bonnin later in life. When she and Pratt
lobbied against peyote use (and its advocate, ethnographer James Mooney),
Mooney pointed out to those attending the 1916 Senate Peyote Hearings that
Bonnin ‘claims to be a Sioux woman. [H]‌er dress is a woman’s dress from
some Southern tribe, as shown by the long fringes. The belt is a Navajo man’s
belt. The fan is a peyote fan, carried only by men, usually in the peyote cere-
mony’ ” (288). For an account of Bonnin’s counterattack on Mooney see: L. G.
Moses, The Indian Man: A Biography of James Mooney (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1984), 200–10.
141 The Sun Dance is a distinctive religious ceremony central to the cultural life
and identity of the indigenous peoples of the Great Plains. It developed among
the horse-mounted, bison-hunting nations during the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries. The nations at the core of its practice and that have con-
tinued it into the contemporary period include the Arapahos, the Cheyennes
(Southern and Northern), the Blackfoot (who include the Siksikas or Blackfoot
proper, the Bloods or Kainahs, and the Northern and Southern Piegans or
Pikunis), and the Sioux (including in particular the westernmost Sioux, who
are the seven tribes of the Lakota nation, but also including the Yanktons and
Santees, who comprise the six tribes of the Dakota nation). From these four
nations, the Sun Dance ceremony spread to the Kiowas and Comanches, who
ranged the Southern Plains, and to Northern Plains nations such as the Plains
230 Indigenous Intellectuals

Crees of Saskatchewan and the Sarcees of Alberta, as well as other Plains

peoples, including the Arikaras, Assiniboines, Crows, Gros Ventres, Hidatsas,
Mandans, Pawnees, Plains Ojibwas, Poncas, Shoshones, and Utes. David J.
Wishart, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska
Press, 2011). Also see:  Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music and Culture
(Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1992); George Amos Dorsey, The
Arapaho Sun Dance: The Ceremony of the Offerings Lodge. Field Columbian
Museum Publication, no.  75 (Chicago:  Field Museum of Natural History,
1903); William E. Farr, The Reservation Blackfeet, 1882–1945: A Photographic
History of Cultural Survival (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986).
142 Catherine Parsons Smith, “An Operatic Skeleton on the Western
Frontier: Zitkala-Sa, William F. Hanson, and The Sun Dance Opera,” Women
and Music, January 2001, 1.
143 There were several “Indianist” operas by white composers in the early twen-
tieth century such as: Arthur F. Nevin (1907). Poia, grand opera performed at
Carnegie Hall; Charles Wakefield Cadman (1912). Daoma: Ramala (Land of
Misty Water), written in collaboration with Francis LaFlesche, opera in four
acts performed at the Metropolitan Opera, New York; Eleanor Everest Freer
(1927). The Chilkoot Maiden, opera in one act performed at Skagway, Alaska;
Ernest Trow Carter (1931). The Blonde Donna: The Fiesta at Santa Barbara,
opera comique performed at the Heckscher Theater, New York; Julia Frances
Smith (1939). Cynthia Parker, opera in one act performed at North Texas State
University, Denton.
144 Hafen, Dreams and Thunder, 127.
145 Review, Deseret Evening News, May 26, 1914, MSS 299; William F. Hanson
Collection; University Archives; L.  Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold
B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. Hafen, Dreams and Thunder, 127.
146 Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of
Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2011),
222. For more on the history of U.S.  legal prohibitions against indigenous
social and cultural practices and “technologies of power” see: Thomas Biolsi,
Organizing the Lakota:  The Political Economy of the New Deal on the
Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservation (Tucson:  University of Arizona Press,
1992), 7–10.
147 Bonnin’s engagement with strategic essentialism in this period parallels the way
identity as performance has been theorized in postcolonial, queer, gender, and
performance studies. My thinking has been informed by: Gayatri Spivak (In
Other Worlds, 202–15; Outside, 3–10) and “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg’s Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture
(1988); Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking:  Feminism, Nature, and Difference
(1989); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993); Homi K. Bhahba, The
Location of Culture (1994); Jose Esteban Munoz, Disidentifications, Queers
of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999). Another useful way of
thinking about identity stems from Satya Mohanty’s critique of Spivak. See;
Satya Mohanty, “The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity,” in Reclaiming
Identity:  Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, edited by
Paula Moya and Michael Hames-Garcia (Berkeley:  University of California
 Red Bird 231

Press, 2000). In postpositivist realist theory, according to Mohanty, under-

standing emerges from past and present experiences and interactions as inter-
preted in sociopolitical contexts. Understanding identity is relative to one’s
experiences as a raced, gendered, classed, nationalized, etc., being. For Bonnin
and other oppressed peoples to define and articulate their social, economic,
and political realities in their own terms becomes part of an ongoing move-
ment to show how structural forces shape their lives and how they act within
the context of such forces. In short, identities are both constructed and real,
identities are mediated through cognitive and social processes, knowledge gar-
nered in the context of oppression should be afforded epistemic privilege, and
the power of individual and collective agency should be part of discussions of
identity.
148 MSS 1704; Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin Collection; 20th–21st Century
Western and Mormon Americana; L.  Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold
B.  Lee Library, Brigham Young University. MSS 299; William F.  Hanson
Papers; L. Tom Perry Special Collections; Arts & Communications Archives;
1130 Harold B. Lee Library; Brigham Young University.
149 Pamela Karatonis and Dylan Robinson, eds., Opera Indigene:  Re/presenting
First Nations and Indigenous Cultures (Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 199.
150 New  York Light Opera Guild advertisement for “The Sun Dance” featuring
Erika Zaranova and Chief Yowlache [sic]. MSS 299, LTPSC. Yowlachie (or
Daniel Simmons) was born in Washington in 1891 and died in 1966 in Los
Angeles. A member of the Yakima tribe in Washington, he began as an opera
singer, but in the 1920s switched to film. Over the next twenty-five years he
played roles ranging from Apache chief to comic relief sidekick, notably in Red
River (1948), where he traded quips with veteran scene stealer Walter Brennan.
Yowlachie also appeared as Geronimo in the 1950s syndicated television series
Stories of the Century starring Jim Davis as a railroad detective, and as I note
in Chapter 4, he was a featured performer at an evening event Luther Standing
Bear designed in 1931 to promote the National League for Justice to American
Indians, a white and Indian reform group based in Southern California.
151 L. T.  “Picturesque Indian Customs Form Basis of The Sun Dance, New
American Opera,” in Musical Courier, May 15, 1938, MSS 299; William
F. Hanson Collection; University Archives; L. Tom Perry Special Collections,
Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University.
152 Charles Wakefield Cadman Collection, 1905–36, HCLA 1460, Special
Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University.
153 The New  York Light Opera guild was founded in the spring of 1931, and
incorporated in the fall of the same year as a nonprofit educational and cul-
tural institution. According to its own record and under general director and
conductor John Hand, from 1931 to 1927, the aims of the Guild were:  “to
establish an adequate season of Light Opera, in Standard English, in New York
City, to become self-sustaining, to provide additional opportunities for debuts
before the public and press for young American singers, to provide singers
in minor roles, as well as members of the ensemble, with the advantages of
lectures and systematic instruction in the school of Light Opera and the histri-
onics of the stage . . . advancement in their singing careers, and to support the
232 Indigenous Intellectuals

American composer through the rendition of established works of new compo-

sitions.” MSS 299; William F. Hanson Collection; University Archives; L. Tom
Perry Special Collections, Harold B.  Lee Library, Brigham Young University.
Further abbreviated as:  MSS 299, LTPSC. Also see:  New  York Light Opera
Guild, Inc. to Editor, November 29, 1937, Letter, MSS 299, LTPSC, regarding
“The Sun Dance” by William F. Hanson. “After careful study of many works,
the Guild now sends you the enclosed article announcing the selection of “The
Sun Dance,” a romantic American Indian opera by William F.  Hanson, an
American Composer from Utah, for production.”
154 “Constitution and By-Laws of National Council of American Indians,”
Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection, Archives
and Special Collections, Frost Library, Amherst College, Amherst, MA.
155 Ibid.
156 Gertrude Bonnin to Miss Charlotte Jones, March 3, 1927, Letter, MSS 1704,
LTPSC. Also see:  Gertrude Bonnin to Rev. Philip Gordon, April 13, 1927,
Letter. She notes, “Last summer, Capt Bonnin and I travelled 10.600 miles by
auto visiting Indian reservations. We started about 25 Local Lodges. During the
Short Session of Congress, the National Council of American Indians cooper-
ated with the Indian Defense Association. We received numerous letters com-
mending our work.” Bonnin makes reference to key differences between the
NCAI and the SAI, which “was top heavy, without any body,” whereas “the
National Council has its Local Lodges in the field, and these discuss and han-
dle their own local problems,–then unite their forces in the Washington D.C.
Headquarters for general, mutual aid before Congress and the Departments.”
Image is courtesy of Frost Library, Archives and Special Collections at Amherst
College.
157 Gertrude Bonnin to Miss Maud B. Morris, January 10, 1927, Letter, MSS 1704,
LTPSC. Another letter, from Bonnin to J. R. H. King, April 5, 1927, offers an
expanded discussion of the NCAI’s formation and its progress to “help Indians
very materially.”
158 Although my example is a historical one, the issue of policing identity with
regards to Native Americans concerning nationalism and modernity remains a
critical arena for discussion and scholarly analysis. For more on the phenom-
ena of culture cops as a contemporary practice see: Lyons, X-Marks.
159 Carpenter, “Detecting Indianness.” I  focus on Bonnin’s correspondence and
also her musical career and her political activism as three different modes of
performance that she integrated into her life as an Indian intellectual.
160 Gertrude Bonnin to Rev. Philip Gordon, April 13, 1927 Letter, MSS
1704, LTPSC.
161 For more on Bonnin’s investment in determining Chinquilla’s real identity to
“define and assert her own” see: Carpenter, “Detecting Indianness.” For a dif-
ferent reading of Bonnin and performance see: Spack, “Zitkala-Sa, The Song of
Hiawatha, and the Carlisle Indian School Band.”
162 Rev. Philip Gordon to Gertrude Bonnin, April 1927, Letter, MSS 1704, LTPSC.
163 Laura I. Fletcher to Gertrude Bonnin, March 13, 1921, Letter, Box 2, Folder
19, MSS 1704, LTPSC.
 Red Bird 233

164 Gertrude Bonnin, Matthew K. Sniffen, and Charles Faben, Oklahoma’s Poor
Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes –
Legalized Robbery (Office of the Indian Rights Association, 1924).
165 For a comparative history that examines the construction of an American iden-
tity based on Indian people and immigrant groups see:  Alan Trachtenberg,
Shades of Hiawatha:  Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2005).
 4

Luther Standing Bear

Staging U.S. Indian History with Reel Indians

The land was ours to roam in as the sky was for them to fly in. We did not
think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams
with tangled growth, as “wild.” Only to the white man was nature a “wil-
derness” and only to him was the land “infested” with “wild” animals and
“savage” people.
– Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle

Introduction
Late in May 1931, not far from the back lots of Hollywood’s burgeon-
ing film industry, a coterie of writers, political reformers, and Native
American actors gathered at the home of Marian Campbell. They came to
Buckingham Road that evening for several reasons. Some came to meet and
mingle with screen celebrities such as Bill Hart, who had, a couple decades
earlier, established his career as a silent film cowboy.1 Others came to see the
less well-known Indian actors who were present, such as Nipo Strongheart,
Chief Yowlachie, and Luther Standing Bear. Still others came to see a per-
formance. Standing Bear, with help from his adopted niece May Jones, had
personally arranged the evening’s entertainment. Given his experiences as
both a performer and an advocate for Indian actors, he was well positioned
to manage white expectations for Indian performance.
First, guests gathered to see Sioux and Hopi dances. Next, they listened
to songs sung by young children, like the Chickasaw girl Pakali, followed
by a duet featuring contralto Lou-scha-enya and tenor Martin Napa. Their
performance was based on an excerpt from The Seminole  – an operetta
composed by their hostess, Campbell, a few years earlier. Next, guests were
surprised and excited to see Chief Yowlachie (or Daniel Simmons) perform
with his wife, Whitebird. Both were becoming recognizable for the roles
they played in movies and as members of Hollywood’s Indian acting com-
munity. Like many high-profile Native actors during this period, Yowlachie

234
 Luther Standing Bear 235

had been given the honorary title of “Chief” to use before his name. This
title was less tribal-national in origin and more a way for Hollywood to
signify his status as an important player. Yowlachie’s acting career is impres-
sive. He appeared in several films ranging from Ella Cinders in 1926 to Red
River in 1948 and The FBI Story in 1959. He also became well known for
his portrayal of Geronimo in the television series Stories of the Century.2
Yowlachie’s presence as a performer and guest signifies how Standing Bear
and Campbell could capitalize on the cultural power of Native celebrity by
building a network consisting of Indian activists who made their living pri-
marily through the entertainment business.
Although Standing Bear had designed the program to center on Indian
folk songs and traditional dances, he drew on his history with Wild West
touring companies to create a dramatic end to the evening by invok-
ing a popular narrative trope  – the covered wagon  – familiar to fans of
Western-themed movies and books.3 The attack on the covered wagon – and
the iconography of the wagon itself – had long been a key scene in William
“Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West. Less than a decade earlier, in 1923, James
Cruz and Paramount Pictures produced a popular film titled The Covered
Wagon that asserted its authenticity and cinematic power based on the real-
ism of scenes featuring Native extras. One program promoting the film
noted, “The attack of a thousand Indians on the two-mile wagon train is
one of the greatest thrills ever staged. These Indians were brought from res-
ervations hundreds of miles away to appear in this episode.”4
By employing a real covered wagon that evening, Standing Bear implored
guests to consider both the symbolic power of these sorts of performances,
and the fraught history of Native and white interactions they aimed to repre-
sent. No doubt guests were already familiar with filmic stories that featured
covered wagons on their way westward, and what that journey entailed for
both settlers and Native people. Standing Bear’s awareness of the roman-
tic, heroic, and tragic ways images of covered wagons had been used in
an American cultural imaginary enabled him to utilize the wagon in his
own staged performance to strategically thrill his guests. As an Indian actor
who had lived in the actual West of the late nineteenth century depicted by
Hollywood’s Westerns, and as an activist situated in Los Angeles during the
1930s, Standing Bear needed to be careful in his deployment of a public
“self.” He could use performances like this one to negotiate the complex
interplay between cultural aesthetics and political organizing as mutually
constitutive, rather than oppositional, categories.
The evening’s entertainment thus concluded when an old covered wagon
emerged in Campbell’s garden driven by young white men dressed as cow-
boys, accompanied by Bill Hart. After receiving robust applause, Hart dis-
pensed refreshments of Indian corn soup and hard tack. As Hart began
doling out soup to the audience, the show became a truly interactive expe-
rience, a film narrative come to life. Hart was simultaneously acting as a
236 Indigenous Intellectuals

cowboy and an ambassador of the Western film, engaging guests in a shared

performance space framed by Western themes.5
This moment offers a poignant example of how Standing Bear, like film
directors and traveling show entrepreneurs before him, designed a specta-
cle that capitalized on and transformed imagery from America’s Wild West
to command the attention of his audience. Like those earlier showmen,
Standing Bear reworked the imagery in order to make an argument about
politics and history. Set in the context of Hollywood, Standing Bear offered
a complex reimagining of the wagon as an iconic prop. His decision to use
the wagon and Bill Hart demonstrates not only a keen awareness of Western
tropes, but also of the powerful association Americans made between their
own identities as citizens and an idealized America built on westward
expansion. His choices for the performance reflect how the Wild West had
already been adapted into films. Standing Bear also seemed to recognize
his Hollywood setting as a site ripe for ironic self-referential humor – and
for powerful cultural politics. Despite the problematic ways Indian people
were often misrepresented in Western stories, Standing Bear reproduced the
powerful imaginary surrounding conquest and the slow disappearance of
the Indian. He did so, however, as part of a larger political strategy driven
by the social activism of Indian people working in Southern California. This
opening anecdote is emblematic of both the role of performance in mobi-
lizing public interest in Native issues and the significance of the political
networks created by performers in Hollywood in the 1930s, networks that
could include Chief Yowlachie and Bill Hart, as well as Marian Campbell
and Luther Standing Bear.
After the performances and the food, Campbell and Standing Bear turned
to the business of the evening. They needed to add members to their newly
formed political organization, the National League for Justice to American
Indians (NLJAI). For Standing Bear, reform and performance were not mutu-
ally exclusive; although Charles Eastman and Gertrude Bonnin “performed”
their own versions of Indianness, it is clear that the movie images Standing
Bear and his fellow actors created  – dynamic, generic, heroic, romantic  –
were slightly different from the Victorian poses of the early twentieth cen-
tury, and a cultural world apart from Chicago, where Carlos Montezuma
donned a tuxedo for his public appearances. Although promoted with the
trappings of Hollywood, the League was strictly political in its aims. It
built its platform on articles from the U.S. Constitution – namely, the First,
Fourth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Because the League identi-
fied itself as part of America’s democratic mission, it could argue in favor
of guaranteeing rights to Indians as citizens of the United States. Readers
of contemporary Native American politics will note that Standing Bear
ignored the Sixth Amendment, one of the articles key to claiming tribal
sovereignty. Like many of his peers (including Montezuma, Bonnin, and
Eastman), Standing Bear was more interested in the question of citizenship,
 Luther Standing Bear 237

which made sense given his urban context and career. The League’s claims
to America and Americanness resonated with Standing Bear’s use of Western
motifs in the performances for the evening meeting, even as the organization
actively revised and resisted the underlying logics of conquest supporting
such motifs of imperialist expansion.6
The League articulated five aims as critical to its mission:
• First: to “publish a true history of the American Indian.”
• Second: “to render assistance to the American Indians in marketing their
wares.”
• Third:  “to promote a study of the legal rights of American Indians as
citizens.”
• Fourth:  “to secure the admittance of Indian children to public schools
throughout America.”
• Fifth: to make “known to the peoples of the world the present conditions
and needs of the various tribes and nations of American Indians, whether
on reservations or elsewhere.”
The fifth and final aim was a familiar objective for progressive reformers
during this period, and the last clause was especially relevant to urban resi-
dents like Standing Bear, Strongheart, and Yowlachie. The fact of Indian
people living in cities and working as actors “marketing their wares” was
an important component of the League’s goals given that it wanted to
increase both employment and political opportunities for Native people.
Its emphasis on education and publishing a “true history” represented its
desire to change how the majority of Americans imagined Indian people
and Indianness as part of American culture. Such an education might push
back against the often derogatory and purely fictional representations that
characterized most silver screen Indians.7
The president of the League was Marian Campbell. As a white woman,
her role is not surprising given that she was a veteran of reform work in
California focused on Indian rights, where she had collaborated with vari-
ous women’s organizations. In addition, years before Campbell moved to
Los Angeles from Cleveland, she had begun work on her light opera based
on Indian themes.8 As a composer interested in Indian culture, Campbell’s
music aligned with the work of white Indianist composers and performers
as well as with the proliferation of an Indian curio market that sold Native
crafts or Native-themed crafts to white consumers through dealers and cata-
logues across the United States.9 Not long after divorcing her first husband, a
wealthy car manufacturer from Ohio, Campbell married Nipo Strongheart;
it is likely that a large part of her interest in promoting Native rights was
based on their relationship. As president, Campbell often spoke on behalf
of the League in public. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times a week
following the first meeting of the League, Campbell stated bluntly that “we
are the only Indian welfare organization seeking the abolition of our age-old
238 Indigenous Intellectuals

Bureau of Indian Affairs [BIA] and demanding that the American Indian
be recognized as an American citizen, treated as such, educated as such.”10
Although Campbell spoke the words, Standing Bear shared the desire for
recognition and the abolition of the BIA. His political vision for Native
people underpinned his participation in the League and reflected ideas artic-
ulated by Native intellectuals like Eastman and Bonnin. The abolition of the
BIA was a prominent topic in the pages of Montezuma’s Wassaja.
As first vice president of the League, Standing Bear worked as an advocate
for Native people who shared similar views. In addition to Campbell, other
white Americans joined the League to assist in their mission. Bill Hart was
named second vice president. Two white writers interested in Western history,
with a particular fondness for Native people, became members of the League’s
advisory board: E. A. Brininstool and Lucullus McWhorter. Both were part of
a broad and critical network of Indian publication and performance.
Three years earlier, Brininstool had worked with Standing Bear as an
editor for his book My People the Sioux, which when published in 1928
featured an introduction by Bill Hart. McWhorter’s involvement grew out
of his connection to a Native author, writer Christine Quintasket, who was
known by the pen name “Mourning Dove.”11 McWhorter had helped with
editing and publishing of her novel, Cogewea: The Half-Blood, in 1927.12
Consider the network active at Campbell’s home that night: singers, includ-
ing Yowlachie, who would go on to a Hollywood career; white and Native
actors Hart, Strongheart, and Standing Bear; and the editorial voices of
McWhorter and Brininstool, two writers and editors with strong ties to the
publishing business. Music, Hollywood, Publishing. Here is a network that
incorporated Indian performance, the film industry, and the literary and edi-
torial work of Native and white activists.13
In addition to white activists, celebrities, and writers, high-profile Native
figures were crucial for the League’s success. Nipo Strongheart, a well-known
actor and activist in his own right, was elected to serve as the executive
secretary and historian for the group. Strongheart actively recruited fellow
Indian performers to become members of the League, which is perhaps why
Yowlachie had been invited to perform at their first meeting at Campbell’s
home. In the years following their first meeting, Strongheart and Campbell,
together with Standing Bear and May Jones, traveled throughout California
to promote the League by giving a series of public lectures.14
As an activist, a writer, and a performer, Standing Bear offers a narrative
for understanding the path Native people could take from Carlisle in the
1880s to Los Angeles in the 1930s. The reform work that Standing Bear
became part of when he and Campbell invited friends to join the NLJAI
signals one specific example of a wider trend. There is no question that
changes in federal Indian policy that occurred in the 1930s were launched
from the West Coast. John Collier had in fact “discovered Indians” after he
moved from New York to California.15 The Association on American Indian
 Luther Standing Bear 239

Affairs had its roots in New Mexico and California, and the chief political
supporters of the Indian New Deal were (at least initially) people familiar
with the multicultural scene in the West.16 The reforms of the 1930s were
not so much products of tribal engagement (although that would come later
with groups like the National Congress of American Indians17) as they were
expressions of broad popular beliefs about Indians as inherently communal
(hence tribal) and consensual (hence governed by “councils” with no separa-
tion of powers). While continuously debated, the Collier reforms seem more
from above than from below, which is why highlighting Standing Bear’s
career helps emphasize the roles that Native people could play on-screen
and off, personally and politically.

Native Actors as Activists

Experiences in the film world led Strongheart and Standing Bear to the polit-
ical work surrounding citizenship. Two decades later, Strongheart reflected
back on these moments. In a piece for Wisconsin Magazine, “History in
Hollywood,” Strongheart comments on his life as a Native American per-
former and criticizes the role of historical research within the movie industry.
He notes the various historic and ethnic misrepresentations and misinterpre-
tations perpetuated by most Hollywood films. Strongheart had worked as
an advisor to filmmakers in order to argue for the importance of accurate
historical study and the procurement of “live material” to guarantee authen-
ticity within a given motion picture. His recollections offer a glimpse into the
costs and benefits for Indians of pitching themselves as the “live material”
that would grant ethnic authenticity to the emergent medium of film. Like
Eastman, Bonnin, Montezuma, and others, leading “Hollywood Indians”
were part of a network of Native intellectuals trying to develop an author-
itative voice with which they might speak to white Americans. Arguably,
Standing Bear was among one of the first to develop such a voice, demon-
strated by his political reform efforts, autobiographical texts, and acting
career. Standing Bear was not alone in these efforts because Strongheart had
served as a historical ethnologist and technical director for multiple produc-
tions, including at least seven films made between 1905 and 1952.18
As Native actors, Standing Bear and Strongheart aimed to use their posi-
tions in Hollywood to reshape some of the ways audiences might view and
desire Indian bodies portrayed on screen. Part self-promotion and part his-
tory lesson, Strongheart’s Wisconsin Magazine piece raised the specter that
haunted and defined performativity for Indians in Hollywood:  the vexed
question of authenticity. The desire to portray “real Indians,” and in effect to
have audiences experience “authentic” Indianness on-screen, enabled direc-
tors and producers to support the careers of a large number of Indian actors.
This often meant a great deal of material gain for Indian people as well as
an authoritative role for Native experts. As early as 1911, a large number of
240 Indigenous Intellectuals

Native people (many of them Sioux from the Great Plains) lived in Southern
California and worked in film. For many viewers, such Indian lives – wage-
workers in Hollywood, living far from ancestral homelands  – would be
defined as “inauthentic.” And yet a discourse of “ethnic” authenticity as a
means for defining Indianness permeated the productions involving these
Indian people, as the promotional materials for Cruze’s The Covered Wagon
made clear.19
Throughout Standing Bear’s lifetime, authenticity (as opposed to per-
formance) appeared as a discourse embedded thoroughly in the context of
Wild West shows, films, and even literary writing. These concepts  – one
focused on the wide world of the imaginary; the other on the wage-working
material practice of that same imaginary – tied discussions of “real” Indians
to the employment of actual Natives. In some significant ways, such ave-
nues for performance existed in tension with the types of images created
by Eastman, Montezuma, and Bonnin. Certainly all these Native writers,
like Standing Bear, engaged with questions surrounding authenticity. Their
politics of racial uplift and those of the Society of American Indians (SAI),
of which Henry Standing Bear (Luther’s younger brother) was a founding
member, led them to create local plays and pageants representing historical
accuracy and “ethnological truth.”20 But many SAI members believed that
the “barbaric” dances and violent clashes performed in Wild West narra-
tives – whether live or on-screen – would hurt Native American chances for
acceptance into American society.21 Of course, these images of barbarism
were bread and butter for the Hollywood film industry. But even as they
performed such images, Standing Bear and other Native actors and activists
like Strongheart and Yowlachie, and later Jim Thorpe, understood the SAI
complaint. They took up the mantle of authentic Indianness to claim posi-
tions of authority within cultural performance venues, to use that authority
to assert their own points of view. Standing Bear lived an extraordinary life
that represented the subtleties and complexities of strategic performances
of ethnic authenticity. His texts, whether written or spoken, at times rep-
licated dominant understandings of Indianness, while at other times criti-
cizing practices of domination carried out by white cultural producers and
political reformers. Always, Standing Bear resisted opportunities that auto-
matically foreclosed the possibility of Indian people to participate in shap-
ing modern U.S. society.22
As a film advisor, Standing Bear often spoke as an Indian expert to con-
firm the authenticity of a film’s sets, costumes, and plot. His insights did not
always result in more nuanced portrayals of Indian characters on-screen,
nor did his interpretation of Native history, culture, language, and behavior
always contradict dominant expectations of a director’s imagination or a
writer’s narrative when it came to representing Indian people. These perfor-
mances and the work of Native people within them raise important ques-
tions. What was the relationship between authenticity as a self-identity that
 Luther Standing Bear 241

generated wages in performance and a kind of self-authenticity that led one

to political commitments, writing, and efforts to change the structures of
representation? What kinds of things could compromise both the public and
private aspects of these performances of Indian self? By interrogating par-
ticular moments in Standing Bear’s life, we begin to answer these questions
and pinpoint specific aspects of his life that might be representative of how
other Native performers experienced acting and activism during this period.
For Standing Bear, entertainment became the realm where he could per-
form Indianness and advocate for more control over these performances to
shift dominant expectations regarding the portrayal of Indian people within
American culture. Popular demands to see Indians in Westerns could then
mean opportunities for Native actors to put on their own public meetings
and “shows” to engage audiences in different narratives regarding the West,
conquest, and nationalism.
The issue at hand for any Native actor was the simplicity of filmic rep-
resentations of Indianness, which resulted in diminishing the complexity of
historical realities, and the cultural specificity and diversity that has always
existed among and between indigenous peoples. As “Plains Indians” became
a type in movies the cultural particularities of peoples like the Apache,
Crow, Arapaho, and Cheyenne were erased  – by lumping them into one
simple ­category – viewers might learn names like Sioux and Comanche as
easily as they forgot Cherokee, Ojibwe, and Wampanoag.23 Nevertheless,
Standing Bear made an argument in favor of indigenous difference and
political agency. He was able to empower Indian actors through the Indian
Actors Association (IAA) and to spur the formation of reform groups, such
as the NLJAI during a time when Southern California became a place many
Native people associated with new career opportunities. The better wages
film offered enabled many Indian actors to escape the paternalism and
poverty characteristic of reservations in the 1920s and 1930s.24 Coming
to Hollywood also enabled Native people to engage with performativity
to build distinct networks that necessitated the “real Indian” performances
they were hired to portray. One way to connect Standing Bear to other
Native actors and Indian intellectuals during this period is to identify both
the employment and activist networks he navigated, to point out the limits
and possibilities emerging for him through these networks.

The Road Ahead for Luther Standing Bear

By the time he was sixty-three, Standing Bear had traveled far and wide
from the Nebraska Territory where he was born in 1868. His final home,
in Huntington Park, California, was where, at age fifty, he put pen to paper
to write his first book: My People the Sioux, published in 1928. As a writer,
Standing Bear aimed to educate his readers about “the truth” regarding the
first Americans. His first book, like the three that would follow, My Indian
242 Indigenous Intellectuals

Figure 9.  Chief Standing Bear full-length portrait.

Public Domain, Date:  ca. 1919. Subject:  Standing Bear, Luther, 1868?–1939.
Indians of North America – Clothing & dress – 1910–1920.
Notes: J236948 U.S. Copyright Office. Copyright by William Charles Thompson,
Alhambra, California. Format: Portrait photographs 1910–1920. Photographic
prints 1910–1920.
Source: Library of Congress.
 Luther Standing Bear 243

Boyhood (1931), Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933), and Stories of the Sioux
(1934), asserted such an aim in the preface. “I trust that in reading the con-
tents of this book the public will come to a better understanding of us,
I hope they will become better informed as to our principles, our knowledge,
and our ability. It is my desire that all people know the truth about the first
Americans and their relations with the United States Government.”25 His
autobiography focuses on the early years of his childhood growing up on
the Plains before he attended the Carlisle Industrial School in Pennsylvania
from 1879 to 1885. Through various recollections Standing Bear describes
his first home, a teepee, and how his parents called him Ota K’te, or “Plenty
Kill.” Later at school, he “was told to take a pointer and select a name for
myself from the list written on the blackboard” and gave himself the name
“Luther.” His younger brother Henry, born around 1869, also went on to
study at Carlisle from 1883 to 1891. According to school records, the older
Standing Bear arrived as “Kills Plenty” and the younger as “Kills Little”
before both took their new English names.26 This renaming policy was a
common practice for Native pupils at boarding schools. In this case, the
erasure of the brothers’ Lakota names works to undo the relational and
descriptive character of their Sioux names.27
Writing about his time at Carlisle, Standing Bear’s autobiography frames
him as a Native exemplar. According to My People the Sioux, from the
beginning of his time at the school, Standing Bear was viewed by the school’s
headmaster, Richard Henry Pratt, as someone other students should emu-
late.28 Pratt’s views may have been guided by the fact that Standing Bear
recognized in himself a sense of status because he was the son of a chief.
Through this, and his self-described “boyish willingness” to live up to the
standards of Pratt’s educational ideology, Standing Bear was sent to work
at the Wanamaker department store. Once there, he believed he was more
than a mere employee; Standing Bear was a representative of his family, his
tribe, and the rest of Carlisle’s students. His text emphasizes the moment
Pratt selected him to go to work at Wanamaker. “As I rose everybody turned
to look at me. It seemed as if I was walking on air. My feet did not seem to
touch the floor!”29 These feelings of exaltation make Standing Bear excep-
tional. Not every Indian kid might feel this way. His feelings of pride as a
Native representative echo similar emotions conveyed by the writings of
Eastman, Montezuma, and Bonnin. By the time Standing Bear is writing
about these early moments he had already been speaking on behalf of fel-
low Sioux, first for Cody’s Wild West and later when he worked for film-
maker Thomas Ince. The narrative from My People the Sioux continues to
refer explicitly to racial uplift and Pratt’s aims in sending Standing Bear to
Wanamaker. “ ‘My boy, you are going away from us to work for this school,
in fact, for your whole race.’ ”30 It was true. By age seventeen, Standing Bear
244 Indigenous Intellectuals

was indeed acting as a representative of an entire “race,” whether he liked

it or not. A  few years earlier, Pratt had succeeded in exposing the young
Standing Bear to other opportunities to travel with other Native students
beyond Carlisle to demonstrate to the world the success of the school’s mis-
sion in educating indigenous youths.

Performing for Carlisle and Wanamaker

On May 24, 1883, at the age of fifteen, Standing Bear made his first trip
to New  York City and his first public appearance. He lined up with fel-
low classmates in City Hall Park, in lower Manhattan, to lead the Carlisle
School’s marching band across the new Brooklyn Bridge. “When the parade
started I  gave the signal, and we struck up and kept playing all the way
across the great structure.”31 The Carlisle band had been invited to play as
part of an American ceremony, a cultural ritual to celebrate the bridge, the
great city of New  York, and the U.S.  nation.32 The desire for Indian par-
ticipation in this ceremony harkened back to Simon Pokagon’s role during
the opening of Chicago Day at the 1893 World’s Fair.33 The first readers
of My People the Sioux would sense a great deal of irony surrounding this
“national” moment of celebration and musical performance. Although the
band played for largely non-Indian audiences, Standing Bear narrates its
experience through a claim to Americanness and citizenship. “So the Carlisle
Indian band of brass instruments was the first real American band to cross
the Brooklyn Bridge, and I am proud to say that I was their leader” (empha-
sis mine).34 His use of “real” before American here denotes an inscription of
indigenous peoples into the U.S. nation as its founders, a subversive revision
of the historical moment that Pratt had designed for his school’s band to
help celebrate the Brooklyn Bridge as the symbol of American modernity.
No matter how grand a performance it was, the students were given no
break, as their trip around New York continued. With several engagements
throughout the city, including the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, the band
moved on to play at large churches in Philadelphia before finally making its
way back to Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Such a variety of locales suggests Pratt
aimed to showcase the talents of his Indian students to a range of audiences
who wanted to witness the now civilized Native musicians, thereby affirm-
ing Carlisle’s assimilationist success.
Although less enamored with Carlisle and Pratt, Gertrude Bonnin had
also seen her performance career take off through her association with the
school’s band less than a decade after Standing Bear’s appearance at the
Brooklyn Bridge. Highly critical of Pratt’s strict discipline and the forced
Christianization of Native students, Bonnin only taught at the school for
two years. As a gifted Native female singer, Bonnin was called on by Pratt
to perform with the school band in 1900 for a concert in Paris.35 That same
year, Bonnin left her teaching position to attend the Boston Conservatory
 Luther Standing Bear 245

of Music. Her decision to leave and study the violin made a lot of sense
given how critical Bonnin had become of Pratt’s assimilation methods.
Both Bonnin and Standing Bear found some success as musicians perform-
ing for large nonnative audiences eager to see civilized Indians playing
Western rather than tribal music.36 These sorts of performative moments,
for Standing Bear and Bonnin, were analogous to events where Eastman
and Montezuma spoke in public but with an important difference: although
the audiences were similar, the performers were not standing in as singular
representatives of their race, but as members of a group showcasing Indian
musical talent and skill. Carlisle’s Indian band demonstrated the promises
of American education and possible futures available for Native youth who
could now master musical aspects of white American culture. Whether they
liked it or not, they were participating in an effective advertising campaign
Pratt designed to sell his fellow Americans on the assimilation success of
Carlisle.
As Standing Bear’s schooling drew to a close, later in 1885, he went,
as promised, to work as a clerk at the Wanamaker department store in
Philadelphia. Pratt had been asked by Mr. Wanamaker to send the very best
students in his school. He told Standing Bear, “Go, and do your best. The
majority of white people think the Indian is a lazy good-for-nothing. They
think he can neither work nor learn anything; that he is very dirty. Now
you are going to prove that the red man can learn and work as well as the
white man.”37 So Standing Bear’s first real job was framed according to
the rhetoric of racial uplift. Whether performing for the band or working
for Wanamaker, Standing Bear learned from a young age that wherever he
would go he might be viewed as a representative of his race, and soon all
Indian people in America became his concern.38
Such labor did not come without emotional costs. Indeed, there are two
types of labor happening in these scenarios:  the ostensible labor of serv-
ing customers and the actual labor of being on display for an audience.
Experiencing both, Standing Bear reflected in his work at Wanamaker
the patronage and patriarchy governing Indian employment in perfor-
mance industries. When outlined within the emergence of a display culture
characterizing department stores at the turn of the twentieth century, his
appearance at Wanamaker suggests a different, racialized interpretation
of display,39 which fit all too easily within the rise of consumer capitalism
“Where Almost Anything May Be Bought.”40
Standing Bear understood the fraught racial politics surrounding his work
in Philadelphia. He recalled Pratt’s instructions clearly: “I was to prove to all
people that the Indians could learn and work as well as the white people; to
prove that Carlisle School was the best place for the Indian boy.”41 For the
most part, his experience at Wanamaker went well, although his classmate
Clarence Three Stars did not find it so “tolerable” and complained saying,
“Luther, my work is not to my liking  . . . as I  go behind the counters the
246 Indigenous Intellectuals

clerks all call me ‘Indian,’ and I don’t like it; it makes me nervous.”42 Three
Stars’ exposure to racial discrimination pushed him to return to life on his
reservation.43 Standing Bear was unable to convince Three Stars to stay, and
with him gone he “worked all the harder” at the store.44
Despite Standing Bear’s initial enthusiasm regarding his work at
Wanamaker, times grew tough once Three Stars left. One day, Standing Bear
was called up to the first floor, where a little glass house had been built. He
was asked to sit inside the house rather than behind the clerk’s counter. “So
everyday I was locked inside this little glass house, opening the trunks, tak-
ing out the jewels and putting price tags on them. How the white folks did
crowd around to watch me!”45 He understood these white onlookers were
under the impression that “an Indian would steal anything he could get his
hands on.”46 In his autobiography, Standing Bear further highlights these
negative attitudes and concludes that despite being put on display, he at least
received a promotion with more pay once he was working inside the glass
house. This is an important assertion, especially in the context of autobiog-
raphy as a self-reflexive genre, because it recognizes a need and desire for
material well-being. Both My People the Sioux (1928), where this incident is
reported, and Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933) are autobiographies narrat-
ing challenging personal experiences that can be read as complicated written
performances. They may not accurately reflect lived experience so much as
narrate key moments Standing Bear used to define his life and his philoso-
phy, from the position of a writer living in the late 1920s and early 1930s.47
While working for Wanamaker, Standing Bear first came into contact
with Cody’s Wild West and the great Lakota leader Sitting Bull (1831–90).
Their encounter was a strange one. One evening, going home from work,
Standing Bear:

bought a paper, and read that Sitting Bull, the great Sioux medicine man, was to
appear at one of the Philadelphia theaters. The paper stated that he was the Indian
who killed General Custer! The chief and his people had been held prisoners of war,
and now here they were to appear in a Philadelphia theater. So I determined to go
and see what he had to say, and what he was really in the East for (emphasis mine).48

Standing Bear strategically remembers how there must have been another
reason for Sitting Bull to make such an appearance; something else was
taking place that evening in a Philadelphia theater, which ran against the
grain of the newspaper’s statement regarding Custer’s killer. After paying
fifty cents to enter, Standing Bear witnessed “many Indian trappings” inside
the theater. With a stage before him, he saw four Indian men, one of whom
was Sitting Bull, seated. Part of the strangeness of the encounter lay in its
context. The other was an issue of mistranslation.
Standing Bear’s autobiography focuses on this moment by remembering
the translator for Sitting Bull and the ways he misrepresented the great lead-
er’s speech. This remembering of mistranslation raises the question of how
 Luther Standing Bear 247

language enabled American understandings of indigenous lives. As Sitting

Bull talked about peace and education, his interpreters wrongly told the
crowd he was describing the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Standing Bear’s
text lays bare this blatant mistranslation to highlight its intended effect of
entertainment, as opposed to accurate historical testimony, for a mostly
white audience. His narrative actually remembers Sitting Bull’s testimony
by laying bare the chicanery of the translator and the show’s operators that
evening.
Framing the event and his memory of it with a keen sense of the represen-
tational politics at stake, Standing Bear’s text reengages the original purpose
of Sitting Bull’s appearance as a performance playing to white expectations.
Standing Bear’s examination of the deeper event of mistranslation allows
him to urge white readers to consider the possibility of inaccuracy. Because
the real Sitting Bull is there, the evidence of authenticity is right in front
of the audience, hard to deny, and yet the story as translated is completely
false. The “representational politics” here are a set of historically contingent
actions involving the creation and distribution of culture and political views
that Standing Bear remembers on his own terms, offering a revised historical
narrative. By calling out the act of mistranslation and his awareness of it,
Standing Bear showcases a moment of pan-Indian solidarity. When Standing
Bear tells the story of mistranslation, he maps his representational politics
onto Indian identity, as something imbricate, fluid, and perpetually chang-
ing – both in relation to an individual’s sense of self, and to how he or she
interprets the expectations of the social context through which he or she
moves. Writing about this event, Standing Bear locates a moment of solidar-
ity given that his identity in the store as an Indian worker is equally perfor-
mative and open to white misreadings. Sitting Bull is similarly positioned,
but because of the mistranslation, he does not have the same opportunity to
correct the record. So Standing Bear’s narrative, written in California over
forty years after the event, demonstrates how the two examples, Standing
Bear in the glass house and Sitting Bull on the stage, are connected. Standing
Bear’s narrative makes the case speak to the larger issue of pan-Indian sol-
idarity. He considers the importance of their encounter as a pedagogical
opportunity to show the next generation of Indian leaders what it meant for
him to see Sitting Bull at “work” for Cody. Years later, Standing Bear as an
author enjoys the benefit of hindsight, and through it, he emphasizes Sitting
Bull’s performance as a strategy. Sitting Bull had worked for Cody to sup-
port his tribe and to resist the surveillance of the Indian agency that sought
to confine and limit him. Although empowered in this way, Sitting Bull’s
testimony could still be willfully misrepresented and the white audiences
seemingly thrilled to hear about Custer’s demise.49
Standing Bear especially remembers how the translator “told so many
lies that I had to smile.”50 The gesture of the smile refers to his memory and
the power relations of the moment itself. At the time of writing, Standing
248 Indigenous Intellectuals

Bear’s description that he “had” to smile recalls this moment to signal cha-
grin, if not outrage, over the translator’s deception. This affective response
toward the translator’s lies suggests Standing Bear could use humor to tem-
per the violence of misrepresentation apparent in this scene. He writes fur-
ther about how two Indian women received his smile. “One of the women
on the stage observed me and said something to the other woman, then both
of them kept looking at me.”51 They knew that he knew, thus creating the
possibility for a shared Indian critical consciousness.
This inversion of the power relations arranged on the stage makes
Standing Bear’s understanding of the real message Sitting Bull means to send
visible to white members of the audience as well as the other Indians that
were present. When the Indians on the stage witness Standing Bear’s smile,
they can read it as an act of opposition. They might also read his smile
as a recognition of the necessity and triumph of defeating Custer. Just as
Sitting Bull’s narrative is overwritten by a mistranslation, Standing Bear’s
text reflects on the act of mistranslation that has taken place and his smile
acknowledges the hegemonic practices of white paternalism and coloniza-
tion occurring through mistranslation. His smile also figures possibility for
subverting these practices by drawing attention to his own understanding
of the mistranslation. Standing Bear’s smile places him with all Indian peo-
ple, symbolically standing on stage with Sitting Bull and the other Indians.
Moving beyond symbolic and toward literal solidarity, Standing Bear’s text
describes how he approached the stage, “not intending to say a word,” but
then speaking Sioux with “the woman who had first noticed me smiling
from my seat.”52 Such a moment of recognition, from one Indian to another,
“of course caused some excitement among the crowd of white people.”53
Next, Standing Bear is called on by Sitting Bull and the others to act as their
translator for the rest of their brief stay in Philadelphia. Standing Bear’s nar-
rative is quite explicit about the ramifications of this experience.
As I sit and think about that incident, I wonder who that crooked white man was,
and what sort of Indian agent it could have been who would let these Indians leave
the reservation without even an interpreter, giving them the idea they were going to
Washington, and then cart them around to different Eastern cities to make money
off them by advertising that Sitting Bull was the Indian who slew General Custer! Of
course at the time I was too young to realize the seriousness of it all.54

His explicit references to the “crooked white man” and the “Indian agent” as
well as how these Indians were used to “make money,” for readers in 1933,
recognizes the ongoing practices of settler-colonialism and the moments
when authentic, real Indians are novel relics of an American past represented
through the successful conquest of the West. The fact that Sitting Bull and
the others were misled regarding the purpose of their trip enables Standing
Bear to further critique the corruption and oppression inherent both in the
misrepresentation of history and in the mismanagement of Native people by
the federal government. The scene prefigures later moments within Standing
 Luther Standing Bear 249

Bear’s text, when he will again work as a translator both for William Cody’s
troupe and Thomas Ince’s film company.
Standing Bear’s depiction of the white translator and the excitement of
the white crowd who did not expect a young Native man in their midst
encourages readers of My People the Sioux to pause and consider the del-
eterious effects of mistranslation on people, cultures, and history itself.55
This scene is further highlighted by the fact that another Indian, who under-
stands and speaks Lakota, must be present to witness and re-translate this
history. Standing Bear’s presence as an Indian neither on display nor on the
stage, but among the audience, offers readers a subtle revision of assimila-
tion practices from this period that claimed an Indian would either assimi-
late or die, whereas in this case he could be sitting in the audience.56

Work for the Office of Indian Affairs

Not long after he left Wanamaker, on July 6, 1885, Standing Bear gradu-
ated from Carlisle and made his way back to South Dakota and the Pine
Ridge Reservation in search of a job. By 1891, Standing Bear was in a bit
of a predicament. Although he had been offered a position as a teacher, the
job was at Rosebud rather than Pine Ridge, where his father and the rest
of his family lived. Given the extreme poverty many Indian people were
facing, Standing Bear could not refuse the position of assistant teacher at
the Rosebud Agency. His longing for Pine Ridge aside, Standing Bear dis-
tinguished himself as an excellent teacher. Ms. Wright, the head teacher of
the school, noted that he was “diligent and faithful, persevering and trust-
worthy” and you could “depend upon his word.”57 Standing Bear also
reflected on his teaching, but in less celebratory terms. “At that time, teach-
ing amounted to very little. It really did not require a well-educated person
to teach on the reservation. The main thing was to teach the children to
write their names in English, then came learning the alphabet and how to
count. I liked this work well, and the children were doing splendidly.”58
Despite sending many inquiries to the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA),
Standing Bear was unable to receive official support to move back to Pine
Ridge and rejoin his family. This did not stop him. He moved there any-
way and began building a home. Although the upper-level administrators of
the Indian Service, many of whom lived in Washington, DC, did not grant
permission for a transfer to Pine Ridge, Standing Bear found local support
from the acting agent, Charles G. Penny. He viewed Standing Bear favorably
because of the young man’s connection to the Carlisle School and a glowing
recommendation from Pratt.59 By November 1891, Penny sent his third let-
ter to the OIA to argue for Standing Bear’s relocation to Pine Ridge.
He is a young man who has been educated in the East, and it is becoming that
great consideration should be shown him. . . . To force him back to Rosebud Agency,
against his will, will tend to dishearten him and to make him discontented. His desire
250 Indigenous Intellectuals

to reside here with his father, brothers and sisters, is natural, laudable and will be
productive of good results.

The “desire to reside” aspect of Penny’s explanation for Standing Bear’s

request refers, in part, to the emotional life of his Indian ward. That close-
ness to Standing Bear’s family would “be productive of good results” sug-
gests contentment and happiness afforded to Standing Bear, at least in this
moment, and suggests he was somewhat privileged because of his mobility.
Penny’s endorsement may have been welcome even if his paternalistic tone
conformed to a politics of uplift that defined Standing Bear’s character in
terms of an education in the East – itself a tool of the government to reshape
Indian people into “fit” citizens. Similarly, Penny’s discussion of Standing
Bear’s desires as tied to family, not the tribal-national unit, as “natural” and
“laudable” worked to position his ward as a part of a white discourse of civ-
ilization. In just two years, federal Indian policy makers would successfully
argue for assimilating Native people through allotments that promised indi-
vidual heads of household private land ownership and eventual citizenship
in the United States.60
As an employee, Standing Bear both challenged and reinforced the power
of the OIA. His move from Rosebud back to Pine Ridge revealed the com-
plicated, multilevel, and contradictory inner workings of the OIA. He found
allies within the system who judged him worthy of “great consideration,” as
Penny did. They too wrote in support of his request for a transfer. This phrase
comes out of the many exchanges made between OIA officials. One might
read it as a remark on his class position given that Standing Bear was an
educated Indian and trying to make himself more American, thereby effac-
ing his race. Such an effort, the OIA agents thought, should be rewarded.
Standing Bear’s move from one reservation to another was hotly debated
among administrators of the OIA. These officials’ letters not only represent
a debate regarding Standing Bear’s request but also the extent to which the
U.S.  bureaucracy designed to manage Indian affairs was enmeshed in the
daily lives of Indian people.
As these officials calculated the line dividing what they thought would be
best for their administration of land and people, as opposed to what would
be best for an individual, they invoked familiar, if troubling rhetoric regard-
ing the fitness of Indians to become part of the Indian Service.61 This issue
of autonomy dogged many of the graduates of Carlisle and the other Indian
schools. In theory, their education should have conveyed, not simply “con-
sideration” from the OIA, but actual control over their own lives.
By the summer of 1892, Standing Bear was settled on Pine Ridge. During
this period, many educated Indians were returning to reservations from
boarding schools to live and work among their people. In this instance,
because he was viewed as a “very competent educated mixed blood” by the
white officials working in the Indian Service, Standing Bear could negotiate
 Luther Standing Bear 251

the terms of his employment in ways other Native people could not. At
the same time, there remained a concern among white progressives work-
ing within the OIA that education itself would not necessarily create mate-
rial and cultural change among Native people, and therefore, those who
returned to their reservations but did not take up farming, teaching, or own-
ing a business of some sort were in danger of going “back to the blanket.”
This reference to a blanket aimed to further patronize and infantilize Native
people, confirming they were doomed to perish if they did not give up their
“old” (primitive, antimodern, and blanket-wearing) ways in favor of those
they had learned at school.62 Despite support from the OIA and some suc-
cess as a teacher, Standing Bear would not remain at Pine Ridge for long.

Performance: A Family Affair
In October 1900, Luther’s brother, Henry Standing Bear, was living in
New  York City and working as an actor. In 1903, along with a num-
ber of other Indians, he performed in a show at Coney Island as part of
the Steeplechase Amusement Park.63 The opening of George C.  Tilyou’s
Steeplechase Park in 1897 marked the beginning of Coney Island’s era as
“the Nation’s Playground” and was the precursor to the modern-day amuse-
ment park. Named for Coney Island’s horseracing tradition, initiated by the
Brighton Beach Racetrack in 1879, the Park drew in an estimated 90,000
visitors a day during its peak years. As a Native performer, Henry was for-
tunate to have more than one option. Both Pawnee Bill’s “Wild West Show
and Great Far East Show” and Fred T. Cummins’ “Indian Congress and Life
on the Plains” were sanctioned by the U.S.  government to entertain Park
visitors at this time.64
While Henry Standing Bear worked as an Indian performer in Coney
Island, Luther performed with Cody’s Wild West. After this, Luther would
join the Miller Brothers’ “101 Ranch” where, like Henry, he “enjoyed mix-
ing with the swarms of visitors.” It is important to situate the brothers
geographically in what became a fully bicoastal arrangement. Henry regu-
larly worked at Coney Island, the most significant amusement park on the
Atlantic, and Luther was employed on the West Coast at Venice Pier, one of
the original mass entertainment venues in the Los Angeles area. In addition
to “playing Indian” as a movie extra and actor, Luther Standing Bear oper-
ated an archery concession on the pier to supplement his wages. According
to one historian, Standing Bear’s capabilities with a bow and arrow were put
to the test at the pier one day when several Japanese tourists challenged him
to a shooting contest. Fortunately for his career, Luther won.65
The opportunity to work in entertainment could be highly gendered;
as men, Luther and Henry were privileged to construct lives apart from
their families when they went to work at either Coney Island or the Venice
252 Indigenous Intellectuals

Pier. Because they were Indian men, these opportunities equally turned on
fictions of race, for they were expected to act the parts of noble savage,
wild warrior, and authentic primitive all at once. Henry’s “fitness” as an
American man might have been called into question because he had left
his family behind in South Dakota to pursue a career in show business. His
wife, Nellie, even asked for help from Indian agent Charles E. McChesney
to transfer her and their five children (Lily, Emily, Julia, Joseph, and Annie)
from Pine Ridge to Rosebud because “my husband left me and I am without
any means of support.”66
By the time Luther moved to California, he too had chosen to abandon
his wife. For both brothers, being apart from their families could not have
been easy. At the same time, what sort of public acceptance might they have
been able to find given dominant expectations for Native men to be Indian
heroes? Was it heroic to leave one’s wife and children at home, perhaps never
to return? Moreover, how did their lives apart from their wives and children
make them seem more or less fit as potential American (white) men? By the
turn of the twentieth century, a white, middle-class masculinity affirmed
men in terms of physical and mental fitness.67 Although the Standing Bear
brothers could easily claim the former as Indian men – and thereby natural
warriors – the ease with which they traveled without much regard for their
families made them look like philanderers. Still, the fluidity of their gen-
der identities fit well enough into the cultural context of traveling circuses
and vaudeville acts that were popular entertainment showcases during this
period. These entertainment acts welcomed an especially diverse array of
people, in regards to gender, race, and sexuality, as performers.68 Also pop-
ular during this era were “medicine shows” that circulated throughout the
United States. These shows offered Native people, both men and women,
unique opportunities to travel and make money at the same time.69
The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company, one of the largest and most
successful medicine show operators in America from 1880 until the 1930s,
hired many Indian spokespeople to attract audiences and sell its products.
Headquartered in New Haven, Connecticut, the Company published a vari-
ety of booklets, posters, and other forms of advertisements to promote its
products independently of the medicine show. The Kickapoo Company pro-
moted the health benefits of its “natural tonics” as necessarily linked to
the heritage and biological strength of Indian people. Many of its adver-
tisements depicted Indian warriors “saving” young white women. This
refashioned captivity tale promised to cure the sicknesses of white society
by tapping into the inherent health of Indianness.70 This advertising strategy
was nothing new.
Since the early nineteenth century, various tonics, even dandruff remedies,
were promoted by advertisements that featured Native imagery. The main
difference for Kickapoo centered on gender. Earlier ads figured the Indian
woman as a healer who had a reputation for healing white men.71 Like
 Luther Standing Bear 253

Wild West shows, the various medicine shows of the late nineteenth century
capitalized on hiring “real Indians” to promote their products. Under the
management of Healy and Bigelow, the Kickapoo Company was so named
because it employed Indians, supposedly Kickapoos, to tour the country
demonstrating Indian life and selling the medicines. By the late 1880s, as
many as 300 Indians were living in the “principal wigwam” – the winter
quarters in New Haven, Connecticut. It is easy to imagine that the adver-
tisements medicine shows used circulated among white reading publics who
were encountering a large number of ads for an Indian curio market and
might be attending popular entertainments featuring Wild West experiences.
It is equally plausible that some of the Native actors hired to work in Coney
Island could have taken the train up to New Haven to act in the “princi-
pal wigwam” designed by the Kickapoo Company; perhaps Henry Standing
Bear was among them.

The Wild West: Part and Parcel of American Culture

From 1882 to 1916, “Buffalo Bill” Cody produced a series of spectacular
entertainments based on America’s history of white-Indian violence. From
the beginning, it was called “The Wild West” (or Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West”),
a name that both eschewed the use of “show” and confirmed it was neither
mere display nor entertainment but ought to be identified with a specific
time, place, and history. Notwithstanding protests by Indian activists and
white progressives and members of the OIA, much of the show’s authentic-
ity was supported through letters from leading military officers published
in the program handed out to audiences. These performances reinforced a
nostalgic imagining of Indianness that reflected a romantic vision of Plains
Indians. Cody’s entertainments aimed to blur the line between history and
fantasy and created oversimplified stories about white conquest and the
Western frontier. Despite attending to authenticity and repeatedly adver-
tising its realist approach, the Wild West, as Cody designed it, was history
conflated with mythology.72
The repetition of these Wild West performances throughout the United
States and in Europe further entrenched a blurred understanding of America’s
past for many audiences. It seems likely that there were savvy white viewers
and Indian people among the audiences who understood that these perfor-
mances were meant to celebrate America more than actually represent facts
about its history. It is less clear whether these same viewers were able to suc-
cessfully disentangle the underlying logic of Cody’s narrative regarding the
West, namely that violence and savage warfare were necessary components
of American progress that coincided with the inevitable decline and destruc-
tion of Indian people.
Throughout these performances, Indians remained central to how Cody,
as well as his white audiences, remembered, imagined, and expected Indian
254 Indigenous Intellectuals

people to be. Nor was Cody the only participant in this game. Throughout the
period, Native intellectuals like Charles Eastman sponsored Indian-themed
pageants that provided a different way for white audiences to access Native
culture. One pageant from Minneapolis (the “Paris of Indian life,” according
to Eastman) featured “sun dances, barbecues, and frolicking in costume to
the music of tomtoms” by white participants.73 Eastman praised the event
for the authenticity of its costumes and noted he would be “delighted to
help” plan similar sorts of engagements in the future.74 These types of per-
formances supported white expectations used to define Native identity and
culture, which were reinforced by white participation in presentations of
Indian song and dance. Entertainment of this type refused to emphasize the
violence characterizing Cody’s performances, which might be why Eastman
participated in supporting these celebrations while criticizing the work of
show Indians. Perhaps Eastman’s proximity to Native and non-Native par-
ticipants gave him a sense of control regarding the ultimate message attend-
ees of the pageants might receive. Much of the excitement advertised by
Cody’s version of the West centered on the reenactment of colonial vio-
lence whereby white settlers found themselves surrounded by hostile Indian
forces. This narrative of the surround, theorized by Philip Deloria, became
integral to American ideas regarding Indians and violence as well as the
cultural productions that drew on these ideas.75
The surround was a necessary part of American history that showcased
colonization. For Cody, the tension between whites and Indians was a
useful allegory for American imperialism and the heroism of the cowboy.
American manhood itself was constructed through these dramatic perfor-
mances as white men represented the promise of a new, young, and virile
nation that defined itself against the primitive savagery of its Indian past.
These imaginings required Native men to represent a warrior aesthetic,
which typified a different sort of highly sexualized and raced masculinity.
Native men, no matter how valiant their efforts to fight white attackers,
were always already doomed to fail. This conquest narrative further under-
mined their strength as men, and by extension suggested Native manhood
was inherently inferior because it would always be threatened and overrun
by the power of American (white) manhood. However fraught this making
of modern America may have been for the Indian performers who joined
Cody’s traveling troupes, their employment afforded many of them more
material benefits than they would have had if they stayed home. This fact
challenged the aims of assimilationists and some white progressives who
believed Native men must serve as the heads of families and live on indi-
vidual allotments to ensure the proper acculturation of Indian people. As
the heads of their heterosexist households, as farmers or businessmen,
Native men could ensure the proper incorporation of Native families into
American society. That Luther Standing Bear, and for a time his brother,
Henry, eschewed this option in favor of more mobile and non-normative
 Luther Standing Bear 255

employment suggests that life as a Native performer resisted as much as it

also complied with colonial ideologies.76
Standing Bear had struggled to find gainful employment after Carlisle,
first as a teacher and then a clerk at a dry goods store, so the opportunity to
travel widely and make money was hard to pass up. The material benefits
of show Indian work prompted him to leave Pine Ridge. As he recalled in
his autobiography, “my wife was greatly pleased when I told her the news
that we were going to have the chance to go abroad.”77 She would join him
initially for their travels with Cody, but not when he went to California.
Traveling with the family, at least at first, afforded the Standing Bears new
opportunities for global travel.
The Standing Bear family’s first journey with Cody was not entirely posi-
tive given prejudices within the company and without. Many of these expe-
riences were marked by changes in policy that came with allotment in 1887
and the end of violent resistance by Indian nations following the massacre
at Wounded Knee in 1890.78 With the end of military conquest and the
Dawes Act, most Americans understood that the frontier, once populated
with Indians, was now closed. No more would white settlers happen to
find themselves, as the minority, surrounded by a majority of Indian people.
Instead, they came to see themselves as the guardians of American land. In
terms of historical reenactments dramatized and popularized by Cody, the
connection between Indianness and violence did not disappear with the end
of the surround. Rather, Indian violence became refigured around a new,
yet eerily familiar, narrative for audiences, which was the outbreak. In this
sense, Indians were still defined as violent and locked into a struggle that
once again doomed them to submit to the power of the white military fig-
ure, cowboy or pioneer, who in turn had to fight (sometimes even resist) the
Indian outbreak.
The outbreak suggested Indians had been conquered and to some extent
“tamed” and contained. But of course, containment by the OIA did not
necessarily mean an end to resistance. Many of these narratives of Indian
violence became part of the repertoire of touring companies and the Western
genre of film. In both spaces, Indians had to perform. Now defeated, they
had to reenact a moment when they historically did hold the power to
surround and destroy white settlers and colonists. Now safely contained,
they performed the possibility that they would escape and become violent
(outbreak!).
So any one performance mixed these things together:  pretending to be
violent and powerful with the possibility that, although no longer powerful,
Indian people could still become violent. Underneath this was an ideology of
pacification, which meant that there was no way that Indians would actually
become violent. Indian performers like Standing Bear were navigating the
terrain of performativity marked by powerlessness in terms of changes in
their own strategies of resistance and the cultural imagination of what they
256 Indigenous Intellectuals

could or would do. Standing Bear had been given a glimpse into these sorts
of narratives beginning with his containment in Wanamaker’s glass box to
when he willfully broke out of Rosebud, but was ironically contained again
in Pine Ridge before he could leave to pursue a career in show business.
Although Cody’s Wild West offered a historical program bent on playing
with racial categories requiring Indian actors like Standing Bear, imbedded
within many of these narratives was a strong identification with American
imperialism. This was perhaps best represented through the military ele-
ments within the show. Posters advertising “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his
“Rough Riders” served a double purpose as they displayed new models
of artillery that, as Richard Slotkin argues, eclipsed the more traditional
Western elements associated with the cowboy. The cowboy was transformed
into a soldier and the place of the Wild West became an even more mobile
concept that could represent new frontiers beyond the physical borders of
the United States in Pacific and Caribbean waters.
In 1899, before Standing Bear joined the troupe, Cody replaced “Custer’s
Last Fight” with the “Battle of San Juan Hill” to celebrate the heroism of
Theodore Roosevelt and “The Rough Riders” as worthy of historical replay.
As Slotkin argues, this type of performance glorified the imperialization of
the American republic and through associations with Wild West imagery
could also democratize the imperial project. Then in 1901, San Juan’s back-
drop was traded in for the Battle of Tientsin to reenact the capture of that
city by the Allied army that had suppressed China’s Boxer Rebellion to res-
cue “captives” from the Peking Legation Quarter. Indian actors were hired
to play the role of the Boxers as the soldiers, and cowboys in the rest of the
troupe now stood in for white civilization. This type of Yellowface perfor-
mance, like minstrel shows, was not uncommon at the turn of the century.79
“Tientsin” remained a popular performance into 1902 before Cody’s troupe
reprised their roles in “San Juan Hill” from 1903 to 1904. Because Standing
Bear was hired to work for Cody in 1902, it seems plausible that he may
have played the role of either a Boxer or a Spanish military officer, although
he does not confirm this in his autobiography. How might he have under-
stood these roles in combination with or set against his work as a translator
and the times he “acted” the part of himself? As Cody’s enterprise took on
international perspectives, he also hired people from Puerto Rico as well as
Hawaiʿi and the Philippine Islands. These new hires were incorporated into
performances and presented as curiosities. Not unlike the Native American
performers before them, they were useful as cultural brown “Others” and
“as memorials of an imaginative world distant in time and space.”80 For
Standing Bear, Cody’s enterprise represented important life lessons about
business, commercialization, and performativity. Issues of class and race
intersected with the performative value of Native people, who were cel-
ebrated as the main attraction for shows where they played Indian and at
other times just played themselves.
 Luther Standing Bear 257

1902: New York and London – No Old Pancakes

for the Indians
Standing Bear’s work with Cody would bring him and his family first to
New York and later London for special performances to entertain British
royal society.81 While in Manhattan, they stayed in a hotel with another per-
former, named Black Horn. After dinner their first night, there was a meet-
ing of all the Indian performers, and a man named Rock called on Standing
Bear to say a few words. Standing Bear remembers this moment in terms of
his dedication to helping “his people.” He addressed the crowd, recalled here
in My People the Sioux, as if they were a part of an extended Indian family.

My relations, you all know that I am to take care of you while going across the big
water to another country, and all the time we are to stay there. I have heard that
when any one joins this show, about the first thing he thinks of is getting drunk.
I  understand that the regulations of the Buffalo Bill show require that no Indian
shall be given any liquor. You all know that I do not drink, and I am going to keep
you all from it.82

Standing Bear praises Cody’s commitment to temperance and confirms his

status as a teetotaler, and therefore a protector of his fellow actors. This
chapter of his autobiography details his trip to England while working for
“Buffalo Bill,” and reads as part celebration of Cody and part nostalgic
remembrance of circumstances surrounding the beginning of his acting
career.83
How Standing Bear and his fellow Indians perceive and are perceived
operate as themes throughout his chapter about Cody’s Wild West. He
positions himself as “The Chief Interpreter of the Sioux Nation,” who
understands the complex relation between class and race as markers of
power for Native performers. Because he speaks for other performers, his
text highlights his rank among them, a reflection of status. Standing Bear’s
position of power is twofold in the text. As the narrator, he can remember
and write about the past however he sees fit. As the “Chief Interpreter,”
he appears as a character in his own story who possesses a power akin
to the translators he witnessed working with Sitting Bull in Philadelphia.
Standing Bear connects a story about the ways Indian performers misread
the status of a butler hired to make their beds with another about the
power relations within the Wild West circuit, which involved, of all things,
pancakes.
One morning everyone in the show was served pancakes for breakfast,
with the exception of the Indian actors. Later that day, they were served
the cold leftovers for dinner. Standing Bear “was very angry” about this
incident. So much so that he “went over where Buffalo Bill and the head
officials of the show were eating dinner” to let him know that serving old,
cold pancakes to the Indians was not right. Standing Bear’s sense of his
258 Indigenous Intellectuals

own importance comes to the fore in this anecdote. He uses it to showcase

an opportunity for activism when he describes how Cody scolded the cook
regarding such ill treatment of his Indians. Cody’s remarks highlight the
performative value of his Indian troupe when he says, “they are the princi-
pal feature of this show, and they are the one people I will not allow to be
misused or neglected. Hereafter see to it that they get just exactly what they
want at meal-time.”84 In this moment the Native actors appear to have more
important cultural capital than any other members of Cody’s enterprise.
Standing Bear’s account does not include how far this sentiment went with
regards to issues like actual pay, benefits, and the type of work Cody pro-
vided for Indian people.
The pancake story reflects how the cook assumed Indians were infe-
rior; he thought they, like animals, would eat cold leftovers. Standing Bear’s
demand recognizes this prejudiced view. Cody concurs because Native per-
formers were the heart of his business. By quoting Cody’s reaction, Standing
Bear suggests the Wild West might provide a complicated cultural space
where Native people could be treated poorly by some while venerated by
others, viewed as lesser socially even if they were valued for their economic
potential.
Standing Bear’s depiction of his work as a “show Indian” casts himself
as a man of good character, largely through his refusal to drink alcohol and
smoke tobacco. He is framed not only as an interpreter of language but as
an arbitrator of morality and culture working on behalf of other Indian
performers who were part of the show. This is, in part, an argument for
the acceptability of their labor. He could speak for his fellow Indians as
their translator, and he could keep in constant contact with Cody regard-
ing their movements and any inappropriate activities related to alcohol and
overspending of wages. He mediated their cultural interactions, whether in
New York or London.
Standing Bear reflects on an interaction that took place in England with
a butler that illustrates his cosmopolitan sensibility regarding dress codes
and social status. This moment in and of itself is also about performance.
He notes how the Native actors for Cody were amazed to find “a very finely
dressed man, wearing a high silk hat, Prince Albert coat, kid gloves, silk
handkerchief in his pocket, and carry cane” who was later seen “making up
our beds.” Their amazement stems from the fact that racial prejudice marked
many of their experiences. The Native performers are amazed because the
man wearing the “silk hat, Prince Albert coat, kid gloves” is not an aris-
tocrat, or even a performer, but is there to serve them. Their perception,
ventriloquized by Standing Bear’s narrative, reflects a critical shift in their
epistemological standpoint; that is, they were afforded mobility (and some
kind of status) through their work as performers and yet their performances
were severely limited to particular types of Indianness. Whenever they were
 Luther Standing Bear 259

not performing, some people saw them as lesser, as the kinds of people who
would eat cold pancakes.
Through Standing Bear’s account of the pancakes and the London trip
one can see two more things: first, how he remembers his life as a Wild West
performer; and, second, what he gleans from these experiences, which is the
necessity of leading and advocating for other Indians, who are defined as a
collective. In some sense, Standing Bear is similar to Sitting Bull – who built
a small network through the performative aspects of his touring life. And yet
Standing Bear is perhaps more exemplary as a primary builder of the next
generation’s network, significant wings of which would grow out of Carlisle,
the Wild West circuit, and the politics of the SAI and other pan-tribal reform
organizations. Standing Bear’s early experiences at Carlisle, Wanamaker,
and Pine Ridge play out in these two stories regarding his work for Cody’s
touring company. These accounts are tinged with anxieties about class and
racial politics, while another brings these dynamics to the forefront by con-
sidering the nature of performance itself and just how far Cody would go to
use actual Native bodies to promote his shows.
While on the road in London, Standing Bear and his wife, Nellie DeCory,
became proud parents for the third time when their daughter, Alexandra
Birmingham Cody, was born. Whether Cody congratulated the couple,
offered them a gift, or passed out cigars Standing Bear does not say. But
he does discuss how Cody saw the newborn infant as performance capi-
tal for his show; Cody quickly proposed to Standing Bear that Alexandra
should be on exhibit as part of a sideshow. This idea was hardly novel.
From the earliest exhibitions, through the 1893 Columbian Exhibition
and the Wild West show era, children and infants had offered showmen a
powerful marketing hook. Audiences gained an opportunity (not always
taken) to humanize Indian people through the harmlessness and “uncul-
tured” nature of children who had not yet been socialized into Native
or white worlds. Children and infants offered possibilities for viewers to
imagine possibilities for individual development rather than social evo-
lutionary destiny – and these “performances” contributed to the cultural
underpinnings of policies (including a Carlisle education) that focused
on the individual, rather than the community. Of course, babies did not
perform. They simply were. But the context in which parents and young
children existed did not allow even everyday lives to be other than perfor-
mative. As performances, they were always already signifying racial pos-
sibilities and destinies, gender hierarchies (it is worth remembering that
Cody approached Luther – not Luther’ wife – about exhibiting the baby),
and even class dynamics.
Within that context, the Standing Bear family members made their own
decisions. You might imagine Standing Bear’s outrage at the thought of their
newborn being put on display. Such might have been the case. But Standing
260 Indigenous Intellectuals

Bear writes about this event to suggest a more nuanced decision-making

process and experience.
My wife sat on a raised platform, with the little one in the cradle before her. The
people filed past, many of them dropping money in a box for her. Nearly every one
had some sort of little gift for her also. It was a great drawing card for the show; the
work was very light for my wife, and as for the baby, before she was twenty-four
hours old she was making more money than my wife and I together.85

His emphasis on the light workload for his wife and the earning potential
of their baby suggests Standing Bear understood this performance as noth-
ing more than a strategy of appeasement coupled with improved earning
potential. But despite the increased financial security that was a boon to the
Standing Bear family, it came at a cost. As large crowds of Londoners made
their way to see the Wild West, they stopped to admire an Indian mother
and child on their way to the show. These glimpses of a real Indian baby on
display helped further a desire to see and market Indianness and confirmed
the necessity of hiring Indian people to play Indian for such occasions.86
This sideshow experience was not wholly dissimilar from Cody’s offer
to patrons to come “back stage” after performances, so that they might
meet and mingle with real Indians. In these instances, Native actors could
decide the degrees to which they were still performing according to certain
racialized scripts. For Standing Bear, the sideshow offered an occasion to
both play Indian and play with Indianness, in that it muddled the usually
clear division between the viewed and the viewer, because it was neither
clothed in the accoutrements of myth nor the spectacle of reenactment, but
rather the messy reality of poverty. According to My People the Sioux, the
personal relationship between Cody and Standing Bear was mutually ben-
eficial if also marked by certain racialized expectations regarding Native
performativity. Standing Bear’s recounting of the display of his wife and
their newborn points to the pervasiveness and intimacy of Cody’s desire to
market historical “reenactments” using his Indian actors. Standing Bear’s
narrative reflects on the dire financial circumstances that undergirded their
decision to use the baby, and at the same time he is explicit about Cody’s
request that they do so. Readers from 1928 and today might ask:  Why
would Standing Bear have consented to this type of public display? Perhaps,
at first, he interpreted Cody’s request as outside the bounds of proper per-
formance given that there was neither a reference to history nor any educa-
tional merit to a sideshow. But, upon second thought, he acquiesced given
the material gain.
For in addition to displaying their newborn, the Standing Bears’ oldest
son, Luther, was hired to play Indian as part of Cody’s enterprise. Standing
Bear describes preparing his son, who had to be “rigged up for the part he
took in the show,” in great detail. He also comments explicitly on his son’s
reaction to taking part in such a performance.
 Luther Standing Bear 261

He had a full costume of buckskin, very much like the one I wore, and every day his
face must be painted and his hair combed and braided for the two performances.
The Indian boys seemed to think it was a pleasure to get the little chap ready for
exhibition. After he was “all fixed up,” he would stand outside the tipi, and the
English-speaking people would crowd around to shake his hand and give him
money. This he would put in a little pocket in his buckskin jacket, and when it was
full he would refuse to accept any more, although the crowd would try to force it
on him. Then he would leave, in apparent disgust, and come inside the tipi. He kept
us all laughing.87

Given the undertones of these sorts of exhibitions and sideshows as cul-

tural phenomena during this period, when a Native mother and child played
“themselves,” or a young Indian boy was paid for dressing in buckskin,
they might be viewed as exotic at best, or as an exhibit of human oddities
at worst by the crowds stopping to see them on display. Standing Bear’s
text offers three slightly different meanings pertaining to his son’s “appar-
ent disgust” following his performances. In fact, at first, one might wonder
whether it was real disgust. Was it Luther Standing Bear’s uncertainty about
his perception of disgust? Or was it a performance of “disgust” for the white
audience? That such a scene kept Standing Bear and the other perform-
ers “laughing” further signals to the reader that this ought to be read as a
critique of the exhibition rather than a light-hearted take on exploitation.
In some sense, their laughter is of a piece with Standing Bear’s knowing
smile in Philadelphia after he witnessed the mistranslation of Sitting Bull’s
remarks before a mostly white audience.88
The performance work of the Standing Bear family is but one example
of how Indian people navigated the arenas of performance open to them.
Certainly, there were other performer families like the Standing Bears who,
however contested the work of “show Indians” may have been throughout
this period, were able to make a decent living through these shows, and
who may have even viewed their experiences in a favorable light. However,
before Standing Bear could parlay work with Cody into future jobs in show
business, he was involved in a devastating train accident that would put
his career on hold. The accident exposed him to different sorts of racism
and corruption, which suggested the critical necessity of pan-tribal efforts
toward political reform.

1904–1911: “Indians Die in Wreck, Survivors Chant

Death Song for Three Victims”
On the morning of April 7, 1904, the Omaha Express stopped near Melrose
Park, a suburb of Chicago. An increasingly dense screen of fog covered the
tracks that morning, stretching all the way from the banks of Lake Michigan
to the west of Chicago’s city limits. The fog made visibility exceedingly poor
for the train operators. The weather, coupled with the fact that the Omaha
262 Indigenous Intellectuals

was running twenty minutes behind schedule, contributed to a devastating

collision between the Northwestern Fast Mail train and the Omaha Express.
The “Express” had traveled all the way from San Francisco heading east
to New  York City. This same train had also picked up sixty-three Sioux
performers from Rushville, Nebraska for their transatlantic trip to England
as part of “Buffalo Bill’s” Wild West. Luther Standing Bear was among the
twenty-nine Indian actors injured during the train wreck, as he had just
begun his second season with Cody’s company.89 Three members of the
troupe, Kills A Head [sic], Philip Iron Tail Jr., and Thomas Comes Last, were
crushed upon impact and died at the scene.90 The serious injuries Standing
Bear and the other performers suffered took a long time to heal. Yet it was
not the physical suffering the group endured as much as a prolonged legal
battle that created a lasting memory of the incident for Standing Bear.
Following the train wreck, Carlos Montezuma came to the aid of the
Lakota actors as both their doctor and their advocate. Montezuma worked
with Standing Bear and the rest of the troupe to sue the Chicago and
Northwestern Railroad Company for compensation accounting for their
injuries and the work they would miss. As a physician, Montezuma wrote
detailed reports regarding the extent of individual injuries. He made a strong
case that the injured parties ought to receive from $1,250 to $12,000 each,
depending on the extent of their suffering. In contrast, the Railroad underes-
timated the passengers’ injuries and offered a meager settlement of $100 to
$2,500 per person. Ultimately, the court accepted the Railroad Company’s
terms.91
At this time, railroad corporate executives had reached the pinnacle of
their economic power, so perhaps it should not be surprising that, although
contested, they triumphed. Ironically, the Indians’ employment with Cody
hindered their claims for compensation. Pine Ridge agent John R. Brennan,
who was working on behalf of the injured Indians, but who seemed more
in support of the Railroad, defined the work of these Native performers as
“un-American.” The connection between the Indian actors and the world
of show business framed them in terms of spectacle and excess. Such claims
sought to undermine their social status by arguing that they should not be
entitled to a higher settlement on account of their lost wages. Standing Bear
and the others who sought damages were caught in a double bind. Their
work for Cody helped to celebrate a narrative of American exceptionalism
that depended on real Indian performers to reenact frontier life as it was in
the Wild West but because they were Indians working for Cody rather than
employed in more respected trades (like Montezuma, the doctor), they were
less “fit” for citizenship, and somehow less entitled to receive money for any
missed work.
Still, fitness for citizenship could be used to argue for or against the case
these Native performers made against the Railroad. This case represents a
paradox because the claimants were being kept out of the very society their
 Luther Standing Bear 263

performances aimed to celebrate because the type of work required for such
celebration defined them as less manly, less white, and less advanced for
inclusion into the body politic of the United States. On May 2, 1904, a copy
of the settlement to be paid to those injured in the wreck and the claims
related to the three men who had died was sent to W. A. Jones, the commis-
sioner of Indian affairs. This agreement, between the Indians’ representative,
J. R. Brennan, the railroad companies, and the U.S. government, reflects not
only a paltry sum regarding damages, but the even more damaging rhetoric
characteristic of the racist and patronizing views of the parties involved in
deciding how to handle the costs associated with the wreck.

It was hard to determine what the values of the lives of the three dead ones were. But
taking everything into consideration, considering also that the Indians themselves
are satisfied with these amounts, we concluded to recommend them. Two of the dead
Indians had never done any work. One of them, Iron Tail, had done some work. The
measure of damages in this State, as I suppose in all States, is based upon the ability
and willingness of the deceased person to work.92

Why was it “hard to determine” the “values of the lives” of the three Native
men who had perished? Framed within the logics of industrial capital and
white supremacy, their Indianness disabled these men, except Iron Tail, who
“had done some work,” to be viewed as valuable contributors to American
society, in essence as workers. The value of their lives lay in whether they
were productive contributors to modern American capitalism, which cer-
tainly conformed to dominant ideologies of the time regarding racial uplift.
In other words, these Native men, because they were Indians, could never
have done much “work” to contribute to American society and thus, in
death, their lives were less valuable than other, presumably white, citizens.
And yet so important was the work of Native performers to Cody’s enter-
prise that he was quick to hire replacements following the train crash so
the season could continue without a hitch.93 Montezuma’s letter on May 6
protested the settlement with the Railroad, and despite his detailed account
of the injuries suffered by the Native men involved, his protest fell on deaf
ears and a new trial never took place.
For Standing Bear and Montezuma, this was an opportunity to consider
extrajudicial means through which they might challenge social expectations
that limited the power and position of Indian people. Perhaps the two men
swapped notes on organizing while Standing Bear was in Chicago. Soon
after this, Montezuma would work closely with Henry Standing Bear and
the SAI. Perhaps Montezuma gave Luther a copy of Wassaja and added
him to his subscription list. Both men were interested in how Native peo-
ple could obtain the rights of full citizens in the United States. At the time,
both agreed that the reservation was not the best site through which Native
people could gain these rights or more power; both would later change their
minds to see the benefits of Native spaces. Although no additional records
264 Indigenous Intellectuals

from the train accident exist to show how this moment marked a turning
point in the lives of the doctor and the actor, what remains clear is that they
worked together to fight for the Indians injured in the crash. As Standing
Bear would later assert in My People the Sioux, he had learned that reform
work beyond the reservation was necessary, and it required a pan-tribal
approach to reshaping politics and culture.
With all my title of chieftain, and with all of my education and travels, I discovered
that as long as I was on the reservation I was only a helpful Indian, and was not
considered any better than any of the uneducated Indians – that is, according to the
views of the white agent in charge of the reservation. . . . If I tried to better the con-
dition of my people, while on the reservation, I found it was an utter impossibility.94

Throughout the pages of Wassaja, Montezuma’s writing echoes this rhetoric

and calls for the abolition of the Indian Bureau and the reservation system.
Despite agreement over the dangers associated with the OIA, the two men
did not necessarily agree with regards to Indian performance.
As an outspoken member of the SAI, Montezuma often criticized Native
actors in Wild West shows for furthering negative stereotypes. Montezuma’s
public and private writings reveal that he was less interested in performing
according to primitivist expectations for Indians. He opted not for the war
bonnet but rather the tuxedo when invited to give public talks or appear
at important functions in and around Chicago.95 Still, the experience of
treating and advocating for actual Indian performers, employed by Cody
no less, may have forced Montezuma to reconsider his views concerning
the costs and benefits of Native performance. Perhaps Standing Bear told
Montezuma about the travel opportunities and economic gains he and his
family received by working in show business.
After he recovered from the crash, in 1907, Standing Bear left Pine Ridge
again in an attempt to reignite his career in show business. At this time, his
brother, Henry, was going to New York City with a party of Indians to appear
in an act at the enormous Hippodrome Theater. From November 1906 to
August 1907, audiences came in droves to enjoy “Pioneer Days: A Spectacle
Drama of Western Life.”96 This show was massive, employing upward of
100 Lakota adorned in feathers, face paint, and war bonnets. They battled
soldiers, attacked stagecoaches, and reenacted the Ghost Dance against a
magnificent orange moon. Although on a grander scale, such pageantry was
similar to Cody’s Wild West and no doubt would have been familiar to
Luther and his brother.
Working in this show, both brothers met other Native entertainers like the
married couple Red Wing (born Lillian St. Cyr) and James Young Deer. Like
the Standing Bear brothers, Red Wing, who was Ho-Chunk, had attended
the Carlisle School, graduating in 1902. She married James Young Deer,
whose ancestry is less clear given that some records suggest he was mixed
race, perhaps white, African American, and Nanticoke from Delaware.97
 Luther Standing Bear 265

Regardless of his background, for the purposes of the show and his future
career in film, Young Deer positioned himself as Ho-Chunk like his wife.
Given the racial prejudice against African Americans as this time it is not
surprising that Young Deer claimed a fully Native identity to escape the per-
vasive oppression of Jim Crow. The two were married on April 9, 1906, just
shortly before their performance at the Hippodrome. Like Luther Standing
Bear, Young Deer’s work in silent film was shaped and made possible by
earlier types of entertainments that employed Indians, such as Barnum and
Bailey’s circus and the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Wild West show. In 1909,
the New York Picture Company established Bison Motion Pictures, in the
Los Angeles neighborhood of Edendale, then the center of West Coast film
production. There they began producing Westerns that Young Deer would
go on to direct. The first Native American film in 1909 was The Falling
Arrow, co-starring Red Wing.98 Thus, a network of Indian performers
emerged to reach across the United States, from New York to Los Angeles,
and across tribes and families.
Luther had a six-month contract in New York, and during this time he
would meet Red Wing and Young Deer at the Hippodrome. He could also
make contacts with other Native actors – who would also become central to
the film industry on the West Coast.99 Economic reasons also helped Luther
Standing Bear decide to stay in the City.
I concluded to stay and see if I  could make my living among the white people.
I appeared in theaters and side-shows. I lectured, and did any sort of work I could
find. While lecturing I met many people who were really interested in learning the
truth in regard to the Indians. I determined that, if I could only get the right sort of
people interested, I might be able to do more for my own race off the reservation
than to remain there under the iron rule of the white agent.100

While in New York, Standing Bear began to experience the political power

of performance in much the same way that Eastman and Bonnin did in
their public lectures. As an actor, he participated in a network created and
driven by Indian performers. After New York, Standing Bear moved to Bliss,
Oklahoma to join the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch show. This spectacular
entertainment was an outgrowth of the Miller brothers’ 110,000-acre cat-
tle ranch. Joe, Zack, and George L. Miller were busy working as cowboys
before their neighbor, performer “Pawnee Bill” (Major Gordon W. Lillie),
showed them how to make a better living by retelling the conquest of the
West, which had made their ranch possible in the first place.101
In 1905, the Millers began producing a local show. These shows func-
tioned like mobile company towns, offering a limited form of mobility to
the Native actors they employed. By 1907, the Millers were on the road
performing outside of Oklahoma at places like the Jamestown Exposition
in Virginia and Brighton Beach in New York – where they cast Native actors
like Henry Standing Bear to play Indian. These heritage sites were already
266 Indigenous Intellectuals

popular tourist destinations, so it seems likely that shows featuring Native

performers sought to take advantage of already captive audiences. During
these performances, the captivity tale was inverted again, but this time, the
experience of white audience members was structured by a market for their
continued desire to see the primitive, wild, yet also romantic Indian as an
ethnic other. Such performers could capture white spectators again and
again.102
Given that the 101 Ranch show was a latecomer to the Wild West-themed
enterprise it is not surprising that they suffered financially with the inven-
tion of motion pictures. Despite this setback, they succeeded in profiting
from the popularity of the Indian curio market.103 Not unlike the Kickapoo
Indian Medicine Company, the Miller Brothers marketed all kinds of Indian
rugs, beaded belts, and silver jewelry manufactured in their novelty factory
by Indian employees. Along with Indian-themed articles, a large assortment
of souvenir leather goods such as cowboy belts, boys’ chaps, and vests were
made and sold to tourists.104
The Miller Brothers lost Standing Bear in 1912 when he applied to work
with filmmaker Thomas H. Ince. Using train fare provided by Ince, Standing
Bear joined the rest of the Sioux actors’ crew in Inceville – located in the
Palisades Highlands stretching seven and a half miles (12.1 km) up Santa
Ynez Canyon, between Santa Monica and Malibu, California. This com-
pany town was built to house Native and other actors working on Ince’s
films. Throughout this period, the more vocal Indian actors attempted to
expand their influence on the films under production at Inceville. Led by
Standing Bear, they pointed out to Ince that his films would be even more
authentic if he used more Indians in the major roles. Frustrated by the lack
of three-dimensional characters for Indian actors, Standing Bear offered
ideas for scripts and volunteered to serve as a language coach for the other
Sioux actors. Perhaps his experiences as a translator for Cody empowered
him to make suggestions to Ince. Unfortunately for him, Ince declined to
accept any of his help.105
Perhaps the fact that Luther Standing Bear continued to work in show
business and did not return to Pine Ridge like his brother, Henry, did after
some years working in New York explains why he never became involved
with the SAI like Eastman, Montezuma, and Bonnin. Despite direct involve-
ment, Standing Bear’s views regarding the Citizenship Bill of 1923, for
example, resonated with many of the concerns the SAI’s leaders shared in
terms of whether “citizenship” would actually amount to material changes
in the lives of Indian people. In his second autobiography, Land of the
Spotted Eagle, Standing Bear writes about this issue explicitly, stating, “The
signing of the bill changed not in the slightest measure the condition of
the Indian.”106 According to Standing Bear, the failure of this bill was true
because “not one agent was removed from office, Indian boys and girls are
still segregated in school life and the reservation and reservation rule still
 Luther Standing Bear 267

exist.”107 Here his rhetoric echoes that of Montezuma and Eastman, both
of whom sought fuller incorporation of Indian students into the American
education system, and who greatly distrusted the corruption inherent in the
reservation system. Standing Bear decided he would not return to live at
Pine Ridge. Separated from the majority of his family, he found new ways
to combine performance and politics so that he might dismantle the notion
that “the Indian of the cheap magazine and the movie still remain as the best
type of the First American.”108

Film from the 1910s to the 1930s: “The White Man’s

Estimate of the Indian Is Established”
Long before Russell Means, Oglala/Lakota, AIM activist, became well
known for playing the part of Chingachgook in Last of the Mohicans
(1992) and narrating Walt Disney’s Pocahontas (1995), Luther Standing
Bear and other Native actors appeared in several silent and sound films,
establishing the genre of the Western and the centrality of Native people
within it. This first generation of Native people played an active role in
establishing America’s film industry. Standing Bear acted alongside Fay
Wray, William Cody, Tom Mix, and William S. Hart, all of whom supported
the careers of Indian actors. In addition, Standing Bear found he was not the
only Carlisle student to gain employment in film. Jim Thorpe, Isaac Johnny
John or “Chief John Big Tree,” William Malcolm Hazlett, Richard Davis
Thunderbird, and Lillian “Princess Red Wing” St. Cyr all worked in film
after leaving Carlisle. Looking through the prism of Standing Bear’s acting
career reveals the connections between performativity and cultural politics
for Indian actors. In this context, issues regarding ethnic authenticity, his-
torical realism, and the history of Native American representations became
critical factors for shaping the ever-evolving genre of the Western, as well
as the stakes Indian actors faced in creating and maintaining the genre.109
In 1921, there were an estimated 87,000 “cinematograph theaters” in the
world, with 16,900 in the United States and just over 4,000 in Great Britain.
During this period a number of Westerns, a genre defined by the setting of
“the American West,” the spirit of struggle, and the decline of the frontier,
were produced to appear in these theaters.110
Many characteristics of Western films stemmed from popular Western
literature of the late nineteenth century. Pulps were first printed in the 1880s
and 1890s and continued well into the twentieth century, and with the vio-
lent backdrop of World War I and the rise of mafia-related violence and the
image of the gangster in American cities, a fascination with the Old West
continued to flourish within American culture. Part of the appeal of the
Western was its simplicity. Westerns featured the pursuit of justice against
forces of violence embodied by the savagery of Indians. “Outlaws” moved
between the two extremes. Cowboys and Indians (like two armies or cops
268 Indigenous Intellectuals

versus robbers) were easily portrayed as oppositional fi ­ gures – doubles that

enacted clear morality tales already familiar to audiences. Another part of
the genre’s appeal was that one could easily predict the winners and the
losers. If the Western novel gave readers a certain myth of America and
its making, then the earliest Hollywood Westerns, from the 1910s to the
1930s, transplanted similar source material to make an even simpler and
more unbelievable narrative of nation making.111
Many of these early Westerns referred back to the Turnerian “frontier the-
sis” and relied on stock characters such as cowboys, gunslingers, and bounty
hunters, who were wanderers wearing Stetson hats, bandannas, spurs, and
buckskin. These figures were largely white, although there were a number
of Native characters, too, as well as Mexicans and Asians.112 All groups
took part in performing westernness, and their portrayals were marked by
violence. They often used revolvers or rifles as everyday tools of survival.
Their way of life was characterized by mobility, not in a modern sense, but
in the horses they rode across vast stretches of uninhabited land. These trips
between small towns and cattle ranches could be interrupted by “hostile”
Indian forces, as the surround articulated in early books and shows. These
moments involved fighting sequences between the U.S. Calvary and Indian
warriors or a band of cowboys and a renegade tribe. Such representations
did not necessarily challenge the notion of westward expansion or the con-
cept of “open” land so much as reify the expectation of Indian men who
were always out for blood, although it was their ultimate destruction that
was almost always the outcome of these violent encounters.
Western films were enormously popular in the silent era, and Standing
Bear built a career that straddled the transition from silent film to “talkies.”
With the advent of sound in 1927–8, however, many of the major Hollywood
studios abandoned Westerns, leaving the genre to smaller studios and pro-
ducers who churned out countless low-budget features and serials into the
1930s. By the latter part of the decade, the Western film occupied a similar
space to the early Western novels because both had declined in popularity.
However, the Western film was brought back to life in 1939 by the release
of John Ford’s Stagecoach, one of the biggest hits of the year, and the vehi-
cle that propelled John Wayne into a major screen star. The year 1939 was
also when Standing Bear acted in his final film, Union Pacific. A review of
DeMille’s masterpiece celebrated the director’s achievements in producing a
new blockbuster: “For Mr. DeMille spares nothing, horses or actors, when
he turns his hand to Western history. . . . He stages a romantic dialogue on a
hand-car hemmed in by grunting bison, a tender farewell in a caboose sur-
rounded by whooping redskins. . . . When he has a chance for real action, of
course, the sky’s the limit – Indian raids, shooting scrapes, brawls, fist-fights,
train robberies, fires, chases and trestle-breaks.”113 Despite their ubiquity,
the reviewer only briefly mentions the Native cast members involved with
DeMille’s film. Although Indian people were essential in adding to DeMille’s
 Luther Standing Bear 269

claims to realism and historical accuracy, Standing Bear and other extras
spoke no lines. The scenes they shared with white characters reinforced the
notion that Indians stood in the way of the transcontinental railroad and
the progress of civilization. “Whooping redskins” and Indian raids did lit-
tle to transform audiences’ perceptions of Native people as violent, sav-
age, and out of pace with modernity. Perhaps more telling than the film’s
over-the-top portrayal of “Western history” is the fanfare surrounding its
premiere in 1939.
Screened in the middle of a four-day celebration known as “Golden Spike
Days” in Omaha, Nebraska, DeMille’s film debuted at the site of the Union
Pacific headquarters. Along with parades of Omaha’s residents dressed in
period costumes for events, many Omaha men grew a beard and mustache
to lend realism to their event costumes. These events, like the film, relied on
pageantry and romance to perform and narrate an imagined Western past.
Unfortunately, Luther Standing Bear did not live to see himself on-screen in
Union Pacific. He also did not live to see that an “Indian Village” was part
of the pageantry required to salute DeMille’s revival of the Western genre.
DeMille’s “Indian Village” had been erected on the lawn in front of Omaha’s
courthouse, and no doubt employed some of the same Indian actors who
had been cast in the film.
An important aspect of this history of representation with regards to
Indianness in Westerns involved whether actual Indian actors were hired
to portray the Indian characters on-screen. The question of bodily authen-
ticity mattered to Cody. It continues to matter today.114 And it mattered to
Luther Standing Bear and his peers in the SAI. Debates among filmmakers
and throughout Indian Country took place regarding whether it was possi-
ble to offer accurate portrayals of Indian life in these movies. As with Wild
West shows, members of the OIA objected to certain features in these films,
and Commissioner Robert G. Valentine (1909–12) promised he would help
reform the industry. Certainly, for a pro-assimilation figure like Valentine,
the romantic frontier narrative, where Indian people were cut off from
the promise of white civilization (at best) or figured prominently as vio-
lent attackers (at worst), would be detrimental to his aim to incorporate
Native people into American society. Through these performances the ques-
tion emerged regarding the “authenticity” of the performance (desirable to
mythmakers) and the degrading character of the performance in relation to
cultural transformation and individual social mobility (desirable to policy
makers). Two groups of white Americans collided on this issue. At least two
groups of Indians did too: reformers, who echoed the white policy discourse
in some ways, and performers who cared about authenticity in tandem with
caring about their livelihoods. Despite protests by Indian activists, white
policy makers, and white reformers, many Western filmmakers continued to
seek out real Indian actors and natural locations to claim authenticity and
historical realism.115
270 Indigenous Intellectuals

For Standing Bear in particular, the merger of Wild West show traditions
(and their promise of realism) with the technological advance of film and its
promise of broader distribution, became integral to the role he would play
as an actor and an activist in Westerns and a growing film industry. By the
end of 1911, the Bison Company had partnered with the Miller Brothers’
101 Ranch Real Wild West show to release elaborate historical recreations
to film-going audiences. This merger was the idea of Thomas Harper Ince,
who created a stock company employing a large number of technicians, art-
ists, and cowboys in the Santa Monica Mountains overlooking the Pacific
Ocean. He even signed an agreement with the federal government to secure
a large group of Indians as employees. By 1913, Ince’s Indian performers
were earning seven to ten dollars a week, plus expenses. It is no wonder
that Standing Bear found himself enticed to go to work in California at
Inceville.116
Standing Bear made many films at Inceville between 1912 and 1915.
He appeared in the second film adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s pop-
ular 1884 novel Ramona in 1916, directed by Donald Crisp, at the Clune
Studio located at Bronson and Melrose Avenues. In 1921, he played the
role of “Long Knife” in White Oak, directed by Lambert Hillyer and star-
ring William S. Hart. Hart’s success as an actor and director of silent films
in Hollywood was useful for Standing Bear in that Hart could connect his
Native friend to a different influential network that existed among white
people involved in film production. White Oak was a story about revenge.
In it, Hart played a gambler looking for a villain (played by Alexander
Gaden) who had “ravished” his sister (played by Helen Holly). Gaden’s vil-
lain also went after Hart’s sweetheart, played by Vola Vale, before moving
on to the daughter of his “partner in crime,” an “Indian chief” played by
Standing Bear. Written by Hart, the film suffered from a number of artistic
and aesthetic shortcomings, not to mention a hyperbolic embrace of misog-
yny. Some of these reflected Hart’s anachronistic view of the West (and those
who populated it) while others arose because of elemental failings of the
genre itself. By this time, Hart’s career was in decline because his version
of gritty melodramatic and low-budget Westerns were no longer popular
among audiences. Still, Hart released three more films that year and one
more in 1921, before retiring in 1925.117
Between 1916 and 1935, as his friendship with Hart strengthened,
Standing Bear acted in at least thirteen films. He was busiest during 1935,
appearing in four films:  he played “Porcupine” in Cyclone of the Saddle,
“Chief Black Hawk” in Fighting Pioneers, “Sioux Chief” in The Circle of
Death, and “Chief Last Elk” in The Miracle Rider. All this activity fueled
Standing Bear’s interest in fairer wages for himself and the other Indian
actors he met, especially given that they were continually competing with
non-Indians for their roles. Apart from wages, Standing Bear was also inter-
ested in confronting representations of Indianness and the larger question
 Luther Standing Bear 271

of whether he could alter the representational politics of the films in which

he acted. These two goals – meeting financial need and pressing his employ-
ers on their inadequacies – required balance, compromise, and calculation.
In each of these films, Standing Bear had opportunities to make new con-
nections, meet new people, and build new alliances to assist in the political
reform work he did outside of film sets.118 Working out of this context,
Standing Bear met Yowlachie and Whitebird, among other Native actors,
and encouraged them to attend the first meeting of the NLJAI. They were
not alone in their efforts.
As a critical mass of Indian people came to live and work in Los Angeles,
local, pan-tribal organizations emerged to support the development of an
Indian community there.119 For example, in the 1920s, the Wigwam Club
formed to raise money for Indians in need. By 1935, the Los Angeles Indian
Center was established as the primary meeting place and welfare agency for
Los Angeles-area Indians, and it served their needs for the next five decades.
Nipo Strongheart went on to become the president of the Center during
the 1950s.120 Other organizations also emerged based on the interests and
participation of Native actors and activists, such as: the Native American
League, the Pan American Indian National Organization Council, the
National American Indian League, and the Association on American Indian
Affairs (AAIA). Standing Bear and his “niece” May Jones traveled together
to present public talks in connection with these organizations. Fortunately
for Jones and Standing Bear, by the early 1920s, three new Indian reform
organizations emerged in California in response to the Bursum Bill of 1922.
This legislation aimed to settle land disputes between Pueblo Indians and
non-Indians who settled after 1848 on Pueblo holdings in the Rio Grande
Valley. White artists, anthropologists, and writers from Santa Fe, with strong
ties to the local Pueblo community, organized the New Mexico Association
on Indian Affairs (NMAIA) to oppose the bill. Similar opposition, although
through a different network, emerged out of New  York City, where resi-
dents formed the Eastern Association on Indian Affairs (EAIA) in 1922. The
NMAIA and EAIA worked together, at first, to fight against the Bursum Bill.
Gertrude Bonnin also assisted them in their efforts during this time. John
Collier, a former social worker, also emerged in opposition to the bill and
formed his own group, the American Indian Defense Association (AIDA), in
May 1923. Headquartered in New York City, AIDA established branches on
the West Coast to tie together networks of reformers, mostly white but some
Indian, based along both coasts of the United States.
For advocates of Indian reform based out of Southern California, like
Standing Bear, the work of NMAIA, EAIA, and AIDA represented a critical
shift from prevailing assimilation goals of the earlier progressive groups.
Although citizenship remained a goal, there was much more tolerance and
celebration of Native cultures by members of these newer reform groups.
Perhaps more important, these organizations were willing to attack the
272 Indigenous Intellectuals

OIA directly. As commissioner of Indian affairs from 1933 to 1945, Collier

would try to overhaul the Office. Through an alliance between the National
Association on Indian Affairs, formerly the EAIA, and AIDA (Collier’s orga-
nization), the American Association on Indian Affairs was formed in 1937.121
Renamed the Association on American Indian Affairs in 1946, the AAIA
promoted the rights of more than 300 Native American tribes through-
out the United States and stood on the forefront of battles for Native
American rights, protecting land and water resources and the right of
self-determination as well as the right to worship freely and to secure equal
educational opportunity for Native children. The Association was similar to
the National League for Justice created by Standing Bear in that it embraced
eight areas of concern to Native Americans: education, economic develop-
ment, health and sanitation, land tenure, irrigation, preservation of culture
and religion, tribal sovereignty, and youth. Also like the League, the AAIA
represented a nexus of culture and policy. This link is perhaps most clearly
seen in Oliver La Farge’s work within the film industry and his leadership
within the AAIA.122
As a white anthropologist and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer for his
novel, Laughing Boy (1929), about the Navajo, La Farge was well posi-
tioned to become a prominent figure within Indian reform activities. At
Harvard University, La Farge pursued an interest in American Indian cul-
ture, specializing in anthropology and archaeological research. Although
highly respected in this field, La Farge abandoned his studies to publicize the
Indians’ dilemma. He rejected the popular sentimental image of the Indian
in contemporary literature and countered it in his own writing. Laughing
Boy’s theme of civilization’s corruption of Indian culture seemed suitable for
white liberals and reformers interested in reshaping popular conceptions of
Indianness to counter a long history of misrepresentation of Indian charac-
ters. A filmic version of La Farge’s novel was first attempted by Universal
Pictures. The studio found vocal opposition to its efforts from Indian agen-
cies, civic groups, and religious educators. B. D. Weeks, president of Bacone
(Baptist) College in Oklahoma, condemned the movie industry for complete
ignorance on the subject:  “These films about white corruption of Indian
people reflect badly upon the red man, and cheapen him in the eyes of the
world.”123 Notwithstanding such protests, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer took
over production and released the film in 1934. Luther Standing Bear was
among the cast. He played the part of “Quiet Hunter” in the film. Perhaps
Standing Bear had been influenced by La Farge’s Laughing Boy when he
and Campbell drafted the goals of their League; their first aim was to “pub-
lish a true history of the American Indian,” which could correct misrep-
resentations of Indian culture in literature and film. Despite MGM’s best
efforts, box office receipts and reviews from Variety suggest Laughing Boy
was a commercial failure, regardless of star performers and a prize-winning
story.124 By the mid-thirties, the Western was fading in popularity and
 Luther Standing Bear 273

with it opportunities to make and promote well-intentioned Indian films.

For Standing Bear and La Farge, Indian reform would have to take place
off-screen.
Considering the work of the NLJAI and the AAIA as well as growing
numbers of Native people working in California’s entertainment industry,
Standing Bear was well positioned to reshape American culture and policy.
The unique character of his performative career alters our understanding
of the cultural politics characterizing a significant group of pan-tribal intel-
lectuals during this time. Standing Bear’s life as a case study shifts the very
notion of resistance and intellectualism to reflect a diverse set of strategies.
Analysis of Native performance builds on Judith Butler’s study of bodies
as constituted in the act of description, whereby her examples of sex and
gender are always (to some degree) performative. When Standing Bear is
framed as a real Indian or a full-blooded Indian (rather than just, say, an
Indian) or is given the title of “chief,” such speech acts are illocutionary and
performative. In the case of Yowlachie, the act of naming an Indian per-
former using “real Indian” or “full-blooded” or “chief” initiated a process
by which Indianness gained symbolic power. While working in Hollywood,
Standing Bear and other Native actors found strategic ways to resist or con-
form to these articulations of Indianness.125
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Hollywood filmmakers hired Indian
actors to portray real Indians on-screen; in the process, Indian perform-
ers were often interpellated into a popular imaginary based on being
full-blooded and authentic enough. Once the necessary proof of Indianness
was provided, they could be hired again and again to play Indian for live
audiences or in film, and could then reap the financial benefits from this
employment.126 The desire on the part of filmmakers and audiences to see
real Indians portraying Indian characters also produced a norm whereby
Indian actors were continually cited as real Indians. This chain of citational-
ity helped reproduce frames for defining Indianness that aligned with domi-
nant narratives and popular (mis)conceptions about Indians. In these cases,
to label an individual as a real Indian was not a neutral act of description,
but rather a performative statement that interpellated the Indian as such.
For Native people, from various tribal nations, the IAA became a new space
through they could shape the filmmaking process in terms of the types of
roles they were offered and who was hired to play these roles.

Indian Actors Association, Founded in 1936

In addition to a desire for authenticity and improved working conditions
and wages, the IAA was established in response to shifting demographics
in Hollywood. By the 1930s, Syrians, Swedes, Arabs, Latinos, and Filipinos
donned braided wigs and face makeup to play Indian for the camera. The
influx of these ethnic groups, along with the onset of an economic depression
274 Indigenous Intellectuals

across the United States and a decline among the film-going public’s inter-
est in Westerns, forced many Indian people to rally together to assert their
rights as actors.127 As an affiliate of the Screen Actors Guild, members of
the IAA demanded that only real Indians be hired to play Indian roles on
screen.128 As a leading figure in the group, Standing Bear advocated for
Indian performers. His visibility as an author helped him to do so. In addi-
tion to casting real Indians, the Association argued for studios to hire Indian
people as technical experts, and it sponsored courses in Indian sign language
and pictography. Perhaps the biggest issue facing Indian actors was compen-
sation. Through vocal protest IAA members won equal salaries for Indian
actors who had been earning half of what non-Indian extras got paid.129 The
paradox of this “win” resides in the fact that playing Indian now depended
on being able to authenticate oneself as such. Casting and compensation
were most certainly linked.
Much of Standing Bear’s success was owed to the efforts of Jim Thorpe,
who worked with the IAA to advocate for his fellow Indians. Thorpe’s pri-
mary concern was how to guarantee that only real Indians portray Native
characters in films. Ironically, with the assistance of the Department of
Labor, Thorpe searched for undocumented Mexican and Italian immigrants
in Hollywood who posed as Indians in order to play Indian on-screen.130
Thorpe made a case that 40 percent of extras playing Indians were in fact
not actual Indians, but the U.S. attorney’s office argued that studio hiring
practices were exempt from federal law, so any complaints Thorpe had on
behalf of the IAA went unheeded. To combat what he saw as a rising tide
of opportunistic Indian fakes, Thorpe established his own troupe of 250
professional Indian actors ready for hire. In 1936, Thorpe was disappointed
when Cecil B. DeMille chose to hire Indians from a reservation outside of
his control to act in The Plainsman.
Later, Thorpe was outraged when DeMille hired two non-Indians, Victor
Varconi and Paul Harvey, to play chiefs in the film. He protested to no avail,
but his concerns seem justified. A  large number of talented Indian actors
was available for hire in Hollywood during this time. Many could speak
their Native language and ride bareback. Perhaps Thorpe’s anger came
from personal experience, given the highs and lows associated with his own
fame and fortune. He had been born in 1887 of an Irish and Sac-Fox father
and part French and Potawatomi/Kickapoo mother, in the Indian Territory
of Oklahoma. After attending Carlisle, where Thorpe met famed football
coach Glenn S. “Pop” Warner, Thorpe went on to win two gold medals for
the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden.
The Amateur Athletic Union revoked his medals in 1913 after accusations
that he had played professional baseball. Still, Thorpe’s career in sports
remained active as he played both professional baseball and football. He
became the first president of the American Professional Football Association
(later renamed the National Football League). However, by the early 1930s,
 Luther Standing Bear 275

Thorpe was living in Los Angeles digging ditches for only four dollars a day.
A  Los Angeles Times reporter observed, “His existence has been a series
of ups and downs with the latter distinctly predominant.”131 While Thorpe
struggled to make a living as a minor player in Hollywood films, he actively
campaigned against studios that hired non-Indian actors.
Indian adventures and interracial romances, made popular in the early
silent films, were no longer of interest to moviegoers by the time Thorpe
protested DeMille’s hiring practices for The Plainsman. The director had
a different sort of Western adventure in mind, as he designed an epic to
revive the flailing genre. By the mid-1930s, “cowboy and Indian” stories of
conquest, taming, and expansion were becoming popular once again, now
as big-budget pictures. The new blockbuster Western needed Native peo-
ple once again to participate. Luther Standing Bear comments on the prob-
lem of representing Indianness in Westerns in Land of the Spotted Eagle.
He writes that the Western stories “joined in glorifying the pioneer  . . . in
their course of conquest across the country,” and could only do so “by com-
mitting untold offenses against the aboriginal people.”132 Although new
Westerns meant more employment opportunities for Native actors, a fact
that pleased Thorpe given his dire financial straits, most roles were neither
realistic nor helpful in curtailing myths about Native peoples. Both Standing
Bear and Thorpe hoped things would change to reflect their realities to at
best represent Indian people as members of modern American society and at
worst provide more job opportunities for many out-of-work Indian actors.
Their success in establishing the IAA reflects one aspect of Standing Bear’s
social reform agenda. He would continue to build and maintain the net-
works that began through his association with Carlisle and his work for
Cody, and that were now built around rich sympathizers like John Collier
and Oliver La Farge, as well as editors and publishers like E. A. Brininstool
and Lucullus McWhorter. Standing Bear continued working as an actor,
writer, and reformer before he found himself caught in a new world defined
by rumor and scandal.

Rumor and Scandal: First His Blood, Then His Character

In 1930, Bill Hart wrote to Standing Bear, as his friend and fellow actor, to
express how “astounded” he was “at certain calumny directed against you.
How any man, woman, or child could question your standing as an upright
American of the red or white race is beyond my comprehension.”133 This
rumor had traveled all the way to Washington, DC and the OIA, where
Commissioner C.  J. Rhodes had to take time out of his busy schedule to
address it. The buzz around town was regarding the “exact degree of Indian
blood of Luther Standing Bear.”134 Once Standing Bear and others had made
the case for Indian people playing Indian parts, the next logical question
was how to identify Indians, and which Indians might be real and which
276 Indigenous Intellectuals

might be fake. Blood quantum, a familiar frame for thinking about “authen-
tic” identity, proved critical to the question. Hart was astounded to hear
that an accusation was being made that Standing Bear had none. The world
of Hollywood was full of actors acting, performers constantly performing,
people shifting names and identities. Given the numbers of non-Indians
playing Indian, it should come as no surprise that all “Indian” actors became
open to identity policing  – a concern for any Indian in Westerns, which
could have profound consequences. It seems as if this accusation would
have fizzled into minor gossip if the commissioner had not made the mistake
of sending a letter to Mrs. Jeanne Cappel (who seemed most invested in ver-
ifying the rumor’s charge) in 1932, in which he noted that Luther Standing
Bear of Rosebud was “three fourths white and one fourth Indian.”135
It turned out the inverse was true:  according to other federal records,
Standing Bear was three-fourths Indian and one-fourth white. Files from
1908 confirm that Standing Bear was a real Indian in the eyes of the gov-
ernment because he was counted as a member of the Sioux tribe within
the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota – and, most important then,
entitled to an allotment of land. The distribution of his allotment had been
approved by the secretary of the interior on October 20, 1906. Notably, it
was the heavy surveillance of the U.S. government managing Indian people
that appeared equally capable of affirming or denying the very Indianness
of any particular individual; it carried such authority that a mistake could
be terminal. In the context of Hollywood’s film industry, the idea of ethnic
authenticity for Indian actors was now crucial for promoting and maintain-
ing their careers because groups like the IAA advocated for the right of
Indian actors as one above those of non-Indians to play Indian parts. Any
question about the fullness of Standing Bear’s blood and Indianness was
critical to his involvement with the IAA and other Indian advocacy groups
at the time. Hart and other friends of Standing Bear were able to cast doubt
on the rumor immediately by invoking indigenous sovereignty. As Hart put
it, Standing Bear’s birthright (his very Indianness) was clear because of his
“nationality as a Sioux.”136 Such a claim to nationhood, recognized by Hart,
performed a critical awareness of Standing Bear’s identity as at once defined
by the United States and also the Sioux Nation.
As this rumor made its way from Hollywood to DC, not only Standing
Bear’s race but also his position as “chief” was in question. As a conse-
quence, Standing Bear sought supporters like E. A. Brininstool to counteract
the “propaganda going around” Los Angeles. In letters and conversations
around town, white and Indian friends testified to the fullness of Standing
Bear’s Indian blood and his character. Standing Bear was able to draw on
networks built around performativity to come to his aid in this matter. He
also turned to a different sort of network by relying on letters from the OIA
to confirm his Indianness. Through these efforts, the rumor was squashed.
No one, however, was prepared for the scandal that followed in its wake.137
 Luther Standing Bear 277

Early in September 1934, Standing Bear sent a letter to John Collier,

who had been newly appointed the commissioner of Indian affairs. In it, he
asserted his concern that many of the Indians he had met with were “unde-
cided” as to how to view the impending Wheeler-Howard Bill that Collier
proposed would resolve the economic, social, and cultural issues resulting
from the Dawes Act of 1887. Standing Bear sought Collier’s help on a num-
ber of fronts. He wanted support for the practice of indigenous religions
on Pine Ridge, especially given that he had witnessed Christian denomina-
tions working against the practice of the “Sun circle.” He argued that “if
my people could once more worship in the natural way of their fathers they
would gain their strength much faster.”138 In addition, he wanted to resolve
a personal concern that his sister, Mrs. Conroy, should have to pay taxes “as
a white citizen” given that she is a “reservation Indian.” Finally, Standing
Bear aimed to confirm the promise made by “Mr. Collette” in California to
procure money for California’s Indian population based on land claims.139
These sentiments regarding religious freedom, individual rights, and how
to manage the work of white reformers were no doubt still on Standing
Bear’s mind; he had described them in great detail just a year earlier in Land
of the Spotted Eagle. Like My People the Sioux, this book was made possi-
ble through the support of a white patron, Melvin R. Gilmore – the curator
of ethnology at the University of Michigan. Before coming to Michigan,
Gilmore taught biology and zoology at Cotner University (1904–11), and
worked as a curator at the Nebraska State Historical Society (1911–16),
where he compiled information about Native American village sites, recorded
Pawnee traditions, and grew plants of Native American origin. From 1916
to 1923, Gilmore was the curator of the State Historical Society of North
Dakota, after which he worked at the Museum of the American Indian
(1923–8). In 1929, he joined the Museum of Anthropology at Michigan and
became the first curator of ethnology. Gilmore’s career had enabled him to
work closely with Native peoples and his collaboration with Standing Bear
would have been known to Collier, and celebrated for their insights regard-
ing Native American life and history.140
In Spotted Eagle, Standing Bear argues that Americans must be reedu-
cated about Indian people and the history of the United States to alter their
impressions of “the Indian of the cheap magazine and the movie.” This pro-
duces a false sense of history, and he suggests, “the parents and the grade
teachers of this land . . . now fulfill the duty of demanding that true histories
be placed in the hands of the young.” Standing Bear goes a step further to
argue that “a school of Indian thought” should be built, so that the nation
might “be cognizant of itself” and through this recognition preserve its true
identity.141
Standing Bear hoped his own books would aid in this cause. The first
step was the publisher who could help promote Standing Bear’s work. He
turned to the well-known and influential Boston-based Houghton Mifflin
278 Indigenous Intellectuals

Company; it had, by the mid-nineteenth century, worked with an array of

well-known American writers, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Mark Twain, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Henry David Thoreau.
By 1928, when the first edition of My People the Sioux was printed,
Houghton Mifflin had also worked with other Native writers.142 Standing
Bear’s ability to work with this publisher may have stemmed from his con-
nection to Carlisle, as well as his collaboration with Western writers like
Brininstool and with ethnologists like Gilmore. Through these different
but related white networks, Standing Bear successfully marketed himself
as a Native writer. As a published author, he carried an air of respectability
with him when he wrote to political leaders like John Collier. How, then,
would his readers, as well as collaborators (Gilmore and Brininstool) and
political allies like Collier, have dealt with the news that Standing Bear
was arrested for “making improper advances to a young half-breed Piute
girl”?143
On May 6, 1935, the Los Angeles Times reported that Standing Bear
had pled guilty to the charge of child molestation. According to records
from Los Angeles County, Standing Bear was convicted under Penal Code
288 of “lewd acts on a minor under 14.” There is little archival evidence
available to clarify the details surrounding this case. The voice and identity
of the eight-year-old girl, Standing Bear’s accuser, remain hidden from the
historical record. Yet the fact of his arrest and the ensuing activity of those
who rallied to assert his innocence or condemn his actions fill in much of the
historical context surrounding these charges.144
After pleading guilty, Standing Bear was sentenced to one year in jail
“as a condition of five years’ probation by Superior Judge Desmond” for
this “sexual assault” offense. The same Los Angeles Times article featured
a photograph of Standing Bear with a feathered headdress and a somber
expression, as well as a list of his friends, all of whom begged for leniency
from the court.145

Among his friends [were] John H.  McGregor, superintendent of the Pine Ridge
Reservation in South Dakota, where Standing Bear was born: Little Badger, White
Bird, Young Beaver, Kuuks Walks-Alone, Weeping Star, Mrs. Bird Jack, Dana
W.  Bartlett, William S.  Hart, Sitting Calf, Willow Birch, Little Horse and Marian
Campbell, president of the National League for Justice to American Indians.146

White Bird, William S.  Hart, and Marian Campbell all knew each other
and Standing Bear through their work for the NLJAI. The others listed
among this motley assortment were likely to be members of the IAA or
white reformers. The Times article concluded by affirming the contributions
Standing Bear had made regarding Indian political rights. “For many years
Standing Bear was a leader in movements to aid American Indians of all
tribes, according to letters received by the probation department.”147
 Luther Standing Bear 279

According to the Times and a slew of letters, Standing Bear was sur-
rounded by people determined to help him. A  network forged through
the meeting of performance and political organizing included people who
responded to his indictment with shock and horror, not because they
believed the young Piute girl, but because they believed Standing Bear was
incapable of such a charge. And yet he pleaded guilty, which suggests there
is truth to his accuser’s claims. The repeated assertions about the impos-
sibility of his guilt are performative utterances that invoke his status as
an Indian activist and older notions regarding the inherent innocence of
Indians linked to primitivism. Supporters repeated details about his life
“without tobacco and alcohol” to exonerate Standing Bear. They reminded
the public, the court, and the OIA that he was a “good” Indian, not one of
the “bad” ones corrupted by white civilization – ironic suggestions given
that these definitions positioned him as akin to a child, proposing he had
not been influenced by depraved behavior. But how could this be if he had
molested the Piute girl?148
The paradox of the defensive rhetoric used to support Standing Bear
seemed to forget the charge of misconduct against a child, while simulta-
neously interpellating Standing Bear into a position of innocence so often
ascribed to children. This sort of framing invariably linked a discourse of
racialization – whereby Indian people were wards of the U.S. nation-state –
to their agency, or lack thereof. Rather than taking into account the com-
plexity of Standing Bear’s identity, the majority of his supporters relied on
this history to argue he not be incarcerated within Los Angeles County, but
released into the custody of his people at Pine Ridge. The desire of his sup-
porters to have Standing Bear in the care of “his people” separated him from
their social space, and by extension, returned him to live under the watchful
eye of the federal government and the Indian Bureau. A familiar narrative
began to emerge, which was because Native people had been pacified, a
by-product of settler colonialism, the maintenance of a separate system to
deal with Natives as wards of the state was necessary. Therefore, Standing
Bear’s allies thought they could use the Indian Bureau as a favorable substi-
tute for their own penal system to deal with his misconduct. Certainly for
many Native people during this period, reservation spaces could and did
operate just like prisons.149
John Collier seemed especially confused as to how to interpret the events
of 1934–5 with regards to Standing Bear’s case. As letters of support poured
into the OIA and Collier learned, as he put it, the “details of the case,” he
deferred help to “Judge Parker” and “local friends of Mr. Standing Bear” as
“the only ones who really can help him.”150 Although Collier spent much
time and effort to address Mrs. Cappel’s accusation regarding the “quan-
tity of Indian blood” of Luther Standing Bear, when it came to a statu-
tory offense brought by a young girl, Collier would not be moved. He sent
several copies of the same letter to individual supporters of Standing Bear
280 Indigenous Intellectuals

redirecting them to local authorities in California, further distancing himself

from the situation.
White residents of Los Angeles and friends of Standing Bear wrote to
Collier in March 1935 recommending that “in the event that Standing Bear
receives sentence” and given that “his whole life has been devoted in their
interests and has done for them what no other Indian has done” by record-
ing the history of the tribe, it would be a futile “gesture to place him in
prison.”151 Moreover, despite Standing Bear’s publishing career and royalties
from Houghton Mifflin, he was in dire economic straits. This financial strain
may have affected his access to legal representation and even the advice for
his plea. He might have had bad counsel, and therefore, thought he would
get probation if he copped a plea, instead of something longer if he did not
and was convicted. The many testimonies about “his personal habits” as
“meticulously careful and orderly; in his mental and moral habits even more
so,” and repeated references affirming his character based on the fact that
he “never indulged in liquor or the use of tobacco in any form” were not
enough to excuse him from standing trial. When his trial day came, it would
seem Standing Bear was guilty – or induced to plead that way.152
In 1935, Laura W.  Soldier, a Sioux woman, and, more important, the
ex-wife of Luther Standing Bear, wrote to James H. Cook. Her letter was
in response to his inquiry regarding the matter of Standing Bear’s charac-
ter and the child molestation case. Her remarks provide another picture of
how some may have perceived Standing Bear’s gender and sexual politics
in response to the molestation charges. Soldier does not mince words in
assessing her ex-husband. “It serves him right; he has been too selfish. I have
never forgot nor forgave him, even tho’ I’m trying to live a Christian life.
He left one woman [Nellie] with 7 children, and left me when Eugene was 6
mo. old.” This raises the issue of whether both Standing Bear brothers were
able to make their way in the world, in part, by abandoning their familial
obligations, further suggesting these choices were underpinned by mascu-
line privilege and an abandonment of the role of hunter/provider that came
out of an older, Lakota cultural practice. Soldier’s statements in the letter
do not confirm Standing Bear’s guilt, but do claim that he “deserves pun-
ishment” because she always thought “he would get in bad some day; his
weakness is women.”153 Such a weakness can be read as a negative evalua-
tion of Standing Bear’s gender politics at best and a confirmation of sexual
abuse at worst.154
Perhaps two failed marriages, both resulting in abandonment of spouses
and children, demonstrate the degree to which Standing Bear’s views of
gender reflected the heterosexual, patriarchal, and sexist ideologies com-
monly held by many men during this period. Or perhaps not. Just two years
earlier, in 1933, Standing Bear expressed his understanding of gender and
race publicly by dedicating Land of the Spotted Eagle to his mother. When
readers turned the opening pages to begin, they would first encounter this
 Luther Standing Bear 281

dedication to: “My Indian mother, Pretty Face, who, in her humble way,
helped to make the history of her race. For it is the mothers, not the war-
riors, who create a people and guide their destiny.”155 Some readers might
pause to consider how “mothers, not the warriors” could be better guides
for the Lakota people. Such a notion set women apart from Standing Bear,
importantly so, as superior leaders of their people. Looking more closely,
his reference to the “humble way” his mother and other women “helped”
make Lakota history suggests Native women played ancillary, if also essen-
tial roles. On one hand, the dedication expresses the gratitude and love of
a son for his mother, and on the other, it relies on vaguely paternalistic and
patriarchal rhetoric to challenge the efficacy of women’s roles in the mak-
ing of history. Regardless of it truth value, Soldier’s condemnation threat-
ened not only to undermine Standing Bear’s manhood but his career as an
actor and an author.
James Cook sent a copy of Soldier’s damaging letter to long-time friend
and editor for Standing Bear’s first book Earl Alonzo Brininstool, who was
living in Los Angeles at the time of the trial. Brininstool had become popu-
lar as a Western historian and writer of “cowboy poetry.” Born in Warsaw,
New York, he moved with his wife to Los Angeles in 1895 so that he could
pursue a career in journalism. Although he mostly wrote poetry involving
Western themes, Brininstool also worked as a freelance writer and contrib-
uted articles to magazines such as Hunter-Trader, Sunset, Frontier Times,
Outdoor Life, and Winners of the West. In fact, his most noted work
was published well after Standing Bear passed away. During the trial and
Standing Bear’s incarceration, Brininstool remained readily available to help
his friend.156
After receiving multiple requests for such help, Brininstool did not take
Soldier’s biting remarks to heart; instead, he supported Standing Bear’s
application for probation in April 1935. Then on May 8 of that same year,
Brininstool received a letter from Robert J. Hamilton:
the Chief was granted probation this Friday morning, May 3, in Department 43
of the Superior Court of this County on condition first, that he serve a year in the
County Jail, and on release therefrom [sic] return to the Indian Reservation in South
Dakota, his former home, and where he has many relatives and friends.157

These events demonstrate how the man who had been elected to a two-year
term as president of the American Indian Progressive Association and
worked to reform Indian affairs during President Herbert Hoover and
Franklin D.  Roosevelt’s administrations, could also be convicted of child
molestation. Such a conviction and the limits of his probation did not result
in a return to South Dakota. Instead, Standing Bear remained in Huntington
Park, California, for the remainder of his life. He refused to relocate to live
under the watchful eye of the federal government and was able to continue
making movies up until his death.158
282 Indigenous Intellectuals

A Contested Will
On a particularly cold and windy day in late February Standing Bear trav-
eled through Los Angeles to his suburban home after a long day of film-
ing DeMille’s Union Pacific. His work was mostly outside that day and the
stormy weather did not help protect him against catching a cold. As evening
came, he developed a severe fever. According to his nurse, Donna Hite, the
elderly Standing Bear was quite ill, and yet May Jones Montoya/Sunflower
insisted on moving him in the middle of the night to sleep at her house. Jones
had been managing Standing Bear’s affairs following his arrest in 1935. The
move that night proved fatal, and on Monday, February 20, 1939, Standing
Bear died at the age of seventy-one.
Later that same day, Indian friends in “full costume” attended a Christian
funeral service followed by a Lakota service honoring Standing Bear’s life.
According to eyewitness accounts, a peace pipe was placed in his hands
before he was laid to rest in Hollywood’s Forever Cemetery. Perhaps he was
buried wearing a costume from one of the many movies that he worked on,
such as the elaborate feathered headdress, bear class necklace, and metal
cuff he wears in Figure 10.159
During his funeral, Indian and non-Indian guests alike would have cele-
brated Standing Bear’s refusal to submit to romantic and anachronistic rep-
resentations of Indianness. These fictional representations existed within the
same cultural and economic sphere that relied on the “fact” of Indian blood
as a marker of one’s status and right to portray an Indian on-screen. Just six
years before his death, Standing Bear commented on this sort of complexity
in Land of the Spotted Eagle.
Irreparable damage has been done by white writers who discredit the Indian. Books
have been written of the native American, so distorting his true nature that he
scarcely resembles the real man; his faults have been magnified and his virtues min-
imized; his wars, and his battles, which, if successful, the white man chooses to call
“massacres,” have been told and retold, but little attention has been given to his
philosophy and ideals.160

These philosophical ideas have left as indelible a mark on American cul-

ture. Early on in this text, Standing Bear notes that “The Indian was a nat-
ural conservationist. He destroyed nothing, great or small.”161 While later
he confirms, “The Lakota was a true naturist – a lover of Nature.” These
rhetorical choices reflect a desire to uplift the image of Native peoples and
simultaneously critique “white America.” Standing Bear continues, “The
white man has come to be the symbol of extinction for all things natural to
this continent.”162 These are biting remarks to be sure, far less ambivalent or
strategic than how he remembered Wanamaker or Cody in his first autobi-
ography. Times had changed by the 1930s, and as Standing Bear grew older
his politics became more radical.
 Luther Standing Bear 283

Figure 10.  Luther Standing Bear actor’s portrait.

Courtesy of Braun Research Library Collection, Autry National Center, Los
Angeles, CA; Photo # OP. 798.

But his books and his funeral are not the end of the story. Following
Standing Bear’s death, Donna Hite and his son George E.  Standing Bear,
who lived in Pawhuska, Oklahoma at the time, fought to regain control
over Standing Bear’s estate from May Jones. Standing Bear and Jones were
friends and political allies. She had worked with him through groups like
the NLJAI, the Native American League, the Pan American Indian National
Organization Council, the National American Indian League, and the AAIA.
Jones was not just a political ally because she had taken control over the
publishing royalties Standing Bear received for his books from the Houghton
Mifflin Company. Despite financial straits that prompted the IAA to raise
money to cover the cost of Standing Bear’s funeral and burial, Jones was
flush with cash because of book royalties. Why did Jones fail to cover the
284 Indigenous Intellectuals

costs of his burial? As the sole beneficiary in his will, Jones had a lot to lose
if Hite and George Standing Bear succeeded in contesting the will.
They were unsuccessful. Jones retained her inheritance when the court
found no legal reason to dispute the will. In tribute to Standing Bear’s life,
Jones continued the political and cultural work they had begun together by
participating in public lectures for many years after his death. Two decades
later, on September 22, 1959, Jones honored Luther Standing Bear by donat-
ing 145 Teton Sioux artifacts and clothing items – many made or owned by
Standing Bear – to the San Bernardino County Museum. Included among
them were the distinctive beaded ensembles and headdresses that he wore
in most of his films. The dynamic of material authenticity in dialogue with
discursive belief reproduced in these objects, both in their making and in
their subsequent display, returns to the issue of authenticity in Native per-
formance. Although these items have provenance, it is uncertain how Indian
these artifacts may be given that many were made solely for the purpose
of playing Indian as part of the film industry. Still, Standing Bear’s bead-
ing ability to craft dance clothes may also be read as an exactly appropri-
ate avenue for him to bring his knowledge of the Sioux world to the film
industry. Looking at the donated garments, museum curators could appre-
ciate Lakota artistry. Exhibited in the museum, visitors could gaze on these
objects with a similar sort of appreciation mixed with curiosity, although
probably less aware that Standing Bear approached the task of beading for
a film with a different sensibility than he would if making these items for
his family or his tribe. The aesthetics and work of beading do not necessar-
ily change all that much because the garments being made are to be worn
on-screen. Of course, ethnographic certification of a feathered headdress, for
example, does offer a different sort of authenticity, one that may not require
testimony or authentication by an Indian person, which is not exactly the
type of authenticity that Standing Bear would have supported.163
Standing Bear was pleased about being an actor during a time when
other Native leaders were not equally proud of the performative moments
in their careers. Unlike other Indian intellectuals from this period, Standing
Bear celebrated his acting career as an accomplishment. The positive posi-
tion he stakes out in My People the Sioux not only reconciles his choice to
work as a performer within entertainments that many Native people viewed
with skepticism and concern, but dovetails with the role he played after he
left Wild West shows and moved to Hollywood. Working in film provided
Standing Bear time and resources needed to produce his books. My People
the Sioux (published over ten years after Eastman’s last book, Indian Heroes
and Great Chieftains), as well as Standing Bear’s other texts, raises issues
of ethnic authenticity, how to confront a vanishing narrative, and how to
correct misrepresentations of Indian history and identity – all themes that
related to work in Western films. During the 1930s, Native people faced these
issues on the eve of a dramatic shift in federal Indian policy with Collier’s
 Luther Standing Bear 285

Wheeler-Howard Act of 1934. Also known as the Indian Reorganization Act

(IRA), it was designed by Congress to reverse the allotment policies of the
1880s and “to conserve and develop Indian lands and resources; to extend
to Indians the right to form business and other organizations; to establish a
credit system for Indians; to grant certain rights of home rule to Indians; to
provide for vocational education for Indians; and for other purposes.”164 In
My Indian Boyhood (1931), Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933), and Stories
of the Sioux (1934) Standing Bear writes about Lakota traditions, beliefs,
and cultural practices to reimagine the roles of Native people in American
culture. These narrative claims are set against the shifting political climate of
the 1930s, so that Standing Bear’s writings work beyond the limits defined
by the IRA to effect broader cultural change in American society. His books
urge white readers to reimagine Native people and their histories. His writ-
ings seem to anticipate the failures of the IRA. As many historians have
shown, the IRA was only mildly successful in reversing the negative effects
associated with allotment.165 For individuals like Standing Bear, who already
lived outside of a reservation community in an urban center surrounded by
Native people from a range of tribal nations, there were different issues at
stake that had little to do with tribal sovereignty and land, although he was
well aware of these issues for his family back home.
As a Los Angeles-based writer, Standing Bear aligned his political reform
agenda more with progressives from the 1920s and 1930s, and especially
the white activists whose efforts grew out of their relationship to the Pueblo
people of New Mexico. Critical to Standing Bear’s life and those of other
Native actors in Southern California was how to negotiate a new, urban,
pan-tribal Indian community. This is different from Collier’s primitivist
political ideas that formed the ideological basis of the Indian New Deal. For
Standing Bear, political reform and literary production represented a turning
point in Indian intellectual production, which built on the earlier writings
of Eastman, Montezuma, and Bonnin, and now asserted a desire to move
outside of federal bureaucracy. Read in the context of the Great Depression
and the emergence of Hollywood as a central site for American cultural
production and Native American participation in that production, Native
actors, like Standing Bear, did more than just make a living through film –
they used the connections produced by that industry to build a pan-tribal
political community.
Perhaps Standing Bear’s fellow activists celebrated the fact that May
Jones felt it appropriate to donate his collection of artifacts and costumes
to a local museum after his death. Through this type of public space, Native
and non-Native people alike could learn more about his career and the lega-
cies of Native performance, more broadly speaking. They might appreci-
ate the struggles of Strongheart, who aimed to challenge the sort of ethnic
“authenticity” required for real Indians to play Indian in some ways and
not others. They might also come to see the aesthetics of these performances
286 Indigenous Intellectuals

as intimately political as much as personal. If exhibited properly, the very

notion of performance itself could be reevaluated to challenge Standing
Bear’s cautionary tale that the damage white writers did to discredit the
Indian was “irreparable.”

Notes
1 William S. Hart started acting in his twenties. At the age of forty-nine, he came
west to Hollywood to start his movie career; he made more than sixty-five silent
films, the last being Tumbleweeds in 1925. In 1921, Hart purchased a ranch
house and surrounding property where he built a twenty-two-room mansion,
which today houses Hart’s collection of Western art, Native American artifacts,
and early Hollywood memorabilia. Hart lived there for almost twenty years until
his death in 1946. See: The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and
William S. Hart Museum.
2 Chief Yowlachie (1891–1966) was born Daniel Simmons. He acted in several
films including Ella Cinders (1926), Bowery Buckaroos (1947), Red River (1948),
Ma and Pa Kettle (1949), My Friend Irma (1949), Winchester ’73 (1950), Annie
Get Your Gun (1950), The Painted Hills (1951), Hollywood or Bust (1956), and
The FBI Story (1959), and he portrayed Geronimo in the television series Stories
of the Century.
3 Michelle Wick Patterson, “ ‘Real Indian’ Indian Songs: The Society of American
Indians and the Use of Native American Culture as a Means of Reform,”
American Indian Quarterly Vol. 26, No. 1, Winter 2002, 50, argues that mem-
bers of the Society of American Indians produced similar sorts of pedagogical
entertainments. Such shows would celebrate traditional dances, music, and sto-
ries from Indian life while also suggesting historical accuracy and ethnological
truth. Standing Bear’s performance drew on similar logics while also referring
to a long history of Native performance driven by imaginaries about America’s
Wild West.
4 Promotional materials and other ephemera related to The Covered Wagon
(1923) available in the archival collection of the Autry Library, Gene Autry
National Center, Los Angeles, CA.
5 Los Angeles Times, “Home, Club and Civic Interests of Women,” May 31, 1931,
ProQuest Historical Newspapers Los Angeles Times (1881–1987), 22.
6 I refer to “America” and “Americanness” to represent the rhetoric used by the
League, which understood America as synonymous with the United States. This
was especially true during the 1930s for American Indian people who would
refer to their positionality by using both terms interchangeably to represent the
U.S. nation, rather than, say, referring to America as a symbol for all three con-
tinents of North, Central, and South America.
7 “National League for Justice to American Indians,” Pamphlet, Lucullus
McWhorter Papers, Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington
State University Libraries, Pullman, WA. An intriguing comparison can be drawn
by looking to the East Coast, and what Alain Locke termed in his 1925 essay
“The New Negro Movement.” As a Howard University professor of philoso-
phy, Locke described this movement as a transformation and departure from
 Luther Standing Bear 287

older models to embrace a “new psychology.” Central to this notion was the
mandate to “smash” all of the racial, social, and psychological impediments
that had obstructed black achievement. Six years earlier, black filmmaker Oscar
Micheaux called for similar changes in his film Within our Gates. Micheaux
represented a virtual cornucopia of “New Negro” types: from the educated and
entrepreneurial “race” man and woman to the incorrigible Negro hustler, as
well as others, from the liberal white philanthropist to the hard core white rac-
ist. Micheaux created a complex, melodramatic narrative around these types
to develop a morality tale of pride, prejudice, misanthropy, and progressivism.
For more on this history see: Henry Louis Gates Jr. “Harlem on Our Minds,”
Critical Inquiry Vol. 24, No. 1, Autumn 1997, 1–12, and Richard J. Powell,
“Re/Birth of a Nation” in Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance
(Berkeley: The Hayward Gallery and the Institute of International Visual Arts,
University of California Press, 1997), 14–34.
 8 A “light opera” is shorter and of a light and amusing character, often created to
appeal to children and sometimes referred to as an “operetta.”
 9 By “Indianist composers,” I  mean those white Americans who wrote music
that in words and sound aimed to represent Native themes even if these songs
were rarely based on actual Native music, but rather built on caricatures of the
“Sound of Indian.” For more on these specific histories see the chapter on music
in Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press
of Kansas, 2006) and see Michael Pisani, Imagining Native America in Music
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).
10 Los Angeles Times, “Home, Club and Civic Interests of Women.”
11 Lucullus McWhorter (1860–1944) from the Yakima River valley of Washington,
became involved in preserving the cultural heritage of the first peoples of the
Columbia Plateau. As an author, amateur historian, linguist, and anthropolo-
gist, McWhorter collected stories, artifacts, drawings, maps, photographs, and
printed materials to preserve the history and culture of these indigenous peoples.
He documented Indian-government relations in eastern Washington, includ-
ing individual recollections of Indian wars such as the Nez Perce War of 1877
and the Yakima Indian War of 1855–8. McWhorter’s published works include
Yellow Wolf: His Own Story (1940), Tragedy of the Wahk-Shum: Prelude to the
Yakima Indian War, 1855–56 (1937), Hear Me, My Chiefs! Nez Perce History
and Legend (published posthumously, 1952), and The Crime against the
Yakimas (1913). See: Biographical description, Cage 55, Guide to the Lucullus
Virgil McWhorter Papers, Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections,
Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA.
12 Cogewea was largely autobiographical. Quintasket had gone to secretary school
to learn how to type so she could draft her own novel. McWhorter’s role as edi-
tor may have complicated matters by rewriting aspects of her text that would
later require her disavowal.
13 For another example of collaborations between Indians and non-Indians
see: Sherry Smith, Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012).
14 Regarding the Stronghearts’ activist work together see:  Los Angeles Times,
“Indian Chief Will Be Church Speaker,” April 27, 1931, and Los Angeles Times,
“Indian Chief Joins League: Nipo Strongheart, Yakima Leader, Speaks at Izaak
288 Indigenous Intellectuals

Walton Gathering; Urges Game Protection,” October 26, 1929, both from
ProQuest Historical Newspapers Los Angeles Times (1881–1987).
15 For more on John Collier up to the late 1920s see:  Lawrence C. Kelly, The
Assault on Assimilation: John Collier and the Origins of Indian Policy Reform
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983). For biographical details
related to the Indian New Deal see: Kenneth Philp, John Collier’s Crusade for
Indian Reform, 1920–1954 (Tucson:  University of Arizona Press, 1977) and
John Collier and the American Indian, 1920–1945 (Lansing:  Michigan State
University Press, 1968). For more regarding Indian people, federal policy, and
the American West see: Peter Iverson, When Indians Became Cowboys: Native
Peoples and Cattle Ranching in the American West (Norman:  University of
Oklahoma Press, 1994).
16 For more on the Association on American Indian Affairs see:  Association on
American Indian Affairs Records, 1851–2013 (mostly 1922–95), Public Policy
Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University
Library.
17 For more on the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) see the fol-
lowing. National Congress of American Indians:  Constitution, By-Laws
and Standing Rules of Order from the official NCAI Web site states the pur-
pose of the NCAI, different types of memberships, and rules and regulations.
Also see:  Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins:  An Indian Manifesto
(New  York:  Avon Books, 1970); N.  B. Johnson, “The National Congress of
American Indians,” in the Chronicles of Oklahoma; Report of Activities,
American Association on Indian Affairs, June 1945-May 1946; Bradley G.
Shreve, “From Time Immemorial: The Fish-in Movement and the Rise of the
Intertribal Activism,” Pacific Historical Review Vol. 78, No. 3, 2009, 403–34;
Thomas W. Cowger, The National Congress of American Indians: The Founding
Years (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
18 Nipo Strongheart’s career in film began with The White Chief (1905) and ended
with Lone Star (1952).
19 For more on the connection between Wild West shows, like the Miller’s 101
Ranch and Thomas Ince, as well as Inceville as the home for the Bison Film
Company see:  the “Research Center at the Oklahoma Historical Society,”
Oklahoma City, OK, http://www.okhistory.org/research/index.html (accessed
May 5, 2011). Aamire Mufti, “The Aura of Authenticity,” Social Text 64, Vol.
18, No. 3, Fall 2000, 87–103. See Mufti for more on the philosophical nature of
authenticity as an aura, where certain cultural practices can be seen as resources
for overcoming alienation produced through the colonial encounter (87).
20 Patterson, “ ‘Real Indian’ Indian Songs,” 50. Patterson argues SAI members
intended to push “forward the ideas that Indians could adapt to ‘civilized’ life,”
and these were best articulated through performances that sought out historical
accuracy and ethnological truth, as opposed to the erroneous representations of
Native cultures perpetuated by Wild West shows.
21 Ibid. “Some members defended the shows by arguing that they reached a broad
spectrum of American society and provided Native people with opportunities
to travel and earn money. The shows also provided an education for both the
audience and the participants.” Also see:  Charles Eastman, “My People:  The
 Luther Standing Bear 289

Indians’ Contribution to the Arts of America,” The Craftsman 27, November

1914, 184–5.
22 Ethnic authenticity has been addressed within history, sociology, literature, and
anthropology as well as in American studies and various critical ethnic stud-
ies fields. What follows is a selective list of key texts that engage and theo-
rize the term. Sean Teuton, Red Land, Red Power:  Grounding Knowledge in
the American Indian Novel (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2008) and
“Placing the Ancestors: Postmodernism, ‘Realism,’ and American Indian Identity
in James Welch’s Winter in the Blood,” American Indian Quarterly Vol. 25,
No. 4, 2002, 626–50; Paul Chaat Smith, Everything You Know about Indians
Is Wrong (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Joane Nagel,
“Constructing Ethnicity: Creating and Recreating Ethnic Identity and Culture,”
Social Problems Vol. 41, No. 1, Special Issue on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity
in America, February 1994, 152–76, and American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red
Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996); Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians:  Episodes of Encounter
from the Late-Nineteenth Century Northwest Coast (Durham, NC:  Duke
University Press); Shun Lu and Gary Alan Fine, “The Presentation of Ethnic
Authenticity: Chinese Food as a Social Accomplishment,” Sociological Quarterly
Vol. 36, No. 3, June 1995, 535–53; Henry Staten, “Ethnic Authenticity, Class,
and Autobiography:  The Case of Hunger of Memory,” PMLA Vol. 113, No.
1, Special Topic:  Ethnicity, January 1998, 103–16. Staten’s article focuses on
Richard Rodriguez’s autobiographical work in Hunger of Memory (1982) to
unpack the ways that Rodriguez has been criticized as a “sell-out” to white bour-
geois culture for rejecting his Chicano identity. Tim Oakes, “Ethnic Tourism in
Rural Guizhou: Sense of Place and the Commerce of Authenticity,” in Tourism,
Ethnicity, and the State in Asian and Pacific Societies, edited by M. Picard and R.
Wood (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 35–70, is an overview con-
sidering the relationship between tourism, culture, and development. He sug-
gests the process of commercial and cultural integration associated with tour-
ism does not necessarily break down a place-based sense of identity or render it
“flat” and inauthentic, but rather becomes an important factor in the ongoing
construction of place identity. Sharmilla Rudrappa, “The Politics of Cultural
Authenticity” in Ethnic Routes to Becoming American: Indian Immigrants and
the Cultures of Citizenship (Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 2004).
Isabel Molina Guzman, “Mediating Frida: Negotiating Discourses of Latina/o
Authenticity in Global Media Representations of Ethnic Identity,” in Critical
Studies in Media Communication Vol. 23, No. 3, 2006, 232–51.
23 I name these two nations not only because of the violence used against Indian
people but because of the complexity of Native actions in both instances, as
two distinct examples of colonial conquest, versus say the Indian Wars of the
Southwest and Great Plains that are often depicted in Western films.
24 The vast majority of Native people who migrated to California for work sought
better employment and living conditions than was possible for them given
the failures of the reservation system. See: Nicolas G. Rosenthal, Reimagining
Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century
Los Angeles (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
290 Indigenous Intellectuals

25 Luther Standing Bear, My People the Sioux (1928; repr. Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 1975), preface, xvi.
26 Carlisle school entry cards, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group  75 for
“Standing Bear, Luther” and “Standing Bear, Henry.”
27 Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle (Lincoln:  University of
Nebraska Press, 2006), 234.
28 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 177–9.
29 Ibid., 178.
30 Ibid.
31 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 171. After Standing Bear left Carlisle,
Gertrude Bonnin also became deeply involved with the Carlisle band. In fact,
from 1899 to 1900 she worked at the school teaching music and was able to
perform with the band at the Paris Exposition of 1900.
32 Alan Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1965, 1979).
33 Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture Vol. 14, No. 1,
Winter 2002, 49–90.
34 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 171.
35 Ruth Spack, “Zitkala-Sa, The Song of Hiawatha, and the Carlisle Indian School
Band: A Captivity Tale,” Legacy Vol. 25, No. 2, 2008, 211–24.
36 For an early twentieth-century history of Native Americans as musicians see
John Troutman, Indian Blues:  American Indians and the Politics of Music,
1879–1934 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012).
37 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 178.
38 Ibid. There are some similarities, at least on the surface, of a connection to Alain
Locke and possibly W.  E. B.  Du Bois, to show “race men” at their best. Yet
another way to think about Standing Bear’s “self-fashioning” in this moment
from his text is in regard to autobiography. For more see:  Arnold Krupat,
Ethnocriticism:  Ethnography, History, Literature (Berkeley:  University of
California Press, 1992).
39 For more about the history of the Wanamaker department store and
Luther Standing Bear’s experiences there see:  Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of
Hiawatha:  Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930 (New  York:  Hill
and Wang, 2004), 278–310.
40 Although Standing Bear’s work for Wanamaker in 1880 complicates and adds
to a culture of display windows developing during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries within similar sorts of department stores in major U.S. cities,
such as W. F. Macy and Company, Marshall Fields, and Schuster’s and Gimbels,
my primary interest is how he interpreted his position given his recent experi-
ences at Carlisle and his status as a young Native man. New York Times, “The
Great Sixth-Avenue Bazaar; Opening Day at Macy & Co.’s  – A  Place Where
Almost Anything May Be Bought,” 1878, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
41 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 179.
42 Ibid., 183.
43 Three Stars became one of the founders of Martin, South Dakota, and one of
the first elected officials, working as the state’s attorney during the early twenti-
eth century; see: Biennial Report of the Attorney General of the State of South
 Luther Standing Bear 291

Dakota, By South Dakota. Office of Attorney General, 556. Charles W. Allen,

From Fort Laramie to Wounded Knee: In the West That Was (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2001).
44 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 183.
45 Ibid., 184.
46 Ibid., 184.
47 As many scholars have argued, autobiography may be a particularly modern and
American genre of writing. James Olney notes the slipperiness of the genre: “But
if autobiography is the least complicated of writing performances, it is also the
most elusive of literary documents. One never knows where or how to take hold
of autobiography: there are simply no general rules available to the critic.” Also
see: John Sekora, “Is the Slave Narrative a Species of Autobiography?” in Studies
in Autobiography, edited by James Olney (New  York and Oxford:  Oxford
University Press, 1988); Arnold Krupat, ed., Native American Autobiography,
An Anthology (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1994); Roy Pascal,
Design and Truth in Autobiography (New  York:  Garland, 1985); Robert F.
Sayre, “Autobiography and the Making of America” and Louis Renza, “The
Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography” in Autobiography: Essays
Theoretical and Critical, edited by James Olney (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton
University Press, 1980); and Sidonie Smith, “Who’s Talking/Who’s Talking
Back? The Subjects of Personal Narratives,” SIGNS:  Journal of Women in
Culture and Society 18, Winter 1993, 392–407.
48 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 185.
49 Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993)
conceptualizes the black Atlantic not as a fixed geographic space, but as a “rhi-
zomorphic, fractual structure  . . . [a]‌transcultural, international formation”
(4). Gilroy’s black Atlantic is an evolving, morphing cultural process, through
which the Black diaspora, African-American and Afro-Anglo history is nego-
tiated. For Indian intellectuals a similar dilemma was at hand as figures were
striving to be both Indian and American. This striving must then be examined
against a perpetually changing cultural network that was made and remade by
Indian and non-Indian people alike and negotiated along with social and polit-
ical concerns. Jace Weaver builds on and complicates Gilroy’s work in The Red
Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927
(University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
50 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 185.
51 Ibid., 185.
52 Ibid., 186.
53 Ibid., 186.
54 Ibid., 187.
55 Ibid., 179–87.
56 Richard Slotkin, “Buffalo Bill’s ‘Wild West’ and the Mythologization of the
American Empire” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, edited by Amy
Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 171.
As Joy Kasson notes, “Like Luther Standing Bear finding bitter amusement in
the mistranslation of Sitting Bull’s remarks during a performance in the 1880s,
Indian spectators attending the Wild West could enjoy a joke when Sioux
292 Indigenous Intellectuals

performed Omaha dances, or understand a subversive monologue when Kicking

Bear recited his deeds in Lakota.” Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity,
Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 212. Richard
White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes
Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), refers to
the “middle ground” in historically contingent terms in his work, whereas my
reference operates more in terms of figurative language.
57 Luther Standing Bear to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, August 24, 1891,
Letter, and Daniel Dorchester to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, August,
3, 1891, Letter, “Letters Received,” Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs
(Record Group  75), Federal Records in the National Archives of the United
States, Washington, DC. From this point on, citations from this archive will be
abbreviated as: LR, RG 75, DC.
58 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 192–3.
59 Throughout the Carlisle School records, part of Record Group  75, in the
National Archives Pratt is called on again and again to testify as to the “fitness”
of his former students as new Indian “citizens” of the U.S. nation.
60 Charles Penny to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, November 2, 1891, Letter,
LR, RG 75, DC. For more on the complex history of the U.S. Indian Service
see:  Cathleen Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers:  A  Social History of the
United States Indian Service, 1869–1933 (Chapel Hill:  University of North
Carolina Press, 2011).
61 Charles Penny to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, November 2, 1891, Letter,
LR, RG 75, DC.
62 “Luther Standing Bear Seeks Position in the School Service,” July 24, 1892,
“First endorsement,” by Captain Brown given August 5, 1892, and Luther
Standing Bear to Capt. George Brown, January 20, 1893, regarding “No. 20
Day School Corn Creek,” Letter, LR, RG 75, DC.
63 Given the year Henry Standing Bear performed at Coney Island he could have
worked either as part of Pawnee Bill’s “Wild West Show and Great Far East
Show” or Cummins’ “Indian Congress and Life on the Plains,” the only Wild
West shows sanctioned by the U.S. government. From Henry’s own letters we
know he was working seasonally within the Steeplechase Amusement Park from
1903 to 1908.
64 Michael Immerso, Coney Island:  The People’s Playground (Piscataway,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
65 Wallis suggests that Luther Standing Bear won the “shooting contest” with
the Japanese tourists. See:  Michael Wallis, The Real Wild West:  The 101
Ranch and the Creation of the American West (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin,
1999), 373.
66 Nellie Standing Bear to Charles E. McChesney, October 1900, Letter, LR, RG
75, DC.
67 For more on gender studies related to manhood and different masculinities in
the United States see:  Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization:  A  Cultural
History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago,
IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1996); E. Anthony Rotundo, American
Manhood:  Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the
Modern Era (New  York:  Basic Books, 1994); Michael Kimmel, Manhood in
 Luther Standing Bear 293

America: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Simon

J. Bronner, Manly Traditions:  The Folk Roots of American Masculinities
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
68 For more on vaudeville, burlesque, circus “shows,” and other popular perfor-
mance arenas where identity was also performed and altered along different lines
regarding gender, race, class, and sexuality see the following: Robert C. Allen,
Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1991); M. Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies:  Gender and
Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill:  University of North
Carolina Press, 1999); Janet M. Davis, The Circus Age:  Culture and Society
under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina,
2002); Rachel Shteir, Striptease:  The Untold History of the Girlie Show
(Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2004); Gillian M. Rodger, Champagne
Charlie and Pretty Jemima:  Variety Theater in the Nineteenth Century
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Nadine George-Graves, The Royalty
of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender,
and Class in African American Theater, 1900–1940 (New  York:  St. Martin’s
Press, 2000); Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls:  Black Women Performers and the
Shaping of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
69 Wallis, The Real Wild West, 373.
70 See U.S. National Library of Medicine for more on the history of the “medi-
cine show” in American culture. Also see the chapter focusing on the Kickapoo
Indian Medicine Company in Stewart Holbrook, The Golden Age of Quackery
(New York: Macmillan, 1959), and Brooks McNamara, “The Indian Medicine
Show,” Educational Theatre Journal Vol. 23, No. 4, December 1971, 431–45.
71 Rayna Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex:  The Image of Indian Women in
American Culture,” The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 16, No. 4, Autumn 1975,
698–714.
72 Slotkin points out that the Wild West was “not only a major influence on
American ideas about the frontier past at the turn of the century, it was a highly
influential overseas advertisement for the United States during the period of
massive European emigration.” Slotkin, “Buffalo Bill’s ‘Wild West,’” 164. For
a different examination of the Wild West with regards to violence and justice
see: R. Michael Wilson, Frontier Justice in the Wild West: Bungled, Bizarre, and
Fascinating Executions (Guilford, CT: TwoDot, 2007). Also see: Don Russell,
Wild West or A History of the Wild West Shows (Forth Worth: University of Texas
Press, 1970) and The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1979); Louis Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America:  William Cody
and the Wild West Show (New York: Random House, 2005); Kasson, Buffalo
Bill’s Wild West.
73 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998),
115. Such a performance, two decades after Standing Bear’s work for Cody’s
Wild West, serves as an example of “playing Indian.” See Deloria for more on
this important phenomenon and the mutually constitutive nature of modern/
antimodern practices that typified touristic escape for white Americans through
Indian play.
74 Minneapolis Morning Tribune, “Annual Celebration Built on Indian Lore
and Settings Planned for City,” October 5, 1919, sec. 1, p.  3, in The Papers
294 Indigenous Intellectuals

of the Society of American Indians, edited by John W.  Larner (Wilmington,

DE: Scholarly Resources, 1986), reel 10.
75 Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 15–51. Deloria theorizes and discusses
examples of the move from the “surround,” where Indian people had more
power to threaten and disrupt settlement, to that of “outbreak,” where they
were the ones now contained by a federal bureaucracy aiming to control, assim-
ilate, or eliminate them.
76 L. G. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883–1933
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996) for more about the costs
and benefits associated with employment in these shows for Indian people.
Frederick Hoxie, A Final Promise:  The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians,
1880–1920 (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1984), in regards to the
progressive era and pro-assimilationist views pertaining to the proper roles for
Native men and women to play.
77 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 248.
78 Janet McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian
(Indianapolis:  Indiana University Press, 1991), 1, for more about the Dawes
Allotment Act of 1887. See: Robert M. Utley, Last Days of the Sioux Nation
(New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1963) and The Indian Frontier
1846–1890 (Albuquerque:  University of New Mexico Press, 2003) for more
about the massacre at Wounded Knee.
79 Julia Lee, Interracial Encounters:  Reciprocal Representations in African
American and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 (New York: New York
University Press, 2011), 22.
80 Slotkin, “Buffalo Bill’s ‘Wild West,’ ” 178–9 and Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,
253–5. Also see: Gretchen Murphy, Shadowing the White Man’s Burden: U.S.
Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line (New  York:  New  York
University Press, 2010).
81 A marriage is listed to Millie Standing Bear in 1886, but it may be Nellie.
See:  Donovan Arleigh Sprague, Images of America:  Rosebud Sioux (Great
Britain: Arcadia Publishing, 2005), 40.
82 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 249.
83 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux and Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.
84 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 261.
85 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 266. This presentation of Standing Bear’s
wife on public display did not occur in a vacuum. Set in a broader context,
this image might be put in conversation with other representations of Indian
families. See: Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires
in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press,
2009), 276.
86 Ruth J. Heflin, “I Remain Alive”:  The Sioux Literary Renaissance (Syracuse,
NY:  Syracuse University Press, 2000), 89. Heflin offers a productive, if short
reading of the scene in Standing Bear’s autobiography concerning the display of
his wife and child as part of a sideshow related to their employment with Cody
in England. See: L. G. Moses, Wild West Shows, 145. L. G. Moses comments
on the negative reactions of reformer Indians against the display of Indians in
sideshows during this period.
87 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 266.
 Luther Standing Bear 295

88 Scott Richard Lyons, X-Marks:  Native Signatures of Assent

(Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Lyons notes that a “dis-
course of Indianness” is “generated by institutions, the state, and the market,” 25.
89 Train wrecks were among the greatest dangers members of traveling shows
faced around the turn of the twentieth century. For more on this incident
see: Cindy Fent and Raymond Wilson, “Indians off Track: Cody’s Wild West
and the Melrose Park Train Wreck of 1904,” American Indian Culture and
Research Journal Vol. 18, No. 3, 1994, 235–49.
90 Chicago Daily Tribune, April 8, 1904; Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1904;
New  York Times, April 8, 1904, ProQuest Historical Newspapers. “Indians
Die in Wreck, Survivors Chant Death Song for Three Victims.” The Washington
Post, April 8, 1904, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
91 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 271. Carlos Montezuma’s personal papers
list his original findings with regards to injuries and also his estimates for dam-
ages. See: Carlos Montezuma Papers, Center for Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis
College, Durango, CO.
92 “Chicago and Northwest Railroad Company Memorandum of Agreement
with Indians Injured in C & N.W. Wreck, near Melrose Park, Illinois, 7 April
1904,” to W. A. Jones, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Letter (copy), May 2,
1904, Carlos Montezuma Papers, Center for Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis
College, Durango, CO.
93 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 272. Letter from William F. Cody to John
R. Brennan, May 27, 1904, William F. Cody Archive, Buffalo Bill Historical
Center, Cody, Wyoming.
94 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 277.
95 Two letters confirm the relationship established between Montezuma and
Standing Bear surrounding the train accident. See:  “Carlos Montezuma to
Hon. William A. Jones,” Commissioner of Indian Affairs, May 6, 1904, Letter,
Carlos Montezuma Papers, Center for Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College,
Durango, CO; “Office of Indian Affairs to Carlos Montezuma et al.,” May 24,
1904, Letter, Papers of Carlos Montezuma, Wisconsin State Historical Society,
Madison, WI.
96 Angela Aleiss, “Who Was the Real James Young Deer? The Mysterious Identity
of the Pathè Producer Finally Comes to Light,” Bright Lights Film Journal,
Issue 80, May 2013.
97 For more about the enigmatic aspects surrounding Young Deer’s racial identity
and his work in film see: Angela Aleiss, Making the White Man’s Indian: Native
Americans and Hollywood Movies (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2005),
1–2 and “Who Was the Real James Young Deer?”
98 Red Wing and Young Deer’s film careers were mostly over by the 1920s. Young
Deer worked in France making documentaries between 1913 and 1919. Red
Wing worked as a college lecturer and civil rights activist. During the 1930s,
Young Deer worked occasionally as a second-unit director on B-movies and
serials. He died in New York City in April 1946. Red Wing died on March 13,
1974. For more on their careers in film see: Aleiss, Making the White Man’s
Indian.
99 Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places.
100 Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 278.
296 Indigenous Intellectuals

101 “Bliss” was later renamed Marland to honor Oklahoma governor E.  W.
Marland in 1922. The origins of the town continue to be disputed by its Native,
primarily Ponca, residents.
102 The cast often included Bill Picket, Bessie Herberg, Bee ho Gray, Tom Mix,
Jack Hoxie, Mexican Joe, Ross Hettan, and an elderly Buffalo Bill. Given that
Henry Standing Bear lived in New York at this time and commented about his
work at Brighton Beach it is likely that they could have cast him, but impos-
sible to know for sure. See the Cherokee Strip Museum of Perry, Oklahoma,
http://www.cherokee-strip-museum.org/index.html (accessed May 5, 2011).
103 Molly Lee, “Appropriating the Primitive: Turn-of-the-Century Collection and
Display of Native Alaskan Art,” Arctic Anthropology Vol. 28, No. 1, 1991,
6–15. Lee emphasizes the roles played by individuals rather than museums
in her study of collecting along the Inside Passage of southeastern Alaska
at the turn of the twentieth century. For more about curio markets in the
Southwest see:  Jonathan Batkin, The Native American Curio Trade in New
Mexico (Santa Fe, NM: Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 2008);
Bruce Bernstein, “The Booth Sitters of Santa Fe’s Indian Market: Making and
Maintaining Authenticity,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal
Vol. 32, No. 3, 2007, 49–79; Edwin L. Wade, “The Ethnic Market in the
American Southwest, 1880–1980.” in History of Anthropology, Vol. 3 Objects
and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, edited by George W.
Stocking Jr. (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). For more on
the intersection of consumerism and ethnic identity construction see:  Erika
Bsumek, Indian-made:  Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1880–1940
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008).
104 Wallis, The Real Wild West.
105 William J.  Ehrheart, “Chief Luther Standing Bear II:  Activist, Author,
Historian,” in Persimmon Hill (Autumn 1997). Later on Standing Bear taught
sign language at the University of California Los Angeles and at the Southwest
Indian Museum.
106 See Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 229.
107 Ibid.
108 Ibid.
109 Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 172. For a preliminary list of schol-
arship concerning Native people in film and as filmmakers see: Peter C. Rollins
and John E. O’Connor, eds., Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native
American in Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998); Jacquelyn
Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1999); Beverly R. Singer, Wiping the War Paint off the
Lens: Native American Film and Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2001); Deloria, “Representation:  Indian Wars, the Movie” in Indians
in Unexpected Places; Aleiss, Making the White Man’s Indian; Edward
Buscombe, ‘injuns!’ native americans in the movies (London: Reaktion Books,
Locations Series, 2006); Michelle H. Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing,
Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film
(Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2010); Denise K. Cummings, ed.,
Visualities:  Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art
(Lansing:  Michigan State University Press, 2011); LeAnne Howe, Harvey
 Luther Standing Bear 297

Markowitz, and Denise K. Cummings, eds., Seeing Red: Hollywood’s Pixeled

Skins (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013).
110 Regarding the genre of the Western I  refer to the American Film Institute’s
definition for the Western from 1921. Also, Davidson Boughey, The Film
Industry (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1921). For more about the ethos
of the frontier drawn from Frederick Jackson Turner in film and American
culture see:  Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, Hollywood’s West:  The
American Frontier in Film, Television, and History (Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky, 2009).
111 The three biggest Western authors who helped define the contours of the genre
were Zane Grey, Maxwell Brand, and Clarence Mulford. All seem to have
drawn some inspiration from Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), a romance
and fictional account of the Johnson County War set in 1890s Wyoming. Based
on their work many films adopted a similar narrative shape. Bob Herzberg,
Shooting Scripts:  From Pulp Western to Film (Jefferson, NC:  McFarland,
2005) Also see: C. Courtney Joyner, The Westerners: Interviews with Actors,
Directors, Writers and Producers, with foreword by Miles Swarthout (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2009) Postwar Western writers like Louis L’Amour harkened
back to these types of works in search of stories that were about a simpler,
more bucolic existence. See: Melody Graulich and Stephen Tatum, Reading the
Virginian in the New West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).
112 My reference to “Mexicans” here reflects the fact that a large number of
Westerns often had at least one “stock character” understood to be Mexican,
usually male, and almost always comic and corrupt in nature. Such representa-
tions were derogatory and threatening to actual people of Mexican or Mexican
American, Chicano, or Mestizo descent, especially given that many of these
characters were portrayed by white European actors.
113 Frank S. Nugent, “THE SCREEN IN REVIEW; Cecil Be De Mille Continues
His Historical Roadwork With ‘Union Pacific’ Opening at the Paramount  –
‘Hotel Imperial’ Is Shown,” New York Times, May 11, 1939.
114 One contemporary example would be debates surrounding Johnny Depp’s por-
trayal of “Tonto” in Disney’s film The Lone Ranger. Months before filming
began, Depp and studio representatives spoke with members of the Comanche
nation, and had several leaders read and critique scripts. See:  Tatiana Siegel
and Pamela McClintock, “Why ‘The Lone Ranger’s’ Johnny Depp Joined the
Comanche Nation,” The Hollywood Reporter, April 26, 2013: “For Chris Eyre,
the highest-profile Native American director working in show business, Disney’s
move is a welcome change. ‘I’m not looking to this movie to be the Native
Schindler’s List,’ says Eyre. ‘But I completely respect Johnny Depp for making
this movie happen and for him to try and rewrite Tonto for a new generation.’ ”
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/why-lone-rangers-johnny-depp-
435652 (accessed May 10, 2013).
115 Aleiss, Making the White Man’s Indian, 10–13.
116 As Philip Deloria and Andrew Smith have shown, as early as 1909 the
New York Motion Picture Company recruited Indian participants James Young
Deer and Princess Red Wing to work on producing Westerns. The two moved
to Los Angeles in November of that year to work as part of the Bison brand
before being lured away to the French company Pathe Freres. And, in this new
298 Indigenous Intellectuals

context they produced a number of films for Pathe that offered portraits of
race and gender that challenged some of the typical elements of cross-race
romance offered by domestic melodramas. Unfortunately for Standing Bear, he
did not work with Young Deer and Red Wing but rather found his entrée into
Hollywood through the usual route offered to Indian actors – the connection
between live-action, Wild West performance and the machinations of Thomas
Ince. See: Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places.
117 Ronald L. Davis, William S.  Hart:  Projecting the American West
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003).
118 Luther Standing Bear’s other roles included:  “Saka” in Bolshevism on Trial
(1919), “Chief Sutanek” in The Santa Fe Trail (1930), “White Cloud” in
The Conquering Horde (1931), “Indian Chief” in Texas Pioneers (1932),
“Indian” – uncredited – in Massacre (1934), and “Quiet Hunter” in Laughing
Boy (1934). See: Alan Gevinson, American Film Institute Catalog: Within our
Gates: Ethnicity in American Feature Films, 1911–1960 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997), and “Chief Standing Bear” in the Internet
Movie Database. “Internet Movie Database,” http://www.imdb.com/name/
nm0822052/ (accessed February 15, 2011).
119 See: Rosenthal, Reimagining Indian Country.
120 Nicolas G. Rosenthal, “Representing Indians:  Native American Actors on
Hollywood’s Frontier,” Western Historical Quarterly 36, Autumn 2005,
329–52.
121 “The Association on American Indian Affairs Archives,” Publications,
Programs, and Legal and Organizational Files, 1851–1983, Filmed from the
holdings of the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.
122 The Association on American Indian Affairs Archives. Among its major
achievements was the Association’s role as catalyst for the enactment of the
Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978.
123 Aleiss, Making the White Man’s Indian, 46.
124 Ibid., 48. MGM invested $518,000 and lost $383,000.
125 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble:  Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(New  York:  Routledge, 1990) and Bodies that Matter:  On the Discursive
Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).
126 Deloria, Playing Indian.
127 Aleiss, Making the White Man’s Indian, 55–7.
128 Importantly, the issue of who was really Indian has lingered into the present.
The American Indian Registry for the Performing Arts, which began in 1983,
served as a civil rights organization and clearinghouse for Native American
talent. Based in Hollywood, this agency attempted to clarify the issue of “real
Indians” by screening members for tribal affiliation. For more on this orga-
nization’s efforts concerning the issue of using only “real Indians” in film
see: Aleiss, Making the White Man’s Indian, 149. In particular she states, “The
registry even created its own talent directory of Indian performers and techni-
cians to encourage studies to hire Native Americans.”
129 According to Angela Aleiss, non-Indian extras received $11/day whereas Indian
actors received only $5.50.
130 “Iron Eyes Cody” (born Espera Oscar de Corti) may be the most well-known
“Indian” non-Native actor who made a career in Hollywood playing solely
 Luther Standing Bear 299

Native roles in film and television. Born to Italian immigrants but claiming
Cherokee ancestry, Cody refashioned himself into an authentic Indian. In 1996,
the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported Cody had Sicilian heritage, but he
denied it. Angela Aleiss, “Native Son:  After a Career as Hollywood’s Noble
Indian Hero, Iron Eyes Cody Is Found to Have an Unexpected Heritage,” May
26. He lived his adult life claiming he was American Indian; his half-sister
and other relatives in Louisiana stated he was of Italian ancestry. Cody sup-
ported American Indian-related causes most of his life. His two autobiogra-
phies disavow any Italian heritage and instead include fabricated family stories
that lay claim to an indigenous past. See:  Iron Eyes Cody and Collin Perry,
Iron Eyes: My Life as a Hollywood Indian (Book Sales, 1984) and Iron Eyes
Cody and Marietta Thompson, Iron Eyes Cody: The Proud American (Empire
Publishers, 1988).
131 Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1940. Also see:  Aleiss, Making the White
Man’s Indian, 96–9.
132 Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 227.
133 William S.  Hart to Luther Standing Bear, August 11, 1930, Letter, Letters
Received File 72636, Record Group 75, National Archives, Washington, DC.
Abbreviated as: LR, RG 75.
134 C. S. Rhodes to Jeanne El Strange Cappel, January 5, 1932, LR, RG 75.
135 C. S.  Rhodes to Jeanne El Strange Cappel, January 5, 1932, Letter, LR,
RG 75.
136 William S. Hart to Luther Standing Bear, August 11, 1930, Letter, LR, RG 75.
137 LR, RG 75, 1908, Luther Standing Bear to E. A. Brininstool, August 9, 1930,
Letter, Earl Alonzo Brininstool Collection, 1850–1945, Dolph Briscoe Center
for American History, The University of Texas at Austin – abbreviated as EAB
Collection.
138 Luther Standing Bear to John Collier, September 6, 1934, Letter, LR, RG 75.
139 Ibid.
140 “Melvin R. Gilmore Papers, 1905–1938,” Bentley Historical Library, University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
141 Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 229.
142 Houghton Mifflin began in 1832 with William Ticknor and the Old Corner
Bookstore in Boston with James Fields. In 1880, the firm became Houghton,
Mifflin & Company, named after Henry Oscar Houghton (1823–95) and
George Harrison Mifflin, who was co-partner in 1872. See: “Harvard College
Class of 1877 Seventh Report” (Norwood, MA:  Plimpton Press, 1917)  and
“Report of the secretary of the Class of 1865 of Harvard” (New York: P. F.
McBreen, 1885). For more on the founding members of this company see:
“Houghton Mifflin Hardcourt Company,” http://www.hmco.com/company/
about_hm/henryhoughton.html (accessed May 5, 2011). Standing Bear, Land
of the Spotted Eagle, 227.
143 County of Los Angeles Probation Office records, EAB Collection. For legal codes
see the Superior Court of California, Los Angeles, http://www.lasuperiorcourt
.org/criminal/ (accessed February 16, 2011).
144 Ibid.
145 With regards to Penal Code 288, “Lewd Acts with a Child,” the way one might
be prosecuted for this offense varies greatly given that a hug and kiss to a child
300 Indigenous Intellectuals

that may not have been done in a “lewd or sexual manner” could still be pros-
ecuted for this charge, according to the law.
146 Los Angeles Times, “Chief Standing Bear Given Year Term in County Jail,”
(1923–Current File), May 6, 1935, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Los
Angeles Times (1881–1987), A1.
147 Los Angeles Times, May 6, 1935, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
148 Many letters were sent to Collier’s office in support of Standing Bear’s charac-
ter and requesting assistance. See: Mrs. Charles E. Burbee, Mrs. H. H. Burgess,
Anne Ross, Chief Ralph Rojas, Nelson M. N. Wauls, Lucien Y. Maxwell, Mrs.
Etta Cortas, Thelma Offet (Whiteflower) to John Collier, March 27, 1935,
Letter, Olympia Houten, White Bird, Kuuks Walks Alone, Young Beaver, and
Little Badger to John Collier, March 28, 1935, Letter, Mrs. May Jones to John
Collier, April 5, 1935, Letter, LR, RG 75.
149 Frederick E. Hoxie, “From Prison to Homeland: The Cheyenne River Indian
Reservation before World War I,” South Dakota History 10, Winter 1979,
1–24; Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and
Clark to Wounded Knee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 109;
Roger L. Nicholas, The American Indian Past and Present (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 2008).
150 Mrs. Charles E. Burbee, Mrs. H. H. Burgess, Anne Ross, Chief Ralph Rojas,
Nelson M.  N. Wauls, Lucien Y.  Maxwell, Mrs. Etta Cortas, Thelma Offet
(Whiteflower) to John Collier, March 27, 1935, Letter, Olympia Houten,
White Bird, Kuuks Walks Alone, Young Beaver, and Little Badger to John
Collier, March 28, 1935, Letter, Mrs. May Jones to John Collier, April 5, 1935,
Letter, RG 75.
151 Ibid.
152 Ibid.
153 Mrs. Laura W. Soldier to James H. Cook, April 23, 1935, copy sent to E. A.
Brininstool, EAB Collection.
154 Standing Bear championed the rights of Indian actors. A  large component
of his fight aimed to replace romantic, simplistic, and nostalgic representa-
tions of Indianness that dominated American narratives about Indian peo-
ple, the West, and the history of the nation and still influenced Indian policy
decisions. Instead, Standing Bear sought ways to make Indians legible as a
three-dimensional people. With this fight in mind I include this court case in
my narrative about Standing Bear to avoid the danger of portraying him in
simplistic terms, as either wholly good or wholly bad, but rather as human.
Just as Collier referred those seeking assistance with the case against Standing
Bear to local authorities, so too has this aspect of Standing Bear’s personal life
been ignored by many historians who have studied him. The dearth of material
available to uncover the specifics of the case, especially the identity and voice of
his accuser, may be one rationale behind these omissions. Certainly it is a strik-
ing, if not corrosive blemish on an esteemed record of service to Indian people
and his contributions to American literary history, which further complicates
Standing Bear’s story enough that scholars would leave it out. But, as respon-
sible scholars, one cannot memorialize all Indian activists like Standing Bear
 Luther Standing Bear 301

as pure, unimpeachably moral, and uncomplicated. As troubling as this part of

his past is to uncover, Standing Bear’s humanity, indeed his Indianness in the
best sense, goes partially unexamined without it. By failing to acknowledge the
various dimensions of his life, the stakes of his life’s political work remain on
the margins as well.
155 Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, dedication page.
156 E. A. Brininstool developed correspondence with participants in the Battle of
Little Bighorn (1876), namely Walter Camp, Fred Dustin, William J.  Ghent,
Charles Kuhlman, and Col Graham. He also tracked down stories of so-called
survivors from the Custer phase of the battle. Of the greater than seventy sto-
ries he collected, none was found to have much veracity. He wrote biographies
of Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, and Dull Knife. See: EAB Collection.
157 County of Los Angeles Probation Office records, copy, and Robert J. Hamilton
to E. A. Brininstool, May 8, 1935, Letter, EAB Collection.
158 I have focused on Standing Bear here more than his accuser because I  was
not able to obtain more material to uncover details regarding the experience,
identity, and voice of this Piute girl. My hope is that drawing attention to the
case’s existence may open the door for more scholars to investigate the larger
ramifications of this event for all parties involved.
159 Figure 10: “Luther Standing Bear,” Braun Research Library Collection, Autry
National Center, Los Angeles; OP.798.
160 Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 227.
161 Ibid., 165, 192, 166.
162 Ibid., 166.
163 Donna Hite to Office of Indian Affairs, April 8, 1939, Letter, LR file no. 23323,
and George E.  Standing Bear to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, May 26,
1939, Letter, LR file no. 35359, both in RG 75, National Archives, Washington,
DC. William J.  Ehrheart, “Chief Luther Standing Bear II:  Activist, Author,
Historian,” in Persimmon Hill, Autumn 1997. Special thanks to Diana Fields
from the Donald C. & Elizabeth M. Dickinson Research Center, the National
Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, OK.
164 For more about the IRA see:  “Wheeler-Howard Act–exempt certain
Indians:  Hearings before the Committee on Indian Affairs, House of
Representatives, Seventy-sixth Congress, third session, on S.  2103, an act to
exempt certain Indians and Indian tribes from the provisions of the Act of June
18, 1934 (48 Stat. 984), as amended. June 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, and
20, 1940,” United States Congress House Committee on Indian Affairs (U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1940).
165 For an investigation of federal Indian policy history and law I  have con-
sulted the following: Graham D. Taylor, The New Deal and American Indian
Tribalism:  The Administration of the Indian Reorganization Act, 1934–45
(Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1980); Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford
M. Lytle, American Indians, American Justice (Austin:  University of Texas
Press, 1983); Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father:  The United States
Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1986); Blue Clark, Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock: Treaty Rights and Indian Law at
302 Indigenous Intellectuals

the End of the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press,

1999); Francis Paul Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy: Third
Edition (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Frederick E. Hoxie,
A Final Promise:  The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001); David E. Wilkins and K. Tsianina
Lomawaima, Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002).
 Conclusion
The 1930s, Indian Reorganization, and Beyond

He looked toward the mountains in the east, and then upward to the fleckless
sky. Nowhere in the world, he imagined, was there a sky of such depth and
freshness. He wanted never to forget it, wherever he might be in times to come.
Yes, wherever he might be!
– D’Arcy McNickle, The Surrounded1

D’Arcy McNickle (1904–77), novelist, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)

administrator, and historian, grew up on the Flathead Reservation in
western Montana, created by the Treaty of Hellgate in 1855 in which the
Flathead, the Pend d’Oreille, and the Kootenai gave up millions of acres
of their land. The reservation space not only confined the three tribes who
signed the treaty, but other tribes as well, and kept them out of the way of an
onslaught of American settlers. McNickle was neither Salish nor Kootenai;
his mother was Canadian Cree. But he was born on the reservation in 1904
and enrolled as a member of the Flathead tribe in 1905. Like many other
Indian children during the first part of the twentieth century, he went to a
reservation grade school before transferring to an Indian boarding school.
At Chemawa Indian School, like most Indian boarding schools of the day,
McNickle experienced school as a military academy. Students wore military
uniforms and marched in formations. Like Gertrude Bonnin and Luther
Standing Bear, he later recalled how students were punished for speaking
to each other in Indian languages. Unlike many other Indian young people
during the first part of the twentieth century, however, McNickle was able
to attend college. At the University of Montana in Missoula he majored in
literature and history and joined the staff of the University’s literary journal,
The Frontier, in which he published poetry and short stories. Although he
had learned a great deal at the University, he did not graduate. However, his
mentor, Harold G. Marriam, the head of the English department, encour-
aged McNickle to expand his horizons and suggested the possibility of earn-
ing his bachelor’s degree at Oxford.2

303
304 Conclusion: The 1930s, Indian Reorganization, and Beyond

Once abroad, McNickle found out Oxford would not accept all of his aca-
demic credit. Although he did not end up enrolling there, McNickle stayed on
in England and attended lectures, explored the libraries, and took advantage
of many opportunities to study on his own. Following this self-education
abroad, McNickle returned to the United States determined to make his way
in the publishing field. While living in New York City, McNickle took on
a variety of freelance jobs, including writing, proofing, and book make-up.
Also while in New York, he enrolled at Columbia University, where he stud-
ied American history, but with the pressures of trying to earn a living at
the same time he was unable to complete his degree. More of an explorer
than a finisher, McNickle still valued these varied academic experiences and
the opportunities education could provide. He believed in making higher
education more accessible and affordable for Indian people. “Bridging the
generational gap between Progressive and post-World War II Indian intellec-
tuals and activists, McNickle’s work marks the boundary between pre-and
post-1934 epochs in American Indian history, when indigenous communi-
ties began to realize their latent power as sovereign nations, long oppressed
under the reservation system.”3 Throughout his life he would work as a
writer and activist toward these goals.
In 1938, four years after Congress had passed the Wheeler-Howard Act
(otherwise known as the Indian Reorganization Act, or IRA), McNickle
published an article, “Four Years of Indian Reorganization,” in the July issue
of Indians at Work. He aimed to take stock of this major shift in policy.
Because John Collier, then commissioner of Indian affairs, had designed the
IRA to reverse the failures of the allotment policies following the Dawes
Act of 1887, questions of citizenship, tribal sovereignty, and Indian labor
were necessary components of McNickle’s response.4 McNickle had already
worked for the BIA and the Federal Writer’s Project (a part of the Works
Progress Administration, or WPA, a New Deal arts program) while strug-
gling to publish his first novel, The Surrounded.5 The rhetoric of his article
and the fact that it appeared in a magazine funded and printed monthly by
the BIA shows that he sought to engage multiple publics, both Indian and
white, to fuel discussion regarding the IRA. From the early 1930s through
the mid-1940s Indians at Work had functioned as a “news sheet for Indians
and the Indian service.”6 The publication of McNickle’s piece represented
a necessary turning point in the history of Indian intellectuals in America.7
At the same time, McNickle’s narrative reflected the political history and
intellectual traditions he had inherited from an earlier generation of Native
writers, including: Charles Eastman, Carlos Montezuma, Gertrude Bonnin,
and Luther Standing Bear.
The life and writings of McNickle can be read as a bookend to the perfor-
mative moment of Simon Pokagon’s appearance at the opening ceremonies
for Chicago Day at the 1893 World’s Fair. Pokagon’s presence at the Fair
prefigured the types of successes and failures future generations of Indian
 Conclusion: The 1930s, Indian Reorganization, and Beyond 305

people would encounter in American history in much the same way that
McNickle’s political activism, literary achievements, and impressive multi-
faceted career confirmed the modern status of Indian people as reformers
and writers in the United States during the 1930s. His work as a founder
of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and his assessment
of the changes in national policy related to Indian people through the IRA
offered a vision for the possible futures Indian people could have in the
decades to follow. Given McNickle’s later tenure as the founder and director
of the Center for American Indian History and Indigenous Studies (that now
bears his name) at the Newberry Library in Chicago, he not only figuratively
but literally returned Native intellectual engagement with U.S.  history to
the site of Pokagon’s “The Red Man’s Rebuke.” In other words, McNickle’s
work at the Newberry helped reinstate American Indian history as a focal
point for research in the city and to remind Americans of the colonial his-
tory that Pokagon and the Potawatomi had experienced.
McNickle’s article from 1938 begins in much the same way that Pokagon’s
speech from 1893 does: he recalls the history of Native America using broad,
somewhat idealistic strokes. “In years past, the seasons came and went, and
left the Indians untouched.”8 Here “the Indians” appears to capitulate to an
aesthetic understanding of Indianness as almost always set in the past and
tied to a primitivist ideal. The word “the” separates McNickle from his sub-
ject, or so he might have his readers assume. The notion that time flowed
over Indian Country so that people remained “untouched” not only idealizes
precontact America but hits his audience with familiar tropes. No doubt, as
the seasons came and went, no one could remain untouched by acts of war,
alliance, and the rise and fall of great civilizations. But McNickle means to
be taken metaphorically, and he leans on the ideas of seasons and growth by
referring to harvests reaped to sustain Native people through long winters.
In 1938, McNickle was right to recognize that a change of season was “upon
us” because “this year, for some Indians, there is a difference. There are grain
fields growing. Hay is ripening. Calves and lambs are finding their legs.”9
By suggesting that the IRA was set in a moment of growth and prosper-
ity, McNickle highlights how this shift in policy had stopped the practice of
dividing Native American tribal lands into individual allotments, and encour-
aged tribes to establish their own formal governments under a written con-
stitution, as well as introduced other reforms to promote Native American
autonomy and to protect cultural traditions. So despite the economic chal-
lenges that still lay ahead, at least ideologically and to some degree structur-
ally, Native America was reimagined by the federal government as more able
to govern its own lands and affairs  – liberating the BIA from more direct
management of Native space. Given these changes, McNickle’s article was
also being literal because the Indians who had survived allotment were now
seeing the differences the IRA promised them regarding the reconfiguration
of tribal governments and land for self-development.
306 Conclusion: The 1930s, Indian Reorganization, and Beyond

In effect, this “Indian” New Deal was a turning point in some important
ways.10 It was largely successful in reversing the Dawes Act’s privatization
of tribal holdings into individual parcels. It also restored the management
of assets (mainly land) more directly into Indian hands. Had the law not
been passed, the continuation of individual allotments might have resulted
in the termination of the reservation system altogether. Under the law, about
2 million acres of land were added to Indian reservations over the following
twenty years. Moreover, the IRA was reasonably successful in providing a
mechanism for establishing stable tribal governments. Still, the IRA did not
always work as intended and therefore has a complicated and fraught legacy.
For example, the new tribal government system increased Indian dependence
on the BIA, thereby actually decreasing tribal autonomy. Many Native com-
munities also disagreed about who should be put in charge of these “new”
governments, especially because many tribal nations had long-established
traditions for governing that were working just fine without the federal gov-
ernment’s intervention. Also, although the affirmative action preferences for
employment with the BIA benefited particular individuals with the hope
of minimizing the long-standing distrust of Native Americans toward the
agency, these were modest gains given a lack of economic development and
educational opportunities for large numbers of Indian people. In the end,
the IRA was not as successful as Collier and others had hoped in reversing
poverty and unemployment rates across Native America.
McNickle, as a former BIA and WPA employee, knew full well that Indian
“reorganization” was necessary not only because of the allotment policy’s
threat to tribal sovereignty but also because of the Great Depression. His
post-1934 article recognized what was new and what was not in the IRA.
He writes:

In four years tribes have become organized and incorporated, money has gone into
tribal treasuries, land has been purchased, students have secured loans to attend col-
leges and professional schools. For these, life will be different this year. Many of the
things being done today through the agency of the Reorganization Act have been
done in the past. Tribes have set up governing bodies before. Tribes have borrowed
money from government. . . . The Indian Reorganization act, apart from certain
legal developments, is primarily a training school in self-government and economic
self-management.11

Although McNickle’s article from 1938 seems to emphasize continuity

rather than change, he continues by highlighting the new powers accorded
to tribal governments. With this new type of recognition, certainly flawed
given the already uneven dispersal of power between the federal government
and Native nations, McNickle suggests Native people may be able to claim
more authority over their own lives to limit the involvement of the commis-
sioner of Indian affairs and his agents. More than tribal autonomy and an
increased land base, McNickle emphasizes a critical cultural change that
 Conclusion: The 1930s, Indian Reorganization, and Beyond 307

would result from the IRA’s increase in educational support through a stu-
dent loan program. With the help of such loans, more Native people could
attend college and professional schools. In essence, McNickle celebrates the
futures that might be possible through education because he is keenly aware
of how his own education afforded him better opportunities as a writer,
activist, and federal government employee.12
The final section of his 1938 article offers readers specific case studies
for the implementation of the IRA, which is an important shift in the tactics
characterizing Indian intellectual thought and reform work. From Hydaburg
village in Alaska, the Hopi in New Mexico, the Tongue River Reservation
and Blackfeet in Montana, as well as examples from the Jicarillas, Rosebud
Sioux, and Flathead tribe, McNickle asserts, “The law must operate in the
lives of men and women before it begins to have meaning.”13 He uses these
case studies to show examples of this meaning, and includes these high-
lights to “indicate some of the currents that have been set up. They are
not intended to indicate how far the trend has gone or how soon any one
question will be answered. Something has started, and here is the general
direction in which it moves.”14 McNickle’s conclusion further refines what
he means by “the general direction” as directly tied to types of education for
Native communities. “Tribal governments have serious need of education
in public administration, in Indian laws, treaties and regulations, and in the
use of the powers embedded in their own constitutions. Failure to get this
education may fairly well destroy the whole purpose of the reorganization
program.”15 Less the cultural politics of the previous generation and more
attuned to administration, policy, and law, McNickle only modestly plays
the Indian cards of primitivism and exoticism in this piece. Instead, he opts
for those of tribal governance and technical expertise, which signaled a shift
in strategy to his Native readers.
McNickle further suggests that with a rising number of organized tribal
governments the federal government will necessarily decrease the funds
allotted for Indian reorganization purposes, which was in fact one of the
rationales behind the Act in the first place. As much as this shift in policy
aimed to reverse the Dawes Act to some extent, for others in Congress, the
Act suggested a future where tribal funds would no longer be tied to the
U.S. Treasury at all. In effect, self-government equaled self-sufficiency and a
separation between the U.S. economy and Native-based ones. Such an issue
has remained central to American Indian affairs. Certainly, McNickle’s arti-
cle was prescient given that less than twenty years later, Native people, and
McNickle himself, would be working against another critical shift in Indian
policy during the Termination Era of the 1950s, when the U.S. government
sought to dismantle tribal sovereignty one nation at a time.16
During these decades, Congress adopted policies aimed at terminating
federal obligations to tribes, in effect attempting to conclude with “reor-
ganizing” Native people that had begun during the 1930s. The three main
308 Conclusion: The 1930s, Indian Reorganization, and Beyond

tools the federal government used to accomplish this were the BIA reloca-
tion program, actual termination of some tribes, and the extension of state
jurisdiction into Indian Country through Public Law 280, which extended
state criminal and some civil jurisdiction into Indian spaces in certain named
states. Termination meant officially ending the process by which the fed-
eral government recognized certain tribes as national and sovereign entities.
Today many of these tribal nations are actively engaging with Congress in
order to regain recognition. At the time, McNickle’s article fit within an
ideology of uplift promoted by the previous generation of Indian intellectu-
als like Charles Eastman, who often worked with Congress and dominant
white reform groups to promote social change and to fight for the future of
Indians in America. For McNickle, the future would build on, if also resist,
the efforts of the IRA through the arenas of politics and culture. Although
measured and abstract, McNickle’s overall message from 1938 is one of
hope and possibility.

The problems are many and certainly there is no intention of belittling them. It is
possible, nevertheless, to realize that where in the past there have been only misgiv-
ings and despair for the future of the Indians, today there is reason to be hopeful. For
some Indians, at least, there is already a difference. Something has begun to happen.
When this year’s harvest comes around, some few Indians will have something to
garner. That is a beginning.17

McNickle was right. The year 1938 was some sort of a new beginning. In
the years following, McNickle became very well known for another piece of
writing: The Surrounded, published by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1936.
In this novel, his fictional focus on the social and political effects shaping
Indian identity fit well into what anthology editors from the 1930s defined
as the connection between storytelling and the “folk.” One reviewer at the
time stated, “Especially noteworthy about The Surrounded is that it’s told
by one who is on the inside looking out.”18 His novel was well received
upon its initial publication as the literary product of an educated Indian.
And, although widely celebrated today for being one of the first of this
period by a Native author, it was not unlike work produced by McNickle’s
contemporaries such as William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Henry
Roth. His writing embraced modern literary styles such as realism and natu-
ralism to engage Native and non-Native readers without relying on romantic
or sentimentalist approaches used by the majority of Native and non-Native
writers from the generation before him.
In The Surrounded, McNickle explores the relationship between vio-
lence, cultural memory, and Native identity. These themes play out as the
protagonist, Archilde, struggles to relate to his family and tribal commu-
nity after returning home. As Paul Whitehouse argues, through a series of
violent episodes, Archilde is able to reconnect to “a symbolic, pre-colonial
past and, in that instant, both recognize and challenge the institutionalized,
 Conclusion: The 1930s, Indian Reorganization, and Beyond 309

legislative, and normative violence that has stifled his individual develop-
ment and threatens to engulf the cultural identity of his wider Native com-
munity.”19 Whitehouse’s reading suggests that McNickle’s novel grapples
with the larger theme of systemic violence that Native Americans experi-
enced in boarding schools, on reservations, and in other facets of American
society given the practices and policies of settler-colonialism. This theme
was not new for Indian writers and intellectuals. Certainly, Eastman under-
stood the reach of systemic violence as a witness to the atrocities Indian
victims suffered after the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. Both Bonnin
and Standing Bear experienced a different, if equally destructive, sort of
violence as a teacher and student within the Indian boarding school system.
Montezuma, sold as a young child by his parents to the Pimas before he was
sold again to Carlo Gentile (an Italian photographer), also experienced the
violence of forced separation from his family and community. For McNickle,
the subject of systemic violence becomes manifest in his text through brutal
forms of physical violence perpetrated on or by various characters, as well
as Archilde’s mother’s violent stand against cultural assimilation. For read-
ers during the 1930s, McNickle offered a fictional account of the negative
effects of settler-colonialism on Native and non-Native people. His novel in
many ways was far bolder in its critique of white America than McNickle’s
nonfiction writings, suggesting that he knew well how to engage with differ-
ent representational strategies contingent on genre and audience.
The figure of Archilde, many critics have surmised, may be a loosely
autobiographical representation of McNickle. At the same time, it seems
equally plausible that Archilde is a composite figure, representing the thou-
sands of untold stories of generations of Indian children who were forced
to assimilate into American society and struggled with how to integrate
themselves back into their Indian communities after being away at school.
McNickle’s story centers on Archilde’s return to the reservation he grew up
on after being away for a few years at an Indian boarding school and having
some success in the white world as a violinist. This fictional account reflects
McNickle’s own explorations to some extent, and also reads as an echo of
Bonnin’s life given her early education, a stint at the New England conser-
vatory, and well-publicized role as an Indian musician. Both Archilde and
Bonnin embraced the violin as a means of escape, liberation, and resistance.
McNickle may well have read her American Indian Stories and known
enough about her life as a musical performer to make his protagonist’s pro-
fession that of violin player.
After writing The Surrounded, McNickle spent the remainder of his life
working for Indian people, often employed by the BIA. He also wrote sev-
eral nonfiction books about Indian history: They Came Here First (1949,
1975), the still-in-print Indians and Other Americans (with Harold Fey,
1959, 1970), Indian Tribes of the United States (1962), Native American
Tribalism (1973), and a young adult book, Runner in the Sun (1954) – a
310 Conclusion: The 1930s, Indian Reorganization, and Beyond

historical fiction story set in the time before any contact with Europeans in
the Americas. During the 1930s, in academe, anthropology was at the center
of what would later become Native American studies as it approached “the
apogee of its rush to ‘salvage’ a supposedly vanishing Indian America in
part through transcriptions of oral storytelling.”20 Like other leading Native
intellectuals such as Vine Deloria Jr., McNickle responded to the work of
professional anthropologists by using both fiction and nonfiction to offer
counter-narratives for broader public consumption.21 Since the nineteenth
century Native people have had to contend with anthropological work that
was both persuasive and pervasive in the claims it made about Indian peo-
ple, culture, and history. For McNickle, anthropology needed to be claimed
by Native Americans for intellectual as well as political purposes. As prac-
titioners in this field, Native people might revise the types of methods used
for studying indigenous communities.
In fact, McNickle built on his literary success through his political work
to create meaningful and lasting bridges across Indian Country in the form
of the NCAI. Like the Society of American Indians (SAI), the membership of
the NCAI was pan-tribal and the group’s earliest concerns related to rede-
fining and reaffirming ethnic identity of Indian people to influence national
politics and cultural change in America. McNickle and the other early
founders Archie Phinney, Nez Perce, and Charles E. J. Heacock, Lakota, first
began discussing the aims of the group in the late 1930s, mostly through
writing letters. Along with other founding members, they met from May
25 to May 27 in 1944, in Chicago, to complete planning for their organi-
zation’s first convention. Despite disagreements about membership and the
scope of the organization, the NCAI thrived and has continued to function
as one of the most important intertribal political organizations of the mod-
ern era, bringing together a wide range of Native peoples to fight the effects
of termination as well as to create the Indian Claims Commission. The SAI
was not only a precursor to the NCAI in terms of a public profile for what
a pan-tribal activist organization would look and sound like, but at least
four of the same members of the SAI were still alive and politically active
in the early years of the NCAI, including: Albert Exendine, Jesse Rowlodge,
Henry Standing Bear, and Arthur C. Parker.22 These connections could be
quite helpful.
Learning from some of the mistakes of the SAI, McNickle was able to
raise funds to support the travel and attendance of Indians to the NCAI’s
conventions because otherwise many would not be able to afford to go.23
By addressing these sorts of material concerns, the issue of uneven repre-
sentation that Henry Standing Bear had found challenging in regards to
the SAI (where reservation and rural Indians were largely cut off from the
meetings of the larger body and the decisions made by the leadership) were
anticipated and ameliorated. And like Henry, McNickle believed it was
 Conclusion: The 1930s, Indian Reorganization, and Beyond 311

essential to bridge any gap between so-called urban Indians (like himself)
and reservation-based members.
In addition to former SAI members, much of the NCAI’s initial success
was due to the same or similar sorts of Indian and white networks created
and harnessed previously by activists like Eastman, Montezuma, Bonnin,
and Standing Bear. For example, when the ad hoc committee met to com-
plete plans to launch the NCAI, McNickle decided to invite the American
Association on Indian Affairs (AAIA) to help. He also thought it was a good
idea to avoid assistance from Indian reform organizations such as the Indian
Rights Association and the Home Missions Council because they were less
progressive and more interested in supporting coercive assimilation prac-
tices. Such a decision departed from the strategies of the earlier generation,
who often had to rely on these types of pro-assimilation groups despite dis-
agreeing with some of the main aims of white reformers – as we have seen
with Bonnin who relied on the patronage of white women’s organizations
even while she remained critical of their ability to completely understand
and support her more radical views. In this new era of the IRA, founding
members of the NCAI were eager to promote tribal sovereignty concerns,
and although the AAIA was a predominantly white reform group, McNickle
believed it was truly sympathetic to Indian issues and different from white
reform groups from the previous period.24
Building relationships across like-minded reform groups was a critical
strategy that the earlier cohort of Indian intellectuals had used to organize
their own pan-tribal groups and to promote themselves as individuals. Thus,
many of the political and cultural strategies the NCAI members used were
indebted to the reform work of figures like Eastman and Bonnin, among
others. The multi-public networking that Luther Standing Bear drew on,
for instance, as he combined politics with a performance career, continued
into and well beyond the 1930s. McNickle and others found ways to build
support for Native activism as well as cultural change given their ties to a
range of publics, which stemmed from different arenas in print culture and
public policy. Another similarity with regards to the formation of the NCAI
and the earlier work of Native political reformers is that several had grad-
uated from Carlisle and the Haskell Institute. And yet an important differ-
ence were the large numbers who had also attended four-year colleges. The
majority, roughly 80 percent, also had some ties to the BIA. Following the
passage of the IRA, many founding members had served on IRA-chartered
tribal councils. So education and employment with the federal government,
which were both components of the Progressive Era’s engagement with the
“Indian Question,” remained critical factors for New Deal Native activ-
ists. Unfortunately, another similarity between the early years of the NCAI
(from 1944 until 1955) and the previous generation’s attempts at political
reform was a stark gender disparity within the group’s membership. In the
312 Conclusion: The 1930s, Indian Reorganization, and Beyond

beginning, only 10 percent of registered delegates were women. Fortunately,

by the 1950s more than half of the membership was female.25
In addition to his work with the NCAI, and as the first director of the
Newberry Library’s Center for American Indian History, McNickle helped
found the Department of Anthropology at the University of Saskatchewan,
Regina. There he was able to continue his work as a self-proclaimed, vocal
proponent of Native American rights to self-determination, cultural pres-
ervation, and continued access to higher education  – all goals that he
had articulated in his article from 1938. Most importantly he was able to
reshape the field of anthropology to hold its practitioners more accountable
for their work with Native communities. McNickle, like Standing Bear and
others from the generation before him, had succeeded in urban America and
remained self-identified with the life he had on the reservation. His voice
and the stories he told represented Native verbal arts and tribal perspectives.
As an intellectual descendent of Eastman, Montezuma, Bonnin, and
Standing Bear, McNickle sought ways to dramatically engage with white
America so that he might push for better understandings of Indian politics,
culture, and history. In fact, as much as this book is a collection of biogra-
phies and stories by distinct individuals, it is also a cumulative history of
the ways these individuals influenced one another and collectively reshaped
how Native and non-Native people alike would come to see the past, pre-
sent, and future regarding Indian policy in the United States. Their efforts
aimed to help everyone recognize the centrality of Native participation in
American culture whether on the stage, on the screen, in the courtroom, or
in the pages of a book.
All four intellectuals featured in this book, along with the networks of
Indian and non-Indian supporters with whom they worked, were committed
to reforming U.S. Indian policy as well as reshaping attitudes in American
society with regards to Indian identity and history. They were also con-
nected to each other through the rhetoric of uplift they used to push against
denigrating portrayals of Indian people highlighted by the popularity of cul-
tural work, like Western films and novels. Standing Bear’s cultural politics
connect to efforts made by Eastman, Montezuma, and Bonnin given how
he championed and criticized aspects of U.S. citizenship as a means through
which Native people could improve their situation in America. Similarly,
Eastman and Bonnin both engaged literary audiences, mostly white ones,
to read about Indian life based on their own experiences. They succeeded
in not only garnering new sorts of attention for the literary worlds Native
authors created at the turn of the twentieth century but demonstrated to
other Indian readers how Native writers might use poetic work to make
political arguments, sometimes overtly and sometimes not.
No doubt McNickle’s cohort had read or were somewhat familiar with
the works of the Native authors who preceded them. Perhaps they had
ordered a copy of Montezuma’s newsletter, Wassaja, or better yet their
 Conclusion: The 1930s, Indian Reorganization, and Beyond 313

parents were among those who sent in letters to the editor that Montezuma
later published. Sandwiched between Pokagon and McNickle, Montezuma
was well positioned to engage in cosmopolitan circles of Chicago given his
professional success as a physician and his consistent commitment to writ-
ing and speaking on behalf of Indian Country. As perhaps the most outspo-
ken critic of the BIA among this early generation, Montezuma was more
forthright in his critiques than Pokagon, but not as measured as McNickle.
Nonetheless his presence in the city reminded those who read Wassaja and
attended Montezuma’s public talks that Native intellectuals were shapers
of American modernity. In a similar way, Eastman, Bonnin, and Standing
Bear fit within the Pokagon and McNickle generational bookends given
their struggles to build careers as artists while working to represent Native
American politics to the world.
The lessons all four figures taught McNickle, and the later generations
who would tote Vine Deloria Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins around with
them, are straightforward. Eastman led by example to tout the benefits of
higher education as a writer and an accomplished public speaker. Montezuma
used his newsletter, correspondence, and other forms of epistolary culture
to create and participate in a range of Native and non-Native cultural and
political networks. Bonnin’s literary work, highly gendered and raced public
performances, and political lobbying demonstrated the degree to which she
needed to engage all three of these strategies to succeed in changing public
opinion and federal policy regarding Indian affairs. And Luther Standing
Bear’s life as a professional performer helped him make inroads into differ-
ent aspects of the entertainment industry to parlay his fame into a career
as a writer and public voice for Indian rights. Like McNickle, these were
Indian intellectuals who found ways to work through various reform orga-
nizations, many pan-tribal and interracial in nature, to reframe dominant
expectations regarding the place of Indian people in America’s past and
also its present. Certainly they shared similar strategies when it came to
the realm of performance and cultural politics. Their work through groups
like the SAI and the National League for Justice to American Indians makes
them the forerunners for Indian leaders who would create the NCAI and
many who would become active participants in the Red Power movement.
Both moments, that of the 1930s and that of the 1960s, required Native
people to consider how best to garner public attention to find support for
their political causes.
As much as the SAI and Eastman’s generation had to rely on public
events that often hinged on the popularity of Indian performativity to pro-
mote their political aims, bring in new members, and procure the support
of non-Indian patrons, so too did the NCAI have to grapple with fraught
representational politics. The stakes remained the same:  how to critique
representations of Indian people and Indian life that stemmed more from
an American imaginary than a Native reality. For McNickle, this came to
314 Conclusion: The 1930s, Indian Reorganization, and Beyond

a head with an unauthorized publicity stunt organized by NCAI members

George LaMotte and Dan Madrano, whom McNickle had disparagingly
referred to as “phony publicity hounds.”26
In May 1945, LaMotte arranged for the NCAI, along with local groups,
to sponsor a reception, luncheon, broadcast, and parade to honor Ira Hayes,
noted Pima war veteran, at Soldier Field in Chicago. Despite LaMotte’s
enthusiasm for public events to celebrate Indianness, no one from the exec-
utive committee of the NCAI had approved such an approach. LaMotte per-
sonally led the parade of seventy-five Indians dressed in traditional attire as
they staged a reenactment of the flag raising at Iwo Jima in front of 60,000
people. This was not quite the same performance as Simon Pokagon ring-
ing a copy of the Liberty Bell in 1893, or Charles Eastman’s reenactment of
Samson Occom to celebrate Dartmouth’s founding mission. Still, embed-
ded within the pageantry surrounding Hayes’ public appearance were dom-
inant, mostly white expectations regarding Native men as natural warriors
who could represent an exceptional part of America’s military fabric, even if
they were not fully accepted into all sectors of American society. McNickle
was not at all happy with such a stunt. He complained that Madrano and
LaMotte had used the event for their own self-promotion. Furthermore,
he argued it encouraged stereotypes and produced negative publicity for
the NCAI. As a behind-the-scenes technician, McNickle was so upset he
threatened to quit until NCAI president Johnson could control the two
men. For McNickle, and many others in the NCAI cohort, the strategy of
Indianized performance seemed out of date given that they were now more
invested in organizing and lobbying and therefore moving away from the
strategies of cultural politics that had characterized the generation before
them. Following McNickle’s outrage, Heacock tried to soothe the situation
by saying that the “Hayes stunt” had actually led to positive publicity for
the organization. Still, the issue at hand was an old one, which was familiar
to previous generations of Indian activists and is still alive today, which is
just how, if you are Native, to seek out public interest in your cause without
relying on familiar, often derogatory, performative tropes.27
During the 1960s and 1970s, Native reformers reversed direction once
again. And, to some extent, they returned to the strategies that had charac-
terized the early twentieth-century cohort’s politics of cultural representa-
tion. This was a departure from the NCAI members, who were less inclined
to this approach even though they had set up the structure to allow for
the alliance of culture and politics that characterized Indian activism in
the 1960s. During the Red Power movement, most young Indian activists
said no to inside game playing with lobbying and politicking; instead they
took to the streets. A striking example of this strategy was the occupation
of the deserted federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay on
November 20, 1969. Referring to the 1868 Treaty with the Sioux, a group
of eighty-nine Native Americans, mostly college students, seized the island
 Conclusion: The 1930s, Indian Reorganization, and Beyond 315

on behalf of “Indians of All Tribes.” They demanded federal funds to remake

the site into a cultural and educational center. This objective recalled the
aims of both the NCAI and the SAI. Although unsuccessful in achieving the
stated goals, the event raised the profile of what later became known as the
Red Power movement.
At the forefront of Red Power was the American Indian Movement
(AIM), founded in 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With young and mil-
itant leaders and a mostly urban Indian membership, AIM was organized
to work for Indian civil rights in cities, not unlike the Black Panthers and
Brown Berets. AIM was able to play a major role in building a network of
urban Indian centers, churches, and philanthropic organizations. The visible
actions of AIM members enabled them to attract attention from the news
media and to inspire the creation of local chapters, as well as writing about
American Indian political issues. Also during this time, many young Indians
began to turn to their elders to learn tribal ways, including traditional dress
and spiritual practices. Like the response to the IRA, Native leaders and
community members wanted to maintain American Indian communities by
promoting self-government at the tribal level.
After three and a half years of being in America’s spotlight through a
series of guerrilla theater tactics, AIM “could highlight a problem, but
failed to make a compelling case for its own vision of change,” according
to Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Warrior in Like a Hurricane: The Indian
Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee – their landmark study of Red
Power. Jerry Wilkinson, the executive director of the National Indian Youth
Council (NIYC), also offered a critique of AIM’s failure, citing two main
weaknesses: “It did not create a tradition of people relentlessly, ceaselessly,
and uncompromisingly pursuing a long-range goal,” and it was “terribly
anti-intellectual.”28 Wilkinson noted too that the telephone had replaced
correspondence and that Indian leaders rarely wrote letters or articles any-
more so that “intellectual growth in the Indian community over the last
twenty years has been next to zero.”29 Wilkinson’s critique was not entirely
valid given that he was speaking from the vantage point of the 1980s, which
had witnessed an impressive growth in Native American literary studies and
the creation of Native American studies programs as well as major shifts in
the field of American Indian history – all of which suggest intellectual ambi-
tions remained salient components of Native life. Still, Wilkinson’s critique
is instructive. By reflecting on these two types of failings in activism and
political organizing from the 1960s, it is easier to distinguish this period
from the earlier era and a generation of Native leaders involved with the
NCAI and those who had formed the SAI. Native reformers from both of
these previous eras strongly emphasized education and intellectual frame-
works as necessary components of pan-tribal reform work.30
The takeover of Alcatraz in 1969 and similar events also demonstrated
that political theater was still a vital tactic for waging a war on American
316 Conclusion: The 1930s, Indian Reorganization, and Beyond

settler-colonialism.31 The publicity surrounding this event provides a histor-

ical through-line connecting members of AIM with earlier Native reform-
ers, especially the Indian intellectuals who figured most prominently in
the early twentieth century, because they sought strategic ways to publicly
engage Indianness for personal and also larger political purposes. Despite
a decline in activity and extreme financial hardship (brought on by hav-
ing to fight the federal government in legal battles that bankrupted the
group), Smith and Warrior note, the AIM made important gains during this
period: “It was also a season of struggle for power and respect, for treaty
rights and personal validation, for economic and political justice. Most
importantly, it gave thousands of Indians a raison d’etre, an opportunity
to be important to their own communities.”32 Therefore, however cloudy
the future would seem, the late 1960s and early 1970s marked a brief time
when Indians did unexpected things to challenge American society with
the hope of changing everything. Many of their strategies had their roots
in the efforts of earlier generations, who knew well how to organize and
promote a reform agenda using cultural tropes and highly visible public
performances. Any failure of AIM to fully embrace an intellectual frame-
work that could enable them to more adequately organize their activism
into a fully fledged movement with a long-term goal seems to suggest that
the lessons of McNickle and the NCAI as well as the multifaceted strategies
and commitments of Eastman’s cohort to education, networking, writing,
and performance are all the more important to remember. Perhaps now the
“edgy, unpredictable creature that challenged American power”33 known
as AIM might be re-envisioned and reactivated into a new movement that
keeps the long history and traditions of Native intellectual work in their
thoughts and their tactics.

Coda
Simon Pokagon and D’Arcy McNickle have become known for significant
literary and political achievements. They lived several generations apart and
were separated even further by different sets of cultural expectations for
Indianness that they could navigate. Certainly, Montezuma might serve as a
bridge figure given his work and political activity based out of Chicago dur-
ing the early decades of the twentieth century. Examining the life, writings,
and political activism of McNickle demonstrates the continued significance
of the themes of education, epistolary culture, publishing, and performance
in relation to Indian intellectual storytelling and political organizing. These
four themes were critical factors in enabling McNickle to build a career
for himself and, often, to become the spokesperson for the next generation
of Indian people. In many ways, the story of McNickle’s life functions as a
through-line for readers of Indian history by moving from the political and
cultural history of the 1880s to the 1930s and beyond.
 Conclusion: The 1930s, Indian Reorganization, and Beyond 317

Returning to 1893 and the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago,

could Pokagon have ever imagined a future where his friend Montezuma
would be a doctor and a political writer? Where McNickle would return to
the same city several decades later to direct the Center of American Indian
History at the Newberry Library, less than four miles from where Pokagon
had addressed fairgoers on Chicago Day? We will never know. But the Native
intellectual leaders who lived, wrote, and performed in the years in between
understood why Pokagon had sought to rebuke his audience rather than
celebrate the arrival of Columbus and the subsequent influx of white settlers
along the shores of Lake Michigan. Like the students who seized Alcatraz,
Pokagon reclaimed Chicago as his city to indigenize an American space. He
stood on the stage that day to remind everyone present about the signifi-
cance of this claim. His rhetoric necessarily engaged a nineteenth-century
audience’s ears and so he could not use the same bold statements made by
leaders like Russell Means and Dennis Banks. But Pokagon spoke as an
Indian nonetheless, and like Charles Eastman he spoke on behalf of the Red
Man’s race because there was a lot the world had to learn about Native
American people.
Today, in the United States of America, debates among, between, and
within Indian nations continue to focus on how to determine and define the
boundaries of Indian ethnic identity and tribal citizenship. From the 1880s,
following the passage of the Dawes Act and later the Curtis Act, and into the
1930s, after the Indian Citizenship Act (1924) and the “Indian New Deal”
(1934), many Native people participated in similar debates as they con-
fronted white cultural expectations regarding what it meant to be an Indian
in modern American society. Anticipating contemporary discussions, Native
intellectuals of the early twentieth century asked hard questions about eth-
nicity and authenticity, particularly in relation to their status as new citi-
zens of the United States. Although separated by time, many contemporary
debates resonate with the ways that this first generation of urban Indian
intellectuals grappled with representational politics. Those politics centered
on the ways they performed and narrated “Indianness” with regard to their
individual subjectivities. These strategic performances had to grapple with
essentialisms (like primitivism) – and derogatory racialized representations
(like the noble savage)  – which were part of larger discourses aimed to
define and confine Indian people by relegating them to America’s premod-
ern past, suggesting their power lay in fiction, memory, and nostalgia rather
than in history and politics. Charles Eastman, Carlos Montezuma, Gertrude
Bonnin, and Luther Standing Bear each understood the contours of these
discourses and found ways to mobilize them for their own advancement
and on behalf of other Indian people in the United States. They wanted to
change how everyone viewed Indian history and at the same time to increase
Native participation in the political systems of their age. Their Indian-based
dialogue has continued to influence contemporary concerns among and
318 Conclusion: The 1930s, Indian Reorganization, and Beyond

between tribal nations, the U.S. government, and diverse sets of ethnic and
racial groups in American society, as well as the wider world beyond it.

Notes
1 D’Arcy McNickle, The Surrounded (1936), 5.  Reprint published by Dodd,
Mead, New York, 1964, 1978.
2 Dorothy R. Parker, Singing an Indian Song: A Biography of D’Arcy McNickle
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992) and “D’Arcy McNickle,” in The
New Warriors:  Native American Leaders since 1900 (Lincoln:  University of
Nebraska Press, 2001). David Martinez, ed., The American Indian Intellectual
Tradition: An Anthology of Writings from 1772 to 1972 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press).
3 Martinez, ed., The American Indian Intellectual Tradition, 269.
4 The IRA was perhaps the most significant initiative of John Collier Sr., commis-
sioner of the BIA from 1933 to 1945. He had worked on Indian issues for ten
years prior to his appointment, particularly with the American Indian Defense
Association. He had intended to reverse some of the worst government pol-
icies and provide ways for American Indians to reestablish sovereignty and
self-government, to reduce the losses of reservation lands, and to establish ways
for Indians to build economic self-sufficiency. Various other interests effected
changes to the legislation that reduced protections for Indians and preserved
oversight by the BIA.
5 Several scholars have written about the literary contributions of McNickle’s
novel. This conclusion aims to point out the political connections between his text
and his activist work as well as the cultural context that gave rise to McNickle
himself and how he may in fact be an inheritor of the Eastman cohort. For more
literary interpretations of McNickle’s first work see: Paul Whitehouse, “Seeing
Red:  Violence and Cultural Memory in D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded,”
Dandelion Vol. 2, No. 1, 2011; Parker, Singing an Indian Song; John Purdy, Word
Ways: The Novels of D’Arcy McNickle (1990); John Purdy, ed., The Legacy of
D’Arcy McNickle:  Writer, Historian, Activist (1996); James Ruppert, D’Arcy
McNickle (1988); Robert Dale Parker, “Who Shot the Sheriff:  Storytelling,
Indian Identity, and the Marketplace of Masculinity in D’Arcy McNickle’s The
Surrounded,” Modern Fiction Studies Vol. 43, No. 4, Winter, 1997, 898–932.
6 Indians at Work Vol. 4, No. 11, January 15, 1937, subtitle “A News Sheet for
Indians and the Indian Service,” Bureau of Indian Affairs, Smithsonian Libraries,
Washington, DC.
7 Although the subtitle for the magazine varies, it has been “An emergency con-
servation news sheet for ourselves” as well as “A news sheet for Indians and
the Indian Service.” For more on the archives related to the magazine Indians
at Work, see Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75.14.12,
“Records of the Civilian Conservation Corps-Indian Division,” National
Archives, Washington, DC.
8 Martinez, ed., The American Indian Intellectual Tradition, 269.
9 Ibid.
 Conclusion: The 1930s, Indian Reorganization, and Beyond 319

10 There is already an impressive array of scholarship on the “Indian New Deal”

era, and as such, this conclusion merely engages with the main sources in order
to provide the political and cultural context of this period as the time when
Charles Eastman (1939), Luther Standing Bear (1939), and Gertrude Bonnin
(1938) died (Carlos Montezuma having passed away much earlier in 1923).
Thus, what follows is not an exhaustive historiography but points to the main
sources relevant for my readings in this chapter. Kenneth R. Philp, John Collier’s
Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920–1954 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1977); Lawrence C. Kelly, The Assault on Assimilation:  John Collier and the
Origins of Indian Policy Reform (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico
Press, 1983); Robert Fay Schrader, The Indian Arts & Crafts Board: An Aspect
of New Deal Policy (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1983).
11 Martinez, ed., The American Indian Intellectual Tradition, 270.
12 Ibid., 272.
13 Ibid., 272.
14 Ibid., 274.
15 Ibid., 274.
16 Kenneth R. Philp, “Termination:  A  Legacy of the Indian New Deal,” The
Western Historical Quarterly Vol. 14, No. 2, April 1983, 165–80.
17 Martinez, ed., The American Indian Intellectual Tradition, 275.
18 J. MacMurrough, “From the Inside:  The Surrounded, by D’Arcy McNickle,”
The New Masses, March 3, 1936, 24.
19 Whitehouse, “Seeing Red,” 1.
20 Parker, “Who Shot the Sheriff,” 1.
21 For some examples from Vine Deloria Jr. see:  Custer Died for Your Sins
(1969), God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (1972), and Red Earth, White
Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (1995).
22 Thomas W. Cowger, The National Congress of American Indians: The Founding
Years (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 41.
23 Ibid., 40.
24 Ibid., 35.
25 Ibid., 41.
26 Ibid., 45.
27 For more on Hayes’ stunt see: ibid., 46.
28 Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane:  The Indian
Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New  York:  New Press,
1996), 275–6.
29 Ibid.
30 For more on the roles American Indians played in Red Power see:  Bradley
Shreve, Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins
of Native Activism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011).
31 Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 269.
32 Ibid., 277.
33 Ibid., 279.
 Afterword

During the summer of 2000 I took my first road trip to cross the contiguous
United States. It began in Brooklyn, New York and ended in San Francisco,
California. Like many road trips, this was not just a journey through time
and across space, but an opportunity to explore new and old places. It was
during the second week of driving that I and my fellow travelers began to
explore South Dakota. Although we were taking a strategic combination of
Interstates 80 and 90 for our east-to-west voyage, we made an important
detour after we reached the city of Sioux Falls, which is where we spent the
Fourth of July. So on July 5, we headed north up Route 29 toward Sisseton,
a small town that sits at the intersection of Route 29 and State Road 81.
For the first time in my life I was about to visit the Sisseton-Wahpeton
Reservation where my grandmother, Ethel Hemminger, had been born and
where some of my more distant relatives still lived. I knew little about this
place, given that Ethel and her parents, having received monetary compen-
sation for their allotments from the Office of Indian Affairs, packed up most
of the family and their belongings to move to Southern California during
the 1920s. There, in different parts of Los Angeles County, they spent the
remainder of their lives working in show business. As part of Hollywood’s
burgeoning film industry, they mostly played the parts of extras in Westerns,
although later my great grandfather and great-uncle would find steady
employment in Disneyland’s “Indian Village,” a focal point of Frontierland
in the then brand new theme park. Working in film and for Disney enabled
my relatives to earn a decent enough living to support themselves and their
children and to meet a rising number of Native Americans who were them-
selves new to the Los Angeles area. In fact, as Indian people traveled from
South Dakota they also came from Oklahoma, New Mexico, Maine, and
Washington, among other places, to join the world that Luther Standing
Bear and the earliest Native actors had begun to build a decade earlier. Well
into the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s a pan-tribal Native community was forming
321
322 Afterword

in Southern California, where my father grew up with memories of going to

socialize at the local “Indian club.” This story of Native intellectuals and the
networks they traveled was not about the Indian world built in Hollywood,
but rather the political, cultural, and economic conditions that necessitated
the mass migration of my relatives and other Indian people across the United
States. They left the Dakotas in the hopes of finding better career opportu-
nities and living conditions in California, through film and other forms of
popular entertainment.
Back in 2000, as we drove toward the BIA office at Sisseton, I had no
idea what to make of this unfamiliar place. I felt strangely shy about ask-
ing anyone we saw for directions. Yet as I  walked toward the BIA office
I felt a vigorous sense of purpose. I knew there would be some information
pertaining to my family’s history somewhere in the agency’s files. After all,
this was an archive of sorts, with records of American imperialism as much
as land holdings for the Hemmingers. After a couple of phone calls to my
father, the immediate heir to our family lands and therefore the only one the
BIA recognized to receive any information, the young woman at the desk
gave me permission to view a large set of maps. Moving through each piece
of paper in this pile of photocopies, she highlighted small squares, parcels
really, which were subsections of collectively owned lands. It was dizzying
and curious. What did I find when I looked at these maps? That my family
could claim 1/54 of this piece of land over here, or 1/322 of this one over
there, or perhaps a little bit more, perhaps even 1/16 of this section way over
there. It was very confusing and unnerving.
After looking at the various highlighted sections and talking with the
office staff, I learned that although we had these shares, so did other Native
people. I began to consider how they might use these claims. Because much
of this land was not useful for farming or anything else, the tribal govern-
ment of the Lake Traverse Indian Reservation decided that a good way to
administer the use of collectively owned lands was to lease it, and each of
us would then be paid according to the fraction of our individual shares.
I still get checks once a year (and they aren’t big) from the U.S. Treasury for
this purpose. What I learned that day was that the U.S. federal government
was often (if not always) the highest bidder when it came to leases, so it
was nearly always the primary lessees of my family’s lands. Interesting and
strange, I thought. As I stood there looking at my maps, I decided it was time
to get on the road again and go look at some of this land with my own eyes,
perhaps to figure out how one might use it. After a short drive (and some
helpful directions from the BIA office) we went to check out a section.
What did I  see? Lots of tall grass growing, and not much else.
Apparently our tribal government had decided to lease these parcels for
grazing. In reality, most of it was fallow, only useful as a crossroads, and
none of it situated at the intersection of State and Main, but rather the
type of liminal and placeless crossroads that no one was apt to travel
 Afterword 323

through or to. What I  wondered at that moment, scanning the horizon

filled with scrubby little trees and miles and miles of grasses, was how
all of this could have happened. How could it be that my people, my
ancestors who had known and occupied vast stretches of the Great Lakes
region as well as areas to the west and north (including parts of Canada)
no longer really used their own land? How could it be that the economy
of this particular reservation community was largely supported by two
small and not so profitable casinos and the BIA? Why were the market’s
shelves mostly empty and only half of the fluorescent ceiling lights on?
In addition, how could it be that after so many military and legal battles,
the federal government still got to use this land however it wanted, even
when that meant not using it at all?
I yearned to know more about the history of Indian affairs and policy,
and also about the lives of the people who had once lived here and those
who had left, as my grandmother had done. I wanted answers to help me
figure out how I might interpret all the strange highlighted parts on this set
of BIA maps and the cultural consequences of dividing up vast stretches
that had once been known, used collectively, and mapped by Indian people
in their own ways. It was this experience that inspired the research for this
book, which led to a different sort of journey altogether.
The archival research necessary to write this collective cultural biography
led me again to travel across the United States, but in a more purposeful way.
In search of answers to these questions, I went to Dartmouth College for
graduate school and found among the school’s archives the personal papers
of an important alumnus from the nineteenth century:  Charles Eastman.
I did not know then as I do now that Charles Eastman was, like my father
and me, part of the Santee Dakota peoples. He had traveled across some of
the same lands that I had just begun to know. Like my grandmother, he had
also chosen to leave them. He left at a young age in search of an education
and in search of answers, because not unlike today, the Dakota people of the
nineteenth century were struggling to navigate cultural, economic, and polit-
ical changes in their already uneasy relationship with the U.S. government.
Eastman wanted to have a voice in those changes. He sought citizenship not
because he wanted to pledge allegiance to the United States but because he
wanted to have a stronger hand in changing the policies of a government
that been intervening in the lives of Dakota people for far too long. And like
him, Carlos Montezuma, Gertrude Bonnin, and Luther Standing Bear found
ways to add their voices to discussions concerning Indian policy. They often,
although not always, worked through culture to influence politics, in order
to shift public perceptions of Indian history and Indian people. After several
trips to different archives I discovered that the details of their lives and the
larger frame for this cultural history began to emerge; it became clearer still
that these four figures were not alone but rather were members of a larger
network of Indian intellectuals.
324 Afterword

Following the unexpected connection between Eastman’s history and

that of my own family, and in preparation to visit archives, I began to ask
a new set of questions in regard to Eastman and his Indian contemporaries.
I knew he could not have been alone in his pursuit of education, his use of
publishing to teach Americans, or his ability to perform a particular politics
on local and national stages across the United States and in Europe. How
did an individual like Eastman maintain ties to pan-tribal networks as he
crafted his own Indian subjectivity? In addition, how did he and other fig-
ures balance the concerns of Native publics with those of their white read-
ers? Eventually, I set out to write a cultural history of the first generation
of urban Indian intellectuals to trace their efforts in mobilizing and revis-
ing concepts like citizenship, assimilation, and modernity. With this collec-
tive cultural biography, I have begun to answer these questions. Moreover,
I found that to tell the story of these writers, performers, and power brokers
I needed to suture together just how their cultural work shaped and reflected
their politics. All the time I was hoping to come to a better understanding
of the highlighted maps that I had held in my hands back in the summer
of 2000.
Indeed, the driving force behind telling a narrative based on Eastman,
Montezuma, Bonnin, and Standing Bear was to examine them as members
of a wider world of Indian people and a collective movement that could be
mapped in material ways. In other words, looking at the actual times and
places that these figures could have and did meet one can see the ways they
moved through social, political, and cultural spaces, and how their mobility
was critical to the creation of pan-Indian reform organizations and public
meetings. Moreover, as powerful as they could each be in getting their ideas
out to people through letters and through the publication of articles, news-
letters, and books, they each had immense influence when they took to the
public stage to give a lecture and address an audience in person. With this
book I have aimed to map out their travels. I have also aimed to map out
abstract concepts to illustrate the ways meaning takes shape and changes
how Indianness was produced by expectations that Native and non-Native
people generated during these moments of public performance. This book
has offered close readings of texts, images, and public performances to point
to the myriad ways these particular Indian figures made their own journeys
across the United States throughout the 1880s and into the 1930s. It has
signaled the other Native people they knew and worked with in regards to
reforming politics as much as culture. Ultimately, my hope is that this story
helps us uncover large portions of U.S. history that have remained on the
margins of the historical record, both to bring me closer to understanding
why my ancestors lost control over so much of their lands, and to bring all
of us closer to understanding the centrality of American Indian people in the
making of American culture and society.
 Appendix

In writing this collective cultural biography a central point that has emerged
is the fact that this cohort of Indian intellectuals participated (sometimes as
members, at other times as leaders) in a number of reform organizations.
Many of these groups had the same or similar-sounding names, which can
lead to a bit of confusion. These Native leaders also sought out white pro-
gressive allies, and in these instances found support from reform groups
composed predominantly of white men and women. In order to assist the
reader in locating these different groups I have made the following table as
a reference guide, and noted when organizations were primarily white; oth-
erwise they were Indian.

Organization Key Figures Location Period

Society for American Founded by: First meeting: 1911–23
Indians Charles Eastman, The Ohio State
(SAI) Henry Standing University
Although primarily Bear, Carlos Columbus, OH
formed by and for Montezuma, Laura
Indians, many white Cornelius, Thomas
allies also became Sloan, Charles
associate members Dagenett
National Council of Gertrude Bonnin, Washington, 1926–38
American Indians President DC
(NCAI) Raymond Bonnin,
Secretary
(continued)

325
326 Appendix

Organization Key Figures Location Period

National Congress of J. B. Milam Washington, 1944 to
American Indians D’Arcy McNickle DC present
(Although distinct from Vine Deloria Jr.
the “National Council”
formed by Bonnin, this
group is referred to by
the same acronym of
NCAI)
Northwest Federation William Bishop Port Townsend, 1913–?
of American WA (western
Indians (NFAI) Washington)
Formed by landless tribes
living in Puget Sound
Indian Actors Jim Thorpe Los Angeles, 1936–?
Association (IAA) Luther Standing Bear CA
Formed as branch of the
Screen Actors Guild
(SAG)
National League for Marian Campbell Los Angeles, 1931–?
Justice to American Luther Standing Bear CA
Indians William S. Hart
(NLJAI) E. A. Brininstool
Lucullus McWhorter
Nipo Strongheart
Lake Mohonk Conference Albert K. Smiley Lake Mohonk, 1883–1916
Also referred to Alice C. Fletcher NY
themselves as the (ethnologist)
“Friends of the Indians”
(An annual meeting
mostly for white
progressives)
Indian Rights Herbert Welsh Philadelphia, 1882–1986
Association (IRA) Matthew Sniffen PA
(A white humanitarian Lawrence Lindley
group dedicated to Charles C. Painter
federal U.S. Indian Samuel M. Brosius
policy)
Boston Indian Citizenship Founded by Boston Boston, MA 1879–?
Committee (BCC) progressives
(mostly white interested in an
organization) association for the
protection of the
rights of Indians
 Bibliography

Archival and Manuscript Material Abbreviations

CAE Charles Alexander Eastman Papers, 1891–1983, MS 829,
Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College,
Hanover, NH
CM Carlos Montezuma Papers, Wisconsin State Historical
Society, Madison, Wisconsin
EAB Earl Alonzo Brininstool Collection, 1850–1945, Dolph
Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas
at Austin
EGE Elaine Goodale Eastman Papers, Sophia Smith Collection,
Smith College, MA
LR, RG 75 “Letters Received,” Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs
(Record Group 75), Federal Records in the National Archives
of the United States, Washington, DC
MSS 1704, LTPSC Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin Collection; 20th–21st
Century Western and Mormon Americana; L.  Tom Perry
Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young
University
MSS 299 William F. Hanson Collection; University Archives; L. Tom
Perry Special Collections, Harold B.  Lee Library, Brigham
Young University
PCM, Larner 1983 The Papers of Carlos Montezuma, M.D. [microform]: includ-
ing the papers of Maria Keller Montezuma Moore and the
papers of Joseph W. Latimer / edited by John William Larner
Jr., Scholarly Resources, Inc. 1983 through the Newberry
Library, Chicago, IL

327
328 Bibliography

Other Archival Collections

Braun Library, Southwest Museum part of the Gene Autry National Center, Los
Angeles, CA
British Newspaper Archive, Bristol, England
Brooklyn Newsstand Collection, Brooklyn Public Library, accessed April 21, 2014
Carlos Montezuma Collection, 1887–1980 (bulk 1887–1922), Department of
Archives & Special Collections, Arizona State University Libraries, MS
CM MSS-60
Carlos Montezuma Papers, Center for Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College,
Durango, CO
Cumberland County Historical Society, and the Richard Henry Pratt Papers, WA
MSS S-1174, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Collection of
Western Americana, Yale University, New Haven, CT
Eugene Gruenberg Papers (MS Mus 234.2). Houghton Library, Harvard University,
“Eulogy of Chief Plenty Coups of the Crows:  Speech of Hon. Scott Leavitt
of Montana in the House of Representatives,” Congressional Record
Seventy-Second Congress, First Session (Mar. 5, 1932).
Helen Gilkison Papers, Mss. 1901, 2175, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley
Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, LA (bulk 1925–48)
John Collier Papers (MS 146), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library
Lucullus Virgil McWhorter Papers, Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections,
Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA
Melvin R.  Gilmore Papers, 1905–1938, Bentley Historical Library, University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Manuscript 061, The Indian Rights Association pamphlets, Years:  1884–1985;
bulk 1884–1934, Center of Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College,
Durango, CO
NAJA collection, Sequoya National Research Center, Little Rock, AR
Papers of Carlos Montezuma (1866–1923), Special Collections Library, University
of Arizona, A-287
Papers of the Women’s National Indian Association #9237, Division of Rare and
Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY
Peter Iverson Collection, 1898–2002, Labriola National American Indian Data
Center, ASU Libraries, MS LAB MSS-165
ProQuest Historical Newspapers:  Chicago Daily Tribune, Los Angeles Times,
New York Times, Washington Post (1881–1987)
Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group  75.14.12, “Records
of the Civilian Conservation Corps-Indian Division,” National Archives,
Washington, DC
Seeley G.  Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, “The Association on
American Indian Affairs Archives,” Publications, Programs, and Legal and
Organizational Files, 1851–1983. Filmed from the holdings of the Seeley
G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University
Students and Alumnae Profiles and Statistics Collection, Archives and Special
Collections, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA
Student Records, New England Conservatory Archives, Boston, MA
The Papers of Alice Cunningham Fletcher and Francis La Flesche, National
Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
 Bibliography 329

Wassaja:  Freedom’s Signal for the Indians, March 1918, Special Collections,
Newberry Library, Chicago, IL
William F. Cody Archive, Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, WY
World Peace Foundation, records, 1899–1993, Digital Collections and Archives,
Tufts University

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 Index

accommodation, 14 American Indian Stories (Bonnin), 171,

acculturation, forced, through 198, 309
education, 170 American Indian Tepee Christian
Adams, Richard C., 118 Mission, 133
Adorno, Theodor, 18 American Indian, The (Eastman), 35
Aegis, The (Dartmouth yearbook), 42 a-ni-shi-na-bwe E-na-mi-ad (newsletter), 117
Agent/Agency System, 49, 52 Antelope, DeForest, 123
Alcatraz occupation, 314, 315 Apache (Apache), 206, 241
allotment, 21, 255 Apess, William, 3, 15, 17
Bonnin and, 176, 177, 193 Appleseed, Johnny, 173
citizenship and, 119, 250 Arapaho (tribe), 112, 207, 241
conservation/development and, 285 archaeologists, Native, 13
Eastman and, 42, 47, 49, 52 Archambeau, Moses, 123
individual, 40, 254, 305 Arche Club, 195
Montezuma and, 110, 111 Archilde, 308, 309
National Indian Association and, 71 Arnold, Matthew, 44–5
Standing Bear and, 276 artists, Native, 13
tribal sovereignty and, 306 Ashue, Harvey, 123
tribally-held land and, 71 assimilation, 10, 14, 19, 271
amalgamation, racial, 40 allotments and, 250, 254
America, Home of the Red Man Bonnin and, 166, 170, 177, 245
(Bonnin), 185–7 Carlyle Indian School and, 244, 245
American Association on Indian Affairs Christian conversion and, 180
(AAIA), 311 citizenship and, 53
American Indian Day, 107 Eastman and, 46, 53
American Indian Defense Association forced, 53, 172, 176, 311
(AIDA), 182, 198, 271 Indian policy and, 52
American Indian Magazine, The, 141, Lake Mohonk Conference and, 135
179, 185 McNickle and, 309
Bonnin and, 181 Montezuma and, 111
American Indian Movement (AIM), 314–16 National Indian Association and, 71
American Indian Progressive Pratt and, 110, 113, 114, 245
Association, 281 Assiniboine (tribe), 206

351
352 Index

Association on American Indian Affairs Standing Bear and, 281

(AAIA), 239, 271 Blue Feather, 181
National League for Justice to American Boas, Franz, 13, 36, 184
Indians and, 272 Bonnin, Gertrude (Zitkala-Sa), 8, 9, 55, 65,
Atlantic Monthly, 13, 16, 172, 179 66, 103, 134, 140, 143, 144, 271, 304,
Atwood, Stella, 189, 197–9 309, 313, 317
Collier and, 198 Atwood and, 198
authenticity Burgess and, 182–3, 193–5, 197
cinematic, 239–41 De Cora and, 178–9
Montezuma and, 140 Eastman and, 55, 183
Standing Bear and, 240 Kasebier and, 199–204
Wild West Show and, 253 Montezuma and, 134, 189–90
authorship Pratt and, 166, 177
Eastman and, 59–67 Bonnin, Raymond T., 9, 171, 180
Montezuma and, 101–4 Boston Evening Transcript, 178
Ayer, Edward E., 124 Boston Indian Citizenship Committee, 52
Boston University, 45
Baden-Powell, Robert, 61 Boxer Rebellion, 256
Banks, Dennis, 317 Boy Scouts of America (BSA), 61
Barnett, Jackson, 123 Brennan, John R., 124, 262, 263
Bartlett, Dana W., 278 Brininstool, Earl Alonzo, 183, 238, 276,
Battle of San Juan Hill (Wild West 278, 281
Show), 256 Bronson, Ruth Muskrat, 196
Battle of the Little Bighorn (Battle of Greasy Brooklyn Club, 72
Grass), 165, 247 Brooks, Lisa, 11
Battle of Tientsin (Wild West Show), 256 Brooks-Aten, Florence, 76
Beane, Fannie, 125 Brooks-Bright Foundation, 76
Bear Dance, The (Hanson), 209 Brotherhood of North American Indians, 118
Beaulieu, Theo H., 134 Bumpo, Natty, 192
Before Cultures (Evans), 65 Burbank, Elbridge Ayer, 124
Bergen, William, 122 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 12, 21, 49, 51,
Berkhofer, Robert, 10 56, 174
biography, collective cultural, 9–16 abolition of, 238
Bird Jack, Mrs., 278 Burgess and, 194
Bishop, Thomas G., 126 Campbell and, 238
Bishop, William, 126 Grey and, 103
Bison Motion Pictures, 265, 270 McNickle and, 303, 304
Black Horn, 257 Montezuma and, 101, 110, 112, 114,
Blackfeet (tribe), 207, 307 136, 142
blood, 16 Pratt and, 114
Eastman and, 67–76 reforming, 40
education and (Eastman), 43 Standing Bear and, 238
full-blooded, 18, 36 Burgess, C. A., 195
authenticity and, 273 Burgess, Marianna, 182–3, 189, 193–5
mixed, 40, 55 Burke, Edmund, 43
Negro, 54 Burke, Margaret Sullivan, 181
one-drop rule, 18 Bursum bill, 198, 271
Pratt and, 113 Butler, Judith, 273
quantum, 146
authenticity and, 276 Cadman, Carles Wakefield, 195, 210
racialized logic of, 21, 113 Cahill, Cathleen, 10, 12
rhetoric of, 18–19 Calhoun, Virginia, 182
special quality of Indian (Eastmen), 54 California Federation of Women’s Clubs, 198
 Index 353

California Grizzly Bear, The, 132 circuits

California Indian Rights Association, 132 cultural, 12
California State Federation of Women’s clubs defining, 12
(CSFW), 182 intellectual, 5
Callahan, S. Alice, 167 lecture, 12, 70
Calloway, Colin, 44, 76 women's and church clubs, 105
Campbell, Marian, 234, 237, 272, 278 literary, 9, 12
capitalism, 38 political reform, 173
consumer, 245 Redpath Chautauqua, 196
corruption and, 51 shared, 12
Christian ideals, 52 Wild West Show, 257, 259
Eastman and, 62, 79 writing, 184
Ginn and, 184 citizenship, 14, 16–17, 20, 50, 271
Montezuma and, 111, 125, 146 Bonnin and, 179, 185, 187
Standing Bear and, 245 Campbell and, 238
Cappel, Jeanne, 276, 279 Congress and, 119
Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 21, 110, defining, 16
114, 243, 245, 311 dual, 17
Band, 177 Eastman and, 42
Bonnin and, 244 full, 48
Standing Bear and, 244 God and, 121
Bonnin and, 9, 109, 166, 177 Montezuma and, 104, 108, 110, 111, 117,
De Cora and, 178 118–22, 125, 136
Eastman and, 9, 53 political, 16
Montezuma and, 9, 106 Pratt and, 113
Standing Bear and, 9, 15 requisites for, 21
Carlton Club, 72 spurious (Montezuma), 101, 148
Carmonia-Nunez, Manuel, 131 Standing Bear and, 236
Carpenter, Cari, 180, 213 Wassaja and, 118–22
Cather, Willa, 35 Wild West performers and, 262
Catlin, George, 20, 203 Citizenship Bill
Center for American Indian History and Society of American Indians and, 266
Indigenous Studies, 305, 312 Standing Bear and, 266
Chamberlain, Joseph Edgar, 178 civilization
Chandler, Mrs. A. D., 34 American
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle basis of, 38
(CLSC), 9, 12, 70 version of progressive, 14
Chemawa Indian School, 303 assimilation and, 119
Cherokee (tribe), 129, 196, 241 benefits of white, 66
Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 119 corruption and, 272, 279
Chesnutt, Charles, 35 Indian, without materialism, 78
Cheyenne (tribe), 123, 207, 241 language and (Parker), 128
Chicago Culture Club, 195 price of, 38
Chicago Day (Columbian Civilizing Power of Language, The
Exposition), 1, 244 (Parker), 127
Chicago Folk-Lore Society, 7 Cloud, Henry Roe, 112, 123
Chicago Race Riot, 148 Cody, William (Buffalo Bill), 9, 22, 70, 73,
Chickasaw (tribe), 234 206, 251, 253–6, 267
children, mixed-blood, 40 Cogewea, The Half-Blood (Quintasket), 238
Chinquilla, Princess, 21, 212–14 Cohen, Matt, 11
Church of Spirit Healing, 195 cohort (defining), 12
cinema, 1930s, 267–73 collective rights, 50
Circle of Death, The, 270 Collette, Mr., 277
354 Index

Collier, John, 182, 197, 238, 271, 272, 277, Crania Americana (Morton), 43
278, 279, 285, 304 Creek (tribe), 123, 303
colonialism, 38 Crescent Club, 72
characterizing Indians as savages, 145 Crisp, Donald, 270
Eastman and, 49, 50 Crittenden, Rachel Connor, 129
gendered, 176 Crow (tribe), 123, 137, 207, 241
Montezuma and, 146 Crow Reservation, 138
settler-, 166, 248, 279, 309 Cruz, James, 235
Bonnin and, 168, 174 Cummins, Fred T., 251
McNickle and, 309 Curtis Act, 174, 194, 317
colonization, and performance, 254 Cushing, Frank Hamilton, 65
color line, 36 Custer Died for Your Sins (Deloria), 313
Columbian Exposition, 1 Custer’s Last Fight (Wild West
misrepresenting indigenous Show), 256
peoples, 6 Cyclone of the Saddle, 270
Comanche (tribe), 241
Comes Last, Thomas, 262, 263 Dagenett, Charles E., 57
community (defining), 12 Dartmouth, 52, 80–4
Conan Doyle, Arthur, 13 Dawes Allotment Act, 10, 18, 40, 49, 52, 62,
Congressional Hearings: Neglected Sources 71, 119, 134, 170, 174, 194, 255, 277,
of Information on American Indians 304, 306, 307, 317
(Staley), 137 De Cora, Angel, 178–9
Connolly, Vera, 188, 189 DearbornIndependent, The, 126
Conroy, Mrs. Victoria, 277 Deloria, Ella Cara, 13, 196, 208
conscience, modern, 36 Deloria, Jr., Vine, 310, 313
Cook, James H., 280, 281 Deloria, Philip J., 10, 170, 254
Coolidge, Sherman, 56, 112, 113, 128 DeMille, Cecil B., 268, 274
Cooper, James Fenimore, 20, 48, 79, 167, democracy
173, 203 Bonnin and, 186
Cora-Dietz, Angel de, 13 first North American (Eastman), 38
Cornelius, Laura, 13, 57 minority participation in, 50
corruption Department of the Interior, 108
Agent/Agency System, 52 Desmond, Walter, 278
capitalism and, 51 Dietz, William (Lone Star), 178
European colonist, 8, 38 Dippie, Brian, 10
Indian Service, 51, 56 Disney, Walt, 267
modernity and, 197 dispossession, 6, 50, 121, 146, 192
Reservation System, 51, 170, 267 Dixon, Joseph K., 125, 135–6, 139
Cosmopolitan, 190 Dodd, Mead and Company, 308
Costo, Rupert, 148 Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and
costume, 196, 282, 314 Law in Native American Literature
authentic, 254 (Piatote), 11, 167
Bonnin and, 141, 195, 196, 199–206 double-consciousness, 147
Eastman and, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81 Dred Scott v. Sanford, 120
Montezuma and, 140, 142, 144, Drifting Smoke (Morris), 191–2
236, 264 Du Bois, W. E. B., 35, 50, 143,
racialization and, 75 147, 184
representations, 74 Duggan, Cornelius, 131
Standing Bear and, 284 Duggan, Mary, 131
Council of All of the New Mexico Dunbar, U. S. J., 205
Pueblos, 198
Courage (Wa-Wa Chow), 132 Early Mission and Contract Schools
Covered Wagon, The, 235 (Eastman), 53
 Index 355

Eastern Association on Indian Affairs Fordlandia, 126

(EAIA), 271 Fort Berthold, 46
Eastman, Charles A., 7–9, 34, 103, 128, 140, Fort Berthold Indian Agency (Fort
144, 148, 174, 184, 254, 304, 309, 313, Stevenson), 106
314, 317, 323 Four Years of Indian Reorganization
Arnold and, 44–5 (McNickle), 304
Bonnin and, 312 Frank, Waldo, 41
Dartmouth College and, 42–5, 80–4 Freedmen’s Bureau, 136
medical career of, 45–7 Friends of Indians (groups), 9
Eastman, Elaine Goodale, 40, 46–7, 83, 178 From the Deep Woods to Civilization
Eastman, Irene (Taluta), 57 (Eastman), 47, 48, 59, 63, 67, 84
Eddy, Mary Baker, 180 From Wigwam to Pulpit (Cloud), 113
education, 108–9 frontier thesis (Turner), 268
Eastman and, 115 Frontier Times, 281
flaws in Indian (Bonnin), 177 Frontier, The (University of Montana
higher journal), 303
McNickle and, 304 Fus Fixico (Alexander Posey), 117
Montezuma and, 106 Future of the Red Man in America, The
racist discrimination and, 14 (Cloud), 112
Montezuma and, 106, 110, 111, 115
National Indian Association and, 107–8 Gaden, Alexander, 270
Edwards, Brent Hayes, 36 Garland, Hamlin, 62–3
Elk, John, 119 Garrison, William Lloyd, 122
Ella Cinders, 235 General Federation of Women’s Clubs
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 83, 278 (GFWC), 189, 198
eminent domain, 49 Gentile, Carlo, 104, 309
ethnologists, Native, 13 Gere, Anne Ruggles, 179
Eulogy on King Philip (Apess), 17 Gilday, Charles, 125
Evans, Brad, 65 Gilkison, Helen (Helen Grey), 137
Evans, Florence (Tsianina Redfeather), 195 Gilmore, Melvin R., 277, 278
Everybody’s Magazine, 179 Gilroy, Mr., 192
“Evils of Indian Bureau System” Ginn and Company, 184–5
(Montezuma), 133 Ginn, Edwin, 184
Ex Parte Crow Dog, 120 Golden Spike Days, 269
Exendine, Albert, 310 Gordon, Philip B., 112, 113, 117, 212, 213
Grammer, Carl E., 114
Faben, Charles, 214 Great Sioux Reservation, 165
Falling Arrow, The, 265 Grey, Helen (Helen Gilkison), 103, 138
Faulkner, William, 308 Gruenberg, Eugene, 205
FBI Story, The, 235
Fear-Segal, Jacqueline, 182 Hafen, P. Jane, 207, 213
Federal Fathers & Mothers (Cahill), 10 Hamilton Club, 72
Fey, Harold, 309 Hamilton, Anna Sanborn, 181
Fighting Pioneers, 270 Hamilton, Robert J., 281
Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Hanson Wigwam Company, 209
out of Existence in New England Hanson, William, 9, 171, 207–10
(O'Brien), 10, 17 Harper’s, 13, 16, 179
Flathead (tribe), 303, 307 Harrison, Carter, 1
Flathead Reservation, 303 Hart, William S., 234, 235, 238, 267, 270,
Fletcher, Alice C., 55 275, 278
Folk Lore of the Indians (Eastman), 73 Harvey, Charles, 59
Ford, Henry, 126 Harvey, George, 34
Ford, John, 268 Harvey, Paul, 274
356 Index

Haskell Institute, 311 Inceville, California, 266, 270

Hauke, C. F., 188, 189 independence, 40
Haunted Brains (Wa-Wa Chow), 131 political, 50
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 278 Indian Actors Association (IAA), 14, 21, 241,
Hayes stunt, 313–14 273–5, 278, 283
Hayes, Ira, 314 Indian Appropriation Bill, 192
Hazlett, William Malcolm, 267 Indian Arts and Crafts Act, 78
He Dog, 122 Indian Board of Cooperation, 132
Heacock, Charles E. J., 310, 314 Indian Boyhood (Eastman), 47, 61–2
Healy and Bigelow (management Indian Bureau Economy (Montezuma), 133
company), 253 Indian Bureauism (Montezuma), 103, 148
Hemminger, Ethel, 321 Indian Charity School, 52
Hertzberg, Hazel, 16 Indian Citizenship Act, 10, 214–15, 317
Hiawatha (NIA-sponsored play), 107 Indian Claims Commission, 310
Hiller, Lejaren A., 191 Indian Congress and Life on the Plains, 251
Hillyer, Lambert, 270 Indian craze, 61, 77, 139
History in Hollywood (Strongheart), 239 Indian Fellowship League, 103
Hite, Donna, 282, 283 Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains
Ho-Chunk (tribe), 178, 264 (Eastman), 284
Holly, Helen, 270 Indian imposters, 212–14
Home Missions Council, 311 Indian Journal, 117
Hopi (tribe), 307 Indian Mission Federation Magazine, 132
Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 278 Indian New Deal, 317
Howells, William Dean, 34, 203 Indian of Tomorrow, The
Hoxie, Frederick, 10, 16, 195 (Montezuma), 105
Huebner, Karin, 197, 198 Indian Play (strategy), 19, 20–1, 213
Hunter-Trader, 281 authentication and, 274
Hurston, Zora Neale, 308 Bonnin, 21
Hutchinson, Elizabeth, 61, 77, 139, 201 Bonnin and, 205
Cody and, 139
identity Eastman, 20, 75, 79
authentic, 276 Montezuma, 20
Bonnin and, 171, 175 Standing Bear and, 21, 252
categories of, 180 Indian policy, federal, 10, 42, 80, 108, 166
clothing communicating cultural, 201 1930s changes, 238
ethnic 1950s changes, 307
Bonnin and, 205 Bonnin and, 169, 181, 189, 194
gender, 116 Eastman and, 50
fluidity of, 252 Indian Citizenship Act and, 214
Indian, 18–20, 83 reforming, 70
authenticity and, 148 Wheeler-Howard Act and, 284
common, 11 Indian Problem, 4, 46, 311
social evolutionary theory and, 22 Montezuma and, 106, 107, 110, 111, 114
Indianness and, 102 Indian Problem from an Indian’s
markers of, 109 Standpoint, The, 110
performance and, 254 Pratt and, 110
quasi-national, for Indian people, 56 Indian Question
racial, 39 Bonnin and, 204
imperialism, 2, 38 Lake Mohonk Conference and, 135
Cody and, 254 Indian Reorganization Act, 10, 18
radical discourse of (Bonnin), 170 Indian Rights Association (IRA), 52, 114,
Wild West Show and, 256 138, 198, 213, 311
Ince, Thomas Harper, 243, 266, 270 Bonnin and, 214
 Index 357

Indian rights, five elements of (Eastman), 49 Iron Tail, Jr., Philip, 262, 263
Indian Teacher among Indians, An Iyohinwin, Ellen Tate, 165
(Bonnin), 172–9
Indian Today, The (Eastman), 47–59, 83 Jackson, Helen Hunt, 270
Indian Tribes ofthe United States Jacobs, Margaret D., 197
(McNickle), 309 James, Henry, 203, 278
Indian tribes, as domestic dependent Janney, Edward, 136
nations, 119 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 278
Indian Welfare Committee of the Federated Jicarilla (tribe), 307
Women’s Clubs, 132 John Elk v. Charles Wilkins, 119
Indian Wit, Music, Poetry and Eloquence Johnny John, Isaac (John Big Tree), 267
(Eastman), 40 Johnson, E. Pauline, 167, 195
Indian’s Bravery (Montezuma), 105 Johnson, Stanley F., 81
Indian’s Friend, The (NIA), 107 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, 214
Indian’s View of the Indian Question, An Jones, Charlotte, 213
(Montezuma), 111 Jones, May, 234, 271, 282, 283, 285
Indianness, 16, 19–20 Jones, W. A., 263
American freedom narrative and, 4 Jones, William, 13, 55
blood and, 273
Bonnin and, 171 Kappler and Merillat (law firm), 138
cinematic, 269 Kasebier, Gertrude, 199–204
cinematic authenticity and, 239–41 Katzieff, Julius D., 45
defining, 8, 47 Kelsey, Penelope, 10
non-Native, 3 Keppel, F. P., 108
Deloria and, 170 Keywords (in Native American
Eastman and, 37, 43–4, 48, 59, Studies), 16–20
64–7, 69, 79 defining, 16
fluidity and, 203 Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company,
imagining (Eastman), 74 253, 266
Montezuma and, 20, 102, 139, 146 “Kill the Indian, and save the man!” (Pratt), 110
as mutually constitutive to Kills Ahead, 262, 263
Americanness, 41 Kimball, Francis H., 72
perspectives on, 19 Kiowa (tribe), 206
Native, 19, 22 Kootenai (tribe), 303
Pokagon and, 3 Kuuks Walks-Alone, 278
popular culture and, 77
public face for, 37–42 La Farge, Oliver, 273
representing (Eastman), 69 La Flesche, Francis, 13, 55, 65, 178
Russell and, 68 La Flesche, Susan, 105
Standing Bear and, 21, 270 Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of
Indians the Indian, 51, 135, 179
Hollywood, 239 Lake Traverse Indian Reservation, 322
Plains, 241 Lakota (tribe), 165, 310
Indians and Other Americans (McNickle and LaMotte, George, 314
Fey), 309 Land of the Spotted Eagle (Standing Bear),
Indians at Work, 304 243, 246, 266, 275, 277, 280, 282, 285
Ingalls, George W., 105 language
intellectuals, 16 cultural, 174
defining, 17 English, 127–9, 130
Montezuma and, 118 school prohibitions against Native, 303
representational politics and, 134, 138 Last of the Mohicans (Cooper), 173, 267
International Congress of Americanists, 179 Laughing Boy (La Farge), 272
International Congress on Race, 184 League of American Pen Women, 181
358 Index

Leavitt, Scott, 123 Miami (tribe), 206

Lenroot bill, 198–9 Middle Five, The (Oskison), 55
Let My People Go (Montezuma), 141–3 Middle Five, The: Indian Boys at School
Leupp, Francis E., 71 (La Flesche), 178
Life, Liberty & Citizenship (Montezuma), Midway Plaisance, 22
20, 120 Miller Brothers (Joe, Zack, and George L.),
Light on the Indian Situation, The 251, 265–6, 270
(Montezuma), 103 Miracle Rider, The, 270
Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement miscegenation, 38, 40, 169
from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (Smith mistranslation, Sitting Bull's, 246
and Warrior), 315 Mix, Tom, 267
Linderman, Frank B., 124 modernity, 14, 17, 269
literacy, 14 Bonnin and, 166, 195, 202
Little Badger, 278 Eastman and, 41, 55, 79
Little Horse, 278 Montezuma and, 145
Little, Brown and Company, 183 Native intellectuals and, 313
Lodge, Oliver, 13 Pokagon and, 2
Lomawaima, Tsianina, 172 Pratt and, 244
London, Jack, 191 molestation, child, Standing Bear and, 281
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 48, 64, Montauk Club, 71
83, 278 Montezuma, Carlos, 8, 9, 21, 57, 189, 262,
Los Angeles Indian Center, 271 304, 309, 313, 316, 317
Lou-scha-enya, 234 Bonnin and, 109
Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 197 Eastman and, 102, 106
Luiseno (tribe), 131 Grey and, 138
Lyceum Movement, 12 Oskison and, 130
Parker and, 128
MacDowan, Alice, 34 Pokagon and, 313
Maddox, Lucy, 16 Pratt and, 109–16
Madrano, Dan, 314 Wa-Wa Chow and, 132, 133
Magazine of the Mission Indian Federation, Morgan, Thomas Jefferson, 46, 62, 105
131, 133 Morris, Gouverneur, 191
Marriam, Harold G., 303 Morton, George, 43
Marshall, John, 119 Mourning Dove (Christine
McChesney, Charles E., 252 Quintasket), 238
McCredy, Alexander, 123 Musical Courier, 210
McGregor, John H., 278 My Indian Boyhood (Standing Bear),
McIntyre, Alfred, 67 243, 285
McKenzie, F. A., 57 My People the Sioux (Standing Bear), 238,
McLaughlin, James, 206 241, 243, 246, 249, 257, 264, 277,
McNickle, D'Arcy, 305, 306–14, 316–17 278, 284
Bonnin and, 312
Eastman and, 312 Nakota (tribe), 165
Henry Standing Bear and, 310 name, double, 117
Montezuma and, 312 Nanticoke (tribe), 264
Standing Bear and, 312 Napa, Martin, 234
McWhorter, Lucullus V., 133, 183, 238 National American Indian League, 271
Means, Russell, 267, 317 National American Indian Memorial
medicine shows, 253 Association, 135
Memorable Sportsmen’s Evening at the National Association for the
Montauk Club, A, 72 Advancement of Colored People
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 272 (NAACP), 143
 Index 359

National Association on Indian Affairs New York Picture Company, 265

(formerly, the EAIA), 272 New York Tribune, 35
National Congress of American Indians Nez Perce (tribe), 310
(NCAI), 197, 239, 305, 310–12 Nicolar, Lucy (Watawaso), 195
McNickle and, 310–12 North American Indian, The
National Council of American Indians (Eastman), 37, 78
(NCAI), 9, 171, 189, 205 Northern California Indian Association, 132
Bonnin and, 181, 214 Northwest Federation of American Indians
Society of American Indians and, 310, 313 (NAFI), 126
National Education Association, 179 nostalgia, 317
National Indian Association (NIA), 52, Eastman and, 64
70, 107–8 imagined, 8
National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), 315 performative, 196
National League for Justice to American Pokagon as, 2
Indians, 183, 236–9, 241, 272, 278 popular culture, 3, 13
National League of American Pen
Women, 181 O’Brien, Jean, 10, 17
nationalism, 17 O’Donoghue, Marian Longfellow, 181
Native peoples and, 121 Ober, C. K., 115
Native peoples and (Bonnin), 172 Occom, Samson, 20, 42, 52, 81, 314
settler (Bonnin), 185–6 Office of Indian Affairs, 12, 249,
tribal, 16, 71 255, 272
Native American Journalists’ Bonnin and, 166, 188
Association, 148 Eastman and, 51, 62, 76
Native American League, 271 native lands mismanagement by, 192
Native American Tribalism (McNickle), 309 Standing Bear and, 249–51, 276
Native Intellectuals, 17–19 Oglala Sioux (tribe), 9
Native rights, 15, 165 Oglala Sioux Indian Reservation, 124
Campbell and, 237 Ohiyesa (Charles A. Eastman), 44, 83, 206
movement, 12 Ojibwe (tribe), 112, 241
Native Sons of the Golden West, 132 Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of
Naturalization Act, 120 Graft, Exploitation of the Five Civilized
Nature Life of the Indian, The (Eastman), 70 Tribes, Legalized Robbery (Bonnin),
“Negro in America, The” (DuBois), 35 179, 214
network Old Indian Legends (Bonnin and De Cora),
defining, 12 178, 179, 184
epistolary 101 Ranch Real Wild West Show, 251,
Bonnin and, 181, 188–99, 211 265, 270
Montezuma and, 127–33 Order of Red Men, 103
multi-public, 311 Osage (tribe), 206
Native intellectual, 23 Oskison, John, 55, 103, 127, 131
performative, 238 Ota K’te (Luther Standing Bear), 243
Pratt and, 112 Our America (Frank), 41
publication, 238 outbreak, 255
reform group, 311 Outdoor Life, 281
Transatlantic Owen, Mr., 113
Eastman and, 76–80
New England Conservatory, 166 Pakali, 234
“New Indian Leadership, The” Palmer, Alice Freeman, 67
(Oskison), 130 Pan American Indian National Organization
New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs Council, 271
(NMAIA), 271 Paramount Pictures, 235
360 Index

Parker, Arthur C., 13, 14, 55, 103, 107, 127, Pioneer Days: A Spectacle Drama of Western
129, 212, 310 Life, 264
Parkman, Francis, 83 Plainsman, The, 274, 275
patriarchy Plenty Coups, 103, 123, 137
Bonnin and, 170, 175 Pocahontas, 267
Standing Bear and, 245, 250 Pokagon, Simon, 1–7, 21, 111, 144, 244, 304,
“Patriotic Sentiment of the Indian, The”, 135 314, 316–17
patronage Apess and, 3
Standing Bear and, 245 as a prototype, 3
Pawnee Bill (Gordon W. Lillie), 251, 265 politics
Pend d’Oreille (tribe), 303 gender, Standing Bear and, 280
Penny, Charles G., 249 representational
Penobscot (tribe), 195 Standing Bear and, 247
People and the Word, The: Reading Native Pontiac, Chief, 83
Nonfiction (Warrior), 15 Posey, Alexander (Fus Fixico), 13, 117, 128
performance, 2, 14 Potawatomi (tribe), 2, 6
authenticity and, 269, 284 Pratt, Richard, 9, 21, 103, 105, 109–16, 138,
based education, 104 177, 243
Beane and, 125 Pretty Face, 281
Bonnin and, 167, 177, 195, 214 property
double (Eastman), 80 Eastman and, 50
Eastman and, 76 Indian relation to, 38, 119, 209
Henry Standing Bear and, 253 ownership by Indan women, 38
Indianness and, 3, 19, 253, 273 Public Law 280, 308
Irene Eastman and, 57 Pueblo (tribe), 198
modes of, 6
Montezuma and, 107, 138–47 Queen of the Woods (Pokagon), 21, 111
Native American Quintasket, Christine (Mourning Dove),
nineteenth and twentieth century, 3 183, 238
opportunities, 214
politics, 76 race leadership, 56–7
Redfeather and, 195 racism
resistance and, 4 Bonnin and, 170
Sitting Bull and, 247 Eastman and, 40
staged Indian, 57 educational institutions and, 53
Standing Bear and, 234, 311 paternalism and, 53
strategies (Standing Bear and scientific, 43
Montezuma), 13 Standing Bear and, 261
Wild West Show and, 253 Ramona (Jackson/Crisp), 270
writing and, 4 Real Indian, 68, 69, 73
philosopher, savage, 39 Real Indian, Dr. Charles A. Eastman, A Full
Phinney, Archie, 310 Blooded Sioux, 73
Piatote, Beth, 11, 16, 167, 172, Real Indian, The (Eastman), 40
185, 195 Red Hunters and the Animal People
picturesque, 43 (Eastman), 47
Eastman and, 83 Red Man in America, The (Eastman), 68
Pigeon, Oliver, 191–2 Red Man, The (Carlyle newspaper), 177, 179
Pimas (tribe), 104 Red Man’s Rebuke, The (Pokagon), 4–7, 305
Pinchot, Gifford, 126 Red Power movement, 314–16
Pine Ridge, 9, 46 Red River, 235
Pine Ridge Reservation, 124, 276 Red Summer of 1919, 148
Standing Bear and, 249–51 Red Wing (Lillian St. Cyr), 264, 267
 Index 361

Redfeather, Tsianina Florence Evans), 195 School Days of an Indian Girl, The (Bonnin),
reformers, white, 71, 135 172, 174
Bonnin and, 189, 214 School of Savagery, The (Eastman), 40
Eastman and, 47, 52, 59, 214 Seminole, The (Campbell), 234
McNickle and, 311 Seton, Ernest Thompson, 61
Montezuma and, 102, 214 settlements, 50, 123, 167, 174
Pratt and, 110, 114 Christian, 52
Society of American Indians and, 134 frontier, 52
Standing Bear and, 277 settler-national state (Piatote), 16
relocation, Bureau of Indian Affairs and, 308 Shanewis (Cadman), 195, 210
Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Shoshone (tribe), 171, 207
Indian Country, 166–1880 (Round), 15 Side by Side (Bonnin), 166–70, 171, 179
renaming policy, school, 243 Simmons, Daniel (Yowlachie), 209
Reservation System, 40, 50 Sioux (tribe), 123, 206, 207, 241, 307
allotments and, 40 Sioux Mythology (Eastman), 7–8
Dixon and, 125 Sisseton-Wahpeton (tribe), 7
Eastman and, 49 Sisseton-Wahpeton Reservation, 321
life under, 37 Sitting Bull, 205, 246–9
Montezuma and, 110 Sitting Calf, 278
reservations, life on, 39 Sixth Amendment, tribal sovereignty
resistance and, 236
Apess and, 17 Skiuhushu, Red Fox, 133, 212–13
armed Indian, 174 Sloan, Thomas, 57
Bonnin and, 309 Slotkin, Richard, 256
cultural sites of, 15 Smart, Leta V., 134
forms of, 15 Smiley, Daniel, 135
performativity and, 138 Smith, Paul Chaat, 315
political, 208 Sniffen, Matthew K., 214
rhetorical, 170 Snohomish (tribe), 126
Standing Bear and, 273 Society of American Indians (SAI), 11, 55, 57,
violent, after Wounded Knee, 255 59, 103, 179, 240, 263
Rhodes, C. J., 275 Bonnin and, 171, 190
Rifkin, Mark, 208 Nationa, 310
Riggs, Alfred, 165 Eastman and, 190
Rodgers, James, 34 Indian Journal and, 101
Rogers Park Woman’s Club, 195 Montezuma and, 133, 142
Romance of theVanishing Race, A, 125 National Council of American Indians
Roosevelt, Theodore, 54, 256 and, 310
Rosebud Agency, 249 Society of American Indians’ Conference, 141
Ross, John, 128 Soldier, Laura W., 280
Ross, Mr., 191–2 “Some Noted Indians of To-day” (Eastman), 55
Roth, Henry, 308 Soul of the Indian, The (Eastman), 47, 66
Round, Philip, 10, 15 Souls of Black Folk, The (DuBois), 36
Rowlodge, Jesse, 310 Southern Workman, The (Hampton), 57
Royal Colonial Institute of sovereignty, 16
London, 76, 78 allotment and, 306
Runner in the Sun (McNickle), 309 indigenous, 276
Russell, E. H., 68 Native, 119, 169
Bonnin and, 179, 214
Said, Edward, 18 Eastman and, 37, 48
Santee Normal Training School, 165 McNickle and, 304
Savages Club, 77 Montezuma and, 143
362 Index

sovereignty (cont.) Thoreau, Henry David, 278

National Council of American Indians Thorpe, Jim, 14, 57, 240, 267, 274–5
and, 311 Three Stars, Clarence, 245
National Indian Association and, 71 Thunderbird, Richard Davis, 267
National League for Justice and, 272 Tibbets, Jonathan, 131
Pokagon and, 2, 6 Tilyou, George C., 251
Standing Bear and, 272 Tomahawk Publishing Company, 134
rhetorical, 167 Tomahawk, The, 134
Sixth Amendment and, 236 Tongue River Reservation, 307
Spack, Ruth, 213 Trachtenberg, Alan, 16
St. James, Red Fox, 21 transcendent strategy, 6
Stagecoach, 268 treaties, 50
Staley, Robert, 137 broken, 134, 166, 167
Standing Bear, George E., 283 Hellgate, 303
Standing Bear, Henry, 57, 123, 240, 243, 254, Laramie, 165
263, 264, 310 limiting tribal sovereignty, 49
Standing Bear, Luther, 8, 9, 133, 140, 144, lost, 132
183, 214, 234, 252, 254, 255–6, 304, mutilated (Bonnin), 186
309, 313, 317 obligation of, 71
Bonnin and, 312 Point Elliot, 126
Collier and, 277 with the Sioux, 314
Eastman and, 312 Tribal Secrets: Recovering American
Hart and, 270, 275 Indian Intellectual Traditions
Montezuma and, 312 (Warrior), 6, 15
Strongheart and, 239 Tribune, 36
Standing Bear, Nellie, 252 Tucker, W. J., 81
Standing Rock Reservation, 180, 206 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 8, 268
Stanton, Theodore, 66 Twain, Mark, 34, 203, 278
Stedman, William H., 105
Steeplechase Park (Coney Island NY), 251 Uintah and Ouray Reservation, 181
Stevenson, Fort, 106 Union (Manchester NH newspaper), 44
Stiya: A Carlisle Indian Girl at Home Union League, 72
(Burgess), 182 Union Pacific, 268–9
Stories of the Century, 235 Unity Club, 72
Stories of the Sioux (Standing Bear), 243, 285 Universal Races Congress, First, 35–7, 50, 79
Story of the Little Big Horn, The Ute (tribe), 207
(Eastman), 40
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 278 Vale, Vola, 270
Strongheart, Nipo, 234, 237, 238, Valentine, Robert G., 269
239–40, 271 Vanishing Race, The (Dixon), 125
Sun Dance, The (Bonnin and Hanson), 9, Varconi, Victor, 274
183, 207–10 Vizenor, Gerald, 2
Sun Dance, The (Bonnin and Hanson), 171
Sunset, 281 Wampanoag (tribe), 241
surround, the (Deloria), 254, 255, 268 Wanamaker Department store, 243–6
Surrounded, The (McNickle), 304, 309 Wanamaker, John, 125, 245
Susag, Dorothea M., 213 Wanamaker, Rodman, 125
War Whoop, The (newsletter), 113, 117
Terrell, Mary Church, 171 Warner, Glenn S., 274
They Came Here First (McNickle), 309 Warrior, Robert, 6, 10, 15, 66, 315
Thomas, Charles, 77 Washington, Booker T., 54, 114
Thomas, Julia A., 206 Wassaja (Carlos Montezuma), 104, 206
 Index 363

Wassaja (newsletter), 13, 20, 101, 107, 110, Wilkinson, Jerry, 315

116–27, 238 Willow Birch, 278
Bonnin and, 123 Wilson, Raymond, 46
Bureau of Indian Affairs and, 122 Winnebago (tribe), 112
Eastman and, 123 Winnemucca, Sarah, 13, 167, 195
Wassaja Award, 148 Winners of the West, 281
Watawaso (Lucy Nicolar), 195 Wisconsin Magazine, 239
Waterlily (Deloria), 208 Women’s Christian Temperance Union,
Wa-Wa Chaw, 13, 103, 127, 131–3 132, 171
Weeks, B. D., 272 Women’s National Indian Association
Weeping Star, 278 (WNIA), 70
Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 171 Wood, Frank, 46, 67
Wenger, Tisa, 198 Woodcraft Indians, 61
What it is to be an Indian Worcester Normal School, 68
(Montezuma), 144–7 Wounded Knee massacre, 9, 46,
Wheeler-Howard Act (Indian 185, 309
Reorganization Act), 277, 285, 304 Wray, Fay, 267
McNickle and, 306–7 writers, Native, 13
Wheelock, Eleazer, 42, 52, 83
White Bird, 278 Yakima (tribe), 123, 206
White’s Manual Institute Yakima Indian Commercial Club, 133
Bonnin and, 15 Yankton Sioux (tribe), 9
White Oak, 270 Yavapai (tribe), 9, 102
White’s Manual Labor Institute, 165 Yellow Star: A Story of East and West
Whitebird, 234, 271 (E. G. Eastman), 178
Whitefield, George, 83 Young Beaver, 278
Whitehouse, Paul, 308 Young Deer, James, 264
Why I Am a Pagan (Bonnin), 179 Young Men’s Christian Association
Wigwam Club, 271 (YMCA), 115
Wigwam Evenings: Sioux Folk Tales Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA),
(Eastman), 47 71, 105
Wik, Reynold, 126 Youth’s Companion, 178
Wild West Show, 107, 208, 235, 240, 246–9, Yowlachie (Daniel Simmons), 209, 234, 237,
251, 253–6 238, 240, 271
Office of Indian Affairs and, 253
Wild West Show and Great Far East Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin, Red Bird),
Show, 251 165, 206