Critical Perspectives on Colonialism

Writing the Empire from Below

Fiona Paisley, Kirsty Reid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136274602
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This collection brings much-needed focus to the vibrancy and vitality of minority and marginal writing about empire, and to their implications as expressions of embodied contact between imperial power and those negotiating its consequences from "below." The chapters explore how less powerful and less privileged actors in metropolitan and colonial societies within the British Empire have made use of the written word and of the power of speech, public performance, and street politics. This book breaks new ground by combining work about marginalized figures from within Britain as well as counterparts in the colonies, ranging from published sources such as indigenous newspapers to ordinary and everyday writings including diaries, letters, petitions, ballads, suicide notes, and more. Each chapter engages with the methodological implications of working with everyday scribblings and asks what these alternate modernities and histories mean for the larger critique of the "imperial archive" that has shaped much of the most interesting writing on empire in the past decade.

Part I

Writing Back to Colonial and Imperial Authority

1 Denouncing America’s Destiny

Sarah Winnemucca’s Assault on US Expansion

Frederick E. Hoxie

The campaign to remove American Indian tribes from the eastern US in the first decades of the nineteenth century had little impact on indigenous communities in the American West. For them, the US invasion did not begin until mid-century, when the press of settlers into Kansas and Nebraska, the discovery of gold in California, and the acquisition of new territories in the northwest and southwest triggered migrations that challenged tribal leaders and threatened their communities’ futures. When newcomers disrupted or destroyed hunting and farming patterns or squatted on tribal land, it was suddenly unclear how Indian families would feed themselves. Their leaders wrestled with how best to confront these disorganized—but well-armed—Americans. Tribal elders struggled to maintain order among their followers while devising new methods of resistance. What military tactic could turn aside such a widespread onslaught? How could public health be protected when new diseases and ailments struck entire villages in rapid succession? Who would protect the children whose parents had disappeared or been disabled? How would the tribes survive?

Complicating these immediate questions was the fact that by mid-century Indian affairs had largely become the province of men. As formal relations between the US and Native groups came to rest on treaty negotiations involving money, land, and rules of behavior, men gained near-exclusive control of public diplomacy and formal political authority. Both sides participated in this process. When the Choctaws and Cherokees devised ‘national governments’ in the 1820s, for example, they excluded women from office holding and the franchise. Despite protests from elder women, many other tribes followed this pattern. Even militant anti-American leaders of the era’s nativist resistance movements, such as the Shawnee prophet and the Seneca visionary Handsome Lake, asserted the privileges of male leadership. Women continued to wield power in many realms of private life, but the status of men as diplomats and authority figures rose steadily through the nineteenth century.¹

Paiute author and activist Sarah Winnemucca spoke directly to these new crises. Her career demonstrated the power of a sophisticated woman’s voice in discussions of Indian affairs. Her speeches and writings examined narrow disputes over treaties and legislation, but placed them in the context of the American nation’s aspiration to be a global symbol of modernity and progress. She demanded not only that the US live up to its ideals, but that the rising tide of national pride be measured on a human scale of justice and morality. Winnemucca also challenged Native leaders by presenting herself not as a local politician representing a tiny tribe, but rather as a defender of indigenous values and traditions shared by many groups. Without using the word, Sarah Winnemucca assumed the mantle of cosmopolitan critic of American expansion.

Born in Nevada just prior to the California gold rush, Sarah Winnemucca came of age in a world transformed by the sudden arrival of American emigrants and the rapid extension of US power to the Pacific Coast. When she was an infant in the 1840s, California was a province of Mexico, Oregon was an integral part of the Hudson Bay Company trading empire, and her Great Basin homeland was a distant corner of an American West that was largely unknown to leaders in Washington, DC. Her Paiute kinsmen had interacted occasionally with Spanish officials and individual American traders, but they managed to sustain a hunter-gatherer way of life rooted in the complex, seasonal migration of small, family-centered bands and the sophisticated exploitation of an arid landscape ringed by mountains and fed by rushing, glacial streams. As she grew to adulthood, Winnemucca witnessed the American conquest of the southwest, the discovery of gold and silver in the neighboring Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the resulting tidal wave of westward migration that all but destroyed the Paiutes’ carefully maintained patterns of existence.

During Sarah Winnemucca’s lifetime, the US intensified its efforts to alter Indian lifeways and dismantle tribal communities. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that government officials and the general public shifted their priorities from simply facilitating the extension of the nation’s borders across tribal territories to creating institutional structures to pacify and incorporate indigenous communities into national life. It is difficult to identify the moment when concern for the ‘reform’ of Indian life replaced simple expansionism as the nation’s principal goal, but one moment of significant transition occurred in 1849—a few years after Winnemucca’s birth—when, in the wake of the Mexican War and the settlement of the Oregon boundary dispute, Congress transferred the Indian Office from the Department of War to the newly created Department of Interior. This transfer symbolized a shift from the view that Indians were simply obstacles to expansion (external enemies to be defeated in war) to the perspective that Native people, living now in the ‘interior’ of the country, would require some form of management and control. This bureaucratic adjustment intensified in the years just prior to the Civil War, when the Indian Office set about creating federally protected enclaves—reservations—for Indians within states and territories. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs promised in 1850 that reservations would be ‘supplied with stock, agricultural implements and useful materials for clothing’, and he assured the public that the government would ‘encourage and assist [residents] in the erection of comfortable dwellings, and secure to them the means and facilities of education, intellectual, moral, and religious.’²

The Indian Office’s goal of making reservations places of ‘intellectual, moral and religious’ education was unprecedented and ambitious, but the program was implemented slowly and unevenly. In view of the many hardships surrounding the eastern removals, federal officials often found it difficult to persuade tribal leaders to lead their communities on to reservations or to accept the dramatic cultural changes required in these new ‘educational’ settlements. During the 1850s, a number of powerful Native groups, such as the Sioux and Cheyennes on the Plains, the Navajos in the Southwest, and the Yakamas in the Pacific Northwest, resisted this extension of American authority in their tribal homelands. This resistance—along with the intense suffering that often accompanied the transition to reservation life—triggered a number of violent conflicts with authorities. Fighting of this kind constituted the bulk of the ‘Indian wars’ that captured public attention during the middle of the century.

Elsewhere, white settlers who viewed reservations as impractical and expensive called for an end to all forms of government benevolence. This perspective was particularly influential in California, where Sarah Winnemucca spent a significant part of her childhood. Indian Office officials in the state attempted to protect local Indian people from the chaos produced by the onrush of settlers in the gold rush years of the 1850s by negotiating treaties with tribal leaders that established eighteen separate reserves where Native people could live without fear of assault. Within months, however, US administrators watched their efforts come to nothing as the new state’s congressional delegation blocked ratification of the agreements in Congress. Even where local opposition was muted (as in Minnesota and Michigan), the federal bureaucracy proved incapable of providing the support and protection the architects of the reservation concept had originally envisioned.³

It was not until after the reunification of the national government in 1865—when Sarah Winnemucca was in her twenties—that public support and federal authority was sufficient to support a comprehensive campaign to transform Indian lifeways. The power of this new effort became evident first in 1871 when Congress declared that it would no longer negotiate treaties with Indian tribes. In the future, congressional leaders announced, federal power alone would dictate the government’s policy toward the tribes. In 1872, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis Walker explained this departure from long-standing practice by noting that national expansion had reduced Indians to powerlessness and widened the cultural gulf separating them from whites. ‘The westward course of population is neither to be denied nor delayed for the sake of the Indians,’ he declared. ‘They must yield or perish.’ The federal government’s responsibility, Walker added, was not ‘to stay this tide … but to snatch the remnants of the Indian race from destruction.’ The commissioner welcomed replacing treaties with a program of ‘directing these people to new pursuits which shall be consistent with the progress of civilization upon the continent.’⁴

Walker’s observation that Indians must ‘yield or perish’, and his sequential references to the ‘advance’ of the frontier and the ‘wretchedness’ of Indians, underscored the official conviction in the 1870s that the US had both the responsibility and the power to transform Native communities. This was a time of American optimism. ‘Every year’s advance of our frontier takes in a territory as large as some of the Kingdoms of Europe,’ Commissioner Walker wrote. American success was assured and self-affirming. Walker added: ‘We are richer by hundreds of millions; the Indian is poorer by a large part of the little that he has. This growth is bringing imperial greatness to the nation; to the Indian it brings wretchedness, destitution, beggary.’⁵ Because American officials viewed themselves as administrators charged with promoting ‘imperial greatness’, they felt completely unconstrained by previous treaties or informal understandings with the tribes.

Not surprisingly, as the Indian Office and other agencies began to organize methods for ‘giving the Indians Anglo-Saxon civilization’ and ‘directing’ tribes to programs of ‘intellectual, moral and religious’ education, government officials turned to contemporary models of domesticity for their inspiration. When architects of the reservation system spoke of ‘comfortable dwellings’, for example, or called for the distribution of tribal lands to individuals, they regularly conjured up a gendered image of ‘civilized’ American families. They imagined Indian men would fence and farm small plots of land while their wives maintained a household for themselves and their children. Government schools would teach men a trade or instruct them in efficient agricultural techniques, while Native girls and women learned cooking, sewing, and other domestic arts. Reformers viewed the creation of an array of American domestic habits as the central avenue by which Indian families would travel from ‘wretchedness’ to modernity.⁶

The centrality of domestic reform to the Indian ‘civilization’ effort was apparent in pre-war proposals to establish reservations, but these ideas were given new life after the Civil War by former abolitionists and humanitarian reformers such as Lydia Maria Child, who sought to extend the promise of American civilization from newly freed slaves to Indians. Child declared in 1870, for example, that ‘human nature is essentially the same in all races and classes of men’, adding: ‘My faith never waivers that men can be made just by being treated justly, honest by being dealt with honestly, and kindly by becoming objects of kindly sympathy.’⁷ Women like Child and Amelia Stone Quinton (who had taught newly freed African-Americans in the South immediately after the Civil War) were at the forefront of this effort. In 1879, Quinton founded the Women’s National Indian Association, a forerunner of the later, male-led Indian Rights Association. This activity inspired younger women such as the anthropologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher and author Helen Hunt Jackson to join the effort.⁸

Women reformers saw domestic reform aimed at ‘civilization’ (education, emulation of traditional gender roles, and individual land ownership) as a solution for Native communities increasingly surrounded by land-hungry whites. Fletcher became an early advocate of assigning Indians to individual plots of land (a program that came to be known as ‘allotment’) and a firm supporter of boarding schools and other authoritarian approaches to creating new Indian communities on reservations.⁹ Helen Hunt Jackson’s popular romance, Ramona, conjured up similar images, celebrating the life a Christian Indian woman struggling to establish a household for her pious husband and son. What one critic has called Ramona’s ‘spectacular homemaking’ echoed the domestic images in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s more famous Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In both settings, the nuclear family was presented as a barrier against hostile outsiders and an instrument for prosperity and social mobility.¹⁰

For Sarah Winnemucca, American expansion was not only a matter of land loss and poverty. For Westerners of her generation, the government’s program to reform domestic life represented yet another phase of the conflict. As she searched for ways to engage the Americans in a discussion of what the future might mean to Indian people like herself, Winnemucca also identified a remarkably uniform set of popular attitudes and rapidly-hardening national policies that left little room for Native survival. Treaties were obsolete, Indians must yield to their American superiors and the adoption of Victorian gender roles and individual land ownership were the surest guarantee that people like herself could attain ‘civilization’. Winnemucca’s challenge to these ideas opened a new arena for the discussion of the Native American future within the US.

In the fall of 1883, the Paiute activist ended her memoir, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, with these words: ‘I visited my people … at Pyramid Lake reservation and they urged me again to come to the East and talk for them, so I have come.’¹¹ Unfortunately, for more than a century following Winnemucca’s declar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Writing Back to Colonial and Imperial Authority
• Part II Speech Acts
• Part III Mobilities
• Part IV Fragmented Archives
• Part V The View from Above
• Contributors
• Index