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A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920
"This is an important book. In the latter nineteenth century, diverse and influential elements in white America combined forces to settle the 'Indian question' through assimilation. . . . The results were the essentially treaty-breaking Dawes Act of 1887, related legislation, and dubious court decisions. Schoolteachers and missionaries were dispatched to the reservations en masse. Eventual 'citizenship' without functional rights was given Native Americans; the Indians lost two-thirds of reservation land as it had existed before the assimilationist campaign. . . . With insight and skill that go well beyond craft, Hoxie has admirably defined issues and motives, placed economic/political/social interaction into cogent perspective, brought numerous Anglo and Indian individuals and organizations to life, and set forth important lessons."-Choice. "This significant study of Indian-white relations during a complex time in national politics deserves close attention."-American Indian Quarterly. "Important and intellectually challenging . . . This volume goes far to fill a large gap in the history of United States Indian policy."-Journal of American History. Frederick E. Hoxie is director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian at the Newberry Library. He coedited (with Joan Mark) E. Jane Gay's With the Nez Percé Alice Fletcher in the Field, 1889-92 (Nebraska 1981).
350 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1984
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September 8, 2018
Throughout the nineteenth century, assimilation was the goal of the Indian policy of the United States. The prevalent view within the United States government was that Native Americans, after being defeated militarily, would acknowledge the superiority of American institutions and begin the transition from “savagery” to “civilization.” By 1880, military defeat was a reality for nearly all of the Indian tribes. However, it remained to be seen if assimilation would come to pass as predicted. A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians 1880-1920, is the story of this effort to assimilate Indians in the United States. In A Final Promise, Frederick Hoxie attempts to explain the events of 1880-1920 in terms of the administration of United States government policy and in terms of the political culture that helped create government policy.
Hoxie begins his narrative with the story of the Ponca chief Standing Bear and his arrest in 1879. Standing Bear and his followers had left their reservation in Indian Territory but had been arrested by the United States Army before reaching their destination on the Niobrara River. A lawsuit followed to test the legality of the arrest. Standing Bear was released after District Court Judge Elmer Dundy ruled that his rights had been violated. The incident was important because it called into question the strategy of completely separating Indians from whites by locating Indians on reservations. Many members of the public and the United States Congress began to believe that the separation strategy was ineffective and called for a new strategy of total assimilation. “They promised that dismantling the reservation system (and the separation strategy that lay behind it) would end frontier violence, stop agency corruption, and “civilize” the Indians while demonstrating the power and vitality of America’s institutions.” (10-11) Hoxie sees this move as the first stage in the assimilation process of this time period.
These events began a movement toward assimilation, but there would be little accommodation by whites. Even Major John Wesley Powell, an experienced Indian ethnologist and author of enlightened proposals towards water and land use in the West, wrote an essay for Congress in which he urged removing the Indians from their homelands and giving them individual plots of land for farming. His goal was citizenship and total assimilation, and he believed this policy best calculated to achieve that goal. While Powell and the various politicians that shared his viewpoint may or may not have been genuinely interested in the welfare of the Native Americans, there were other reasons this viewpoint was attractive politically. It had few political costs. Most Indians lived in territories, not states, and territories had no voting representation in Congress. Legislation could be passed with little opposition. As a result, this conservative policy of assimilation was put into law by a combination of reformers and western interests.
From this analysis, Hoxie argues that the central issue of the 1880s was how the reservation system should be changed, not if it should be changed. The result was staggering. Primarily due to seven major land cessions, Native Americans lost nearly half their lands between 1880 and 1895. This was far more land than would be lost under the Dawes Act of 1886. In place of land, the Indians were to be given schools and education. Though the government did spend over $2 million annually to support these schools, the social costs for Native Americans could be high. Many students left their homes (some were forced to leave) for boarding schools. In addition, over time the schools focused more and more on vocational skills so that Indians could become cogs in the American industrial machine. “In the twentieth century, schools would not transform the tribesmen; they would train them to live on the periphery of American society.” (210)
From the later 1890s through the beginning of the twentieth century, the way that Indians were seen by society began to undergo a change. Previously, society had largely viewed the Indians as uncivilized, but capable of progressing to civilization given time and a little help. But by 1900, many were no longer so sure. At the St. Louis Exposition of 1904, a “Congress of Races” exhibit showed the effects of “scientific” racism. “No longer portrayed as a ‘people in transition’ and a breed of primitive exotics, Native Americans had become members of one of the world’s many ‘backward races’.” (92) New social scientists argued that the assimilation campaign of the 1880s was a mistake, though the scientists were often unsure of what should take its place. At best they argued that expectations for Native Americans should be lowered. At worst, they took the viewpoint that “Many proud tribes have perished, one after another, before the march of civilization, and the remainder at times seem surely destined to ultimate extinction.” (123)
Hoxie follows this sobering description with an equally sobering discussion of the fate of the remaining Indian lands after the passage of the Dawes Act. The original act had given each tribe the right to choose to hold their lands (approximately 160 acres per person) individually or communally. Excess reservation land would then be opened to American settlement. Underlying this Act was the assumption that tribal land was private property. The decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1900) destroyed this assumption. The Court decision gave Congress the power to sell tribal lands without tribal consent in return for a “promise” to reimburse the tribes with the land payments. Any thoughts of assimilation were shoved to the side, and a government-backed land grab took their place.
The Commissioners of the Indian Office (including the aptly named Cato Sells) did everything in its power to accelerate the land grab. Their rationale was based on the idea that the paternalistic, protective government policies intended to shield the Indians from exploitation were actually holding the Indians back. Therefore, Indian lands should be opened to settlement and economic development by Americans as rapidly as possible. Unfortunately, result of this viewpoint “lowered the barriers surrounding Indian property and encouraged the Native American’s metamorphosis from rising citizen to dependent subject.” (167)
The final blow to assimilation came in the area of citizenship. By 1915, Native Americans were losing ground, their legal rights often being exercised for them by federal administrators. Even worse, the legal justification for this process had shifted “from treaty guarantees to racial backwardness.” (215) The results of forty years of assimilation efforts, illustrated in the Meriam Report of 1928, are painful to consider. Infant mortality was twice the national average, tuberculosis seven times as prevalent. Illiteracy was as high as sixty-seven percent in one state, and another sixty-seven percent made less than one hundred dollars per year. (242)
A Final Promise accomplishes what Frederick Hoxie set out to do. Hoxie does a fine job of describing the political currents that affected Indian policy from 1880-1920. He describes the change in how Native Americans were viewed over time, and how that affected government policy towards them. A Final Promise is clearly written, and the amount of detail Hoxie provides is adequate to reinforce his points without bogging down the reader. There are several powerful quotations in A Final Promise, but also some statistical analysis. For example, Hoxie examines how certain senators voted together on Indian Policy and shows how a small group could pass legislation when several other senators were absent during votes on Indian policy. My main criticisms concern what is missing from A Final Promise. I finished the book extremely curious to know how different Indian tribes viewed, and reacted to, the various policies of the United States government. Hoxie explicitly states in his Preface that the book is not an ethnohistory, but I regret that viewpoint was not represented at least occasionally. Similarly, I would have liked a few more specific examples of how United States government policy affected the individual tribes.
Hoxie begins his narrative with the story of the Ponca chief Standing Bear and his arrest in 1879. Standing Bear and his followers had left their reservation in Indian Territory but had been arrested by the United States Army before reaching their destination on the Niobrara River. A lawsuit followed to test the legality of the arrest. Standing Bear was released after District Court Judge Elmer Dundy ruled that his rights had been violated. The incident was important because it called into question the strategy of completely separating Indians from whites by locating Indians on reservations. Many members of the public and the United States Congress began to believe that the separation strategy was ineffective and called for a new strategy of total assimilation. “They promised that dismantling the reservation system (and the separation strategy that lay behind it) would end frontier violence, stop agency corruption, and “civilize” the Indians while demonstrating the power and vitality of America’s institutions.” (10-11) Hoxie sees this move as the first stage in the assimilation process of this time period.
These events began a movement toward assimilation, but there would be little accommodation by whites. Even Major John Wesley Powell, an experienced Indian ethnologist and author of enlightened proposals towards water and land use in the West, wrote an essay for Congress in which he urged removing the Indians from their homelands and giving them individual plots of land for farming. His goal was citizenship and total assimilation, and he believed this policy best calculated to achieve that goal. While Powell and the various politicians that shared his viewpoint may or may not have been genuinely interested in the welfare of the Native Americans, there were other reasons this viewpoint was attractive politically. It had few political costs. Most Indians lived in territories, not states, and territories had no voting representation in Congress. Legislation could be passed with little opposition. As a result, this conservative policy of assimilation was put into law by a combination of reformers and western interests.
From this analysis, Hoxie argues that the central issue of the 1880s was how the reservation system should be changed, not if it should be changed. The result was staggering. Primarily due to seven major land cessions, Native Americans lost nearly half their lands between 1880 and 1895. This was far more land than would be lost under the Dawes Act of 1886. In place of land, the Indians were to be given schools and education. Though the government did spend over $2 million annually to support these schools, the social costs for Native Americans could be high. Many students left their homes (some were forced to leave) for boarding schools. In addition, over time the schools focused more and more on vocational skills so that Indians could become cogs in the American industrial machine. “In the twentieth century, schools would not transform the tribesmen; they would train them to live on the periphery of American society.” (210)
From the later 1890s through the beginning of the twentieth century, the way that Indians were seen by society began to undergo a change. Previously, society had largely viewed the Indians as uncivilized, but capable of progressing to civilization given time and a little help. But by 1900, many were no longer so sure. At the St. Louis Exposition of 1904, a “Congress of Races” exhibit showed the effects of “scientific” racism. “No longer portrayed as a ‘people in transition’ and a breed of primitive exotics, Native Americans had become members of one of the world’s many ‘backward races’.” (92) New social scientists argued that the assimilation campaign of the 1880s was a mistake, though the scientists were often unsure of what should take its place. At best they argued that expectations for Native Americans should be lowered. At worst, they took the viewpoint that “Many proud tribes have perished, one after another, before the march of civilization, and the remainder at times seem surely destined to ultimate extinction.” (123)
Hoxie follows this sobering description with an equally sobering discussion of the fate of the remaining Indian lands after the passage of the Dawes Act. The original act had given each tribe the right to choose to hold their lands (approximately 160 acres per person) individually or communally. Excess reservation land would then be opened to American settlement. Underlying this Act was the assumption that tribal land was private property. The decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1900) destroyed this assumption. The Court decision gave Congress the power to sell tribal lands without tribal consent in return for a “promise” to reimburse the tribes with the land payments. Any thoughts of assimilation were shoved to the side, and a government-backed land grab took their place.
The Commissioners of the Indian Office (including the aptly named Cato Sells) did everything in its power to accelerate the land grab. Their rationale was based on the idea that the paternalistic, protective government policies intended to shield the Indians from exploitation were actually holding the Indians back. Therefore, Indian lands should be opened to settlement and economic development by Americans as rapidly as possible. Unfortunately, result of this viewpoint “lowered the barriers surrounding Indian property and encouraged the Native American’s metamorphosis from rising citizen to dependent subject.” (167)
The final blow to assimilation came in the area of citizenship. By 1915, Native Americans were losing ground, their legal rights often being exercised for them by federal administrators. Even worse, the legal justification for this process had shifted “from treaty guarantees to racial backwardness.” (215) The results of forty years of assimilation efforts, illustrated in the Meriam Report of 1928, are painful to consider. Infant mortality was twice the national average, tuberculosis seven times as prevalent. Illiteracy was as high as sixty-seven percent in one state, and another sixty-seven percent made less than one hundred dollars per year. (242)
A Final Promise accomplishes what Frederick Hoxie set out to do. Hoxie does a fine job of describing the political currents that affected Indian policy from 1880-1920. He describes the change in how Native Americans were viewed over time, and how that affected government policy towards them. A Final Promise is clearly written, and the amount of detail Hoxie provides is adequate to reinforce his points without bogging down the reader. There are several powerful quotations in A Final Promise, but also some statistical analysis. For example, Hoxie examines how certain senators voted together on Indian Policy and shows how a small group could pass legislation when several other senators were absent during votes on Indian policy. My main criticisms concern what is missing from A Final Promise. I finished the book extremely curious to know how different Indian tribes viewed, and reacted to, the various policies of the United States government. Hoxie explicitly states in his Preface that the book is not an ethnohistory, but I regret that viewpoint was not represented at least occasionally. Similarly, I would have liked a few more specific examples of how United States government policy affected the individual tribes.
November 20, 2019
Beginning in the 1880s and '90s, a coalition of American philanthropists, ethnologists, and Senators sought to improve (in their view) the lives of Native Americans by culturally converting them, changing them from “primitives” to full members of the national community. Through tribal land cessions, the creation of family allotments, and the establishment of publicly-funded boarding schools, the American government would strip Indians of their old identities and prepare them for assimilation. The transformation would both demonstrate the benevolence of the United States and the manifest superiority of white American civilization.
The program that grew from this movement forms the subject of A FINAL PROMISE, Fred Hoxie's first book. The philanthropic designs of assimilationists, Hoxie observed, may have engendered the allotment and boarding-school programs, but each of them changed with the shifting currents of national politics. President Theodore Roosevelt's pro-Western ideology and the admission of ten new states to the Union (1889-1912) gave increased power to Western legislators, who took charge of Indian affairs in the early twentieth century. These more pragmatic policy-makers paid only lip service to the cause of “civilization”; mainly, they wanted to cut Indian Office expenditures and procure Indian land for corporations. Concurrently, professional ethnologists and the American public at large began to view Indians not as future U.S. citizens, but as a static and backward people doomed to perpetual inferiority.
In consequence, federal courts formally defined Indians as wards of the U.S. government. Congress assumed plenary power over Indian resources, which it no longer trusted Indians to manage, and sold or leased them to whites in the name of “beneficial use” (170). The Indian Office, under Commissioner Francis Leupp (1905-09) and his successors, assumed trusteeship over most remaining Indian land allotments. Boarding schools stopped preparing Indian children for economic and civic integration and instead trained them to “labor patiently on the fringes of 'civilization'” (210), as hewers of wood and drawers of water. By 1920 guardianship, colonialism, and pessimism had replaced citizenship, civilization, and optimism as the principal features of U.S. Indian policy. The author does find one happy irony in this depressing story: by abandoning the ideal of assimilation and confining Indians to peripheral reservations, policy-makers helped Native Americans preserve their customs and community bonds. Going forward in the twentieth century, the nation would become a more pluralistic society, not a homogeneous one.
One noteworthy feature of this book is Hoxie's willingness to ask “What exactly did the white American 'public' think?” and to find new ways of answering the question. Hoxie elucidates public opinion by reading popular literature of the early 1900s and examining the portrayal of Indians in four World's Fairs (1876, 1893, 1904 and 1915) based in American cities. This kind of rich cultural history was rare in earlier Indian policy studies; one might even credit Hoxie with inaugurating an “ethnohistory of policy,” complementing the ethnohistories of Native peoples that scholars had begun to write in the 1970s and '80s.
The program that grew from this movement forms the subject of A FINAL PROMISE, Fred Hoxie's first book. The philanthropic designs of assimilationists, Hoxie observed, may have engendered the allotment and boarding-school programs, but each of them changed with the shifting currents of national politics. President Theodore Roosevelt's pro-Western ideology and the admission of ten new states to the Union (1889-1912) gave increased power to Western legislators, who took charge of Indian affairs in the early twentieth century. These more pragmatic policy-makers paid only lip service to the cause of “civilization”; mainly, they wanted to cut Indian Office expenditures and procure Indian land for corporations. Concurrently, professional ethnologists and the American public at large began to view Indians not as future U.S. citizens, but as a static and backward people doomed to perpetual inferiority.
In consequence, federal courts formally defined Indians as wards of the U.S. government. Congress assumed plenary power over Indian resources, which it no longer trusted Indians to manage, and sold or leased them to whites in the name of “beneficial use” (170). The Indian Office, under Commissioner Francis Leupp (1905-09) and his successors, assumed trusteeship over most remaining Indian land allotments. Boarding schools stopped preparing Indian children for economic and civic integration and instead trained them to “labor patiently on the fringes of 'civilization'” (210), as hewers of wood and drawers of water. By 1920 guardianship, colonialism, and pessimism had replaced citizenship, civilization, and optimism as the principal features of U.S. Indian policy. The author does find one happy irony in this depressing story: by abandoning the ideal of assimilation and confining Indians to peripheral reservations, policy-makers helped Native Americans preserve their customs and community bonds. Going forward in the twentieth century, the nation would become a more pluralistic society, not a homogeneous one.
One noteworthy feature of this book is Hoxie's willingness to ask “What exactly did the white American 'public' think?” and to find new ways of answering the question. Hoxie elucidates public opinion by reading popular literature of the early 1900s and examining the portrayal of Indians in four World's Fairs (1876, 1893, 1904 and 1915) based in American cities. This kind of rich cultural history was rare in earlier Indian policy studies; one might even credit Hoxie with inaugurating an “ethnohistory of policy,” complementing the ethnohistories of Native peoples that scholars had begun to write in the 1970s and '80s.
July 17, 2023
A towering book with genuine historical insights. Still relevant after all these years.
Read
December 31, 2020Describes the transformation of assimilation policy between 1880-1920, which I think offers an important, granular perspective on the way the United States has historically approached governing multicultural populations. Assimilation was originally championed by social reformers as an answer to the inhumane, restrictive conditions of reservations. In the late 19th century, reservations meant education and the incorporation of native Americans into institutions and lifestyles "like" white Americans. Independent of whether this would have ultimately been "good" or betrayed a beliefs in the superiority of Anglo-American mores over other cultures, it was guided by a paternalism which led to activist policy: indigenous peoples were put in Christian schools, but those schools were well-funded; tribes were encouraged to farm and convert reservations into allotments, but this land was held in trusteeship to protect them from falling prey to opportunistic investors; alcohol consumption was patronizingly regulated, but reservations received tax exemptions for the same reason. By the 1910s, however, the Western scramble for land and apathetic administrators accelerated the shift from "gradualist" assimilation to dispossession which eliminated the land trust period and allowed for federal land sales at prices negotiated without tribal consent. As Hoxie summarizes, by the end of this period the meaning of assimilation evolved to shed its obligations of uplift.
Reading this made me think more critically about the contexts in which critiques of postwar racial liberalism are invoked and more carefully evaluate whether they are productive. Early assimilation was supposed to be an answer to accusations of racism--Dawes took on the Indian cause when, nearly two decades after the Civil War, Republicans could no longer claim moral high ground by being the anti-slavery party and anti-Chinese, anti-Catholic attitudes seemed hypocritical. Native Americans, then, were supposed to be the model minority, redeeming both the party and American institutions. I can't be the first person to make the model minority connection, but if the regression from paternalistic to apathetic assimilation were better understood, maybe it would help Asian Americans better understand the precarity of their status. Overemphasizing the throughline of white supremacy in the United States (both in Indian policy and generally) prevents us from also understanding how regression from incremental progress could occur and the subtle distinctions in how liberal social policy can grapple with racial inequality.
Reading this made me think more critically about the contexts in which critiques of postwar racial liberalism are invoked and more carefully evaluate whether they are productive. Early assimilation was supposed to be an answer to accusations of racism--Dawes took on the Indian cause when, nearly two decades after the Civil War, Republicans could no longer claim moral high ground by being the anti-slavery party and anti-Chinese, anti-Catholic attitudes seemed hypocritical. Native Americans, then, were supposed to be the model minority, redeeming both the party and American institutions. I can't be the first person to make the model minority connection, but if the regression from paternalistic to apathetic assimilation were better understood, maybe it would help Asian Americans better understand the precarity of their status. Overemphasizing the throughline of white supremacy in the United States (both in Indian policy and generally) prevents us from also understanding how regression from incremental progress could occur and the subtle distinctions in how liberal social policy can grapple with racial inequality.
January 11, 2024
This made me so angry I almost stopped reading. What arrogance, how condescending! Indeed how racist were these men (and a few women) who decided American Indians were a backward, inferior, hopeless "race."
Rant finis. Hoxie gives us a well-researched and thorough look at the miseries of Indians of that period. But he ends on an optimistic note, talking about the cultural revival of the 1960s and '70s. The Indian culture survived magnificently.
Rant finis. Hoxie gives us a well-researched and thorough look at the miseries of Indians of that period. But he ends on an optimistic note, talking about the cultural revival of the 1960s and '70s. The Indian culture survived magnificently.
December 18, 2016
A wonderfully written, engaging discussion of the assimilation campaign that was waged against American Indians—although it was published in 1984, it remains relevant today and gives some good overview of how assimilation policies came to be, how they were enacted, and the outcomes. There are some times when a good grammar editor was needed [especially the preface] but that can easily be overlooked. The content is truly worthwhile for those interested in studying the politics of the United States and, especially, those interested in working with American Indian nations/peoples/communities.
The first chapter sets up a scenario in which the US government’s actions are explained, titled “The Appeal of Assimilation.” It is important to note that at least some of the individuals passing legislation to assimilate American Indians thought they were doing the correct/best thing for American Indian people. This included: “Separate branches also undertook individual acts of charity such as supporting schools, providing funds for farm equipment, and marketing Indian handicrafts” (p11). While the effects were far more damaging than helpful, and I would argue some individuals had ill intentions all along, I appreciate that Hoxie gives background and explanation as to why assimilation was a policy to begin with. Basically, it revolved around removing Indians from their land, putting them on reservations, then converting them to Christianity, and making them citizens that you wouldn’t be able to tell apart from any other American. Problematic—but at least Hoxie offers this other side of the story.
Absolutely worth a read. I keep it on my shelf for any time that I need more information on assimilation policies; my poor copy has more highlighting than it does clean areas at this point.
The first chapter sets up a scenario in which the US government’s actions are explained, titled “The Appeal of Assimilation.” It is important to note that at least some of the individuals passing legislation to assimilate American Indians thought they were doing the correct/best thing for American Indian people. This included: “Separate branches also undertook individual acts of charity such as supporting schools, providing funds for farm equipment, and marketing Indian handicrafts” (p11). While the effects were far more damaging than helpful, and I would argue some individuals had ill intentions all along, I appreciate that Hoxie gives background and explanation as to why assimilation was a policy to begin with. Basically, it revolved around removing Indians from their land, putting them on reservations, then converting them to Christianity, and making them citizens that you wouldn’t be able to tell apart from any other American. Problematic—but at least Hoxie offers this other side of the story.
Absolutely worth a read. I keep it on my shelf for any time that I need more information on assimilation policies; my poor copy has more highlighting than it does clean areas at this point.
June 27, 2013
This is a very important work in the Native American history canon, even though it may seem a little dated now (published in 1984). Hoxie's study on the hegemonic attitudes that drove government policies is painful to read, but reminds us that we as a nation need to remain vigilant in our fight against racism. I only wish he had included notions of gender in this book; I can't help but think they also inflected policies.
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