American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment by Jason Edward Black

Author:Jason Edward Black [Black, Jason Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, Language Arts & Disciplines, Rhetoric, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, Native American Studies, American
ISBN: 9781628461961
Google: Zun9oQEACAAJ
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2015-01-15T02:50:29+00:00

CONCLUSION

Identity Duality and the Legacies of Colonizing and Decolonizing Rhetoric

IN 1906, AFTER EIGHT YEARS OF WORKING HIS LAND THROUGH ALLOTment, activist Dewitt Clinton Duncan (Cherokee) concluded that the Dawes Act had not improved his condition as either a self-sufficient American Indian or a US citizen. Duncan took particular umbrage with how the Interior Department intruded on Native lands, thus violating any semblance of sovereignty or citizenship. Of this colonial travesty, he exhorted a congressional committee, “Suppose the federal government send a survey company into the midst of some of your central counties of Kansas or Colorado or Connecticut and run off all the surface of the earth into sections and quarter sections . . . rescinding and annulling all title.”1 Appealing to a sense of fairness and equity he then asked, “Would Colorado submit to it? Would Kansas brook such an outrage? No! . . . There is not an American citizen in any of these states [who] should submit to it, even if it cost him every drop of his heart’s blood.” Expressing his discontent with the government’s license to encroach on Native lands as a dominant force, Duncan concluded that such oppressive actions would ultimately amount to “ruin, immeasurable ruin; devastation.”2

Vitally, Duncan’s resistance represented one of the ways that American Indian remonstrations to allotment spoke to the colonizing and decolonizing discourses extant in the Native-US relationship and to the identity duality that continued into the twentieth century. He worked through the policy’s pledges of citizenship to construct American Indian and US citizen identities as equally included. To this end, Duncan’s scenario analogized Native communities to “American citizen[s] in any of these states,” drawing the two together as joint identities under the government’s aegis. Emancipating opportunities like these allude to the empowerment that American Indians experienced in the twentieth century. According to Frederick Hoxie, political leaders such as Duncan demonstrated how Natives had a “say” in Native-US affairs along with their governmental counterparts. This talk “produced results” and eventually led to both American Indian citizenship and a retraction of the Dawes Act.3

Around the time of Duncan’s decolonial rebuke of allotment, Ruth Muskrat Bronson (Cherokee) was experiencing the same lag in the so-called benefits of the Dawes Act. As with Duncan, she addressed the government’s lapses in fulfilling its republican aims by parceling Native lands and assimilating American Indians. According to Peter Nabokov, Bronson’s 1910 essay to the Interior Department likely sparked some thought about “revising the allotment policy,” especially when combined with other decolonial protests from the era.4 In her essay she told the story of Jim Runningwolf who “typical of much of the Indian population” lost his land to the US government.5 The failure of American Indians to work the land did not factor into the government’s rationales for the Dawes Act. Similarly, an extraction of Native territories was not part of the government’s benevolent justification for allotment. But, Bronson argued that the Interior Department in particular prompted these difficulties. She wrote that, “the Indian agent [came] along” and said to Runningwolf, “You are not using your land .

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