This Indian Country by Frederick Hoxie

Author:Frederick Hoxie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

PURSUING CITIZENSHIP ON A NATIONAL STAGE

In the years immediately preceding the founding of the Society of American Indians, Thomas Sloan entered the orbit of an informal network of like-minded Native activists. Some of those who later became active in the society, such as Carlos Montezuma and Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala Sa), knew of each other as lecturers and popular writers. Others—the ministers Sherman Coolidge, Philip Joseph Deloria, and Charles Eastman’s brother John—crossed paths while working as missionaries. Boarding school classmates frequently corresponded following their return to their home communities. These networks often overlapped with one another. The Eastman brothers, Coolidge, and Deloria, for example, all were active in the YMCA. Bonnin, a former Carlisle teacher, often met with former students and staff members. She and Montezuma were even engaged for a time.

Regional groups also appeared. These included the Black Hills Council in the Dakotas (1911), the Alaskan Native Brotherhood and Sisterhood (1912), and the Northwestern Federation of American Indians (1914). Since all these organizations became involved in lobbying, legal disputes, and claims cases, their leaders frequently encountered one another at the SAI’s annual meeting or in Washington, D.C., as they called on law firms, legislators, and reform groups.

It is not clear when Sloan first corresponded with Charles Eastman, Richard Pratt, and Carlos Montezuma, but surviving letters indicate that the Omaha lawyer established a working relationship with each of these men around 1905, when he was working on appeals of the Hallowell and Thurston County cases. In a 1909 letter to Pratt, for example, Sloan referred to a meeting the previous winter in which eleven tribal representatives, counseled by the former Carlisle headmaster, had called on the secretary of the interior to urge greater funding for Indian schools. A press report from the same year noted that Sloan was also part of a delegation of boarding school graduates that called on President Taft a few days after his March 1909 inauguration. The group also included Alexander Upshaw, an Indian Office employee from the Montana Crow Reservation, the aspiring Pawnee writer and fellow Hampton alumnus James Murie from Oklahoma, and the Reverend John Eastman.47

Sloan’s deepest engagement with other activists in these early years occurred in June 1909, when he joined a group that gathered at Haskell Institute, the government boarding school in Lawrence, Kansas, to found the Indian Memorial Association. Among the organizers of this short-lived organization were Charles Kealear, a Yankton Sioux classmate of Sloan’s from Hampton; Dennison Wheelock, a Wisconsin Oneida graduate of Carlisle who, like Sloan, had read law and been admitted to the state bar following his return from school; and Walter Battice, a Sac and Fox Indian from Oklahoma who had also attended Hampton before going to work for the Indian Office. The group elected Sloan president and adopted a series of resolutions critical of government paternalism. Removing the restrictions of guardianship, they argued, “is indispensable to . . . bringing the Indians into the full enjoyment of the rights and privileges to which they are entitled as men under the constitution and laws of this country.

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