Negotiating Allotment for the Citizen Potawatomi, 1861 - 1891
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Copyright by Kelli Jean Mosteller 2013 The Dissertation Committee for Kelli Jean Mosteller Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Place, Politics, and Property: Negotiating Allotment for the Citizen Potawatomi, 1861 - 1891 Committee: Erika Bsumek, Supervisor James Sidbury Martha Menchaca John McKiernan-Gonzalez James Cox Place, Politics, and Property: Negotiating Allotment and Citizenship for the Citizen Potawatomi, 1861 - 1891 by Kelli Jean Mosteller, B.A; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2013 Place, Politics, and Property: Negotiating Allotment and Citizenship for the Citizen Potawatomi, 1861 - 1891 Kelli Jean Mosteller, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 Supervisor: Erika Bsumek This study explores the varied Citizen Potawatomi responses to federal assimilation and land policies from 1861 to 1891. The professed intention for these laws and treaties was to acculturate Native Americans into American society, but there was a clear ulterior motive to drastically reduce the land base of tribes in the West. The outcomes of policies that arranged for allotment and citizenship were mixed. The federal government successfully dispossessed the Citizen Potawatomi of large quantities of land and virtually every tribal member became a U.S. citizen, but few individuals became successful farmers or businessmen. The government’s efforts also unintentionally resulted in fostering a stronger tribal identity and better tribal organization to argue for the collective and individual rights of Citizen Potawatomi tribal members. As the United States became embroiled in a devastating civil war and thousands of Americans flooded west in search of opportunity, the Citizen Potawatomi entered into a treaty agreement to allot their lands and become U.S. citizens. The Citizen Potawatomi treaty of 1861 forced tribal members to abandon the practice of holding land in common by stipulating that they must accept allotments and become U.S. citizens. Unintended iv consequences of the flaws in the government’s plan were the near-complete loss of lands allotted to the Citizen Potawatomi, and a muddying of their legal status. Within a decade a large percentage of tribal members were landless and sought a new home in Indian Territory. By 1872 the Citizen Potawatomi better understood how to use non-Indian methods to fight for favorable allotments and full enfranchisement in the extralegal condition that characterized both their new home and themselves. Two decades later, when the federal government opened thousands of acres of Citizen Potawatomi lands to non-Indian settlement, tribal members had learned a painful, but strengthening lesson. To salvage a distinct tribal identity and political independence, the Citizen Potawatomi took command of their relationship with the federal government by demonstrating knowledge of the legislation that defined their legal rights and manipulating the inconsistent application of those policies. v Table of Contents List of Figures ...................................................................................................... vii Introduction .............................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: A Face of Brotherhood or a Face of Death .........................................15 Chapter 2: A Certain Time and Place: The Larger History that Created the Citizen Potawatomi Treaty of 1861 ...........................................................................54 Chapter 3: The Genesis of the Citizen Potawatomi: The Treaty of 1861 and its Aftermath ......................................................................................................80 Chapter 4: Forever Until Tuesday: Allotment and the End of Indian Territory .119 Chapter 5: Starting Over in Indian Territory: The Citizen Potawatomi's Struggle to Realize their Rights .....................................................................................141 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................186 Bibliography ........................................................................................................191 vi List of Figures Figure 1: Potawatomi villages in the 1830s, by name of leaders .....................22 Figure 2: Map of Potawatomi removals ...........................................................45 Figure 3: Sac and Fox Agency in Indian Territory, 1879...............................154 vii Introduction Anthony Navarre, Mary Bourbonnais, and George L. Young had very little in common. Navarre was an ambitious and forceful man educated at the Choctaw Academy in Scott County, Kentucky. Mary Bourbonnais was a mother of five children who converted to the Society of Friends as an adult and taught the first Sunday school for the church on the Potawatomi reservation. George L. Young was a non-Indian man who married a Potawatomi woman, served on the tribe’s Business Committee, and became an entrepreneur, running a successful ferry business in Indian Territory. These three individuals had a familial bond because they were all Citizen Potawatomi tribal members (even if only by adoption) and they are bound together in history of the Citizen Potawatomi because each one was an outspoken advocate for the rights of the tribe. Throughout the thirty year scope of this narrative these three individuals and many other tribal members put pen to paper to express their concerns and frustrations about the treatment of the Citizen Potawatomi by the federal government.1 This project explores the relationship between those individuals and the United States government by analyzing the tribe’s responses to federal assimilation and land policies of the late nineteenth century. I argue that, over time, the Citizen Potawatomi learned to leverage their previous experiences dealing with government agents, at all levels, to better argue for their rights in Kansas and Indian Territory. Even though the assimilatory processes of allotment and U.S. citizenship ultimately led to mass dispossession of the Citizen Potawatomi in both locations, it motivated them to create political structures and shape the tribe’s legal status in ways that generated the 1 The Citizen Potawatomi Nation is one of nine present-day, federally recognized tribes of Potawatomi in the United States and Canada. This dissertation will explore the origins of this distinct group. 1 opportunity to influence the outcome of the government’s plan for their lives. The Citizen Potawatomi utilized their undefined status as both Native Americans and U.S. citizens to challenge the federal government and receive more advantageous allotment conditions in Indian Territory. In the 1850s and 1860s, the Office of Indian Affairs put a great deal of pressure on the Citizen Potawatomi to accept allotments and U.S. citizenship as part of a concerted effort to assimilate and dispossess the Native Americans of Kansas. The Citizen Potawatomi eventually agreed to the assimilation effort, in part because they succumbed to these pressures, but they also made a conscious decision that it was a valid option for their community. Tribal members had experienced several forced removals in the preceding decades and they sought permanence and security. They wanted the social status, economic advantages, political agency, and assurance of protection from further encroachment by non-Indian settlers or another removal they believed private land ownership and U.S. citizenship would entail. Essentially, I argue that the politics of assimilation policies cannot be separated from lived experiences. Instead, the decisions of the Citizen Potawatomi regarding allotment and U.S. citizenship grew out of the political climate, personal experiences, feared consequences, and desires of their daily lives. AN INDIAN POLICY OF ASSIMILATION The assimilation policies of allotment and U.S. citizenship fully developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, after several other methods of dealing with the so- called “Indian problem” were judged inadequate. In the decades before they decided on assimilation, reformers worked to shift federal Indian policy from the forced or coerced removal of Native Americans from their ancestral territories to a policy centered on the 2 formation of collectively held reservations. Both of these policies resulted in exacerbating a condition of wardship and dependence on federal annuities by most Native Americans. By the late 1880s, the allotment of individual plots of land was touted as the panacea to Indian dependency. It was conceived with the hope that Native Americans could be assimilated into the dominant Euro-American society and become self-sufficient farmers, organized in nuclear families rather than tribes, who would cease to be reliant on government aid and annuities. The lack of an official policy governing assimilation for twenty-five years after they entered into their allotment and citizenship treaty makes the case of the Citizen Potawatomi intriguing. There must be a careful distinction drawn between the years when allotment was the government’s preferred method of dealing with Native Americans and when it became the official policy that forced severalty on native peoples. The Citizen Potawatomi became a test case for allotment and