© 2016 Scott Ashley Bruton ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE AMERICAN DREAM IN INDIAN COUNTRY: HOUSING, PROPERTY, AND ASSIMILATION ON THE NAVAJO RESERVATION AND BEYOND By SCOTT ASHLEY BRUTON A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in History Written under the direction of Jackson Lears And approved by _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The American Dream in Indian Country: Housing, Property, and Assimilation on the Navajo Reservation and Beyond by SCOTT ASHLEY BRUTON Dissertation Director: Jackson Lears This dissertation argues that over several decades between Navajos’ Long Walk in the late 1860s and the effective end of federally enforced livestock reduction in the 1940s, Navajos resisted and adapted to US government assimilation policies focused on housing and property use both to assert Navajo sovereignty over tribal lands and to establish Navajo cultural standards as the legal basis for managing land use and habitation rights. In this context, this dissertation examines contending American and Navajo cultural concepts of housing and property within the framework of United States policies to assimilate American Indians. This dissertation contributes to the literature on US government policies to assimilate American Indians and Navajo conceptions of domestic architecture, land use and subsistence patterns, and sovereignty by considering how they interacted with American cultural concepts of housing, home ownership, domesticity, and private property during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I became involved with the issues surrounding Navajo culture and economic development in May 2000, when I was hired to work on a study of homeownership on American Indian tribal lands funded by the Fannie Mae Foundation and conducted by Professor David Listokin at the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University. In the summer of 2000, I began work on a case study of homeownership on the Navajo Nation. The Fannie Mae Foundation and the Center for Urban Policy Research (CUPR) published the finished product: Economic and Housing Development in Indian Country: Challenge and Opportunity (2005). The final two chapters of the report were the case study of the Navajo Nation and represented the springboard for my dissertation. While the Fannie Mae Foundation study provided a valuable resource to help economic development and banking industry specialists understand the unique requirements of building and lending on reservation lands, the study did not consider the historical context of reservation interactions with the US economy nor the dynamics that shaped Navajos’ strategies to maintain important cultural patterns. This dissertation seeks to provide a better understanding of the historical antecedents of the housing and economic development issues that Navajos and the Navajo Nation have grappled with since the mid-twentieth century. I would like to thank the following people for their help with this dissertation: my parents, James and Mary Bruton for their loving and unwavering support for the various paths I have taken in life, with a special thanks for my mother, who instilled and nurtured a love of learning in me; Julie Taylor, my wife, for years of sacrifice in providing me the iii time away from other responsibilities to work on my dissertation; my son William for being understanding when Daddy had to work on his dissertation; Susan Schrepfer for her consistent support of my academic work and guidance in balancing my labor and social justice organizing and activism with my other responsibilities; Dawn Ruskai for kindly and cheerfully helping me navigate the Rutgers University bureaucracy for all these years; David Listokin for hiring me to work on the Fannie Mae Foundation and CUPR study of homeownership in Indian Country, which changed my academic and professional path; Byron Clemens for inviting me to visit the Navajo Nation with him and for introducing me to his adoptive Navajo family; Leta O’Daniel for her hospitality and letting me stay with her family during several visits to the Navajo Nation during the summers of 2000-2005; Tom Bedonie for introducing me to so many wonderful people and experiences on the Navajo Nation; Lorenzo Bedonie for helping me to better understand the Navajo Nation government and for many helpful introductions; Paul Israel and all the folks at the Edison Papers for providing me with a wonderful place to work and much appreciated friendship, while also encouraging my dissertation research and writing; Housing Counseling Services and the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development for providing me direct experience working with tenants and affordable housing policy in Washington, DC; all the people at Google, HathiTrust, and Internet Archives who are working to digitize the books in the world’s libraries; and Jackson Lears, my advisor, for all the editing experience I gained working at the Raritan Quarterly, for many years of patience, and for helping to get me across the finish line. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Abbreviations vi Introduction 1 Chapter One How European and American Theories of Civilization and 38 Property Shaped Early Encounters with Navajos Chapter Two Hogan vs. House: Cultural Visions of Home, Private 74 Property, and Land Use on the Navajo Reservation Chapter Three Civilizing the Indian Homestead: Allotment and Model 139 Homes Chapter Four The Field Matron Program: the “Woman Question” Meets 202 the “Indian Problem” Chapter Five Land Use, Property Rights, and Navajo Sovereignty 289 Chapter Six Denouement 335 Bibliography 384 v ABBREVIATIONS ARBIC: Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners ARCIA: Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior ARIRA: Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the Indian Rights Association ARWHMS: Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Woman’s Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church ARWNIA: Annual Report of the Women’s National Indian Association IIL: Indian Industries League IRA: Indian Rights Association LMC: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian OIA: Office of Indian Affairs WHMS: Women’s Home Missionary Society WNIA: Women’s National Indian Association vi 1 INTRODUCTION This dissertation argues that over several decades between Navajos’ Long Walk in the late 1860s and the effective end of federally enforced livestock reduction in the 1940s, Navajos resisted and adapted to US government assimilation policies focused on housing and property use both to assert Navajo sovereignty over tribal lands and to establish Navajo cultural standards as the legal basis for managing land use and habitation rights. In this context, this dissertation examines contending American and Navajo cultural concepts of housing and property within the framework of United States policies to assimilate American Indians. One of the continuing ironies of the semiotics of American identity is the lack of overlap between two of its most enduring symbols: the American Indian and the “American Dream” of owning a piece of land and the house on it.1 Each of these icons 1 Historian John Truslow Adams coined the phrase “American Dream” in the midst of the Great Depression. In The Epic of American (1931), Adams traced what he considered the influence of the “American dream” throughout the history of the colonial America and the United States. Due to the popularity of the concept, which made the book a bestseller throughout 1931 and 1932, Adams also wrote a series of articles for the New York Times in which he put the crises of the Great Depression into the larger context of the American experiment using the “American dream.” In these articles, Adams provided a more concise definition of the concept than in his initial work. In a 1 January 1933 article, Adams wrote that “The dream is a vision of a better, deeper, richer life for every individual, regardless of the position in society which he or she may occupy by the accident of birth. It has been a dream of a chance to rise in the economic scale, but quite as much, or more than that, of a chance to develop our capacities to the full, unhampered by unjust restrictions of caste or custom. With this has gone the hope of bettering the physical conditions of living, of lessening the toil and anxieties of daily life.” John Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1931); “America Faces 1933’s realities,” New York Times, 1 January 1933, SM1. See also “ʻRugged Individualism’ Analyzed,” New York Times, 18 March 1934, SM1 and “What of ‘the American Dream’?” New York Times, 14 May 1933, SM1. In defining his notion of the “American dream,” Adams echoed Alexis De Tocqueville, who wrote in the second volume of Democracy in American (1840) that “in democracies the love of physical gratification, the notion of bettering one’s condition, the excitement of competition, the charm of anticipated success, are so many spurs to urge men onward in the active professions they have embraced, without allowing them to deviate for an instant from the track.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, The Social Influence of Democracy, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: J. & H. G. Langley, 1840), 71. 2 represents a cluster of values that are almost defined against each other. The myth of the settled bourgeois home seems almost antithetical to the mythic Indian way of life: nomadic, unsettled, or, from a more recent and sympathetic point of view, living lightly off the land. In fact, American Indians are much more attached to home and place than Euro-Americans historically imagined, but those attachments were formed within a different cultural context of communal (rather than fee simple) property holding and gift (rather than commodity) exchange.