Native Americans in Final Project Cover Sheet Due 27 July 2013

Project Title: Native Land Dispossessions and the “Vanishing Indian” : Mohegan Land Struggle, 1704- 1773 and The Blackfeet Agreement of 1895

Summer Scholar: Teresa (Terry) Leonard-Gilham

Overview of Project: From the time Europeans first made contact and established relationships with Native Americans, throughout the next three centuries and up to the present day , Natives have been engaged in a struggle to maintain and preserve their rights to traditional lands. Challenges to colonial conquest and control as well as to government regulation of Native lands has taken many forms. The history of Native land dispossession runs deep and is complicated by the numerous layers of the legal system that serve as impediments to Native efforts to reclaim their land. One theme that is ubiquitous through the cases regarding Native land dispossessions is the notion that Native tribes will inevitably be a people of the past, i.e., “The Vanishing Indian”. This myth of inevitable extinction served to legitimize much of the land takings from Native peoples. As time has passed, Native peoples, time and again demonstrate they are not “vanishing”. Indeed they have demonstrated a great tenacity in resisting land dispossessions which reflects significant connection between their land and their tribal identity. This lesson will consider the relationship between land and tribal existence in the context of Native Land dispossessions. It will examine the ways in which existing power structures and underlying assumptions about Native people determine outcomes. The lesson will center around two specific land dispossession disputes – one involving the Mohegan Indians beginning in 1704 and the other case concerning the Blackfeet Indians land use rights under the treaty of 1895. Students will examine the series of events leading up to the cases, understand the circumstances surrounding the disputes from multiple perspectives, examine the maps associated with the land disputes, research the key players and possible agendas and in each case. Students will use primary and secondary sources to draw conclusions and comparisons from the two cases concerning underlying power struggles, assumptions about the survival of Native tribes, and the relationship between land and survival.

Essential Questions: 1. What is the relationship between land and the existence of a culture? 2. By what standards is “extinction” determined?

Primary Sources: Bibliography of Primary Sources "Act concerning the Mohegan Indians Oct. 1726/129." New England Indian Papers Series Database. N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. The Yale Indian Papers. Web. 18 July 2013. . "Agreement with the Indians of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana 1895." Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. Ed. Charles J. Kappler. Vol. 1. Oklahoma State Digital Library. Web. 25 July 2013. . Den Ouden, Amy. Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England. NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Print. Page 117: General Assembly, Proc. 1769: 194 Farr, William E. Reservation Blackfeet. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984. Print. Photos from the book: Preceptress at Old Agency, 1887 - page 22; Three Bears at the Wheel of the Glacier Park Tourbus - page 197 Grinnell, George Bird. "The National Parks." Ecology 2.1 (1921): 78. Print. Letter to the editor from George Bird Grinnell concerning the national parks. "Map showing the Territory of the Blacfeet and the common Hunting Ground of the Blackfeet and Western Indians as established by the Treaty at the mouth of the Judith, 17 October 1855." Digital Commons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Center for Great Plains Studies, Apr. 2001. Web. 25 July 2013. . From the National Archives, Records of Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG75, Microcopy T-494, Roll5, Frame 1093 As it appears on page 134 of the Great Plains Quarterly, Spring 2001 in the article "When We Were First Paid" by William Farr "The Mohegan Dish." The Common Pot. Lisa Brooks, n.d. Web. 20 July 2013. . Map of the reserved territory claimed by the Mohegans in land case.

Historical Background Information: Following the conquest of Native tribes in the east in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, traditional lands considered Native lands were severely reduced in size. The experiences of Native tribes in the west follow a similar pattern but take place at a later period, that is, land dispossessions on western Native lands were aggressively pursued in the mid to later part of the nineteenth century. One of the underlying themes in Native land dispossession is the implicit and explicit assumption that Native people will inevitably cease to exist as a people. Examining cases of Native land disposition assists in understanding the concepts of the “Vanishing Indian” and the relationships between tribal identity and land . Two cases of historical significance, are the Mohegan land struggle (1704- 1773) and the Blackfeet dispute over reserved rights in the land ceded to the U.S. government by the 1895 treaty. In both cases the tribes were “legally” dispossessed of the contested lands. In the case of the Mohegans, the lost land became incorporated into the town of New London, Connecticut and in the Blackfeet case, the ceded strip became the eastern portion of Glacier National Park along the Continental Divide with the usufruct rights under the 1895 unmentioned. Although these cases are separated by over 100 years of history, they are tied together by the underlying assumption of the inevitable extinction of these tribes. The lesson is designed for students to carefully read and examine the source materials associated with the two cases and consider if evidence supports this viewpoint as well as other perspectives. In the early to late eighteenth century, the Mohegan Indians embarked on a long struggle to define the extent of their lands in the Connecticut colony. In 1705 as a result of Mohegan disputes with colonists over the boundaries of their lands, a survey of Mohegan lands was ordered by Queen Anne. The of the Mohegans, Owaneco, had petitioned the English crown directly for redress of their grievances against Connecticut government. The lands in question were traditional planting and hunting lands. The case is complicated by the existence of a number of deeds made by Owaneco to colonists between 1659 and 1710. Although the commission found in favor of the Mohegans, and recognized Mohegans as a tribe in their own right, unjustly dispossessed of their reserved lands, further appeals by the colony and various legal proceedings over the course of the next 33 years ended in overturning of the 1705 decision. In 1769 a report on Mohegan lands, ratified and confirmed by the Connecticut General Assembly, declared that only the eastern part of the Mohegan lands from the 1705 survey would remain Mohegan lands. The language in the order of 1769 has been suggested by scholars to enshrine the ‘anticipated “extinction” of the reservation in colonial law.’ (Den Ouden, 117). Going forward to the nineteenth century and moving west, the second case centers around Blackfeet Indian reserved usufruct rights to traditional lands in what was part of the 1895 treaty agreement with the United States. Historically, the contested land bounded on the east by the mountains as well as the mountain environs were traditional lands of the Blackfeet. Much of Blackfeet mythology, stories, ceremonies, and spiritual as well as everyday practices have their foundations in this area. For them it is a special place regarded as part of “Mistakis”, the Backbone of the World. The beauty and grandeur of the eastern border of the Blackfeet reservation did not escape the attention of the outside world, including an early conservationist by the name of George Bird Grinnell. In 1895 the Blackfeet recovering from a series of near starvation winters and being in a debilitated state, made an agreement with the U.S. government ceding a strip of land on the eastern edge of the reservation in which they permanently reserved certain usufruct rights within that land. Grinnell, considered a friend to the Blackfeet was instrumental in securing their agreement to the treaty. In a series of event that followed immediately the 1895 treaty, the National Park Service was created and the ceded land was included in the Glacier National Park Act of 1910, extinguishing all Blackfeet rights to land on the western boundary of the reservation, what is now come to be known as the “ceded strip”. The creation of Glacier National Park made no mention of the reserved ususfruct rights of the Blackfeet. The park became the Crown of the Continent, and Blackfeet Indians were hired to promote tourism to the park. Advertisments around 1912 referred to the Blackfeet as “Glacier Park Indians” and Glacier Park as a place where you could see “specimens of a Great Race soon to disappear”(Spence, 83). The Blackfeet were summarily excluded from the ceded strip and what followed in the next several decades were legal challenges to the government’s position. In a 1935 Court of Claims decision, while acknowledging that the U.S. had engaged in previous treaty violations, the court specifically found that the Blackfeet had not sufficiently exercised any reserved rights in the land and thus their rights were terminated by the Glacier Park Act of 1910. From 1935 on the Blackfeet have persisted in a variety of ways to defend their claim to the use of the ceded land. This issue still remains unresolved.

Annotated bibliography of secondary sources:

Beck, David R.M. "The Myth of the Vanishing Race." American Memory Project. Library of Congress, Feb. 2001. Web. 22 July 2013. . This essay was written by Associate Professor, David R.M. Beck from the Native American Studies Dept. at the University of Montana. It appears on the American Memory Project, Library of Congress, website for the topic Edward S. Curtis' The North American Indian. Den Ouden, Amy E. Beyond Conquest Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Print. The author is a scholar in the field of Native American land dispossessions in colonial New England. Her work covers the issues of illegality, colonial authority, Native resistance to land dispossessions, including the Mohegan Land Struggle, 1704-1738, and the relationship between the disappearance of reservation communities and the extinction of Natives. Ewers, John C. The Blackfeet Raiders on the Northwestern Plains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958. Print. The author, John Ewers, was an ethnologist that spent time living among the Blackfeet Indians in the early to mid-20th century and was the first curator of the Museum of the Plains Indian on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. The book is a history of the Blackfeet Tribe through the 1950s. Farr, William E. The Reservation Blackfeet, 1882-1945 A Photographic History of Cultural Survival. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984. Print. This book is a photographic history of the Blackfeet Indians over the period 1882-1945. The 200 photos chosen for the book provide an incite to the complex cultural changes experienced by the tribe during a significant span of time. "Indian Land Cessions in the United States, 1784-1894." American Memory Project. Library of Congress, n.d. Web. 22 July 2013. . United States Serial Set Number 4015 contains the second part of the two-part Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1896-1897. (Part one is printed in United States Serial Set Number 4014.) Part two, which was also printed as House Document No. 736 of the U.S. Serial Set, 56th Congress, 1st Session, features sixty-seven maps and two tables compiled by Charles C. Royce, with an introductory essay by Cyrus Thomas. The tables are entitled:Schedule of Treaties and Acts of Congress Authorizing Allotments of Lands in Severalty andSchedule of Indian Land Cessions Kristyna, Bishop. "This Land Knows Me: Indigenous Land Rights." Cultural Survival Quarterly. Cultural Survival, 9 Apr. 2010. Web. 22 July 2013. . Publication, Cultural Survival Quarterly, is produced by the NGO Cultural Survival in Cambridge, . The organization is dedicated to the helping indigenous communities throughout the world defend their human rights. Levine, Richard. "Indians, Conservation, and George Bird Grinnell." American Studies 28.2 (1987): 41-55. JSTOR. Web. 15 July 2013. . The article is an academic discussion of the conservationist George Bird Grinnell , his relationship to Indians, his failure to understand and appreciate the Native Americans' conservation practices and his attempt to secure Native lands to advance his desire for American wilderness. Lewis, Michael, ed. American Wilderness a New History. : Oxford University Press, 2007. Print. This book is a collection of original essays that covers the scholarship on the history of Americans relationship and understanding of the wilderness concept from the first contact with Natives through 2000. Mitchell, Jessie Lincoln. "A Portal to the Past: The Blackfeet and Their White Friends." Montana: The Magazine of Western History 14.2 (1964): 75-81. JSTOR. Web. 14 July 2013. . Written in the 1960's this article gives a glimpse into the status of the Blackfeet Indians in the 1930's by recalling a visit of an army General to the Blackfeet Reservation. Oberg, Michael Leroy. First of the Mohegans. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Print. The book, authored by a scholar in the field of Native New England history, covers the life of Uncas, an important sachem of the Mohegan people, in seventeenth-century Connecticut and integrates his story into the larger story of Colonial settlement in America. Schultz, James Willard. Why Gone Those Times? Blackfoot Tales. Ed. Eugene Lee Silliman. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974. Print. This book contains stories written by the author about his life experiences living among the Blackfeet Indians in the late 19th and early 20th century. James Willard Schultz was considered a storyteller and not a historian. He spent many years as a trader, hunter, guide, and writer among the Blackfeet and married a Blackfeet woman, Nahtaki. Many of his stories and articles appeared in the magazine, Forest and Stream, as a result of his association with George Bird Grinnell, editor of the magazine. The stories are reprinted in this edition exactly as Schultz wrote them. Spence, Mark David. "Crown of the Continent, Backbone of the World: The American Wilderness Ideal and Blackfeet Exclusion From Glacier National Park." Environmental History 1.3 (1996): 29-49. JSTOR. Web. 13 July 2013. . This article based on the book by the same author, Dispossessing the Wilderness, focuses on the creation of Glacier National Park as it relates to the Blackfeet dispossession of traditional land. - - -. Dispossessing the Wilderness Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print. The author examines the link between the preservation of wilderness by the creation of three of our National parks (Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier) and the policies of Indian removal. This work examines the origins of the national parks and the wilderness ideal. Tovias, Blanca. Colonialism on the Prairies Blackfoot Settlement and Cultural Transformation, 1870-1920. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2011. Print. This book focuses on a century in the history of the Blackfoot First Nations of present-day Montana and Alberta. It explores the specific ways in which Blackfoot culture persisted amid the drastic transformations of colonization. It addresses the strategies and tactics adopted by the Blackfoot in order to navigate political, cultural and social change during this transitional period. "Treaty with the Blackfeet 1855." Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. Ed. Charles Kappler. Vol. 2. 1904. 736-40. Oklahoma State University Electronic. Web. 22 July 2013. . Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, compiled and edited by Charles J. Kappler, is an historically significant, seven volume compilation of U.S. treaties, laws and executive orders pertaining to Native American Indian tribes. The volumes cover U.S. Government treaties with Native Americans from 1778-1883 (Volume II) and U.S. laws and executive orders concerning Native Americans from 1871-1970 (Volumes I, III-VII). The work was first published in 1903-04 by the U.S. Government Printing Office. Enhanced by the editors' use of margin notations and a comprehensive index, the information contained in Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties is in high demand by Native peoples, researchers, journalists, attorneys, legislators, teachers and others of both Native and non-Native origins. Walters, Mark D. "Mohegan Indians v. Connecticut and The legal Status of Aboriginal Customary Laws And Government in British North America." Osgood Hall Law Journal Archive. Merton College, Oxford University, 1995. Web. 22 July 2013. . This article examines the eighteenth century case of Mohegan Indians v. Connecticut with respect to the legal status of Aboriginal customary law and government in British North America. The article concludes that the Mohegan case confirms that in certain circumstances native nations on reserved lands in British colonies were subject, not to colonial jurisdictions established for settlers, but to their own traditional customs andinstitutions. The overview of the case on. pages 19-22 are the ones being used for the lesson plan. Weinstein-Farson, Laurie. "Land Politics and Power: The Mohegan Indians in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries." Man in the Northeast 42 (1991): 9-16. Print. This scholarly article examines the ethnohistory of the land relations of Mohegan Indians in the 17th and 18th century New England. Yirush, Craig Bryan. "Claiming the New World: Empire, Law, and Indigenous Rights in the Mohegan Case, 1704-1743." Law and History Review 29.2 (2011): 333-73. America: History and Life on the Web. Web. 15 July 2013. Law review article of the Mohegan Land struggle over land in Connecticut between 1704 and 1773 covering the issues from legal, social, and historical perspectives.