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SIGN THIS AND GO AWAY: DEBATES SURROUNDING THE SETTLER COLONIAL PROJECT OF THE GENERAL ALLOTMENT ACT 1881-1906 A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN HISTORY AUGUST 2019 Eli K.M. Foster Thesis Committee: Noelani Arista, Chair Fabio Lopez-Lazaro David Hanlon The Thesis of Eli K.M. Foster is approved: ____________________________ __________________ Dr. Noelani M. Arista, Chair Date ____________________________ __________________ Dr. Fabio Lopez Lazaro Date ____________________________ __________________ Dr. David Hanlon Date Acknowledgements “It takes a village to raise a child.” This oft used proverb of unknown origin is appropriate for this historian. A group of dedicated scholars and storytellers assisted and guided me as I walked down this road. I must therefore thank all those that made my journey possible, and in some very tangible ways, smoothed that road upon which I walked. There are several outstanding historians at University of Hawai’i Manoa that have taught and counseled me. I am forever grateful to Dr. Noelani M. Arista for her unending support. As my Thesis chair and mentor, her encouragement, refusal to accept less than honest and indigenous minded storytelling and calling me on my occasional laziness inspired and uplifted me. My gratitude to Dr. Fabio Lopez Lazaro goes far beyond appreciating his requirement of me to create accurate analysis or his modeling of the intellectual historian. He led me to many historical works that I may never have considered to be relevant to my work which have proved invaluable. Dr. David Hanlon not only provided inestimable insights and revisions to my historization in a general sense, but also insights into doing ethnographic history I’ve found to be quite illuminating. Dr. Matthew Lauzon was always willing to help and listen to anything I had to say. His guidance and encouragement, on and off campus will not be forgotten. For all that these gracious and committed professionals have done for me I say Yakoke (Thank You). My classmates and other faculty and staff at UHM have made for an enjoyable and enlightening journey. The various points of view and the numerous discussions have been a great part of the learning process. To my wife Anna and my daughters, for understanding and giving me time to write, I say thanks. I also must thank JC Thompson of the Mount Tabor Indian Community for his unending support, even when I was behind on tribal council duties while writing. I want to thank Ivonne Fitzgerald who helped me to re-learn the language of my youth. Muchas gracias por darme el poder del lenguaje. Lastly, I i want to thank Nannie Thompson, my great grandmother, for never forgetting who you were and teaching it to your descendants. It is to her that I dedicate this work. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments .................................................. i Abstract .................................................. iv Notes on Historiography .................................................. vi Introduction .................................................. 1 The Situation before Allotment .................................................. 10 The Congressional Debate of 1881 .................................................. 25 Why Allotment? .................................................. 46 The Congressional Debate of 1886 .................................................. 58 Who was American? .................................................. 77 The Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes .................................................. 91 Enrollment .................................................. 103 After Allotment .................................................. 116 Conclusions .................................................. 120 Source Notes and Bibliography .................................................. 126 iii Abstract This micro-history is an investigation of the debates about, work and results of the United States General Allotment Act of 1887, commonly called the Dawes Act. The legislation, adopted by the 49th U.S. Congress, allowed for the executive to terminate Indian tribal land holdings and tribal governments. Lands thus disposed were to be allotted to individual Indian people, who would, by accepting allotment, also receive United States citizenship. The stated goals of the Act were to dissolve tribal governments, make lands available for white settlement, and to lift tribal citizens out of poverty by allotment of their lands in severalty and with fee simple title with the object of assimilating them into the larger fabric of American society. The legislation can be argued to have failed utterly in achieving these goals, thus requiring further legislation in the mid-twentieth century. The result of the Dawes Act was a fragmented and virtually un- assimilated Indian population and increased poverty for Indian people. The General Allotment Act and the follow-on Curtis Act (1898) which extended the provisions of the Dawes act to include the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes” were undertaken within the context of the demonstrable failure of the treaty and reservation system that preceded them in an effort to create a final solution to the “Indian Problem.” It has been argued that the stated goals of the Dawes Act and its implementation were based upon Indian reticence and resistance to white settlement of their lands, Indian people’s social incompatibility with white Americans, and the property based political philosophy of the United States, as well as influences brought to bear by religious minded philanthropists of a decidedly paternalistic bent. This history fills a gap in current historicizing of the Act by assessing the sources of justification used by members of Congress while debating the object of land in severalty as a civilizing agent for indigenous peoples. What common factor allowed them to pass legislation that superficially at least, appeared to be a iv complete reversal of existing Indian policy? The effects of the General Allotment Act have been historicized but the congressional debate about land in severalty is less well analyzed. Were congressional justifications based in U.S. Law or was their source extra-Constitutional? Evidence shows that the Allotment Act of 1887 was not a new idea, but rather an extension of an old one. U.S. Indian policy had not evolved into one of tribal dismantling and allotment of land in severalty with the Dawes Act. Rather the settler colonial project of the United States, encoded in the country’s founding documents and expressed as an outward bound and “Manifest Destiny” brought pressure on the Congress of the United States to provide living space for the immigrant and native-born settlers of the project. With the passage of the Dawes Act the government tried, as they had on previous policy attempts, to achieve their primary goal, the disappearing of the American Indian after nearly a half century of continuous attempts. v Notes on Historiography Historiography of the General Allotment Act falls into a few broad categories; the Frontier thesis/benign solution narrative, the dispossession narrative and spatial control narratives. This categorization is by no mean intended as complete; transnational and world historiographies, world systems analysis, and Hegelian or Marxist viewpoints have made contributions to the overall study of American History. The benign solution narrative espoused by early historians is that while the Act was an objective failure [all narratives tend to agree on this point] it was none the less well intended. A dispossession narrative, while emotionally satisfying, can obscure the Indian in history; placing him out of time and space as an extinct and stereotypical exotic “other.” This narrative then is not well represented in this work. The late Dennis Cosgrove’s spatial control hypothesis not only grants Indian agency within the context of that dispossession, it tends not to fetishize the Indian person and relieves the burden of thinking of space in cartesian terms but rather as a place as well as a concept, this idea is fundamental to analyzing the perceptions of settlers and the U.S. government with regards to Indian populations.1 American Historians have produced a Bunto (mound) of books and monographs on the General Allotment and its effects. Early analysis and writings on allotment tend toward finding its place in the larger historical narrative of the United States and ask whether the policy was benign or oppressive. These analyses tend to fit the allotment into the larger debate on Federal Indian Policy. This is understandable given the relative newness of the object as an historical phenomenon, the United States being less than three hundred years old. The first group of these 1 Dennis Cosgrove, “Landscape and Landschaft”, Spatial Turn in History Symposium, German Historical Institute, February 19th, 2004. vi historians, which includes D.S. Otis, J.P. Kinney, and other early twentieth century advocates of Frederick J. Turners “Frontier Thesis,” which created an understanding of the subject that held sway well into the twentieth century.2 These historians tend to shy away from judgement of the Allotment itself; Otis wrote “Whatever the intrinsic merits or flaws of the allotment system, the Government failed utterly at a crucial moment in its implementation” when discussing the failure of allotment in achieving its stated goals. This is certainly

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