Crooked Paths to Allotment

C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa. Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight Over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

This short study focuses on the public careers of two men--Ely Parker, and Thomas Bland--who worked in the late Nineteenth-century Indian reform movement. Parker--an American Indian who had served as Ulysses S Grant's aide in the Civil War--served as the head of the Office of Indian Affairs for a few years following the war. Bland, a white man who also served in the war as a physician, founded the National Indian Defense Association, a private organization that combated the forced assimilationist policies of the Indian Rights Association. The latter group was led by white reformers who believed strongly that the government needed to take a firm, paternalist role in forcing Indians to adopt white American modes of living, including giving up tribal identities and collective land ownership. Leading up to the passage of the Dawes Act and the implementation of the "allotment period", this is a story about two leaders who tried--and largely failed--to stem the tide of Federal Indian policy.

Parker, and then Bland, both pushed back against the growing consensus in post-Civil War America regarding Indians and their fate in the polity. Parker's experience with the Federal government was largely positive--he saw the Army as an efficient and well-run organization, so he was inclined to view the possibilities of harnessing governmental power favorably. He also took the view that a continued reliance on treaties was a mistake--Indian nations had declined in power dramatically, and were continuing to do so; in his view treaty-making was based on the fiction that Indian nations had the power to defend their own sovereign interests, but by the 1870's this was no longer true. For example, Parker sought to have the Office of Indian Affairs transferred back to the War Department from the Interior Department. By ending the reliance on treaties, Parker believed that the government would be compelled to take a more active and constructive role in assisting Indians in meeting their needs so they could enter American society on their own terms.

Parker was pushed out of government service before his reforms could take shape, through political jostling and institutional battles in which his opponents relied on the rhetorical language of "corruption", a charge which Genetin-Pilawa argues was often more useful as a weapon against attempts to wield governmental power on behalf of the disenfranchised than an accurate description of actual corruption as most would define it.

Thomas Bland came to Indian reform by way of his interest in other reform movements; his opposition to concentrated economic power (he seems to have been a Greenback Party member at one point, for example). Once he learned of the government policy of forced assimilation, Bland became an avowed opponent of such measures, and soon was organizing on a national scale against the better-funded and more connected leadership of the competing Indian Rights Organization (the name might be regarded as a cruel joke by many of the recipients of its intended activism).

Bland ultimately failed as did Parker, but both of their careers suggested alternate paths not taken, and therefore illustrate the ways in which the final collapse of Indian sovereignty and resistance in the final decades of the nineteenth century was anything but inevitable or uncontested.