Domestic Subjects 9780300189094

Table of contents :
Contents
A Note on Terminology
Introduction
1. Entangled Love
2. Unnatural Children
3. Preoccupations
4. The Long Arm of Lone Wolf
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Domestic Subjects

The Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity

ser i e s e ditor s: Ned Blackhawk, Professor of History and American Studies, Yale University, and Kate W. Shanley, Native American Studies, University of Montana

ser i e s m is s ion s tat ement Named in honor of the pioneering Winnebago educational reformer and first known American Indian graduate of Yale College, Henry Roe Cloud (Class of 1910), this series showcases emergent and leading scholarship in the field of American Indian Studies. The series draws upon multiple disciplinary perspectives and organizes them around the place of Native Americans within the development of American and European modernity, emphasizing the shared, relational ties between indigenous and Euro-American societies. It seeks to broaden current historic, literary, and cultural approaches to American Studies by foregrounding the fraught but generative sites of inquiry provided by the study of indigenous communities.

Domestic Subjects Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature

bet h h . p ia to te

New Haven and London

Copyright © 2013 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. A version of Chapter 1, “Domestic Trials: Indian Rights and National Belonging in Works by E. Pauline Johnson and John M. Oskison,” was first published in American Quarterly 63, no. 1 (March 2011): 95–116. Copyright © 2011 American Studies Association. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Electra type by IDS Infotech. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Piatote, Beth H., 1966– Domestic subjects : gender, citizenship, and law in Native American literature / Beth H. Piatote. p. cm. — (The Henry Roe Cloud series on American Indians and modernity) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-17157-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American literature—Indian authors—History and criticism. 2. Canadian literature—Indian authors—History and criticism. 3. American fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Indians of North America—Intellectual life. 5. Indians in literature. 6. Family in literature. 7. Citizenship in literature. 8. Ethnic relations in literature. 9. Indian women in literature. I. Title. PS153.I52P53 2013 810.9’897—dc23 2012029894 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my family wé·tes wax. waqҌí·swit

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Contents

A Note on Terminology ix

introduction 1 1.

entangled love Marriage, Consent, and National Belonging in Works by E. Pauline Johnson and John M. Oskison 17

2.

unnatural children Adoption and Loss in S. Alice Callahan’s Wynema and E. Pauline Johnson’s “Catharine of the ‘Crow’s Nest’” 49

3.

preoccupations Labor, Land, and Performance in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea 91

4.

the long arm of

LONE WOLF

Disciplinary Paternalism and the Problem of Agency in D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded 133

conclusion 173 Acknowledgments 181 Notes 185 Bibliography 207 Index 221

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A Note on Terminology

I use the term Indian, the common term that appears in the legal and literary texts during the historical period (1879–1934) that is the subject of this book, to refer to indigenous and aboriginal people in what is now the United States and Canada. As much as possible, I refer to specific tribes by name. I also use the terms Native American, indigenous, native, and aboriginal when speaking of broader collective historical, cultural, and social contexts. I do not fully spell out sq—w but replace letters with a dash. I do this for two reasons. First, I intend to draw attention to the obscenity of the term in order to denaturalize its use. Second, the dash serves as a marker of violence; even when used ironically or for literary effect, the term is not free of the physical and sexual violence it directs at indigenous and aboriginal women.

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Lapwai Schoolchildren. Elizabeth Penney Wilson, Jane Pankin, and Jane Swan, 1892. E. Jane Gay Collection, Idaho State Historical Society, #63-221.22

int r o d u c tion a p ho t o graph f rom 1892 shows three Nez Perce girls kneeling on a grassy slope, their faces turned away from the camera, their hands and minds intent upon the worlds of their making. Rising on her knees, the girl on the left draws a tipi canvas taut across miniature lodge poles, perhaps playing house. In the middle of the frame, a girl nestles a cradleboard in her lap, gently tugging the laces to secure a baby doll inside. The beaded flowers of the cradleboard create a floral interplay with the petals of the girl’s lace collar. Emerging from different aesthetic and cultural traditions, the collar and the beadwork here gain unity, or complementariness, perhaps the shared creations of a young girl’s hands. On the right, a girl with cropped hair gazes at her doll tucked in bed; she holds the tipi flap open in a gesture that may be saying, táҌc kulé·wit/good night or táҌc mé·ywi/good morning or kíne wé·s/here I am. Occupied by their thoughts, none of the girls seems to care that the camera’s eye is fixed upon them, yet surely they are aware of it. It is the late nineteenth century, and surveillance is a fact of life on the reservation. Every detail of this photograph—the girls in their school dresses, their fashioning of Indian domesticity, the very ground upon which they play—is a site to be surveyed, documented, measured, and changed under the terms of American assimilation.1 The assimilation period in American Indian history is broadly understood to be between 1879 and 1934, its beginning marked by the opening of Carlisle Indian School and its end by the passage of the Wheeler-Howard Act, or the Indian Reorganization Act. These events inaugurated and suspended the two most dominant policies of the era: the forced removal of indigenous children from their families to attend government-funded boarding and day schools and the allotment of reservation land in severalty. The policy of compulsory school attendance originated with the commissioner of Indian affairs in 1884 and was adopted by Congress in 1891.2 The law was enforced

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introduction

through a range of military and reservation agency apparatuses, from the withholding of rations to the imprisonment of Indian parents.3 The allotment policy, known as the Dawes Act, was passed by Congress in 1887. It required the survey and division of communally held reservation lands into individual allotments, assigning fee simple title to individual Indians after a period of trust and opened so-called surplus lands to nonnative homesteaders.4 While these laws emerged through different processes, they nonetheless extended from a shared point of origin: the advocacy of eastern humanitarian groups collectively known as the Friends of the Indians. The first groups, the Boston Indian Citizenship Committee and the Women’s National Indian Association, were founded in 1879. Three years later the Indian Rights Association (IRA) was established in Philadelphia. In 1883 an umbrella group, the Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian, began to hold annual meetings at which delegates would debate and determine the objectives of Indian policy.5 To these advocates, policies of assimilation—that is, the systematic conversion of communal Indian land and cultural practices into individuated “civilized” forms amenable to market capitalism and liberal democracy—were preferable to the policies of bloody annihilation that had dominated much of the nineteenth century.6 Yet the end of bloodshed did not mean the end of violence. In many ways the efforts of the Friends of the Indians can be understood as oppositional to the Indian Wars; in other ways their advocacy depended upon and extended military violence. In the former sense, Indians as a population were no longer targeted for extinction. In the latter, Indian economies, lands, kinship systems, languages, cultural practices, and family relations—in short, all that constituted the Indian home—became the primary site of struggle. The battle, although not the stakes, moved from the indigenous homeland, what I call the tribal-national domestic, to the familial space of the Indian home, or the intimate domestic. In the assimilation era, the tools of conquest were not so much armed commanders as

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administrative circulars. The cavalry man was supplanted—or, rather, supplemented—by the field matron, the Hotchkiss by the transit, and the prison by the school. A turn to the domestic front, even as the last shots at Wounded Knee echoed in America’s collective ear, marked not the end of conquest but rather its renewal.

Foreign Domesticity A rich body of scholarship has brought attention to the relationship between domesticity as an ideology that orders the home and nation and the work of U.S. national expansion domestically and abroad.7 Anne McClintock has shown that the elements that produce the domestic—the order of the home, the nation, and its affective and material labors—are not a naturally occurring or universal set of facts, but an elaborately constructed ideology that strives to conceal its genealogy. Linking the nineteenth-century “cult of domesticity” with the imperial work of “domestication” of colonial land, animals, and native populations, McClintock shows that these projects were deeply interdependent.8 In Tender Violence, Laura Wexler argues that the staging of white, middle-class domesticity functions to elide and buttress violence and that literary and photographic tropes that valorize this idea of domesticity participate in the “expansive, imperial project of sentimentalism” itself.9 The “affective values” produced through sentimental fiction’s construction of the white, middle-class home as the model of nurture “supplied the rationale for raw intolerance to be packaged as education,” thus making policies such as Indian child removal thinkable, framed in the terms of paternalistic benevolence.10 At the same time, as Wexler, Hazel Carby, Lora Romero, and others have argued, the deployment of domestic imagery and discourse offers possibilities for critique by those who were positioned differently in the domestic order. In Romero’s words, such ideologies “give people an expansive logic, a meaningful vocabulary, and rich symbols through which to think about their world.”11 The political dimensions of domesticity, then, shape the production of its aesthetic.

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Much of the scholarship that interrogates the interpenetrating workings of the domestic and the foreign relies on a binary construction of terms. As Amy Kaplan writes in The Anarchy of Empire, “Domestic and foreign spaces are closer than we think, and the dynamics of imperial expansion cast them into jarring proximity.”12 But from the perspective of Native American polities during the assimilation era, the categories foreign and domestic were not so much proximal as coterminous. That is, Native American domesticity, that which constitutes family and domicile, was largely located within the tribalnational domestic, an entity both foreign and domestic to the United States in territorial and political terms. During the assimilation era, these interlinked Indian domesticities became the battleground in a contest with a third, foreign domesticity: U.S. settler-nationalism. The existence of what I term the foreign domestic is a force known to colonized internal populations who maintain a political national status within the larger nation. From the perspective of the indigenous subject there exist not one but two national domesticities, occupying the same contested space: the tribal-national domestic and the settler-national domestic. Kaplan’s productive analysis relies upon a binary that cannot fully account for this multiplication of domesticities. Like Puerto Rico and other unincorporated territories, the political status of tribal nations, that is, domestic dependent nations, remains both foreign and domestic under U.S. legal constructions, just as the United States remains foreign and yet intimate to the tribal-national.13 The primary objective of this book is to make visible the resilience of the tribal-national domestic by centering the intimate domestic (the Indian home and family) as the primary site of struggle against the foreign force of U.S. national domestication. The photograph that opens this book, then, reveals that, in the hands of Indian girls, fixtures of Indian domesticity are not merely symbolic representations of a larger political struggle but are themselves constitutive of the struggle. At stake in this contest is control over Indian futures—children, culture, land, and imagination—the very subjects of

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the photograph. Assimilation-era policies, as many scholars have established, were driven by the notion that the tribal-national polity, as a competing national sovereignty, must be destroyed. And the way to break up the tribe was to break up the Indian family and to cultivate children’s allegiance to the United States rather than to the tribe. Domesticity served as the structure of the assimilation argument and operated at three interconnected registers. First, the compromised legal status of Indians was defined in familial terms. In a ruling of 1831, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that the nationhood of Indian tribes was limited primarily by U.S. military conquest. It defined the tribal political organizations as “domestic dependent nations” and their members as “wards of the nation,” existing in “a state of pupilage.” The ruling continues, “Their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian. They look to our government for protection; rely upon its kindness and its power; appeal to it for relief to their wants; and address the president as their great father.”14 Through this ruling, the same domestic and familial metaphors that rationalize the order of the settler state serve as the legal and material structure of political relations. A fundamental feature of this paternalistic structure is the purported alignment of interests between the benevolent father and his dependent wards. In the second register, domestic discourse undergirds a larger wave of nineteenth-century national domestication, in which American territories and diverse populations were brought under federal jurisdiction. The existence of tribal-national polities, with powers and territories beyond those of states (as states did not enter into treaties with the United States), represented a threat to the sole sovereignty of the nation. The national domestication projects of settlement and expansion corresponded with the proliferation of domesticity as an ideology, clearly articulated in such publications as the sentimental novel, the housekeeping manual, the family portrait, and the advertising circular.15 Third and finally, the workings of domesticity and all of its attendant relations, labors, and affects offered the mechanisms through

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which to reach these national domestication goals. The Indian Rights Association was particularly concerned with the tribal structure as a political entity and its interdependence with what the IRA considered aberrant family forms, such as an extended kinship network, lateral rather than lineal distribution of resources, nonnuclear family gender roles, and marriage practices that accommodated divorce and polygyny. A prominent activist in the IRA, Merrill Gates, named the family as the key to breaking down the tribal polity. Bringing together the three registers of domestic discourse, Gates offers a paradigmatic argument in this excerpt from a speech he gave in 1885: The question whether [Indian] parents have a right to educate their children to regard the tribal organization as supreme, brings us at once to the consideration of the family. And here I find the key to the Indian problem. More than any other idea, this consideration of the family and its proper sphere in the civilizing of the races and in the development of the individual, serves to unlock the difficulties which surround legislation for the Indian. The family is God’s unit of society. On the integrity of the family depends that of the State. There is no civilization deserving of the name where the family is not the unit of civil government. . . . The tribal organization, with its tenure of land in common, with its constant divisions of goods and rations per capita without regard to service rendered, cuts the nerve of all that manful effort which political economy teaches us proceeds from the desire for wealth. True ideas of property with all the civilizing influences that such ideas excite are formed only as the tribal relation is outgrown.16 Again linking the fate of the Indian home with that of the tribal nation, Gates exhorts, “We must as rapidly as possible break up the tribal organization and give them law, with the family and land in severalty as the central idea. We must not only give them law, we must

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force law upon them. We must not only offer them education, we must force education upon them.”17 That there is no logical or rhetorical distance between Gates’s call to “give” and “force” forms of domesticity, private property, and education upon Indians reveals much about the deployment of foreign domesticity in the everyday lives of Indian families during the assimilation era. The restructuring of Indian economies, reassignment of labor, and reshaping of gender roles extended from the paired workings of allotment and boarding schools. A number of studies have made explicit the link between the domestication regime of Indian boarding schools, the dispossession of Indian lands through allotment, and the particular burdens borne by Indian women. As Tsianina Lomawaima argues, the military-style organization of the schools, the mandatory uniforms, the requirements of labor and obedience, and the constant surveillance went hand in hand with the dismantling of the reservation land base and tribal political system. The school practices “were exemplars of the federal practice of organizing the obedient individual whereas policy aimed to disorganize the sovereign tribe. Federal vocational and domestic education for Indian women was an exercise in power, a reconstruction of her very body, appearance, manners, skills, and habits. Federal educators hoped to manufacture civilized and obedient souls in civilized and obedient bodies.”18 But, as Lomawaima and others have pointed out, such efforts did not go unchallenged, as Indian students and their communities responded by resisting, subverting, and reimagining the terms of domestication.

Domestic Subjects The title of this book refers to two interdependent conditions that shaped the lives of Indian communities during the assimilation era: their legal status as “domestic subjects” of the U.S. settler state and the contest over national domesticity that centered on the Indian home and family. The category of domestic subject is positioned in opposition

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to U.S. citizenship, marking its place as within but not of the settler nation.19 An opinion of 1856 by the U.S. attorney general provides this distillation: “Indians are not citizens of the United States, but domestic subjects.”20 This subjectivity extended from the settlernational conceptualization that, as Mark Rifkin argues, indigenous lands were always already domestic to the United States and its indigenous peoples inevitable subjects of nationalization.21 In constructing a passage from domestic subject to citizen, domesticity emerges as a central category linking personal bodies with national bodies. The mechanism of citizenship through which individuals come to belong to a nation works through the personal to produce the national. Political rights that attach to domestic relationships among individuals, particularly those that involve marriage, divorce, and child rearing, are defined and policed through state regulation. For this reason, cultural and social attitudes that define what counts as love, home, and kin directly shape political rights and subjectivities. Domestic subjects, then, refers to the book’s focus on competing legal and literary representations of home, family, and nation in Native American literature. Central to the understanding of domestic subjects is the complex history of Native American citizenship in the U.S. settler nation. While most studies of U.S. citizenship treat the Native American experience as somewhat anomalous or even irrelevant in the dominant narrative of immigration, this book argues that Native American citizenship deserves a more central consideration in American studies scholarship. Native Americans as domestic subjects by law were legal wards of the nation: living within and under U.S. control but lacking representation and full rights as individuals. Even after the passage of birthright citizenship in 1924, Native Americans have continued to suffer impaired rights both in reservation regulations and in voting, which is part of a larger history of American citizenship. In her history of immigration, Mae Ngai argues that immigration restrictions that began in the 1920s “produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously

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a social reality and a legal impossibility. . . . The illegal alien is thus an ‘impossible subject,’ a person who cannot be and a problem that cannot be solved.”22 Ngai’s analysis is productive for thinking about continuities between the status of Native Americans as domestic subjects—a different, though equally impossible form of subjectivity— throughout the century prior to the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. Ngai’s study begins in 1924, with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which established a national origins quota system to restrict immigration. I argue that one must consider these two acts as being related or coextensive, giving rise to the argument that the illegal alien replaced the domestic subject and that some form of impossible subjectivity has been a feature of U.S. citizenship from the origins of the nation. While this book asserts the centrality of Indian domesticity as the site through which the settler state has exerted force to gain control over the tribal-national entity, the domestic is also the locus through which Indian families and nations have expressed resistance. Examining the “intimacies of empire,” as Ann Stoler argues, reveals the incompleteness of colonial projects. Through intimate spaces “relations between the colonizer and colonized could powerfully confound or confirm the strictures of governance and the categories of rule.”23 By examining the literary works of indigenous authors with an eye toward the ways in which assimilation policies are depicted and contested, I reveal that colonial programs are not only incomplete, but also fraught entrapments for the colonizers themselves. In addition, these stories uncover the workings of an anticolonial imaginary: visions of alternative futures that may explain, in part, how Indian communities survived the violence of the assimilation era.

Literature and Law This book focuses on the literary works of five writers of the assimilation era who illuminated the layered, complex meaning of domestic

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subjects: E. Pauline Johnson, Mohawk; John Milton Oskison, Cherokee; S. Alice Callahan, Creek; Mourning Dove, Okanogan; and D’Arcy McNickle, Cree/Salish. Methodologically I consider both literature and law as partial texts that, when viewed together, provide a broader (though still incomplete) view of a historical situation. As Stoler suggests, literature “portrays sensibilities, sentiments, and states of distress that remain outside our history writing, that haunt and hover on the descriptive fringes of scholarly histories of the colonial.”24 In this project, literature illuminates the web of social relations that law seeks to dismantle. The law names particular subjects, but unnamed subjects remain within its grasp. By viewing law and literature together, it is possible to see the effects upon the unnamed as well as the named subjects in the ordering of social hierarchies and the distribution of political rights. Literature challenges law by imagining other plots and other resolutions that at times are figured as nonresolution or states of suspension. The intertextual reading of law in literature also deepens one’s understanding of aesthetics and form. The authors I discuss here use genre to great effect by combining the comforting familiarity of plots and tropes with a disquieting critique of social relations. In contesting law, writers like Callahan and Mourning Dove encounter the representational limits of their respective genres, the sentimental novel and the western, calling upon and also changing the conventions of these forms. While the transnational turn has grown increasingly prominent in the field of American studies in recent years, it has, for the most part, had relatively little to do with Native American studies.25 This book demonstrates, however, that any examination of Native Americans during this period is of necessity transnational at its core, centering on the contest between two forms of sovereignty— settler-national and tribal-national rule—as competing national formations. In addition, this book explores the ways in which Canadian contexts shaped these writers’ works. For example, in the early chapters the Indian Act in Canada affords an illuminating

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counterpoint to Johnson’s work and offers a powerful example of the ways in which gender was construed in colonial laws. In the later chapters, the indigenous territories and routes that were partitioned by the U.S.–Canadian border are revealed to be critical to an ongoing anticolonial imaginary in works by Mourning Dove and McNickle. The five writers I examine were not the only ones responding to political conditions through their literary work, as a number of recent and compelling studies in Native American literature have shown.26 Many of the writers of this prolific generation—those named above as well as Sarah Winnemucca, Charles Eastman, Zitkala-Ša, Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Luther Standing Bear, Carlos Montezuma, Arthur Parker, Alexander Posey, and others—distinguished themselves in both the literary and political realms. In selecting works to focus on here, I was drawn to those that figured the interpenetrating workings of law with gender, illuminating the particular burdens borne by Indian women, who found themselves on the front lines of defending home and family during the assimilation era. This project is in direct dialogue with the productive and problematic aspects of Native American literary nationalism. While it shares the movement’s keen attention to the political dimensions and stakes of indigenous writing, it seeks to foreground the relational nature of “nation” and aesthetics across time.27 In referring to the tribal polity, I tend to use tribalnational rather than national to indicate the hybrid, contingent nature of indigenous nationalism as it takes shape in the vexed conditions of settler-nationalism. My work aligns with Romero’s contention that the political nature of cultural production “resides in local formulations— and in the social and historical locations of those formulations—rather than in some essential and ineluctable political tendency inhering within them.”28 I hope that through intertextual readings of literary works and legal renderings of multivalenced domestic subjects, this book will bring greater attention to the deeply political dimension of works by these early writers as well as contribute to a broader definition of what counts for politics and aesthetics in Native American literature.

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Chapter 1, “Entangled Love: Marriage, Consent, and National Belonging in Works by E. Pauline Johnson and John M. Oskison,” considers the legal mechanism of marriage as a site that joins notions of love and consent with the apparatus of state regulation, analyzing the rupture of an interracial union in Canada and the pressure to dissolve a polygamous marriage among Creeks during the drive to Oklahoma statehood. Drawing on Canada’s Indian Act and antipolygamy campaigns in the United States, the chapter analyzes the structure of consent as entangled by the demands of competing national domesticities. I introduce the term entangled consent to identify the structure of settler-national laws that sought to transfer property and cultural rights from indigenous polities into the settlernational domestic under the rubric of consent and love. The chapter examines the operation of the tropes of Indian suicide and religious conversion as forms of voluntary surrender within both the legal and literary texts and analyzes how Johnson’s and Oskison’s stories aesthetically and politically contest the voluntary extinguishment of Indian claims to life, home, and nation. In chapter 2, “Unnatural Children: Adoption and Loss in S. Alice Callahan’s Wynema and E. Pauline Johnson’s “Catharine of the ‘Crow’s Nest,’” I focus on the meaning of unnatural children in two senses: the adoption of nonbiological children and the legal invention of Indians as wards of the nation and perpetual minors under law. I explore how Callahan and Johnson called upon the sentimental genre to make maternal love legible against cultural and legal discourses that framed Indian mothers as unfit and dangerous to Indian children, thus legitimizing the mass removal of Indian children to governmentfunded boarding schools. I offer the concept of tiered maternalism as a way to examine how cultural meanings of motherhood are stratified by race and underwritten by a structure that subordinated Indian women as legal wards. I consider the tension between representations of Indian women as competent mothers and as sexual agents in both the literature and the law, showing how the criminalization of Indian women’s sexuality and the oversexualized representations of Indian

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women by non-Native authors placed limits on Native literary representations of Indian women’s sexuality and agency. The third chapter, “Preoccupations: Labor, Land, and Performance in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea,” considers the legal concept of occupation as a multiply inflected term in the novel and analyzes the function of indigenous preoccupation as it motivates claims to land and self-determination. The chapter links preoccupation as a territorial claim and as the iteration of both anxiety and alternative imaginaries in the novel, or what I call the dialectic of preoccupation. The chapter also considers the representation of labor and performance in light of how occupational changes were central to the legal rationale for and the force of allotment and boarding school policies. Both sought to shift Indian occupations from traditional economies into agricultural and manual and domestic wage labor. As part of a wider discussion of labor, gender, and the construction of citizenship, I introduce the idea of a performative taxonomy of citizenship as a way to understand how the federal competency commissions worked to assign political and land rights during this period of uneven citizenship for Indians. The term taxonomy recognizes the construction of citizenship as a set of dynamic, weighted categories that are measured through the normalizing gaze of the state, and the performative aspect identifies the bodily submissions that are required in the movement from domestic subject to citizen, while at the same time affirming the multivalent possibilities of performative acts. Chapter 4, “The Long Arm of Lone Wolf: Disciplinary Paternalism and the Problem of Agency in D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded,” analyzes the closed circuit of legal circumscriptions that extend from the structure of government paternalism and wardship. Based on the concept that Indians were the children of the “Great Father” in the U.S. national family, wardship offered the legal fiction that the interests of the father were naturally coextensive with those of the ward. The chapter examines how legal rulings such as United States v. Kagama (1886) and Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903) constructed Indian interests as being aligned, rather than oppositional, to U.S. domestic

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policy. Because the acts of the father cannot be legally conceptualized as outside of the interests of the ward, Indian agency is severely limited, a problem illuminated by the novel’s motif of escape. I introduce the term disciplinary paternalism as an alternative to the widely accepted language of benevolent paternalism, arguing that Indian policy advocates and the law understood surveillance and violence as regrettable but necessary features of the assimilation process. Because of the assumed alignment of father and ward, such measures against Indians could be understood only as being for their own good. This chapter analyzes the book’s critique of disciplinary paternalism, explores the representation of legal incommensurability through unequal discourse, and highlights the agency of women in reconstructing alternative visions of indigenous autonomy. In particular, the chapter argues that Catherine and Elise, the central women in the book, critique available forms of agency and citizenship as distributed through a liberal, individual rights system. A brief conclusion considers the history of domestic subjects in light of the contemporary struggles of indigenous families and communities as well as of national debates over same-sex marriage and immigration policy more broadly. Finally, a note on photographs. Most of the photographs I selected for this book were taken between 1890 and 1915. I found them in the course of conducting research in state and university archives in the Pacific Northwest. Each photograph is meant to reflect and engage the primary themes of the chapter it introduces as well as critically exhibit a range of photographic practices of the era.29 Yet there is another narrative that threads through this collection. From the cover image to the acknowledgments, the photographs evoke the pages of a family photo album. Like any family album, it features a range of candid, staged, and studio images taken on ordinary and special days that tell the stories and affiliations of the family. I want the photographs to be understood this way, as a family collection, for two reasons. One is to bring into focus the complex intertwining of personal archives with public collections and the quotidian

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intimacy of the family that forms the base of public history. The other reason, however, is more important. I want readers of this book to see and think about Indian families, to recognize the distinctive worlds in which they lived, and to look upon their faces as I do, with wonder, respect, and love.

Nez Perce at Meal Time. Rare Inside Photo, c. 1900. Idaho State Historical Society, #77-60.3

1 . e n ta n gle d love Marriage, Consent, and National Belonging in Works by E. Pauline Johnson and John M. Oskison

Never was it the case that the imperial encounter pitted an active Western intruder against a supine or inert non-Western native; there was always some form of active resistance, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, the resistance finally won out. —Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism “No,” said the girl with quick, indrawn breath. —E. Pauline Johnson, “A Red Girl’s Reasoning”

th e “ in dian girl of modern fiction ” suffered a great deal at the pen of popular American and Canadian writers in the nineteenth century, a fact lamented by the Mohawk writer E. Pauline Johnson in an essay she wrote in 1892. According to Johnson, popular fiction could conjure only one “regulation Indian maiden.” She was ever the daughter of a chief; her appellation was invariably Winona or a similar sounding name; and her tribal affiliation was undefined, as she was “merely a wholesome sort of mixture of any band.” To this template add the possession of “a suicidal mania. Her unhappy, self-sacrificing life becomes such a burden to both herself and the author that this is the only means by which they can extricate themselves from a lamentable tangle.”1 Johnson goes on to enumerate popular American and Canadian texts—including such historical fictions as John Richardson’s Wacousta (1832) and Graeme Mercer Adam’s and Ethelwyn Wetherald’s An Algonquin Maiden (1887)—that portray Indian women as being “violently in love” with white men, for whom 17

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they commit suicide, being so obsessed with the male hero that they are “treacherous to [their] own people.”2 While Johnson’s critique aims at literary tropes, it gains greater significance when applied to the construction of Indian subjects under Canada’s Indian Act of 1876. In both popular literature and law, the Indian woman was imagined as possessing a form of suicidal, violent love for white men. In literature, white men served as symbolic representations of the settler colonial society, and Indian women embodied a sacrificial love that would resolve the settler–native conflict. But in the laws that regulated Indian political subjectivity, these metaphors gained materiality. White men as patriarchal heads of households became the stable center through which Indian political rights could be defined and assigned. And that had very real consequences for indigenous people as well as for those whom they loved and how they loved them. Indeed, for an Indian woman to fall in love with a white man was to contemplate legal suicide and a turn to treachery against her own family and band. It would be bad enough, as Johnson points out, to live with narratives of native suicide as national fantasy—a simple tale that absolves the settler state of its violence by portraying native extinguishment as the result of all-consuming love, of madness. But literary works were not the only texts to link an Indian woman’s love with her consent to death. Under the Indian Act, love and violence were intimately entwined, requiring an Indian woman to commit a form of legal suicide—the extinguishment of her status as an Indian—in order to marry a white man. Such extinguishment would not be borne by her alone but would diminish her band in political, social, and material terms as well, making her “treacherous to her own people.” The Indian Act sought to transfer property, cultural, and legal rights from indigenous polities into the settler-national domestic under the rubric of consent and love. It was impossible to consent to one without “consenting” to the other, a structure I have termed entwined consent. Under the terms of entwined consent, an act of assent to love triggers the surrender of legal and cultural rights, with no means by which to separate the paired workings of love and death.

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This chapter concerns the mechanisms by which marriage law disrupts indigenous domesticities under the rubric of consent and the ways in which Native literature seeks to confront and suspend the force of law. Foregrounding the notion of entwined consent, this chapter reads short stories by E. Pauline Johnson3 and the Cherokee writer John M. Oskison4 that figure the stakes of two forms of marriage—one interracial, the other polygamous—for indigenous communities under the settler colonial laws of the United States and Canada. Johnson’s story of a couple torn apart by competing conceptions of marriage in the context of Canada’s Indian Act5 and Oskison’s story of a polygamous marriage under pressure to dissolve during the drive to Oklahoma statehood show how indigenous writers drew upon popular literary conventions to disentangle and challenge the terms of Indian consent. The analysis charts a double movement: a legal history and a literary history. The legal history traces how settler-national laws that regulate interracial marriage and outlaw polygamy demand sacrifice by the Indian subject—a severing of Indian political and relational structures and claims to land and love. The interconnected workings of the intimate domestic, the tribalnational domestic, and the foreign domestic of the settler state become clear, as these laws seek to align Native American subjectivity with the settler state and in the process abrogate the territorial and political status of the tribal-national domestic. Through the regulation of intimate domesticity, settler-national domestication goals are accomplished. The corresponding movement this chapter charts is Native American literary history, in which writers like Johnson and Oskison expose the consequences of these laws and stage alternative endings. Both stories envision the withholding of consent, producing states of suspension that bring administrative violence uncomfortably into view. Additionally, the stories suggest that laws aimed at nonconforming populations can entrap even the settler nation’s most secure subjects. As such, the unnamed subjects of law can be bound to its force as surely as those who are named, producing a broader critique of society.

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“A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” published in 1893 as a prizewinner in Dominion magazine, centers upon the marriage of Christine Robinson, the daughter of a Hudson’s Bay trader and an Indian mother, to a young white man named Charlie McDonald. Charlie met Christie on the reserve, where he had been employed by the government as a census taker. Such an occupation suited him well, as he had long nurtured his love of Indian collecting: “As a boy he had had the Indian relic-hunting craze, as a youth he had studied Indian archaeology and folk-lore, and as a man he had consummated his predilections for Indianology by loving, winning, and marrying the quiet little daughter of the English trader.”6 The young couple departs for the provincial capital, where Christie is “all the rage” at their high society gatherings.7 They make their home with Charlie’s brother, Joe, who is a surveyor. The triangulation is, on the face of it, a queer domestic arrangement that hints at the resistance that follows. The occupations of both brothers—census taker and surveyor— reveal their participation in the denomination and domination of aboriginal peoples by the state. Charlie’s vocation as a census taker and his avocation as a relic collector, along with Joe’s work as a surveyor, encompass the very technologies that Benedict Anderson names (“census, map, museum”) as the tools that “profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion—the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry.”8 Christie shows that she is aware of the implications of these technologies. She jokes that Joe serves as a potential replacement for her husband: “You may come in handy for an exchange some day, as Charlie does always say when he hoards up duplicate relics.”9 Through her teasing, Christie questions the politics of collecting and imagines a reversal of the unequal power relations that such possession entails. One night at a ball two guests inquire about the marriage of Christie’s parents, and she replies that they were married by Indian rites. The guests are appalled at Christie’s revelation. One woman

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rants, “It is shocking! . . . outrageously shocking! I wonder if they told Mr. McDonald before he married her!”10 A look at Charlie’s pale, stricken expression reveals that they did not. At home later, Charlie accuses Christie of disgracing him as well as her family: “You have literally declared to the whole city that your father and mother were never married, and that you are the child of—what shall we call it—love? Certainly not legality.”11 He demands to know how Christie can speak of such things without shame. She replies, “Shame? Why should I be ashamed of the rites of my people any more than you should be ashamed of the customs of yours—of a marriage more sacred and holy than half of your white man’s mockeries?”12 In these opening exchanges, the language of love, law, and rites emerges as the language of political and cultural rights. Christie and Charlie are distinct political subjects formed in two different legal systems and the rites/rights that are bestowed through each. Their argument continues as these competing political identities are put on trial: a domestic dispute between partners that tries the domestic bonds of the nation. While Christie remains calm and levelheaded, Charlie grows ever more irrational. When she asks if her parents’ marriage would have changed his decision to marry her, Charlie throws himself into a chair and says, “God knows.” Christie’s response is composed and unemotional: “There was no such time as that before our marriage, for we are not married now. . . . Why should I recognize the rites of your nation when you do not acknowledge the rites of mine? According to your own words, my parents should have gone through your church ceremony as well as through an Indian contract; according to my words, we should go through an Indian contract as well as through a church marriage. If their union is illegal, so is ours.”13 Making a pointed reference to colonization, Christie continues, “How do I know when another nation will come and conquer you as you white men conquered us? And they will have another marriage rite to perform, and they will tell us another truth.”14 By raising the specter of a future wave of colonization that would entrap white settlers equally with Indians, Christie argues that political

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rights are never natural but contingent upon military dominance, a fact underscored by her reference to conquest. Finally, Christie removes her wedding band and throws it across the room, saying, “That thing is as empty to me as the Indian rites to you.”15 By this act Christie highlights the character of law as constituted by performative acts; at the same time, she acknowledges the limits of performative speech to respond to the force of law. In the fusion of marriage rites and political rights, Christie contests the erasure of indigenous forms of governance by the settler state. She asserts and in a sense embodies the existence of legal systems that predated colonial control and the right of communities to live and reproduce themselves within those systems. Christie’s and Charlie’s argument animates a debate that was, in the late nineteenth century, increasingly critical to aboriginal communities who sought to maintain internal control. As the legal scholar Sidney Harring points out, the problem in translating systems of law was based not in the absence of legal systems (as Charlie’s character would suggest) but in the inability of the dominant system to accommodate other concepts (rights) and practices (rites) of law: “Canada’s Indian nations remained sovereign political communities long after colonial contact, either because early authorities de facto recognized that sovereignty, or because they lacked the power to interfere with it. . . . Indians, under their own laws, did not need a common law title to the lands they occupied: they had property rights, defined by their own laws, but obviously they could not define their title in terms of the English common law.”16 The incommensurability of systems of law became a site of struggle over a range of legal rights, including property rights, which were regulated in part through marriage. In the United States and Canada indigenous populations are bound to not one national domestic but two: the tribal-national and the settler-national. For aboriginal subjects, entry into the colonial legal system risks the elision as well as the destruction of the tribal-national polity. Because the object of settler colonialism is the acquisition and control of land, it has historically been in the interests of the settler state to liquidate

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indigenous land claims, particularly those held communally by the indigenous nation, as these sites represent an affront to settler national sovereignty. The dissolution of territorial and tribal-national rights is accompanied by the attempted assimilation of indigenous subjects as indistinct from others into the national body. Marriage was one mechanism, among others, that could move land and individuals out of the tribal-national and into the settler-national domestic. The problem of incommensurability plays out at multiple levels in this story. At the plot level it is about a conflict over the language of rights and rites and the competing political systems that produce them. At another level, in the context of the law, it is about the use of consent to produce coercion. This paradox is made more visible through Johnson’s use of the sentimental genre, which reveals the incommensurability of the language of love with the law of dispossession. Christie’s calm, reasoned response stands in opposition to Charlie’s emotional volatility and lack of rationality, offering a critique of the rational nature of the Canadian legal system. When Christie declares her independence from Charlie, he leaps to grab her by the wrists and demands, “Do you dare doubt my honor toward you?” while she protests that he is breaking her arm.17 Charlie’s harsh reaction to Christie—beginning with his immediate descent into rage at the ball when his reputation is threatened and ending with him assailing his wife both verbally and physically—reveals something of the thin line between a commitment to the rule of law as a source of social order and the violence of coercion. While a violent core has been widely recognized as a general feature of the rule of law, this aspect is even more evident with respect to indigenous people in settler states and to aboriginal women in Canada. As J. R. Miller shows, a range of social policies designed to protect Euro-Canadian definitions of the family unit outlawed native cultural practices such as the potlatch, summer dances, polygamy, and matrilineal systems of identity and authority. These policies were rationalized as efforts to protect native people, particularly women, from what the dominant

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culture considered deviant behavior. Such attempts at “cultural remodeling” of native people revealed that “the first step on the path of protection seemed always to lead to the depths of coercion.”18 Charlie’s rage is interrupted by Joe, who wrests his brother away from Christie. She, in turn, leaves Charlie during the night, after writing a farewell note to Joe. Over the next months, a desperate Charlie searches for his estranged wife, rescuing a St. Bernard named Hudson in the process. At the conclusion of the story, Charlie finds Christie in another town, where she is supporting herself through “embroidery and plain sewing.”19 His arrival is marked by its liminality; he comes to her cottage on the edge of town at twilight, where he treads a “weedy, unkept path” to the verandah, where she stands. Overcome, Charlie throws himself before her and begs her to forgive him: “‘You will come back to me, dear? It is all such a bitter mistake—I did not understand. Oh! Christie, I did not understand, and you’ll forgive me, and love me again, won’t you—won’t you?’ “‘No,’ said the girl with quick, indrawn breath.”20 He continues to beg, but she remains resolute, even when her heart seems that it may yield for a moment: “‘You cannot make me come,’ said the icy voice, ‘neither church, nor law, nor even’—and here the voice softened—‘nor even love can make a slave of a red girl.’”21 Following Christie’s rejection, Charlie returns to his hotel, where he throws himself on his bed and cries out, “Oh! God, dear God, . . . I’ve nothing left now, nothing! It doesn’t seem that I even have you to-night.” Charlie looks up then, to feel his dog licking his sleeve.22 The implications of Christie’s refusal are layered. At one level she denies the administrative power of the state, what Michel Foucault calls subjection, over aboriginal women who confront not only violent expressions of state power but also appeals for consent.23 In enumerating the powers of church, law, and love, she effectively renders them separate forces, thus separating the possibilities for consent. By disarticulating categories of consent that are conflated under the Indian Act, she challenges the idea that consent to one

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category automatically produces consent to the others. At another level Christie offers a broader critique of settler colonial society as a culture that would use Victorian love to “make a slave” of any woman. This critique is evident in her entry into the workforce, which challenges the code of Victorian womanhood that erases the economic value of women’s domestic production by framing women’s work as a labor of love. As Jane Simonsen has argued, women writers of this period whose sentimental work portrayed women’s labor as a natural and spiritual expression of “true womanhood” were themselves engaged in masking their own labor as writers: “Like writing itself, domesticity established its value to the world by erasing signs of its creation; in order for both the home and the novel to exert influence, they needed to appear without effort on the part of their creators.”24 Johnson’s decision to expose the mechanics of women’s work and the requirements of self-sustenance offers a moment of self-reference in the text. Like Christie standing on the verandah, Johnson occupied a liminal space in the world of popular fiction, not because she wasn’t successful or famous (she was both) but because she shifted its conventions. Unlike the suicidal Indian women of historical romance or the plucky yet ultimately domesticated heroines of sentimental fiction, Johnson’s female protagonists often unsettled nationalist narratives of containment, occupying a third space of costly autonomy. Critical to Christie’s refusal is Charlie’s acquiescence. Under law, he could compel her to return, yet he respects her autonomy instead. The clear sexual subtext—“you cannot make me”—gives voice not only to aboriginal rights but also to women’s rights more generally to assert sexual independence. As Peggy Pascoe points out, marital rights for men in the nineteenth century “were integrally related to notions of property,” such as the right to custody of children and “de facto property rights to their wives’ sexuality” because husbands could not be charged with rape within marriage.25 The right of sexual consent—that is, the right of a wife to refuse the sexual desires of her husband—was a key concern of the women’s movements in the United States and Canada in the nineteenth century.26 The sexual

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aspect of self-possession is complicated in Christie’s refusal because she not only still loves Charlie but sexually desires him. In their final encounter, Charlie recalls “the memory of times when he had but to lay his hand on her hair to call a most passionate response from her,” and as he throws himself before her, “clasp[ing] his arms about her with a boyish petulance,” he feels her response: “She quivered from head to foot as his fair, wavy hair brushed her neck, his despairing face sank lower until his cheek, hot as fire, rested on the cool olive flesh of her arm. A warm moisture oozed up through her skin, and as he felt its glow he looked up.”27 What he sees in her face, however, is far from inviting: “her teeth, white and cold, were locked” over her lower lip, and “her eyes were as grey stones.”28 Like many of Johnson’s heroines, Christie is a complex character, animated with vitality and purpose. She is far from the Indian heroines of historical romance, whose mad passions drive them to suicide. And yet the images of death remain: cold, white teeth and gray stones evoke the headstones of cemeteries, suggesting the mortal stakes of political recognition, borne upon and through the bodies of aboriginal women. So what, precisely, prevents the much-desired reconciliation of this pair? According to the heroine, it is those two words (“God knows”), a betrayal of faith. Because of words, Christie must bifurcate her substantive self, subordinating the will of her body and heart to the problem of commensurability. The fullness of Christie’s desire comes up as a wave against the stark boundary wall of words, giving a sense of the law’s imposition on the everyday lives of its subjects. Christie’s and Charlie’s love cannot escape or transcend the competing discourses of rights in a society stratified by the Indian Act; ultimately words entrap them both. The pain of love’s entanglement with law is visible here: in her struggle Christie reveals not only the pain of losing her love but also the pain of having to make such a choice. Returning to Johnson’s critique of the trope of the suicidal Indian woman, it is clear how death textually relieves Indian women’s subjectivity in both literature and law. As Johnson describes it, the

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suicidal trope allowed mainstream authors to “extricate themselves from a lamentable tangle.” Arguably, federal law regulating indigenous people in the United States and Canada can be understood precisely in those terms: a lamentable tangle. In Canada the Indian Act worked to extinguish Indian rights, relieving legal texts of the burden of Indian lives. During the assimilation period, the pressure to write Indian subjects off the page—whether those pages were property deeds, government rolls, or frontier romances—became acute. The textual milieu for Indian lives featured a range of surrendering types, from the gently receding Hiawatha of literature to the enfranchised Indian woman who is made legally white on paper. In both literature and law, settler societies expressed deep anxiety about the threat of vital, contemporary indigenous populations with capacity to reproduce lives, culture, and land claims. Thus sexuality was figured in these works as a (self-)destructive rather than a (re)productive force. The narrative of voluntary native extinguishment was gendered yet featured a common romance plot that, like the law, placed white men at the center. A paradigmatic American historical romance of native sacrifice, Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times, published in 1824 by the white social reformer Lydia Maria Child, features a love triangle of a white woman, Mary, a white man, Charles, and a Mohawk man, Hobomok.29 Unlike the works critiqued by Johnson that turn upon the suicide of Indian women, Hobomok features the suicide of an Indian man. In the novel Mary initially loves Charles, but when he leaves for England and is later reported dead, Mary turns to Hobomok. Defying her Puritan family, Mary weds Hobomok, and they have a son together, not knowing that Charles is still alive. When Charles returns to New England, Hobomok’s passion is stirred, and he considers killing his rival, yet ultimately Hobomok chooses to defer to Charles. Hobomok, with great pathos, departs to the West to commit suicide. His noble exit frees Mary to wed Charles and allows Charles to assume the role of father to Hobomok’s son (“Take care of my boy,” Hobomok tells Charles).30 Within days of Hobomok’s suicide, Charles and Mary reunite and wed, and as Hobomok’s son grows up and

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attends Harvard, his cultural whiteness is assured: “By degrees his Indian appellation was silently omitted.”31 In this novel, Hobomok’s virility—his ability not only to marry a white woman but also to procreate with her—is tempered by his homosocial relationship with Charles, and passion is channeled into Hobomok’s self-destruction. While Hobomok explains his decision to commit suicide as a sacrifice for Mary’s sake, he nonetheless makes his decision in the company of Charles, not Mary. Although Hobomok touches Charles’s arm and weeps in his presence—expressions of passion and intimacy—Hobomok does not reenter his house but stands at the threshold and longs for the embrace of Mary and his son before he departs with “a bursting heart.”32 The transaction that resolves the love triangle does not physically involve Mary at all; it happens between the two men. Violent love is embodied by an Indian man for a white man; the white man remains ever the object of Indian love in these romance plots. Hobomok’s capacity to love both Mary and Charles suggests an excessive or perverse masculinity that exceeds heterosexuality and thereby turns upon itself. Hobomok’s sexuality serves strictly to transmit indigeneity to the son, who is then reared within white society by white parents, thereby sanctifying the transfer of indigenous land to settler society. Such narratives, as the scholars Philip Deloria and Shari Huhndorf have argued, have served as cultural and political foundations of the American state.33 In this formulation, Hobomok’s heterosexuality produces indigenous claims to land through white bodies, and his homosociality (his self-sacrificing love for Charles) sanctifies the transfer of land as a gift even while it affirms the structure of patriarchy as the transfer of property between men. By committing suicide Hobomok wills—in both the legal sense and the agentive sense—his claims to Charles. Other literary depictions, such as James Fenimore Cooper’s novels and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” feature homosocial male love as a characteristic element of noble Indian extinguishment and the consequent reassignment of land. Midlife suicides of Indian figures, whether men or women consumed with “violent love,” allow the threat of a vital indigenous presence to be

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raised, then quickly resolved, as the departed Indian is immediately reclassified as ancestral and thus non-threatening. Johnson, working in the sentimental genre, was keenly aware of the dominant portraits of Indian women and men as always consenting to their own death—through love. Her use of the genre exposes its structure of consent; Hobomok, for example, withdraws as an act of consent, whereas Christie withdraws on the grounds of consent. The limits of the genre are exposed by Johnson’s story, as it refuses the domestic resolution that typifies the sentimental. The domestic is irredeemably shattered, the male protagonist cast adrift and the heroine left to bear the economic and social burdens of autonomy. Love functions differently in Johnson’s story; it portrays a love that is not a sanctifying, sacrificial force but rather one of flesh, desire, and vitality. It is also one of will. Christie owns her sexuality; she is not consumed or driven mad with love. No “suicidal mania” drives her to abdicate Indian rites/rights or causes her to become “treacherous” to her own people. Unlike Hobomok, Christie’s will does not bestow but rather refuses. Johnson’s story, “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” accomplishes what mainstream literature and the Canadian Indian Act do not. It separates death from love, and establishes new terms for consent.

Two Become None: Sex, Marriage, and Property What does it mean to say, “I do?” As histories of marriage show, public policy has extended and denied rights through marriage to different populations at different times.34 As Nancy Cott notes, marriage is a unique contract in that couples enter the agreement but do not set its terms; rights and obligations are determined by public policy.35 The character of marriage as belonging to both intimate domesticity (the private home) and national domesticity (the public sphere) is complicated for indigenous subjects, who belong to another national domesticity: the tribe or band. This entity, the tribal-national domestic, came under attack through a range of assimilation-era policies. For aboriginal

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women in Canada, the 1876 Indian Act constructed a set of “agreements” that were interlinked; under the law, consent to “marry out” also meant submission to patriarchy, loss of property rights, and loss of identity as a status Indian with legal and land rights. This policy was called “enfranchisement,” and was meant to create a similar legal status for Indian women with white women in Canada, without taking into account that many aboriginal communities accorded greater property rights, more respect for women’s autonomy in marriage and divorce, and greater freedom from patriarchal structures of power than did white women at the time.36 Yet marriage was hardly the only mechanism under the Indian Act to “enfranchise” Indian women and thus dissolve their Indian status. By removing band status from any Indian, ipso facto, who earned a university degree or spent five years in a foreign country, the Act ensnared aboriginal women’s subjectivity through their other loves and passions as well.37 Indian women’s legal situation overlapped and differed with those of settler Canadian and immigrant women in two significant ways. First, Indian women in the late nineteenth century, like all women who married, entered into a well-established legal system of coverture, or the legal oneness of a married couple. Coverture absorbed the woman’s legal identity into the man’s, such that “two become one” under law, with property, children, and citizenship rights belonging to the man.38 Yet under the Indian Act, Indian women’s property and band status did not simply follow her into marriage but could be dissolved. Second, a change in national status was understood as part of the marriage contract for immigrants: the marriage of a citizen to a noncitizen could bring the latter to the fold of the extended national family. However, the stakes of national integration for indigenous communities has been fundamentally different from the stakes for immigrants. During the national domestication thrust of the nineteenth century, immigrants joining the new national family were expected to leave behind their nations of origin, but not to destroy them. This was not the case for indigenous subjects, particularly those who fell under Canada’s midcentury Indian Acts, because they could

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not marry across racial lines without extinguishing aboriginal national rights and land claims. The contest over property distinguishes the stakes in recognizing national sovereignty of the immigrant (whose home nation is left intact) and the indigenous subject (whose home nation is diminished) in the movement across national domesticities. Physically, the tribal-national domestic resides within the territory of settler nation. Thus the extinguishment of aboriginal political rights directly transfers to the extension of land (and sovereignty) for the settler nation. In this context, Johnson’s critique of the fictive Indian woman’s “suicidal love” for white men is illuminating; Indian women in Canada who married white men performed a form of legal suicide to their Indian subjectivity and property claims. Such violent love made an Indian woman “treacherous to her own people” not metaphorically but materially because it extinguished Indian land claims and broke down the tribal political body, not only for herself but for all of her descendants. Christie’s “icy” assertion “You cannot make me” is meaningful, given that this is precisely what the Indian Act in Canada intends to accomplish: to make Indians. Under the policy of enfranchisement, Indian women would be made legally white, with no legal attachment to their aboriginal bands, if they married white men. The Indian Acts both explicitly and implicitly defined Indian nations in patriarchal and patrilineal terms; women were recognized only through patrilineal descent or marriage in a patriarchal society—a complete abrogation of the matrilineal principles of Johnson’s Mohawk society and many other North American indigenous peoples.39 The Indian Act of 1876 defines a person as “any individual other than an Indian” and an Indian as First. Any male person of Indian blood reputed to belong to a particular band; Secondly. Any child of such person; Thirdly. Any woman who is or was lawfully married to such person.40

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The statute engenders full aboriginal personhood as restricted to men and forces Indian women and minors to locate their political, social, and cultural identities through attachment to a male body, a condition contested by Christie, a “red girl” who demands autonomy. Under the law, the concept of heterosexual love becomes a crucible for Indian women, who must weigh familial and tribal attachments against legal outcomes. The severance from one’s ancestral community was a wound inflicted not only on individual women who “marry out” but also on all of their descendants. As codified by the Indian Act, aboriginal men would be recognized as Indian, as aboriginal national subjects, regardless of their attachments; women might not. The early Indian Acts attempted to delimit and define the cultural and political subjectivity of aboriginal women (while offering limited privileges to aboriginal men) by controlling their domestic relations—that is, through regulating the doubly inflected domestic locations of the family and the tribal nation. Domestic attachments at the familial scale thus determined legal, social, and economic identities under the terms of national domestication. The Indian Act, as Bonita Lawrence points out, had a direct impact on indigenous landholdings: “Without Indian status, and the band membership that goes along with it, Native people are not allowed to live on any part of an Indian reserve in Canada (unless it is leased to them as an ‘outsider’). They cannot take part in the life of their own community unless they have Indian status and hence band membership in that community.”41 As a result of this administrative method of displacement, Lawrence notes, by 1985 two-thirds of all Native people in Canada had been rendered landless and personless to their indigenous nations.42 From the point of view of aboriginal sovereignty, the Indian Act’s ability to dissolve aboriginal legal identities meant that for Indian women “marrying out,” not only does two become one, but two becomes none. Given the dominance of suicidal Indian subjects—literary death through popular novels and legal extinguishment through the Indian Act—Johnson’s story appears even more powerful as a construction of

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alternative social relations between aboriginal subjects and the settler nation. Although Christie is married to Charlie by a priest, she later denies that such rites have any hold on her; she demands recognition of Indian rites/rights as reciprocal. She continues to assert the validity of Indian legal systems as rational against the brute force of colonial conquest. Finally, when Christie informs Charlie that “nothing . . . can make a slave of a red girl” she rejects any denial of her personhood. A slave is not recognized as a full person under the state; to a lesser degree, Indian women were denied full personhood under the Indian Act, which recognizes their subjectivity solely through their relations to men. Johnson’s story radically reimagines the possibilities for Indian women by showing their autonomy—their sovereignty, in a sense—as social, cultural, and political beings. For example, although Christie initially returns to the reserve upon leaving Charlie, she soon leaves to make her home in another city. Her movement resists the linking of Indian women’s agentive bodies to land, instead tacking back and forth across social and geographic boundaries without disrupting the material or political integrity of the native community. Most important, Christie refuses to die. Her act of refusal (“‘No,’ said the girl with quick, indrawn breath”) involves the lungs; she respires rather than expires. Her refusal is nothing short of life-giving or lifeextending. Christie’s rejection of Charlie expresses key elements of aboriginal women’s political autonomy that are denied by the Indian Act. First, by moving at will across legal boundary lines in her marriage, she reveals the arbitrary nature of the principle of enfranchisement. From the opening lines of the story, it is clear that her Indian mother, not her white father, has determined the young woman’s identity, although by Canadian law she would have been categorized as nonstatus on the basis of patrilineal descent. Her father’s assertion that “Christie’s disposition is as native as her mother’s, every bit,” endorses aboriginal culture over Canadian law as a more stable category of personal and political identity.43 These vexed identities suggest that Christie’s revelation at the ball does more than scandalize

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the party; it opens a moment of racialization. Accompanying the assumption of Christie’s supposed illegitimacy is the question of her racial identity as defined by Canadian law: was she white or Indian? If Christie’s white father was married by church or state law to her Indian mother, then both parents would be legally white and so would Christie. The disconcerting question at the table is whether Christie was white before she married Charlie. The questions of class and race converge at once. Charlie’s reaction—turning pale, becoming even whiter—is a visual cue to the nature of this moment of exposure. The social disarray of the moment reveals a function of the Indian Act upon non-Indians: the construction of social order through a hierarchy of race. If Christie isn’t who they think she is, how could they know who they are? The anxiety expressed by the guests at the ball reveals how the Indian Act used the instrument of law to establish and enforce social hierarchies of the settler state. The story gets to the core of how social identities are always constructed in unstable relation to one another and of how every legal act that isolates Indians as subjects only further entangles the conditions of Indians with everyone else. By framing the domestic conflict over the reciprocal nature of rights, Johnson taps into an issue that resonated with settler Canadians in their relationship to the British Crown: the desire for autonomy vis-à-vis the British Empire. The relationship between empire and colony has often been understood in familial terms. Nancy Cott shows that American revolutionaries arguing for independence saw England as a bad parent, promoting the marriage metaphor as an alternative analogy: “The method of the new nation was union, and the essence of the national union was to be the voluntary adherence of its citizens. Allegiance was to be contractual, not coerced—to be motivated by love, not fear. . . . Understood to be founded on consent, marriage could be seen as an analogue to the legitimate polity.”44 Reciprocity is also the basis of treaty agreements, and while Johnson’s story gestures toward the treaty relationship, it more fully questions the nature of consent in a liberal democracy. As a tool of colonial administration, rights-granting institutions such as enfranchisement

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and marriage can take away from one population what they bestow upon another, stratifying political rights within a liberal democracy. Johnson’s story not only makes these inequities visible, but also expands the terms of loss: in the end, Charlie, the white man who would be the most secure subject under the law, suffers a great loss. In the Indian Act, white men figure as the unnamed, stable center against which the rights of white women, Indian men, and Indian women are defined. Yet, as the story suggests, these unnamed subjects are not outside but integrally knit into a racial classificatory system that can devastate them as well, albeit unequally. Charlie despairs at the end; his loss is real. However, his personhood and security within the nation will not be imperiled. Historically the marriage contract has functioned fundamentally as an economic arrangement that defines and protects private property holdings. As a tool of settler colonialism, marriage provisions in the Indian Act also redefined and expanded national property, or territorial holdings. But this was not the only sense in which property was shaped by the Indian Act. In her study of interracial marriage law in the United States, Peggy Pascoe argues that prohibitions against intermarriage were motivated in large part by the desire to retain private property in the hands of whites. Drawing on the work of critical race theorists, Pascoe considers how marriage laws construct the idea of race itself as a form of property.45 That is, when the law grants rights to some and excludes them for others based on race, then race becomes a form of property or asset through which to establish claims. In the case that Pascoe cites, In re Paquet, a Tillamook woman named Ophelia Paquet married a white man by Indian law during the 1880s in Oregon (in order to circumvent the state’s antimiscegenation law of 1866) and was denied rights to his property after his death. Their thirty-year union notwithstanding, the man’s brother claimed the estate, leaving Paquet destitute. The brother traded on his whiteness while deriding the couple’s Indian marriage as a mere sexual arrangement rather than a legitimate marriage (the same anxiety expressed by Charlie when he confronts Christie).

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In Paquet, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that the widow’s race disqualified her from marriage to a white man, effectively erasing her from the potential pool of heirs, and awarded the property to the brother. The Indian marriage could not be recognized as legal because the wife lacked the essential capital of whiteness in the Oregon state system.46 The Indian Act in Canada likewise understood legal whiteness as a form of property or capital. This is central to the concept of enfranchisement, which inherently understood that Indian women who married white men would be gaining social and legal capital through their new claims to whiteness. Likewise, white women who married Indian men would be losing their property rights to whiteness, although gaining some form of Indian status rights and band membership. This form of property, as is evident in both Paquet and Johnson’s story, relies in part upon the subordination of Indian marriage law as inferior or even illegitimate as a legal system. The stakes are extremely high for Christie: when she refuses to accept the denigration of Indian rites as a legitimate system of law, she also resists the property-making function of the law that establishes whiteness as a form of capital. She throws away her ring. These two forms of constructing property rights—the management of real property and the structuring of rights for both named and unnamed subjects—come together again in a second story that centers upon marriage. Published in 1907, John Milton Oskison’s story “The Problem of Old Harjo” concerns a polygamist marriage of Creek elders in Oklahoma whose union is threatened when Harjo attempts to join the church.47 In this story consent is figured as conversion, which served as the dominant idiom of Indian policy advocates in the United States during the assimilation period.48 The fundamental goal of assimilation was the concomitant conversion of land title and political identity. As land would be converted from communal holding to private property, so Indian political subjectivity would transfer from indigenous national identity to U.S. citizenship. In 1887 Congress passed the General Allotment Act, which created a

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two-tiered system for the breakup of reservation lands. Under the act, parcels between 40 and 160 acres were allotted to individual Indians, and the title was held in trust by the federal government for twentyfive years.49 At the conclusion of the trust period, Indians would receive title in fee simple and become U.S. citizens. The allotment process created surplus land of the reservations, which the federal government provided to nonnative settlers. Native communities lost more than 90 million acres, or two-thirds of the reservation land base, through this process.50 The primary advocates of the General Allotment Act were Protestant activists in the East who “professed an almost mystical faith in the value of private ownership and its power to transform the nature of any Indian who could be persuaded or forced to accept it.”51 A small number of tribes, including the Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Seminoles, Osage, Miamis, Peorias, and Sacs and Foxes of the Indian Territory were excluded from the original provisions of the act. Six years later Congress established the Dawes Commission, whose mandate was to negotiate with the tribes of the Indian Territory and make a roll of all tribal citizens. These efforts failed. In 1898 Congress passed the Curtis Act, which extinguished tribal control without the Indians’ consent and began the allotment process in the Indian Territory.52 Like the Indian Act in Canada, allotment laws assumed a set of perceived agreements or a structure of entwined consent, which carried consequences at the three interpenetrating scales of the domestic: the intimate, the tribal-national, and the settler-national. Oskison’s story explicitly references the legal process of settling the Dawes Roll as a precondition of Oklahoma statehood, for which the traditional Creek marriage and kinship system presented a troublesome knot. Set during the transitional period between Indian Territory and Oklahoma statehood, Oskison’s story animates the disciplinary pressure exerted upon ambiguous territories seeking to formalize statehood status. The practice of polygamy—and its aura of danger and excess—linked Mormons and Indians as populations and Utah and Oklahoma as territories. While the story focuses upon the Creek

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marriage, it gestures at the larger context of national expansion, showing how the process of a state entering the Union (itself a metaphor of marriage) demanded the regulation of family units in coconstituting itself with its citizenry. Like the Johnson text, Oskison’s story works through multiple discourses of Indian rights; it also suggests terms of loss for the secure members of society, positioning Indian law as central to the distribution of rights for all subjects.

Impossible Converts “The Problem of Old Harjo” opens with a declaration of conversion: “The Spirit of the Lord had descended upon Old Harjo. From the new missionary, just out from New York, he had learned that he was a sinner. The fire in the new missionary’s eyes and her gracious appeal had convinced Old Harjo that this was the time to repent and be saved.”53 When the young missionary, Miss Evans, reports to her superior Mrs. Rowell that Harjo has converted, Mrs. Rowell demands that Harjo “put away one of his wives” and “conform to the laws of the country in which he lives, the country that guarantees his idle existence.”54 Continuing in a wry tone, the narrator describes Mrs. Rowell as both sincere and patriotic, noting that “her own cousin was an earnest crusader against Mormonism” who had participated in the protests in the prior year against Reed Smoot, the statesman from Utah who was nearly expelled from the Senate because of his Mormon affiliation.55 From the opening, social anxieties over Mormonism appear on the periphery of the story. Given her orders, Miss Evans embarks on a mission of “moral rehabilitation” of Harjo, paying a visit to “the Creek’s own home where the evidences of his sin should confront him as she explained.”56 What Miss Evans finds at Harjo’s home is a double-articulated cabin surrounded by ten acres of recently harvested corn, four hogs, three cows and their heifers, two mares and their colts, well-tended gardens, and plentiful winter stores. It appears that Harjo is surviving the transition to farming in a market economy that came with the

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dissolution of the Indian Territory: “Harjo was solvent; and if the Government had ever come to his aid he could not recall the date.”57 Yet his twin cabins with a covered passageway connecting them suggests that Indian economic and social systems, maintained through kinship and other practices, continue to form the base of domestic life. Harjo offers a warm greeting to Miss Evans, who “thought of the patriarchs as she saw him lead her horse out to the stable; thus Abraham might have looked and lived.”58 The biblical reference to the revered Abraham, the father of Isaac and Ishmael through relationships with Sarah and Hagar, offers a pointed irony. Oskison’s construction of a wry, wise narrator, his use of dialect, and the specificity with which he refers to Indian Territory locales, people, and situations place him firmly in the fold of literary realism. His particular form of realism, usually termed local color or regional realism, both grows out of and asserts that Indian Territory as a distinct geopolitical and cultural space. By focusing on regional distinctions and everyday encounters, the genre lends itself, in a sense, to an autonomy that mirrored the anomalous position of the Indian Territory. As Daniel Littlefield and James Parins argue, the “separateness and relative isolation that went with Indian tribal status” might have contributed to the marginalization of Oskison and other Native American realist writers of the Indian Territory, whose contributions have only recently begun gaining attention among American literary scholars.59 Like his contemporaries Mark Twain, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Will Rogers, and Alexander Posey, Oskison drew upon the democratic promise of realism as a genre to expose the shortcomings and paradoxes of democracy as an American institution. Unquestionably, Oskison was a gifted stylist, yet his use of dialect offers more than mere local color in his stories. When Harjo introduces his family to Miss Evans, he says, “These two my wife—this one ‘Liza, this one Jennie.”60 The grammar of Harjo’s speech (“these two my wife”) suggests a problem of translation between indigenous and settler colonial systems. Harjo uses the singular term “wife” and makes his statement absent a verb that would have fixed a meaning in the

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singular or plural tense. For Harjo to give an accurate account of his world, he must fracture the colonial language. The broken English produces its own aesthetic, which draws attention to the incommensurability of systems. Undaunted, Miss Evans informs Harjo that in order to join the church he must give up one of his wives. Taking her words as jest, Harjo smiles and responds, “Give up my wife? . . . You tell me, my friend, which one I give up.”61 During this exchange ’Liza and Jennie, who “had not shared Harjo’s enthusiasm either for the white man’s God or his language,” smile pleasantly at their guest.62 The humorless Miss Evans, not understanding Harjo’s joke, replies, “Why, Harjo, how can I tell you!” Harjo sighs and turns to his wives, explaining in their native language that they need to decide which one should go. The women “laugh heartily” as they speak with Harjo, and Harjo presently translates for Miss Evans that Jennie has proposed running a race to decide. At this point, Miss Evans catches on. With her face flushed with anger, she says, “Harjo, you are making a mock of a sacred subject; I cannot allow you to talk like this.”63 The multilingual interchange breaks apart as Harjo and Miss Evans realize that they are speaking in incommensurate registers. When Harjo sees that Miss Evans is serious, he replies, “It is not good to talk like that if it is not in fun.”64 To Harjo, the “sacred subject” of his family could be challenged only as a joke. He silently rises and goes out to the stable and brings out Miss Evans’s horse, still “champing a mouthful of corn, the last of a generous portion that Harjo had put before it.”65 As Harjo waits for Miss Evans to depart, she feels anger and humiliation, and then “the humor of it burst upon her, and its human aspect. In her anxiety concerning the spiritual welfare of the sinner Harjo, she had insulted the man Harjo.”66 The journey undertaken by Miss Evans gives some sense of the distance between the abstract rule of bureaucracy and the reality of human lives. On paper, the nineteenth-century policy of individualization—of converting indigenous subjects from deeply knit social, economic, and spiritual systems into disarticulated

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citizen-subjects of a liberal democracy—seemed like a plausible solution to the “Indian question” put forward by members of benevolent societies.67 The extended family structure of Indian societies served as the locus of efforts by the activists, who found polygamy to be a “special abomination” to attack.68 Further, as Sarah Carter shows, the criminalization of polygamy served as a disciplinary tool to “undermine the authority of many of the leading Native American men” by disqualifying them from leadership positions, imposing fines, and sentencing them to prison time with hard labor. While these punishments were aimed at men, the economic and political consequences were also borne by women and children.69 Angie Debo suggests that late nineteenth-century reformers were determined “to dissolve the plural marriages, regardless of what it would mean to the discarded wives and children.” Debo quotes Chief Quanah Parker of the Quahadi Comanche as saying, “Now I come and sit down as you want. You talk about wives; which one I throw away? You pick him? You little girl, you go ’way; you got no papa— you pick him? You little fellow, you go ’way; you got no papa—you pick him?”70 The questioning of the historical Parker and the fictive Harjo is nearly identical, shifting the burden of the decision back upon the reformers. As Miss Evans realizes at the home of Harjo, what may seem ideologically straightforward is much messier on the ground and much more violent. Conversely, what seems an abomination is much more peaceful and orderly than she imagined. Her intention of addressing Harjo in his home so that “his sin should confront him” is reversed; it is she who is converted to Harjo’s cause. That the realization “burst” upon her evokes a sudden blast of light, not unlike the one seen by the biblical Saul on the road to Damascus.71 Miss Evans, stepping through the connecting passageway, begs Harjo for forgiveness and tells him she does not want him to give up one of his wives, asking only that he explain his situation. Thirty-five years ago, he says, he married ‘Liza, and they built their farm. At that time Jennie was caring for her mother who was very sick and later died, whereupon ’Liza suggested that Jennie come to live with them and

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that “maybe we have children here then.”72 He concludes, “But we have not children—never have children. We do not like that, but God He would not let it be. So, we have lived here thirty years very happy.”73 The argument for “putting away” a wife, as Tucker Chambers suggests, “mistakes love for objectification.” Miss Evans initially conceives of ’Liza and Jennie as objects of and at Harjo’s disposal. In referring to them as “his women,” she reveals an assumption that they are “his property, and what could be so difficult about giving up a duplicate object?”74 Harjo, however, refuses to view ’Liza and Jennie as things, thus he also refuses the property-making functions of monogamous marriage under American law. He has accounted for his marriage as an arrangement of mutual benefit and care, one grounded in social and legal understandings of kinship relations. If Harjo were to accept the charge to put away a wife, he would simultaneously move her out of the home and all three of them out of one legal system into another. But he refuses to see ’Liza and Jennie under the same terms that they are viewed under law: as property. If monogamous marriage understands a wife as property, then polygamous marriage produces surplus property—that is the rationale that undergirds the charge that Harjo must give up one of his wives. His refusal exposes the power of coverture law in American marriage to objectify women as property and asserts Creek family formation, and the laws that produce it, as valid. He remains, with ’Liza and Jennie, within the bonds of tribal-national law. Upon her change of heart, Miss Evans returns to the church to argue with the impenetrable Mrs. Rowell that the requirement for Harjo to put out one of his wives would not “in the least advance morality amongst the tribe, but . . . would make three gentle people unhappy for the rest of their lives.”75 The conversion of Miss Evans, then pitted against Mrs. Rowell, reflects the fact that debates over Indian policy were multifaceted and that power does not operate as a monolithic force. Sarah Carter cites evidence that a number of missionaries, not only in North America but also globally, expressed

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ambivalence or outright disagreement with their church’s antipolygamy stance. In the 1850s an Anglican bishop in South Africa declared that “those who broke up families in the name of Christian abhorrence of polygamy denied the true message of Christianity,” and in 1887 an Anglican missionary on the Blood Reserve in Canada refused to baptize two men with plural marriages, but wrote, “I have often thought it would be wrong for these Indians to put away their wives. They are old and have no homes.”76 The narrator explains, “Mrs. Rowell was not seeking to create unhappiness, for enough of it inevitably came to be pictured in the little mission building. ‘You may be right,’ she repeated, ‘but it is a grievous misfortune that old Harjo should wish to unite with the church.”’77 Old Harjo’s spiritual predicament is not unlike his political one: suspended, with no clear path through purgatory. Native Americans under assimilation policies encountered impossible situations, where the opportunity to be recognized as citizens (as “man,” in both narrow and broad senses) came at the price of disarticulating themselves from their families and cultures. In multiple ways the Dawes contract involved the exchange of the intimate domestic for the settler-national one, extinguishing the tribal-national domestic in the process. In Oskison’s story, Miss Evans shares the burden of this knowledge but is incapable of resolving it. She, too, cannot escape the essential problem of assimilation-era Indian policy: that what works as abstract bureaucracy can quickly take the form of brute force. Reformers’ commitment to the sanctity of the hearth required the rending of hearts. When Miss Evans converts from viewing Harjo as a sinner (or, in political terms, a problem) to seeing him as a man, she is haunted by her ethical position: “Month after month, as old Harjo continued to occupy his seat in the mission meetings, with that mute appeal in his eyes and a persistent light of hope on his face, Miss Evans repeated the question, ‘What can be done?’”78 The life of Miss Evans is suspended, as “she could not run away from her perplexity. . . . No, Harjo was her creation, her impossible convert, and throughout the years, until death—the great

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solvent which is not always a solvent—came to one of them, would continue to haunt her. And meanwhile, what?”79 The final words of Oskison’s story, “And meanwhile, what?” reanimates the Indian question with new significance. The story implicates the machine of assimilation policy that would equally “pulverize” indigenous lands and families. The emphasis in the final scene upon the “mute appeal in [Harjo’s] eyes” and the “light of hope on his face” asserts Harjo’s humanity, desire, and soulfulness. The illumination of Harjo’s face suggests the iconic imagery of saints and martyrs within the Christian tradition. Yet the recognition of Harjo as a spiritual rather than a degraded subject produces an emotional and spiritual disturbance in Miss Evans, who is haunted by his presence. This haunting is the irreconcilable tension produced when the colonial state comes upon its own “impossible convert[s].” In this story Harjo is suspended, as historically many Indians were, as they attempted to secure their lands through ever-shifting legal paradigms of treaty and allotment rights that left them in legal limbo. This state of legal limbo was recognized by Indian policy advocates at the time, and it fueled arguments for allotment as a solution, one that should be reached with great expedience. Yet Harjo also represents a site of refusal. Like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, Harjo does not allow the machine to run smoothly. The fragment that ends the story (“And meanwhile, what?”) rhythmically stops it short. The question lacks subject and verb, yet its action is powerful. It throws a stick in the cog of conversion. The story speaks to the rupture of conversion, and the haunting that occupies both Harjo and Miss Evans animates its aftershock. Their extended suffering gives lie to the rhetoric of proponents of allotment who envisioned conversion as a singular event that, once accomplished, was over and done. Oskison’s story records the violence of settlement, yet it does not play into the dominant narratives of the time that figured the Indian Territory as a site of chaos and lawlessness. As Littlefield and Parins argue, Oskison and other Native American writers such as William Jones (Sac and Fox) and Posey (Creek) published accounts of Indian

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Territory as a site of complexity and plurality, writing against a popular representation of the Indian Territory as “a place where whiskey flowed freely, lawlessness and violence were the rule, tribal officials were incapable of ruling and enriched themselves with tribal funds and white inhabitants (though there illegally) were virtually without protection of the law.”80 Such depictions supported the drive to statehood through the dissolution of the territory. Native American realist writers depict violence, Littlefield and Parins argue, but do not portray Indians as perpetrators: “The rule is amicable relations. While racism and racial tensions abound in the United States, racial relations are delicately balanced in the tri-racial society of the Indian Territory.”81 In this context, the conversion of Miss Evans gains significance; she crosses the boundary line of law and bears the burden of her empathy. She, too, is an impossible convert. Oskison’s contributions through the genre of realism respond to dominant narratives of Indian Territory. He not only gives shape to the Indian Territory as a distinct geopolitical and cultural space but also offers an alternative vision of what it is and what it could be. Oskison’s text draws a wider scope by describing resistance to Utah statehood, produced by social anxiety related to polygamy. The story makes three explicit references to Mormonism: two in the opening pages and one at the end. Stylistically, the threat of Mormonism provides the outer frame of the story, ever visible at the periphery of the action. The connections between Indian Territory and Utah Territory were of a piece; both represented uncontrolled populations whose domestic practices deviated from the nuclear family unit deemed essential to the liberal democratic state. As Cott argues, since the model of monogamous marriage, based on mutual consent, served as the operating metaphor for the American form of government, “Utah presented more than a religious and social aberration. It was a political threat to the integrity of the United States.”82 Mark Rifkin argues that at stake in the polygamy debate was the narrative of settler colonialism that justified the domestication of native lands and peoples based on claims to superior forms of domestic

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order at the familial and national scale. He writes, “U.S. narratives that domesticated native peoples relied on topoi of familial and household formation that validated, and in many ways naturalized, geopolitical and jurisdictional assertions of authority over indigenous territory, and the narrative of Mormonism as posing a danger to the nation is part of this legacy.”83 By linking the situations of Indian Territory and Utah Territory as both being under disciplinary settlement by the United States, the story reflects the larger dilemma for settler society. In this story Old Harjo has converted—has consented—to the church but refuses to dissolve his plural marriage. His consent to one but not the other produces an unbearable state of limbo. As a metaphor of joining the Union, this state of ambiguity questions whether nonconforming populations can ever be reconciled to the state, and if so, at what cost?

Entangled Loss Love and violence were intimately twined in Indian policy rhetoric and practice during the assimilation era, a dynamic richly expressed by indigenous writers of the period. Johnson, working in the genre of sentimental fiction, shows the incommensurability of the idiom of love with the violence of coercion. Oskison draws upon realism in his tale of impossible converts, revealing the specificity of demands upon Indian Territory within a larger project of settler-national domestication. The plots of both stories center upon marriage as the locus of intimate and national domesticities, illuminating its regulatory effects upon the third site of the tribal-national domestic. Policies aimed at breaking down the tribal-national domestic and consequently strengthening the settler-national domestic through the site of the intimate relied upon a structure of entwined consent. Johnson’s story illustrates how entwined consent functions through the Indian Act to extinguish Indian status through intermarriage. Challenging these terms of “fatal love,” the story refuses to subordinate Indian political and legal systems under the terms of the settler-

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national dominance. Oskison’s story of a plural marriage resisting pressure to splinter presents indigenous polities (writ small as a polygamous marriage) as the unanswerable question that will continue to haunt the nation indefinitely. The “meanwhile” that emerges in Oskison’s story is both resistant and troubling, given that no children came forth from the marriage. Is “meanwhile” a deferral of “vanishing”? Can meanwhile serve as an acceptable historical space? How can Old Harjo bear a likeness to the patriarch Abraham, the father of nations, while Harjo’s family is represented without children? The fusion of love and violence, as these stories suggest, is loss, a loss that entangles nonnative subjects as well. These losses are different in both kind and degree as a result of systems of stratified rights. The stories of Johnson and Oskison show the struggle of Indian protagonists who sought to separate the terms of consent, agreeing to one aspect (love) but not the other (death). Although Christie succeeds in defending aboriginal autonomy, both she and Charlie are heartbroken in the end. Old Harjo, while retaining the integrity of his marriage, is caught in a mournful limbo, sacrificing another love (his church), as Miss Evans stands by. These stories animate the possibility of resistance by disentangling the terms of consent. But such rending produces loss, and the stories end in enduring pain.

Nez Perce Women and Child. Ms. Allen and Carrie Nesbitt with child, n.d. E. Jane Gay Collection, Idaho State Historical Society, #63-221-303

2. u n n a tu r a l c h ildren Adoption and Loss in S. Alice Callahan’s Wynema and E. Pauline Johnson’s “Catharine of the ‘Crow’s Nest’”

At Fort Hall to-day, if there were present a sergeant or a lieutenant, with ten mounted soldiers, simply camped there, and I sent out to those Indians and told them that within ten days every child of school age must be in school, they would be there. Shall it be done? It will be done if public sentiment demands it; it will not be done if public sentiment does not. —Thomas J. Morgan, commissioner of Indian affairs, 1892

d u r i ng t h e assimila tion p eriod “se nt i me nt ” drove Indian policy. The wholesale removal of Indian children from their families in order to place them in government-sponsored residential and day schools depended upon public understandings of family and tribal-national domesticities as aberrant formations that were hostile to the settler states of the United States and Canada.1 Promoters of the compulsory education policy, including the Friends of the Indian, tended to frame the policy through two interlinked concepts of the settler-national family: one, that the federal government was responsible for educating its wards, the Indians; and two, that Indian parents were jeopardizing the welfare of their children by keeping them in the familial and tribal system.2 Disciplinary paternalism, a practice that recognized the violence of policies against Indian families but justified it as necessary for the Indians’ own good, was a force shaped by public sentiment. As the epigraph above indicates, public speeches supporting the schools were quick to suggest the efficacy of military deployment; in practice, Indian families endured 49

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imprisonment, forced removal, and the suspension of rations to compel attendance.3 The force of sentiment exerted itself through public policy and domestic fiction alike, working together to define the affective and legal boundaries of the family. The legal structure of wardship constructed Indians as perpetual children, in this way limiting their access to the language of both parental love and rights. Cultural ideas about the capacity of Indians to function as competent parents, combined with military and legal power, directly facilitated the ability of the settler-nation to remove Indian children from their families and homes. As legal wards—as “unnatural children” of the nation— Indians had very little rhetorical or legal standing to make claims as parents. Public sentiment took shape through the circulation of a range of texts, including tracts, newspapers, and novels. Each of these print forms played a role in constructing proper forms of public feeling and defining which bodies could function as appropriate bearers of sentiment and citizenship. In this chapter I analyze works of sentimental fiction in relation to other texts in circulation— tracts, novels, and newspapers—that produced public sentiment. In constellating these materials, I argue that the discourse of maternal love was racially stratified and, combined with the legal structure of wardship, was foreclosed to Indian mothers and families. Working through the genre of sentimental fiction, S. Alice Callahan, a Creek writer, and E. Pauline Johnson sought access to maternal discourse by portraying Indian women as mothers of adopted children. These “unnatural” children bring attention to the legal invention of Indians as wards, or unnatural children of the state, and serve to challenge the dominant portrayals of Indian families as incompetent, narratives that rationalized Indian child removal as rescue, and the very structure of wardship itself.4 At the same time, the adoption motif reveals the limits of representation, as access to the discourse of maternal love comes at the cost of suppressing Indian women’s sexuality.

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To begin, I offer the following report from a recruiting party representing the Hampton Institute that reflects the nearly insurmountable challenge Indian mothers and fathers faced in making their love of their children legible. The report is typical of the political tracts circulated by the Indian Rights Association beginning in 1879. In this report, published by the association in 1884, Rev. J. J. Gravatt describes a visit to a Lakota family with four children.5 The family was part of Chief Hump’s camp, located about eighty miles from the Cheyenne River Agency, and one of many that Gravatt’s team visited on a recruiting mission for Hampton Institute: We went to the poor home—if home it could be called—and asked the man to send his daughter to school. He kept quiet for awhile, and then said: “I have not spoken because I am not going to send my children.” I tried to reason with him. He said: “It is no use to argue with me; I cannot let my children go.” The grandmother then appeared at the door of her tipi and began to howl. She declared that they must not go, saying, “The Government has taken away our tobacco, has cut down our rations, and now wants to take away our children.” I told them I would carry the children to the Agency to be examined by the physician. If well, I wanted them to go to school; if not, I would not take them. This was enough for the mother, who had been sitting still. She thought the time had come for her to part with her children, and she could stand it no longer. She looked at me, it seemed for a moment or more—that look I cannot forget— and screaming, rushed to the door of her miserable house, broke it open, took down a long knife, and gashed herself until the blood flowed. The knife not being sufficiently sharp, she got a stone and whetted it, weeping all the time. This meant, I believe, that she had yielded the point and was terribly grieved at the idea of giving up her children, she

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knew not for what. The worst was over, and if the children could have been placed in a school near home it might have done well, but it would not do to take them under such circumstances any great distance. These poor creatures know not what they are doing in refusing to take the help offered them.6 Gravatt opens his report by implying the inferiority of Native American domesticity, questioning whether it can be conceived in the same terms as white domesticity. He then recounts three distinct moments of refusal: the father’s silence, which he must translate for Gravatt as resistance; the grandmother’s voiced objections and physical obstruction of the door; and the mother’s mourning ritual, in which she limns her petition in blood. The mother’s actions seem to be in response to Gravatt’s assertion that the children are well and thus about to be taken away. She counters the claim upon her children by slashing her own body; she destabilizes the concept of wellness by embodying the destruction of the pending loss. Yet her act of sacrificial love cannot be conceptualized as such by Gravatt. Each instance of opposition—from the father, the grandmother, and the mother—is read not as love but as incompetence by Gravatt, who posits institutionalized schooling as a reasonable and, indeed, superior home. Although he is ultimately moved by the mother’s petition, his conclusion nonetheless confirms the foundational assumption of the policy: “These poor creatures know not what they are doing.”7 This episode suggests how difficult it was for Indian families to harness the force of sentiment and shift the imperatives of the child removal policies; an Indian mother could barely make her love legible even when she wrote it in her own blood. Nineteenth-century American literature is awash in the elevating power of maternal love, yet not all forms of motherhood, love, and home are equal; representations of maternal power were racially differentiated. Even before the expansion of a literary market for women, American literary representations of “republican motherhood” valorized

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mother love as a force to protect and uplift the home and nation. Despite the purported universality of motherhood and its attendant affects, racially stratified depictions of mothers and motherhood differentiate competing national domesticities. That is, cultural and literary depictions that stratify mothers as representative of nations position domesticity differently; historically, mainstream American literature has subordinated the tribal-national to the settler-national domestic. Such subordination, present in literary representations from the early Republic, was dominant in the nineteenth century. Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, for example, represents the contest between the settler-national and the tribal-national domestic by elevating white, Christian maternity in the context of a degraded Native American domesticity. It is Rowlandson’s identity not simply as a colonial settler and a woman, but as a mother who traverses these contested boundaries that gives them shape and reveals the stakes for the future of the settler-national domestic.8 In the era of sentimental fiction, writing the mother as loving and competent and hence a bearer of sentiment—or, conversely, as savage and incompetent and without access to public feeling—was a political act with the power to shape policy. I want to explore how Callahan and Johnson, two indigenous writers working in the sentimental genre, portrayed motherhood and adoption in ways that countered legal renderings of Indian wardship and public sentiment that questioned the fitness of Indian domesticity. At stake are both legal and cultural conditions that will determine the intimate and tribalnational futures of Indian homes and families. Callahan’s story, set in Oklahoma in the late nineteenth century, recuperates the violence of Cherokee/Creek displacement and of the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 by reconstructing an Indian kinship network with a Creek woman, a white man, and orphaned Lakota infants at the center. Johnson’s story, set in a work camp during the construction of a portion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1897–98, challenges the new order of the Canadian state, which legally constructs aboriginal subjects as children to a white father. As a response to the negative

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portrayals and legal wardship of Indian mothers, adoption provides an innovative yet problematic answer: Callahan and Johnson could figure Indian women as valorous, loving mothers of adopted children, thereby avoiding any reference to sexuality. The limits of representation suggest that access to the dominant discourses of maternal love came at a cost: the elision of sexual agency and the suppression of the threat of Indian women as reproducers of life and culture. From 1879 onward, the mass removal of indigenous children from their families and homelands relied in part on a gendered discourse that constructed Indian mothers as incompetent and their children as being in need of rescue. This discourse worked within a legal structure of wardship in both the United States and Canada and perversely created legally minor status for multiple generations of indigenous populations: adults were wards, and so were their children. The structure of wardship meant that the legal destination for children was not the age of majority, or legal adulthood, but only continued status as a child; these putative rescued children could legally ascend to another rung of wardship only under governmental paternalism. The doubling of Indian wardship in legal terms produced a corresponding cultural discourse: white women activists found the opportunity to multiply their domesticating force by assuming the place of mother to both Indian mothers and their children. I am calling this dynamic tiered maternalism, in which cultural meanings of motherhood are stratified by race and underwritten by a legal structure that subordinated Indian women as legal minors, or wards. Tiered maternalism structured white, heterosexual women and their values at the apex and was coproduced with a system of disciplinary paternalism that aimed to secure the legal privileges and social positions of white society under the terms of liberal benevolence.9 The legal construction of a racially stratified national family was naturalized in popular culture in part through the production of romantic and sentimental literary texts in the nineteenth century. Such national fantasies imagined indigenous societies paradoxically: as ever-extinguishing ancestors or romantic partners bequeathing the

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land to the settler state; and as perpetual children.10 These constructions foreclose the threat of a vital contemporary generation of Indian families and kinship networks that are capable of reproducing life, culture, and claims to land. The dominant literary trope of the Native woman in both the United States and Canada through the nineteenth century imagined the hypersexualized, suicidal maiden as being hopelessly in love with the white man (see chapter 1).11 This plot structure portrayed Indian women as sexual agents, but with passions that turned back on them as self-destruction. But what if those women refused to die? Given the anxiety of an ongoing Indian presence, indigenous women came to represent a distinct kind of threat to the settler state, and government policies, particularly in Canada, aimed to curb their expressions of sexual agency. Within these two dominant contexts—tiered maternalism and Indian women’s sexuality as a threat to the state—the trope of adoption offers a rich site of investigation. I examine the work of adoption for its promise and its limitations. Adoption in these works illuminates the constructedness of relationships at the level of the family and the nation, offering both visions of indigenous recuperation and critique of the wardship structure that makes Indians unnatural children of the state. At the same time, adoption elides the autonomy of Indian women by making sentimental mothers who could draw on maternalist discourses absent the threat of sexual agency. Further, this chapter explores the expression of sentiment as the substance of a public identity. That is, proper expressions of sentiment as defined by novels and other cultural forms became the site through which claims to the public sphere are made. Callahan’s novel in particular reflects and challenges the deployment of sentiment and its relation to the constitution of white and Indian public identities.

Making Blood Relations The sentimental novel Wynema links multiple scales of indigenous domesticity with national domestication projects, while producing

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native responses that expose and counter the violence of the assimilation era. This is not to suggest that the state, dominant culture, or indigenous societies were monolithic; indeed, it is the very fluidity and contradictions within these structures that produce the opportunities for discourses to collide, challenge, or correspond. The novel, published in 1891, is set in Oklahoma among the resettled Muskogee Creeks and explicitly engages the processes of removal, treaty violation, allotment, abuse by Indian agents, and military attacks on Indian communities, including graphic depictions of the massacre at Wounded Knee. Written when Callahan was young— she was twenty-three the year the novel was published—the work admittedly has some shortcomings, including passages of unpolished prose and some ethnographically problematic depictions of Creek and Lakota communities.12 While certain frames of analysis, such as indigenous literary nationalism, may find the value of the novel questionable, I argue that it remains significant for the ways in which it performs the coproduction of national domesticity with the violence of Indian assimilation policies and thus depicts the Indian wars as unremittingly wars waged upon Indian families. In the process it highlights indigenous kinship structures—including intertribal practices of adoption—as a potential alternative to the destruction of native families. In terms of the plot, the novel foregrounds the friendship of two women, Wynema Harjo, who is Creek, and Genevieve Wier, who is white. Through the course of the novel they pursue their professional and romantic interests, ultimately marrying their respective suitors. The warmth of their friendship and eventual reciprocal kin relationship is layered. Wynema is a child when the story opens, and Genevieve—Miss Wier—is a teacher at the mission school who boards with Wynema’s family. Wynema’s development into womanhood corresponds with Genevieve’s acculturation to Creek society (as somewhat problematically depicted in the novel)13 and awakening to the political conditions facing Indians, particularly those relating to allotment and the massacre at Wounded Knee. These

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corresponding developments allow the two young women to become friends, socially and professionally, as Wynema trains to work as a teacher as well.14 Their friendship is deepened through kinship ties; even in advance of her arrival Genevieve is welcomed into the Harjo family as the patriarch, Choe, promises, “We will do all we can for the teacher, if she will live among us.”15 Later, after the pair makes an extended visit to Genevieve’s southern home, Wynema enraptures Genevieve’s brother, Robin, and a reciprocal kinship relationship is formed through their marriage, which solidifies Wynema’s place in the Wier family. Because the Wier family home is located in the South, the site of Wynema’s ancestral Creek home before the Trail of Tears, Wynema’s marriage figures a return and possible recuperation of Creek homelands. These interracial placements are not seamless; upon Robin’s confession of love, Wynema urges him not to tell his family: “I fear your mother may care, and I should feel criminal to think I had come down here and stolen you away like a wolf steals away a lamb.”16 The predatory metaphor speaks to the context that Indian women’s agency, including sexual agency, presents a threat that must be contained. In contrast, Genevieve, who manages two suitors before breaking her engagement with one and marrying the other, is portrayed as demure and proper, “a young lady, intelligent and pretty, endowed with the graces of heart and head, and surrounded by the luxuries of a Southern home.”17 A related contrast is that while Wynema’s foray into the South is portrayed as an invasion (of the southern family home) and a theft (of the white son), Genevieve’s entry into Creek country is framed in terms of invitation and benevolence. Against an unstated backdrop where the alternative was to have Creek children forcibly removed to distant boarding schools, Choe Harjo seeks out a teacher to instruct children in the home community. Genevieve says, “God has called me and I dare not refuse to do his bidding. He will care for me among the Indians as he cares for me here.”18 Genevieve’s narrative of deference to God’s will and sacrifice within the Christian idiom sanctifies her entry into Indian Territory as a divine process of national

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domestication. That is, while Wynema can be seen as an interloper to southern domesticity, Genevieve does not differentiate in any substantive way the Creek homelands from her southern homeland in terms of her claims to enter. In the logic of the story, it is impossible for Genevieve to be an interloper because the Methodist missions have both materially and rhetorically already made a home for her there; her presence is portrayed as an ethical mandate.19 That Genevieve never questions her place among the Creeks and that she finds her husband, the white missionary Gerald Keithly there, reflects the extent to which the Creek lands in Indian Territory, despite being under Creek jurisdiction, are naturalized as national domestic space. The sentimental genre, through its focus on familial bonds and domesticity, reveals and produces understandings of intimate and national domestic spaces. The tripartite structure of Wynema links processes of national domestication through movement across geographic sites: Indian Territory, the South, and the High Plains. These sites correspond to the bloody rending of various homelands in the messy work of nation building: Indian Removal in the 1830s, the Civil War in the 1860s, and the Indian Wars culminating in Wounded Knee in 1890. The book opens in Indian Territory, a distinct political space invented to accommodate the removal of southern and eastern tribes, particularly during the 1830s under Andrew Jackson’s presidency. While relocation by Indian tribes to the West began in the early 1800s, the forced migration of the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Chickasaws, and Choctaws following the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830 firmly reconstructed these lands as home to tribes whose origins were elsewhere. The dispossession of indigenous communities was part of a process through which the United States sought to unify its settlement along the eastern seaboard. As the novel opens, the diasporic Creek community is portrayed as peacefully residing in the Indian Territory, having reestablished cultural practices such as feasts, dances, and other traditions, while acculturating to the influx of missions and schools.

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The second third of the book begins with chapter 11, provocatively titled “In the Old Home,” in which Wynema travels to the South with Genevieve. The correspondence of Wynema’s ancestral home with Genevieve’s familial home, giving a double valence to the phrase “the old home,” links the Creek displacement to Indian Territory with white settlement in the South. Genevieve’s primary purpose in visiting is to evaluate the status of her relationship with Maurice Mauran, a rising young lawyer and a childhood sweetheart to whom she has been betrothed. A great deal of the action takes place in the parlor, where contentious political debates over women’s suffrage and the allotment of Indian lands reveal Maurice’s negative view of women and Indians alike. As scholars have noted, the novel treats women’s rights and Indian rights as intertwined oppressions under the patriarchal system.20 The interdependence of these issues under national domestication finds expression in a discussion between Genevieve and Maurice in which he disapproves of her position on Indian rights. He says, “I cannot but feel it a disgrace for you to have lived and labored among such a people—a people very little superior to the negro in my opinion. I am fond of you, you know, and proud of your gifted mind, but I do not want my wife to stock her mind with sentiments that, if held by all, would be injurious to the commonwealth.”21 Maurice’s association of sentiment with injury is pointed and revealing; he recognizes her access to the language of sentiment as a threat. He is concerned about the maintenance of a white male power structure, preferring to empty Genevieve’s mind of her supply of dissenting ideas. She soon cuts him off midsentence and, “flaming with indignation,” says, “I have had enough of that. I asked you your opinion on the Indian question and instead you are giving me the model by which you expect to mold your future wife.”22 Genevieve criticizes the way that “the Indian question” is answered by the buttressing of white patriarchal domesticity. She goes on to break her engagement with him, showing that she has outgrown the ideals of her youth. This rupture allows Genevieve to freely return to Indian Territory and marry the more enlightened Keithly. In this

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section the South is portrayed as a socially unprogressive site in terms of race and gender equality. In the parallel plot, Robin voices his support for women’s suffrage, expressing his admiration of Wynema in part because of her feminist stance. He ultimately leaves the South for the Indian Territory as well. Both love matches, Genevieve with Gerald and Wynema with Robin, are made at the end of this section, and a typical sentimental novel could have concluded with this happy resolution. However, chapter 18 opens “some years later” on the eve of the Wounded Knee massacre (the novel itself was published within months of the event, in the spring of 1891). As the action of the novel intensifies, so does the diction of the text, turning at times to fierce irony as it impugns the military action. Callahan’s explicit description of the massacre focuses on a Lakota couple, Wildfire and Miscona, who die covered with blood while their infant sleeps between them.23 After the massacre Carl Peterson, a doctor who will soon marry Genevieve’s younger sister, Winnie, recovers three orphaned Lakota infants along with an elderly survivor and brings them back to Indian Territory. Each of the three infants is adopted by one of the newly formed couples: Carl and Winnie, Wynema and Robin, Gerald and Genevieve. The elderly Lakota survivor, Chikena, lives among them all until her death. The action of the novel ultimately returns to the Creek center in Indian Territory, but with a reconstructed kinship system. Through the course of the novel, all of the central characters have become relations through marriage and adoption. But these are not the only relationships illuminated by the text; the plot movement through geographies of ruptured domesticity—Indian Territory, the South, and the High Plains—underscores the novel’s understanding that these sites are connected through a history of national domestication. At the conclusion of the novel Peterson predicts that the U.S. house, not unlike a Greek tragedy, will be visited by God’s wrath: I often think with a shudder . . . of the terrible retribution in store for our Government on account of its treachery and

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cruelty to the Indians. . . . It will surely be visited with troubles and sorrows and afflictions, as it has afflicted and troubled the poor, untutored savage. There will be wars and pestilence, anarchies and open rebellions. . . . Let us pray, my brothers and sisters, that God will open the eyes of the Congress and people of the United States that they change their conduct toward the despised red race, and thus avert the evil that is sure to come upon us if they persist in their present treatment of the Indians.24 Peterson’s sobering plea places not only the massacre but a whole system of oppressive policies as part of a cycle of violence that, despite aims to domesticate the American nation, will ultimately unsettle it. In its movement, the novel connects geographies of loss under a rubric of national domestication. Peterson’s speech makes these connections and potential consequences explicit. He names a shared experience of violence as the basis of an emerging pan-Indianism, one forged through blood. The concept of adoption functions at multiple levels in regard to this emerging pan-Indianism. In one sense, Creek identity operates beyond blood by making kin relations across racial boundaries and integrating whites under Creek familial terms, even as these structures are under strain and flux. But the adoption of the Lakota orphans, essential to their survival beyond the massacre, is made through blood or, more precisely, through bloodshed. Lakotas and Creeks become blood relations in a new way, bound by loss and need to survive. In the adoption of Lakota children into Creek society, the novel animates the birth of a pan-Indian political movement forged in blood, awash in bloodshed. Such a rendering aligns Callahan’s nascent work with that of later indigenous writers, who draw upon what Chadwick Allen has termed the “blood/land/memory complex.” Similar to the post-1945 writers who are the focus of Allen’s Blood Narrative, Callahan’s articulation of interconnected geographies and intertribal blood relationship

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“makes explicit the central role that land plays both in the specific project of defining indigenous minority personal, familial, and communal identities (blood) and in the larger project of reclaiming and reimagining indigenous minority histories (memory).”25 Adoption, because it demonstrates the constructed nature of relationships, underscores the unnatural course of events (dispossession, massacre) that produce the new sense of blood relation among tribal nations, giving life to an emerging pan-Indian identity.

Not Mere Sentimentalism Sentimentalism as a genre offered an obvious strategy for writers like Callahan to make legible the experiences of love and connection within Indian families and to depict the horror of state violence against these families. As Shirley Samuels points out, sentimentality in the nineteenth century operated through a range of texts to produce “a movement of sympathy, in all its anxious appeals, across race, class, and gender lines.”26 But more than offering Indian subjects as sympathetic figures, Wynema circulates a range of texts, particularly newspapers and treaties, which construct Indians as public citizens. Showing the production of public life through, rather than in opposition to, the private sphere, the novel offers several scenes of political discussions in the parlor of the home. These conversations are attended across race and gender lines, suggesting a shared world in which women and men, Indians and whites interact openly and express shared stakes in public policy. In these scenes, both Indian and American newspapers play such a prominent role as to constitute a formal voice in the discussion. Several characters recite items from the newspapers and essentially place these voices as part of ongoing debates. In a passage that discusses the escalation of tensions in the Lakota territory, Genevieve, Gerald, Mrs. Wier, and Winnie discuss items from three papers: the first, “a dispatch from Sisseton, South Dakota,” describing a state of starvation among twelve thousand Lakotas due to “the Government’s

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failure to furnish subsistence”; the second, an editorial from “another paper” that disparages the Ghost Dance and suggests that “if the United States army would kill a few thousand or so of the dancing Indians there would be no more trouble”; and a third that features the response of Masse Hadjo, a Creek elder, to the anti-Indian editorial.27 His letter to the editor is a stinging critique of white aggression against the Ghost Dance, an Indian messianic movement, that reviews the unsavory histories of Christian conquest, including the burning of innocent “witches” at the stake and torture during the Inquisition, and the very crucifixion of the Christian Messiah. He concludes, “You are anxious to get hold of our Messiah so you can put him in irons.”28 As Lisa Tatonetti argues, one of the novel’s successes is that it accentuates not only the Ghost Dance but also the problem of Indian starvation at the hands of the agents and the violation of treaties as critical conditions that surrounded the Wounded Knee massacre. Rhetorically, Callahan separates these ideas in distinct journalistic genres—the news report and the editorial—in two separate papers. According to Tatonetti, “By pairing the article on the severity of the Lakota’s difficulties with the editorial illustrating the rabid nature of dominant calls for bloodshed, Callahan invalidates any suggestion that the Lakota Ghost Dance ‘caused’ the deaths of 300 Miniconjous at Wounded Knee. . . . Callahan unsutures the Ghost Dance from Wounded Knee and refutes the simplistic narrative of cause and effect that comes to dominate later histories.”29 Callahan’s integration of the voices of multiple newspapers reflects a robust print culture at the heart of Indian Territory. The novel draws upon actual published material from both mainstream and Indian newspapers.30 Against the legal barriers to full citizenship for Indians, Callahan portrays the domestic consumption and circulation of print media as prominent aspects of both white and Indian civic identities.31 And Indian media, particularly nontribal, independent papers produced and published by Indians, played a large role in the production of protest literature, both internally, for debates within Indian Territory, and externally, for a non-Indian

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audience.32 The rapidly changing conditions in Indian Territory, particularly after the Civil War, produced a precipitous rise of the independent Indian press. Between 1865 and 1900, this phenomenon was almost exclusively limited to the Indian Territory.33 While multiple forces contributed to the rise of this flourishing print culture, two are named by Littlefield and Parins as most significant: “Paternalistic control of the reservations by the Office of Indian Affairs made no allowance for the kind of independent journalism that typified the nontribal (Indian) press,” and the combined influx of illegal settlers and the acculturation of Indians within the Territory, which created “rapid economic growth and volatile politics.”34 In 1890, when Callahan was writing Wynema, nearly twenty tribal and independent Indian papers were operating in Indian Territory.35 The novel’s depiction of this lively print culture constructs an alternative public of the tribal-national domestic and in doing so constructs the claim to public sentiment and political rights. Among the issues most energetically debated and that to great degree gave rise to the nontribal Indian press was the question of allotment, one of the domestic subjects explicitly addressed in Wynema. Contemporary critics have rightly appreciated this aspect of the novel, yet I would suggest that the very act of reading the novel as protest literature—as mere sentimentality—forecloses interpretations that reveal its role as a text circulating among many texts within the Indian Territory. If sentimentality’s main thrust was to produce “a movement of sympathy . . . across race, class, and gender lines,” then the novel’s work as a document that addresses an Indian audience is something beyond the scope of sentimentalism. That is, the novel functions for both internal indigenous audiences as well as external audiences, charting different courses for its “movement of sympathy.” While exhibiting the hallmark qualities of the sentimental genre, it nonetheless departs from them as well, producing a hybrid text that is something more or different from sentimental fiction. The intertextual nature of the work, drawing upon multiple genres, as well as its biting use of irony, sets it apart from any other sentimental novel of the time.

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In one of two chapters devoted explicitly to the allotment question, Genevieve convinces Wynema that the allotment policy is another device to enable white settlement on Indian land, exposing Wynema’s position (“But I don’t see how dividing our lands can materially damage us”) as naïve.36 Siobhan Senier suggests that such voicing is strategic: “If Callahan did have a white audience in mind, she may have found Genevieve the safest vehicle for voicing an anti-allotment position.”37 But what if Callahan did not have an exclusively white audience in mind? It is possible that Wynema was reconstructing the same debates voiced through the Indian press that would have been immediately recognizable to her contemporary readers.38 As Littlefield and Parins suggest, many newspapers “were established for political reasons, and when the issues—such as contested elections—that had brought them into existence disappeared, the papers ceased.” The highly charged but often short-lived papers reflect “the tribal factionalism that racked the Indian Territory in the last decade of the nineteenth century.” The stakes of publishing a position for or against allotment were high, and Littlefield and Parins argue that proallotment publications contributed to the demise of tribal status: “Every time the Indian press, whether tribal or nontribal, spoke out for allotment or other change in the tribal status or attacked the tribal government, the tribal title to the land moved one step closer to oblivion.”39 In constituting a debate with and through the press over allotment, the novel reflects an Indian public sphere in which real debates and differences can be aired without imperiling the tribalnational polity. The political debates voiced through the newspapers and in response to them produce a layered discourse that maps onto a political domesticity that is also layered and contested. That is, the iteration of the allotment debate not only reflects an intense internal conflict over the policy within Indian communities (the tribalnational domestic), but also exposes such debate to an external audience (the settler-national domestic). The novel works within two distinct national domestic contexts, complicating what can be

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understood as the public sphere, its potential effects, and who has a stake in it. Because the tribal-national domestic exists within the surveillance scope of the American-national domestic, any airing of political opinion carries potential consequences. At the same time, the geographic, cultural, and legal boundaries between these competing national domestic sites were rapidly disintegrating. This, too, is reflected in the novel not only through the adoption and intermarriage plots, but also through the polyvocality of the newspaper accounts. In one such passage, Wynema praises a satirical work that appeared in the St. Louis Republic, which produced “scathing criticism of the part the United States Government has taken against the Indians of the Northwest.”40 She then notes that “here are more papers with dots from the battlefield” and invites Robin to read them. He recites a long passage from the Cherokee Telephone, asking Wynema to translate into Lakota for the elderly Chikena.41 The Telephone editorial enumerates a history of “shameful dealings” by the U.S. government as the source of tensions with the Indians, saying, in part, “The Government has neglected to comply with treaties with these people—hence the war. They would rather die by the sword and bullet than to see their wives and children perish by degrees. . . . The Government owes the Indians of North America justly to-day, ten times more than it will ever pay them. Search history and you will find that these are facts and figures and not mere sentimentalism.”42 Callahan’s work frequently quotes actual newspaper accounts, and this is likely the case in Wynema’s and Robin’s exchange here. These intertextual moments reflect a complex political landscape in which issues of reproduction, war, displacement, sexuality, and Indian survival are already conjoined in the public sphere. Benedict Anderson has proposed that newspapers construct imagined communities of readers to whom the papers’ logs of markets, marriages, and happenings belong. He suggests that pools of readers can selectively read papers in ways that reflect asymmetries of power: “A colonial creole might read a Madrid newspaper if he got the

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chance (but it would say nothing about his world), but many a peninsular official, living down the same street, would, if he could help it, not read the Caracas production.”43 Through the interweaving of these various newspapers, the novel refuses the asymmetries of power that would separate the local from the national, the vernacular from the official. War orphans, allotment, land claims, and treaty discourse interpenetrate a range of texts, as does the language of sentiment. Newspaper editorials and political tracts alike distanced themselves from sentimentalism, as Robin quotes from the Cherokee Telephone: “Search history and you will find that these are facts and figures and not mere sentimentalism.” But the description works for the novel as well: Wynema is a sentimental novel, yet it contains multiple genres and voices, suggesting the limits of domestic fiction in containing dissenting or ambivalent voices concerning national domestication. Illuminating the contest over tribal-national and settler-national domesticities, the work becomes something more—not mere sentimentalism.

Women and Indians in a Bind The romantic plot of Wynema is not the exclusive or even the dominant love story in the novel. Rather, the strong bonds of affection between Wynema and Genevieve and their intersecting political concerns remain constant throughout the book. As Susan Bernardin writes, the bond between the two women launches “the novel’s efforts to forward an interlocking vision of gender, regional, and interracial affiliation based on shared moral grounds.”44 In key moments Wynema advocates white women’s suffrage, saying that “we are waiting for our more civilized white sisters to gain their liberty, and thus set an example which we shall not be slow to follow,” and Genevieve argues against the allotment policy.45 Their shared concerns and shared “moral grounds” are hampered by the structure of tiered maternalism, which stratified their access to power by race. Despite expressing the same opinions, the public sphere in the United States could

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not recognize Wynema as a bearer of sentiment; instead, Wynema exists within the realm of Indian affairs and serves as a site for the expression of sentiment and the base of Genevieve’s claims to the public sphere. The closeness of the women and their concerns belies the great distance in their individual access to the national power structure. In terms of citizenship, race positioned Genevieve and Wynema differently. As Susan Ryan points out in her study of antebellum America, white women were empowered by race to be generally understood as U.S. citizens, but because gender was an operative category, white women lacked the full citizenship rights of white men. Public advocacy of benevolence became a way for white women to more fully participate in society. According to Ryan, “Benevolence offered them a means of participating in civic life without challenging the era’s strictures against their more overt involvement in the political sphere (by voting, holding office, or speaking in public to mixed audiences). For these women, benevolent activism was the very substance of their citizenship.”46 Throughout the nineteenth century the arenas of African American uplift, Indian affairs, and workingclass urban welfare provided the sites of advocacy that shaped middleclass white women’s public identities. In other words, the impaired domesticity of blacks, Indians, and lower-class white women served as the sites for middle-class white women to assert and claim public identities. A central claim to this power by such women was made and upheld through discourses of motherhood. Maternalism as a movement corresponded with the assimilation era in Indian affairs and succeeded by making critical links between the welfare of women and children and the future of the state.47 Nineteenth-century maternalism has its roots in the late eighteenthcentury ethos of Republican Motherhood, which held that mothers would shape the future of the nation by nurturing its men. The order of the home was understood to produce the order of the republic, linking intimate and national domesticity.48 Through the rhetorical linking of these sites, as Seth Koven and Sonya Michel state,

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“maternalism always operated on two levels: it extolled the virtues of domesticity while simultaneously legitimating women’s public relationships to politics and the state, to community, workplace, and marketplace.”49 Margaret Jacobs’s work shows that white women’s activism, particularly in upholding the aboriginal child removal policies in the United States and Australia, extended from maternalist ideologies and practices. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, middle-class social reformers, particularly white women, sanctioned the rescue of children from working-class families deemed neglectful or inadequate. Yet the practice of removing children from workingclass and immigrant families dramatically decreased by the turn of the twentieth century, as reformers sought social alternatives such as day nurseries that would allow families to stay together. At the time, the forced removal of aboriginal children continued without pause; while the rubric of child welfare was applied selectively to immigrant and working-class families, Jacobs contends, “the state never envisioned the removal of all children of immigrant and workingclass parents as it sought to place all Indian children in boarding schools.”50 Public sentiment regarding the fitness of Indian mothers was critical; how society viewed Indian mothers would shape policies aimed at all Indian families and polities. The domestic novel, then, offered a forum to make legible the love of Indian mothers for their children and families and resist the child removal policies. At the same time, it could produce the maternalist discourses that attached the conditions of family to the national—though from the perspective of indigenous rights, intimate domesticity refracted upon both tribalnational and settler-national domesticities. In Wynema, the chiastic bond between the women’s concerns, that is, suffrage and allotment, reflects the ways in which women’s and Indian affairs were bound together, but unequally. White women’s advocacy organizations, such as the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA), relied upon Indian affairs as a source of exerting moral and political authority. The WNIA was founded in 1879 as the first Indian advocacy organization, predating the male-led

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Indian Rights Association by three years.51 The language of maternalism not only infused its rhetoric but also formed the structure through which these women understood their relationship to Indian issues. Here I return to the concept of tiered maternalism to stress the ways in which white middle-class women reformers constructed an idea of motherhood that excluded the maternal feelings and practices of Indian women. This sentimental exclusion corresponded to the dominant legal exclusion that defined Indians as wards of the nation. Given the constructed deficiency of Indian maternalism vis-à-vis white, middle-class motherhood, members of the WNIA defined their role as one of mothering Indian mothers and thereby speeding the assimilation process. As an editorial in the monthly WNIA publication The Indian’s Friend succinctly stated it, “A society like this, in the hands of the Christian women of the nation, is perfectly able to supply what is needed and to do this mother-work for the Indian race. . . . Let us women, then, give to the destitute tribes Christian homes and missions, for without these no race can rise. As the women are, so will the nation be. And in many tribes the women are still in savagery, and that means suffering.”52 The WNIA explicitly linked a constructed deficiency on the part of Indian mothers with an aberrant domesticity that was incompatible with American civilization and claimed for itself the responsibility of reform. If Wynema’s and Genevieve’s overlapping domesticities are emotionally and materially linked, so too were white civilized domesticity and Indian savage domesticity. The unequal bind of women and Indians suggests what Ryan has termed “intersubjective or relational citizenship,” in which individuals display their fitness for citizenship through their bonds to others, especially acts of benevolence, rather than strictly by their relationship to state. Benevolent activism in the nineteenth century was critical to shaping this kind of citizenship claim because it opened the possibility of shifting the question of citizenship “from the conventional question of who one is to the more fluid register of what one does.”53 The editorial in the inaugural issue of The Indian’s Friend makes clear that

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Indian affairs would remain a site of activism even after its formal goal of attaining citizenship rights for Indians is achieved. Even if legal barriers between white and Indian women could be ameliorated, the WNIA asserts, its cultural work would remain: There is a sense in which the Indian question must become more and more a woman question. When all legal rights are assured, all fair educational facilities provided, the women and children of the tribes will still be a sacred responsibility laid upon the white women of the land. The true civilization that begins with the child and in the home must come through women’s work, and, in one way or another these must be brought to recognize their obligation, which is all the greater because of the generations in which uncivilized women and children were inaccessible and civilized women indifferent. Indian women are coming to be, as opportunity is given, eager to redeem past losses, and white women are coming to be, as opportunity offers, eager to atone for past neglects. The latter can make their own opportunity; the former must have theirs given to them.54 In this passage the language of atonement and redemption emphasizes the organization’s self-conception of its relationship to Indian affairs as “a sacred responsibility laid upon the white women of the land.” The passage makes evident the power dynamics inherent in tiered maternalism: white women, occupying the top tier, can make their opportunity; Indian women, on the lower tier, must depend upon white benevolence to “have theirs given to them.” The power to give and take, to distribute opportunity or loss, was both part and product of a singular kind of white domesticity in the nineteenth century. As Laura Wexler argues, sentimentalism itself functioned as an “expansive, imperial project” focused on “the subjection of people of different classes and different races, who were

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compelled to play not the leading roles but the human scenery before which the melodrama of middle-class redemption could be enacted.”55 The downtrodden—above all, Indians, blacks, and immigrants— served as domestic workers in dual senses, that is, in the material maintenance of actual white homes and at the level of emotional comfort, by providing the site or the context of redemption for white domesticity. White domesticity subjugated nonwhite populations in real terms by naturalizing the affective bonds and cultural norms of middle-class Christian domesticity. It is the result of “several decades of domestic ‘sentiment’ that established the private home as the apotheosis of nurture, even within the context of slavery[,]” that made the removal of Indian children from their families to attend boarding schools thinkable.56 The connection between the material and cultural apparatuses of white domesticity can be understood, as Wexler argues, not as aspects of sentimentality, but as “a generic cultural category on its own—that is, the sentimental fiction.” This prevailing fiction “would be the myth that the avowed reform goals— widespread instruction in domesticity and vigorous pursuit of a social reform based explicitly and insistently on affective values—were never really intended to restore the vitality of the people that domestic expansion had originally appropriated.”57 The removal of Indian children from their families was a centerpiece of policies that, despite being framed in terms of benevolence, served as extensions of earlier military campaigns aimed at Indian pacification.58 As Jacobs argues, assimilation policy “arose in the midst of nineteenth-century Indian wars on the Great Plains, and reformers and officials regarded child removal as a means to prevent further resistance from Indian peoples.”59 When Capt. Richard Pratt carried out his educational experiment on Indian prisoners of war in St. Augustine, he found that the Indian men offered compliance in return for seeing their wives and children. Reformers and government officials shared Pratt’s knowledge that “separating Indian people from their kin could serve as a powerful means of compelling their obedience and squelching their resistance; Indian child removal

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worked as a tool of control as powerful, if not more so, than outright warfare.”60 Citing Pratt’s autobiography, Jacobs points to the example of a government official ordering Pratt to remove children specifically from the allegedly hostile Lakota agencies of Spotted Tail and Red Cloud, making clear that the children would serve as hostages to ensure good behavior.61 The domestic novel as a genre allows Callahan to express a fundamental truth: Indian wars are wars on Indian families. In the final chapters, the novel portrays the Lakota couple Miscona and Wildfire valiantly fighting “the iron-clad hand of the white soldiers” in a battle that pitted families against a military machine: “Not only the men, but the helpless, defenseless women and children. The command was, ‘No quarter! Kill them every one.’”62 At the close of the battle Miscona and Wildfire lay dead, their arms in an embrace, their infant sleeping quietly between them. The sentimental rendering of Miscona’s and Wildfire’s fierce love for each other and for the Lakota people can be understood as an attempt on the part of the novel to humanize Indians by making their love legible in the terms of white domesticity. It further suggests that Indian kinship systems were compatible with the kind of love associated with the nuclear family through white domesticity. As the novel makes evident, the Wounded Knee massacre was an act of war against families: elders, parents, and children. This intimate tableau not only reproduces a version of the images of the actual event, but also visually and emotionally centers the Indian child as the key question of Indian survival. The recuperation of Lakota infants into a Creek-centric adoption narrative implies a different vision of rescue, one that graphically defines the primary endangerment of Indian domesticity as the destruction of Indian domesticity. Given the scale of assault upon Indian families, the adoption motif in Wynema can be seen as a response to the rescue narrative that rationalized child removal. If one thinks of the novel as a response to such narratives, the portrayal of Miscona as a bloody mother resonates with Gravatt’s report of the mother objecting to the removal

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of her children, slashing her arms in desperate mourning. These images of bloody mothers concurrently circulated in a contest over public sentiment. At stake are policy decisions that will either facilitate or impair the continuity of Indian family relationships, for the mother and child and for all kinship relations. It is troubling that of these two bloody Indian mothers, only one bears the sentimental affect of a competent mother: the dead one. The novel links the gentility of white domesticity with its terrifying and violent underbelly by pairing the courtship and domestic plot in the foreground with the tensions over allotment, treaty violations, and Wounded Knee in the background. But the novel also offers domesticity—a complex, multiracial domesticity that reflects the rapidly shifting demography of the Indian Territory—as a potential site of recovery. With the rescue of orphans at Wounded Knee and their placement with Indian and white families in the Creek community, the novel offers a limited vision of adoption as a potential alternative to the cultural and material destruction of indigenous communities. By including the elderly Chikena in this reconstruction of family, the novel affirms indigenous kinship practices as a strategy of survival.63

Reconstructing the Nation: A Canadian (M)other While the novel figures intertribal adoption in Indian Territory, the story I turn to next offers a tale of interracial adoption and reverses the narrative of white rescue in Canada. E. Pauline Johnson’s short story “Catharine of the ‘Crow’s Nest’” (1910) features an Indian mother rescuing a white child from a lake after her mother drowns in a canoe. The story reverses dominant literary tropes of the suicidal Indian woman drowning herself in a canoe as well as the conjoined literary and legal constructions of the racially stratified national family (see chapter 1). Like Wynema, “Catharine of the ‘Crow’s Nest’” treats adoption as an act of familial and national autonomy. Yet the story also reveals unsettling limitations. In the story’s attempt to make the

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love of Indian mothers visible, it must suppress Indian women’s sexuality. For all of the political possibilities of adoption, it functions as a form of producing children without the possibility of sex. The representation of the central figure, Catharine, as both fiercely maternal and yet asexual must be understood within the context of the intense criminalization of aboriginal women’s sexuality in Canada. My analysis of the story builds upon the reading of Wynema in linking intimate domesticity with national domesticity and the pervasive violence that made unnatural children possible. It extends the discussion of tiered maternalism by showing how literary efforts to represent Indian women equal to white women as mothers displaces the portrayal of Indian women as sexually or culturally reproductive. The “nest” in “Catharine of the ‘Crow’s Nest’” may suggest images of home and maternal love, yet the opening lines locate the tale within the domestic space not of the home but of the nation: “The great transcontinental railway had been in running order for years before the managers thereof decided to build a second line across the Rocky Mountains.”64 The railroad project is both symbol and structure of national identity, a specific mode of marking the land, promoting westward expansion, and establishing national sovereignty. The story opens with a rather lengthy description of the building activities, revealing the constructed nature of the nation and juxtaposing the natural with the man-made: Tunnels, bridges, grades must be bored, built, and blasted out. It was the work of science, endurance, and indomitable courage. The summers in the canyons were seething hot, the winters in the mountains perishingly cold, with apparently inexhaustible snow clouds circling forever about the rugged peaks—snows in which many a good honest laborer was lost until the eagles and vultures came with the April thaws, and wheeled slowly above the pulseless sleeper, if indeed the wolves and mountain lions had permitted him to lie thus

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long unmolested. Those were rough and rugged days, through which equally rough and rugged men served and suffered to find foundations whereon to lay those two threads of steel that now cling like a cobweb to the walls of the wonderful “gap” known as Crow’s Nest Pass.65 Johnson’s language both valorizes the effort of the workers and portrays a world of natural resistance. The “work of science” meets the agency of a hostile site, where the forces of deadly sun, cold, snow, and predators lie in wait. In this cinematic passage, threats to survival come from above—weather patterns descend, eagles and vultures, wolves and mountain lions alight from their watchful perches. In the end, the railroad workers manage to “find foundations” to naturalize the enterprise of nation building through attaching the “threads of steel” to the walls of the mountain, giving them the appearance of nature’s cobwebs. The conflict that initiates the action of the short story is not exactly man-against-nature, but more along the lines of man-against-kitchen. The workers of the camp have lost their cook, and it falls to the head engineer, Wingate, and his foreman, Brown, to come up with a solution. After a day of unsatisfactory auditions by members of the work crew, Brown recalls that an Indian woman who “cooks like a French chef” lives up the canyon in a small shack. Wingate dispatches Brown immediately to offer her the job. The statuesque Catharine meets him at the door of her cabin but does not allow him to enter; she agrees to the terms and the wages but refuses to come down from the canyon to live among the men at the camp, establishing firm boundaries between these raced and gendered domestic sites. Through the autumn and early winter months she travels a rough road to the camp early in the morning and late at night to cook for the men, and even when snows approach she refuses to live at the camp. Catharine’s identity offers a paradox often portrayed in Johnson’s work: the woman who is at once refined and a force of nature. The

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mother figure that is Catharine is settled in the sense that she lives in a house that predates the work camp and wild in that she lives in a “crow’s nest.” The position of her cabin above the work camp is multivalenced; it suggests both a social position and sensibility above the rough, masculine workings of the camp and an association with the forces of nature which threaten the workers and their enterprise. In her manner, Catharine displays the height of Victorian sensibility, maintaining clear boundaries between her home above the camp and the camp itself; at the same time, she speaks a rough English vernacular. Her simple expressions belie a depth of knowledge that is perceived by Wingate; he is fascinated by her silence and her “strength of character” and a “depth of mournfulness to her eyes.”66 Catharine reminds Wingate of his mother, and her “vague, haunting look” reminds him of the one great tragedy in his life: the drowning death of his wife and daughter on Kootenai Lake.67 Wingate’s obsessive work on the railway, the daily challenge of pushing through Crow’s Nest Pass, numbs his grief. One day Catharine returns home during a blizzard, and Wingate and Brown follow her, trekking through the snow to her cabin. They track her trail as they would a deer’s. On the trail Wingate expresses his concern for Catharine, saying, “She looks at me as my mother used to; her eyes are like mother’s, and I loved my mother.” He later blurts out, “She’s a good woman.”68 Once they reach her cabin they discover her reason for steadfastly returning home each night, even in the face of great peril: she has a child, for whom she is the sole caretaker. Wingate asks Catharine why she did not simply bring the child with her to the camp, rather than “taking these dangerous tramps night and morning”: “Your camp no place for girl child,” she replied, looking directly at him. “Your men they rough, they get whiskey sometimes. They fight. They speak bad words, what you call swear. I not want her hear that. I not want her see whiskey man.”

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“Oh Brown!” said Wingate, turning to his companion. “What a reproach! What a reproach! Here our gang is—the vanguard of the highest civilization, but unfit for association with a little Indian child!”69 Given the history of broken promises between native peoples and government agents, Catharine’s pairing of “bad words” and “swear[ing]” is ambiguous. The corruption that she seeks to shield the child from might be as much a propensity for making false oaths as for the use of obscene language. Wingate’s comment that “our gang” is the “vanguard of the highest civilization” identifies an irony of the paternalistic policies of Canada. In the course of their conversation the child stirs and reveals her arm, “the arm of a white child.”70 Wingate is alarmed. Catharine steps between Wingate and the child, and “something of the look of a shepanther came into her face, her figure, her attitude. Her eyes lost their mournfulness and blazed a black-red at him. Her whole body seemed ready to spring.”71 She “half snarled” at Wingate, forbidding him to touch the child. Here the force of mother love is fully animated as a force of nature. Wingate speaks gently, and Catharine’s bearing changes: “A thousand mother-lights gleamed from her eyes, a thousand measures of mother-love stormed at her heart.”72 This mother love is directed at Wingate, as she reveals the child to him as none other than his own daughter, Margie, rescued by a group of Kootenai Indians after the accidental drowning of Wingate’s wife. In this development three distinct shifts in the boundaries of domesticities occur. It begins with the shocking revelation of a white arm as the disembodied, almost terrifying evidence of the interpenetration of white and Indian domesticity. Second, Catharine imposes herself as the physical boundary between the domestic (her girl child) and the foreign (Wingate as the estranged and strange figure). Finally, all boundaries (white/Indian, domestic/foreign) collapse as Catharine, through the force of love, claims Wingate as another child. These melodramatic shifts reflect the instability of

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domestic categories that attempt to be fixed through renderings in literature and law. Wingate is quite naturally overcome with the realization that his child is alive and wants to take her back to the work camp with him. Catharine is distressed at losing the girl, but her maternal feelings for Wingate prompt her to relieve his suffering by returning the child. As he prepares to leave “with his treasure-child hugged tightly in his arms,” he finds that he is without words to “thank the woman who had saved half his world for him.”73 He chokes on his emotions. Brown and Wingate depart, but when they reach the edge of the canyon Wingate realizes he cannot leave Catharine behind. He returns to her door and asks her to take the child to Calgary until he completes his survey: “Catharine, will you go with her, take care of her, nurse her, guard her for me? You said I was as your own son; will you be that good mother to me that you want to be? Will you do this for your white boy?”74 In response Catharine smiles for the first time, as “she knew with great gladness that she was not only going to keep and care for Margie, but that this laughing boy would be as a son to her for all time.”75 The story ends. Catharine’s impenetrability, like that of Crow’s Nest Pass itself, is broken by this resolution, as a new family is constituted with an Indian mother and her two white children. The physical recovery of Wingate’s child from the shores of Kootenai Lake reenacts the biblical Moses tale, in which Pharaoh’s daughter rescues the infant Israelite from the reeds of the Nile, calling upon canonical stories of interracial and intercultural devotion. The relationship evokes another biblical reference as well, that of a most revered mother among Christians: Mary, the virgin mother. Like Mary, Catharine becomes a mother without ever “knowing” the child’s father, although in this case such knowledge is literal, not merely euphemistic. Love that emerges through such extraordinary circumstances constitutes a sacred bond and elevates its agents. Johnson’s appropriation of biblical figures, particularly women, is a characteristic of her work.76 Such intertextual subversions serve both to universalize her stories for a nonnative audience and to deliver often sharp critiques of Christian

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hypocrisy. At the same time, the symbolism would be obvious to native readers as well, especially those trained through the missions, suggesting a particular appeal to aboriginal audiences. As a reconfiguration of the national family, Johnson’s story challenges the ways in which Canadian paternalism denies a proper place for Indian people yet challenges the mythology of national origins. The trope of adoption as a mechanism for making relations magnifies the constructedness of the national family, and in doing so illuminates the unnatural way in which Indians have been legally designated as wards and children of the settler-national state. The refiguring of relations suggests that the settler societies are the children of a magnanimous aboriginal mother and should treat her with respect, gratitude, and dignity. In this story the aboriginal nation is gendered female, a reversal of the Indian Act of 1869, which determines Indian legal identity through male lines (see chapter 1). Although Catharine’s story symbolically refigures the national family, on the material plane the gains to Catharine’s status seem marginal. At the level of the plot, one could argue that this is simply the story of an Indian woman becoming a nanny to a white family and not threatening the structure of power in the settler state at all. As Lora Romero’s study of domestic fiction maintains, genres and individual texts can appear contradictory or partial in their vision: progressive in some ways and reactionary in others. Following Romero’s prompt, one must consider how “some discourses could be oppositional without being outright liberating or conservative without being outright enslaving.”77 Just as the limits of the story are shaped by its surrounding political realities, so its contributions can be understood in the context of representations of Indian mothers in popular culture and law.

Controlling Sex/Acts Johnson’s portrayal of Catharine as a desexualized, stable, maternal figure directly contests the ways in which Canadian law and culture

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had hypersexualized aboriginal women’s identities in the nineteenth century. Colonial discourse promoted in the United States and Canada as the basis of protection of indigenous women relied upon contradictory definitions of their autonomy. On one hand, they were portrayed as helpless victims of indigenous economic and social structures that condemned them to life as sexual slaves and work drudges in need of rescue.78 On the other hand, indigenous women were portrayed as sexual agents with uncontrolled appetites in need of discipline and containment.79 As Jean Barman demonstrates, government campaigns to tame aboriginal women’s sexuality in British Columbia, which were supported by sensational news reports and exaggerated accounts by missionaries of Indian prostitution and debauchery, “so profoundly sexualized Aboriginal women that they were rarely permitted any other form of identity. Not just Aboriginal women but Aboriginal women’s agency was sexualized. In the extreme case their every act became perceived as a sexual act and, because of the unceasing portrayal of their sexuality as wild and out of control, as an act of provocation.”80 Using the rationale of containing Indian women’s agency—understood as coterminous with their sexuality—policies were adopted to ban the potlatch, outlaw traditional modes of housing, limit Indian mobility, and require Indian children to attend boarding schools.81 In the United States, the intimate domestic also served as a site of surveillance and a fertile base for the construction of legal offenses under the Office of Indian Affairs. As Thomas Biolsi shows, Indian agents had great latitude during the assimilation era to define and punish a range of criminal and civil offenses, which included, among other things, establishing a plural marriage, intoxication, performing the Sun Dance, fornication, and practicing as a medicine man or traditional healer. A disproportionate number of charges—punished by imprisonment, fines, hard labor, or the withholding of rations— centered upon “illicit sexual relations and prohibited domestic arrangements.” In an effort to ensure legally documented paternity, the agencies issued free marriage licenses after 1900, but there was no

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governing body authorized to grant divorces, giving rise to the “numerous cases listed as adultery, bastardy, bigamy, fornication, and illicit relationship.” In 1905, fornication and adultery topped the list of criminal and civil cases at the Pine Ridge (Lakota) reservation, and “divorce and separation” counted as an official offense.82 Johnson’s portrayal of Catharine as stable and maternal, in the model understood through sentimental fiction, challenges these portrayals of Indian women as potentially criminal agents in need of legal regulation. The stripping of Catharine’s sexuality must be understood within a context of surveillance and discipline over aboriginal women’s agency. A number of studies of Canadian policy during this period show that the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) imposed multiple disciplinary measures upon Indian families in an effort to control women’s autonomy and force conformity to the norms of white Christian society: monogamy within a nuclear family structure, a fixed rather than migrant residence, and the performance of labor within the cash economy.83 Although Euro-Canadian women were also under pressure by the state to conform to these norms, as Robin Jarvis Brownlie points out, the Indian agents had greater access to and power over Indian women than social workers had over urban immigrant women. In particular, agents could (and did) deny rations or departmental payments, curtail travel, and remove children from aboriginal women whose behavior was deemed transgressive. As Brownlie explains, “Agents showed particular objection to two kinds of behavior in women: becoming politically active in some way, usually in the form of fighting for an improvement in living conditions, and pursuing extramarital or unchurched relationships. Although political activism is not an apparently sexual activity, women who challenged the DIA ran the risk of being labeled sexual transgressors, or of being punished more harshly for perceived sexual transgressions than women who were less outspoken.”84 Brownlie terms the conflation of political and sexual agency as the “sexualization of dissent” and argues that it reflects “the larger sexualizing discourse

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with which whites responded to Aboriginal women’s refusal to cooperate with their own oppression and marginalization.”85 In this context Catharine’s situation prior to Wingate’s discovery is precarious: she is an unmarried Indian mother of a white girl, moving autonomously between her home and the all-male work camp. Living at the margins of both the work camp and Indian society and supporting herself through her own labor, she can all too easily be labeled a prostitute. The narrative that redeems her story is the narrative of domesticity in its parsed roles: cooking, caretaking, protecting. As the cook for the work camp, Catharine proves that she is serviceable (rather than a threat) to work on settler–nation building. And although Wingate and Brown are momentarily scandalized when they realize that Catharine’s charge is a white child, she is soon enough revealed as Wingate’s own. And how could it be otherwise? The too-tidy plot twist is necessary to assuage cultural anxieties over the threat that autonomous Indian women posed to white domesticity. The story responds to cultural and legal representations of Indian women as hypersexualized by producing its opposite: the hypermaternal. Adoption as the path to motherhood plays a central role in this magnification because it places all of Catharine’s agency into maternity and none into sexuality. The extreme nature of Catharine’s portrayal, then, offers some insight into the limits of portraying an autonomous Indian woman on the frontier as, in Wingate’s words, “a good woman.” The story further speaks to the problem of translation of interracial relations from frontier to urban domestic space during the time of national domestication. Intermarriage between native women and nonnative settlers and fur traders had been common since early contact. As Sylvia van Kirk shows through her study of women and the fur trade, marriage à la façon du pays was seen as an economic and social necessity for men on the frontier, particularly because it protected white womanhood. Such marriages were not sanctioned through clerical rites but formed through native social conventions. It was not uncommon for bourgeois men to abandon their Indian

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partners and families at the posts when they returned to urban society.86 These two models of domestic relations—the country marriage and the civil society—defined specific social geographies that served to construct and maintain national coherence by making incompatible two forms of domesticity. Although somewhat limited, the incorporation of Catharine into Wingate’s emotional, social, and civic world of Calgary is presented as a possibility. The story imagines that a relationship made outside of civil society could nonetheless accommodate it within its urban boundaries, and that white and Indian domesticities can coexist. The contribution of “Catharine of the ‘Crow’s Nest’” may be more fully appreciated in light of its departures from earlier representations in popular literature. The story can be usefully compared to Ann Stephens’s popular novel Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter, published in 1860. In this romantic tale, the lovely Malaeska, the daughter of a chief, marries William Danforth, a white man who joins her to live with her people. They have a child, William, but their domestic world is disrupted when hostilities break out between her tribe and the nearby white settlement in upstate New York; Danforth fights on the side of the whites and kills Malaeska’s father. In the process Danforth is also fatally wounded. Although he lacked the courage to introduce his Indian wife to his family while he was living, his dying wish is that she take the child to his family in Manhattan. Malaeska faithfully carries out her husband’s wishes, leaving her tribe behind and paddling herself and her small son in a canoe to Manhattan, where she finds Danforth’s family. Malaeska’s in-laws are grieved by their son’s death but even more disturbed by his “disgrace.” They do not want her identity as the boy’s mother known by anyone, including the child. The elder Danforths allow Malaeska to remain with the child under the condition that she assume the guise of a nanny, but even in that role she is soon replaced by a white nanny. In the Danforth home Malaeska is allowed to perform only the most menial and degrading duties, while watching her son grow up from a distance. She has no real place in the home: “Forbidden to

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associate with the people in the kitchen, yet never welcomed in the formal parlor when its master was at home, she hovered around the halls and corners of the house, or hid herself away in the gable chambers.”87 Malaeska’s hovering in peripheral areas reflects the settler-national fantasies expressed in both literature and law that force Indians to the margins of society. One day Malaeska takes the young William with her in an attempt to return with him to her tribe, but they are pursued by the elder Danforth and a crew of four men, who wrest the child away from her. She tries to follow but fails. Over the next years she lives on the edge of the city, supporting herself by selling Indian wares. William occasionally visits her and one day tells her he is leaving for Europe. Malaeska attempts again to rejoin her tribe but is rejected. She makes her home in her former wigwam on the edge of a white settlement near the Hudson River. Many years later she encounters her son again because he has become engaged to a young woman from the settlement. Malaeska sobs and falls into his arms when she sees him, but he is repulsed by her touch: “Even gratitude for all her goodness could not conquer the disgust with which he recoiled from the embrace of a savage.”88 Both of William’s grandparents have died, and Malaeska decides to tell him the truth. He is deeply distraught at the revelations and begs her to retract the story. His future is foreclosed: “I was about to be married to one so gentle—so pure—I, an Indian— was about to give my stained hand to a lovely being of untainted blood.”89 Unable to reconcile his shame, William jumps into the river and kills himself. Malaeska goes after him but is able to retrieve only his lifeless body. After William is buried, Malaeska is found dead, draped over his grave, “the heart-broken victim of an unnatural marriage.”90 The interesting parallel in the stories of Malaeska and Catharine is their relocation to a domestic space within an urban world where their motherhood is reframed. Malaeska’s situation is marked by far greater spiritual and physical violence; she is denied her true identity as the mother of her child while she continues to perform the labor of

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motherhood, until even that is denied her. Within the domestic space of the white home, she simultaneously takes on two forms of invisibility: the phantom domestic worker and the vaporous, extinction-bound Indian. While Malaeska is unable to find a real place in the Danforth house, the powerful Catharine is seen by Wingate as the guardian of his home and family. The identity of mother is diminished in Malaeska and multiplied in Catharine, as she is seen as a maternal figure to both Wingate and his child and metaphorically to the nation. Johnson’s story depicts an interracial relationship that evades the Indian Act. The Indian Act extinguished the aboriginal legal identity of Indian women, making them legally white or enfranchised if they married white men (see chapter 1). The shared domesticity of Wingate and Catharine and Margie does not draw the eye of surveillance by the settler state precisely because it is understood as being nonsexual. And its stratified structure—with Catharine as the mother to both Wingate and the girl—ensures that the family will not operate as a partnership of equals. In fact, Wingate’s valorization of Catharine as (his) mother and as a representative of motherhood more generally ensures that he will not see her on equal terms—a dynamic that can be understood as part of domesticity’s function in shaping gender more broadly. While the story offers a critique of the social order that subordinates Indians to settler society, it also raises questions about the terms of national domestication. Will the requirements of white domesticity continue to dictate the terms of national belonging? As the story suggests, such conformity comes at a price. While “Catharine of the ‘Crow’s Nest’” challenges and reimages the legal and emotional bonds of the national family, thus showing the constructedness of such national imaginings in law and culture, the story sacrifices both Catharine’s sexuality and aboriginal forms of domestic relations in order to do so. This is not a critique of Johnson but an opportunity to consider the racialized limits of the sentimental form in the context of the ways in which law and culture sexualized

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indigenous women’s agency. The only expression of interracial domesticity permitted by this story is Catharine’s multiplied, yet sterile, maternalism. Wingate and Catharine can look upon each other only in nonsexual terms, deadening Catharine’s vitality and agency; she is neutral in terms of her potential threat to the settler state. Further, in her quest to adopt her white children, Margie and Wingate, she doubly removes herself from aboriginal domesticity: from her homeland, the home that was built by the Kootenai, and from the possibility of having her own children and reproducing aboriginal forms of domesticity.

Unnatural States Indians in the United States and Canada, deemed legal wards, existed as unnatural children to the state: unnatural in the sense that their position within the racial hierarchy was entirely invented, but unnatural also in the sense that Indian wards were not permitted to grow up. Legally and socially, Indian status existed (and to some degree, continues to exist) in an anomalous or unnatural state. Adoption as a literary trope reveals the constructedness of family relations at both the intimate and national scales, while affirming long histories of indigenous autonomy in terms of making relations, both personal and political, and reconstructing Indian domesticity. Both Johnson and Callahan utilize the genre of sentimental fiction, drawing upon the idiom of sentiment that shaped Indian policy and reinscribing Indian mothers as competent and loving. Both heroines adopt unnatural children, the orphans of misfortune, whose lives would not naturally intersect, except for the intervening circumstances of war and settler nation building. Callahan’s story recuperates the violence of Cherokee/Creek displacement and Wounded Knee by reconstructing an Indian kinship network and imagining the blood relation between family members as a shared history of military conquest. Johnson’s story foregrounds the constructedness of national identity through its setting in a work camp for the transcontinental

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railroad and challenges the new order of the Canadian state, which legally constructs aboriginal subjects as children to a white father. Johnson reverses this imagined national family by portraying the Indian mother as the central figure who adopts white children and in doing so reimagines power relations in a way that places the aboriginal woman at the apex. Against the political backdrop that naturalizes the idea of indigenous populations as wards and children to the state, Johnson’s story shows how very unnatural, that is, constructed, such cultural and legal inventions can be. In the context of forced removal of Indian children and the criminalization of Indian women’s sexuality, Callahan and Johnson worked to make the love and competence of Indian mothers and families legible, but the limits of doing so were met in the sentimental forms that privileged models of white domesticity. Furthermore, the association between Indian women’s political agency and their sexuality can be understood through the limits of representation. Although the adoption motif offers a critique of the rescue narrative and depicts Indian mothers as competent to nurture white children, it limits the threat of agency by suppressing the possibility of Indian women’s sexuality. For all that Johnson’s story accomplishes, it mutes Catharine’s domestic oppositionality; she is not portrayed as a reproducer of aboriginal children and culture. Understanding this limitation in the text is critical to understanding the larger cultural and legal pressures that Indian women and their families faced at this time. The production of proper sentiment bore directly upon access to the public sphere, with white women benefiting from the structure of tiered maternalism to make their claims for a stake as public citizens. Callahan’s novel contests this racially stratified structure by producing an alternative national domesticity through the circulation of newspapers and parlor room debates that allow tribal-national domesticity to push against and imbricate itself with settler-national domesticity. Aesthetically, the novel’s incorporation of newspaper accounts and dramatic ruptures in tone—such as anger and irony—reveal the limits of the sentimental

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genre in accommodating expressions of protest from an alternative national domestic site. Put differently, the domestic novel in its conventional form cannot represent the contest of tribal-national and settler-national domesticities, as shown through Callahan’s modifications. In significant ways, her work unsettles the domestic novel and extends its capacity for dissent.

Mourning Dove, 1915. Lucullus Virgil McWhorter Photograph Collection, P.C. 85, Manuscript, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University

3 . p r eo c c u pa tio ns Labor, Land, and Performance in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea

“I wonder,” [Cogewea] concluded dramatically, “what is on the range for me?” —Cogewea, The Half-Blood

in the opening chapters of Mourning Dove’s western novel Cogewea: The Half-Blood, the workers on the Horseshoe Bend Ranch are caught up in the seasonal roundup of horses, an activity that alters their regular schedules. The heroine, Cogewea, who under normal circumstances is free to ride the range, read books, and take part in domestic duties as she pleases, is enlisted full-time in cooking, housework, and the care of her two young nephews. The work is relentless: while Cogewea and her sister Julia “were weary of the endless cooking and constant clatter of dishes,” the male ranch hands, some hired just for the roundup, “rode in the hot sun from early morning till dark, and sometimes far into the night.”1 As the sisters look forward to the end of the roundup, Cogewea muses, “Cooking and rope-throwing! . . . What a combination! The connections are manifest, but what of the results?”2 She compares the roundup to a game of chance and wonders “what is on the range for me?” When her sister teases her about catching a man, Cogewea is quick to clarify that she is “not yet riding the matrimonial round-up . . . nor am I still hunting for any maverick.”3 In other words, Cogewea isn’t about to be domesticated in any conventional sense and plans to occupy “the range” on her own terms. Indian occupations and preoccupations loom large in Cogewea, a western romance set on the Flathead reservation during one summer

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between roughly 1908 and 1915. The plot centers on the life of Cogewea, a mixed-blood Okanagon who, upon her return from an Indian boarding school in the East (presumably Carlisle), helps manage the Horseshoe Bend Ranch. She is caught in a love triangle with two ranch hands: Jim LaGrinder, the mixed-blood foreman, and Alfred Densmore, a white eastern greenhorn. Densmore is revealed soon enough to harbor ulterior motives: he hopes to marry Cogewea through Indian rites, murder her, and legally inherit the land title she holds through allotment. His scheme reveals a conceptualization of Indian law as a legitimate structure of rights, but one that is subjugated under U.S. law to deliver property rights to white men such as himself. Fortunately for Cogewea, Densmore’s plan fails, he leaves the ranch, and Cogewea happily marries Jim. The thinness of the plot is augmented by multiple detours, produced in part through Mourning Dove’s collaboration with Lucullus V. McWhorter, who heavily edited the manuscript and was the primary contact with publishers. The novel is strongest and most aesthetically pleasurable when it adheres to the western plot and less satisfying as it raggedly accommodates poetic epigraphs, ethnographic notation, and long passages of stilted, didactic political speech. Its complicated authorship and uneven aesthetics notwithstanding, the novel is compelling for the ways in which it illuminates two interlinked concepts that were central to the distribution of property and citizenship rights under the General Allotment Act of 1887: occupation in its multiple valences and performance. This chapter considers the novel’s depiction of labor, performance, and the construction of indigenous geographies that figure multiple forms of occupation and preoccupation. The term occupation is generally used to indicate one of three distinct meanings: (1) to physically inhabit or possess a place; (2) to take up space or time, such as by a vocation or avocation; or (3) to take by military force. Yet these meanings are not always distinct, and a trajectory within Indian policy since the 1830s has conflated occupation as both place and labor, while relying upon the third sense, military occupation, to underwrite

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its aims. Against a legal history that constructs indigenous property rights as a right of occupation, the novel pictures an array of occupational activities, from rounding up horses to competing at the Fourth of July powwow. Through all of the plot twists and uncertainties, the underlying pulse of the narrative is anxiety, or preoccupation, intensified by the fragmented structure of the novel itself. I begin my analysis by considering the particular threat to Indian women whose property rights through allotment made them vulnerable to mortal violence. I move to a discussion of the multivalenced meanings of Indian occupation in the novel and in law as the foundation to understanding the novel’s iteration of anxiety as a productive, rather than pathological, form of preoccupation. I then discuss the role of performance as both a site of establishing and challenging citizenship rights and end with a discussion of the authorship of the book. Questions of Indian occupation and performance are not only central to the themes in Cogewea but also a constitutive aspect of the book itself. For years scholars have wrestled with the issue of the editorial collaboration between Mourning Dove and McWhorter, and critical investigations that sought to align Mourning Dove’s diction with her “mixed-blood” identity or that analyze the degrees of indigenous authenticity to the text have, in a sense, preoccupied the field.4 A great deal of the scholarship available on Cogewea has centered on one of two analytical loci: (1) the significance of “halfblood” or “mixed-blood” identity in the text and (2) literary authenticity and textual authority in the polyvocal coauthored work. Many scholars who have considered these questions have claimed that these two aspects of the hybridized text are intertwined. Margaret Lukens argues that Mourning Dove’s focus on the mixed-blood heroine Cogewea as well as the author’s autobiographical claim to have had one Scottish ancestor, creates “an imaginative space in which to represent the reality of mixed-blood people, and a concurrent creation of a crosscultural genre, complete with its own ‘half-blood aesthetic.’”5 Martha Viehmann connects Mourning Dove’s cultural identity with her

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literary work, claiming that “mixed descent permeates every aspect of the text.”6 I attempt here to shift attention away from those themes by placing Mourning Dove and McWhorter within the milieu of the book itself, not only representing Indian occupations and performances but engaging in those labors themselves.

Western Plots The skill in performing one’s work bears directly upon one’s claim to land in the world of the novel and the logic of Indian allotment. When Cogewea’s suitors are introduced, their capacities as workers are proportional to their familiarity with the western range. While Jim is known as the Best Rider of the Flathead and previously worked as a performer in a Wild West show, Densmore can’t manage to stay in a saddle. Densmore is so inept as a ranch hand that at one point Cogewea complains that he can’t even swear right.7 Yet Densmore, with his “smooth tongue and beguiling smile,” is nonetheless able to work the situation by charming Cogewea, who is not only a competent ranch manager but also a landowner through allotment.8 In accordance with the formula of the western, Densmore has come to Montana in search of adventure and possibly riches, and his employment at Cogewea’s ranch affords him opportunities for both. As his riding skills improve, he learns from the other ranch hands that Cogewea holds title to allotted lands; they tell him she is secretly wealthy. Densmore’s romantic overtures, as he attempts to gain Cogewea’s hand—that is, her land—in marriage are patently obvious to Cogewea’s family members and the ever-devoted Jim, whom Cogewea claims to love as a brother. Jim gamely responds to her affections by calling her “little sis,” and their conversations throughout the text are marked by an ironic use of stereotypical Indian terms, such as “bury the hatchet,” “go on the warpath,” and so on. Despite the warnings of her family, Cogewea entertains Densmore’s marriage proposal, although she is suspicious when he insists upon Indian rites rather than a civil ceremony. One night, while contemplating

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an elopement, Densmore asks her to front the money and becomes impassioned when she agrees. He tries to hide his glee as he imagines “a light marriage ceremony—acquirement of property title—accidental drowning while pleasure boating—fatal shooting while hunting—sudden heart failure. . . . In mad ecstasy he again unsuccessfully attempted to kiss.”9 The intensity of Densmore’s sexual desire increases with each fantasy in which Cogewea’s dead body yields her land and stock to him. This fictive rendering aligns marriage rites with property rights and replays a very real danger for Indian women at the turn of the century, who stood to lose both their lives and their allotments if they made the wrong choices in love. Both legal and historical records support this problematic formula. In 1888, one year after the passage of the Dawes Act, Congress passed a statute to regulate the marriage of white men to Indian women, stating that no white man married to an Indian woman “shall by such marriage hereafter acquire any right to any tribal property, privilege, or interest whatever to which any member of such tribe is entitled.” Further, an Indian woman married to a white man would be automatically declared a U.S. citizen, but such status would not “impair or any way affect the right or title of such married woman to any tribal property or any interest therein.” While the statute protects communally held Indian properties from passing through Indian women’s bodies to their white male partners, it does nothing to protect the property rights of Indian women who held allotments.10 A dramatic example of this danger was the mass murder of Osage women and families during the early 1920s, after the Osage received individual mineral rights (or “head rights”) for the oil discovered on their land.11 Cogewea rebuffs Densmore’s sexual overtures, but the next day she reluctantly goes to the bank to withdraw one thousand dollars. Feeling some misgivings, she rides out on the range and meets Densmore and is surprised to see he is packing a gun. Densmore pressures her for information about her property and finances. She has the unfortunate task of telling him that the ranch hands have

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played a trick on him: while she does hold a title, it is only to eighty acres, the precise allotment under the Dawes Act. The cash Cogewea has withdrawn represents one-third of her entire net worth. Furious, Densmore ties Cogewea to a tree (an apt metaphor for the ways in which allotment connected Indian women’s bodies to land) and rides away with her money. Jim later finds Cogewea and helps her return to the ranch. She has lost some money and her pride, but not her life—or her land. Mourning Dove’s employment of the western as a genre allows for the portrayal of the violence of frontier settlement to be offered as melodrama. This genre choice becomes central to the politics of the book because it presents the threat of violence against Indian women, then resolves it without reproducing it. Although the resolution of the novel lies with the marriage of Cogewea and Jim, in opposition to a disastrous pairing with Densmore, the text cannot be characterized as anti-intermarriage. Cogewea herself is the daughter of an Okanogan woman and a white man; and both of her sisters intermarry. Her older sister’s husband runs the Horseshoe Bend Ranch, and long before the marriage takes place he hopes Cogewea will marry Jim so that the foreman can be made a partner in the ranch, thereby extending the kinship network and solidifying the land base within the family, albeit in patriarchal terms. Cogewea’s younger sister marries Frenchy, a ranch hand, and the two embark on a life together in Europe. The novel does not offer a condemnation of white men or of intermarriage, but portrays family structures within the terms of Indian kinship relations. Love does not operate as a neutral term. Here, the love triangle illuminates the ways in which the language of love can mask the threat of violence for Indian women, with personal, legal, and, above all, mortal considerations at stake. Love also has the capacity to shift the terms of loss. Shortly after Cogewea marries Jim, the washed-up Densmore, finding himself “in a cheap boarding house in an eastern city,” learns that Cogewea and her sisters have inherited tremendous wealth from their long-lost Scottish father in Alaska. In the end, it is not Cogewea but Densmore for whom the West is lost.

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Indian Occupations Densmore’s romantic preconceptions of the West are evident from the moment he arrives at the train station. He is immediately disappointed to find not “the painted and blanketed aborigine of history and romance” but a “miniature group of half-bloods and one ancient sq—w.”12 Here it is ambiguous whether “miniature” refers to the number in Cogewea’s party at the station to pick up her grandmother or simply the diminishment of Densmore’s outsized expectations. Densmore engages the ranch hand Silent Bob in a conversation, telling him, “I grew tired of the tameness of city life, and came out here hoping to secure employment on some large stock farm. I want to rough it a while among Indians and cowboys.”13 Densmore offers a familiar narrative of the West as a site of selftransformation, and throughout the text he struggles uneasily on the boundaries between competing mythic and mundane versions of the West, where he must match the skills of riding, roping and wordplay with his fellow ranch hands. Silent Bob immediately seizes upon Densmore’s ignorance of the difference between a farm and a ranch. The farm is “whar they keep hawgs, and milk a pen full of cows an’ feed calfs outen a bucket” and “hire tame white men an’ sunny school-teachers.” A ranch, Silent Bob explains, is “whar they keep hosses an’ cattle an’ run ’em on th’ range, an’ roun’ ’em up in corrals an’ bran’ ’em with a hot iron. . . . On a ranch they have wil’ Injuns an’ wil’er range riders; all a wearin’ big hats an’ silver spurs; an’ a totin’ of a six-shooter or two, with maybe notches in th’ han’els.”14 Silent Bob makes clear distinctions between the worlds of farming and ranching and establishes an important rubric of the text: the idea of the range as an alternative to complete domestication. Silent Bob’s comparison is markedly racialized and gendered, identifying the farm and its workers as an effeminate, Christianized, pale version of the wild, masculine, violent site of the ranch. In the context of eastern social reformers bent on destroying Indian subsistence economies in favor of domesticated farming, the ranch offers an alternative idiom for

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representing both practices. Through the discourse of labor—the nature of work on the ranch—the categories of “wil’ Injuns” and “wil’er range riders” are collapsed rather than oppositional. While allotment was designed to make farmers of the Indians—to domesticate them like “tame white men” and Sunday school teachers, as Silent Bob would say—the world of the range as an uncontained, unbounded site offers an alternative social and physical geography. The novel’s location on the postallotment Flathead reservation animates “ranging” as an alternative parlance and practice to “roaming,” in a sense reflecting Native American adaptation in the face of massive land loss and assault upon subsistence economies. As Robert Bigart shows in his study of the Flathead/Bitterroot Salish economy in the late nineteenth century, the expansion of agricultural enterprise was the primary strategy for retaining traditional homelands following the decimation of the buffalo and the encroachment of white settlement, which intensified with allotment.15 The mapping of the range and ranching can be understood as a representation of resistance to farming, and the endurance rather than loss of tribalnational land. Occupation operates at two somewhat dissonant registers: the ongoing occupation of homelands by indigenous communities; and the changed occupations of Indian workers trying to survive the upheavals of the economy. While shifts in Indian occupations represent changes at the scale of the tribal-national domestic, Cogewea, too, shows the pressures of domestication at the intimate, familial level. Through the movements of Cogewea, these two scales of domesticity are linked. Cogewea (or Q’wec’íy’ea, the Salish term for “Chipmunk”)16 is introduced in the text as a skilled equestrian who makes “runaway trips” by horseback into the “bordering mountains,” heedless of her grandmother’s warnings; she is compared to “some creature born of the wild” who would not be deterred from her course once her mind was set.17 In contrast to the era’s models of demure womanhood, models which were firmly enforced through Indian boarding schools, of which Cogewea was a product, the text states that “no prudishness marked

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the movements of this strange, self-reliant girl,”18 suggesting an association between her economic and sexual autonomy. When Densmore first encounters Cogewea he is perplexed: “He could not fathom the ‘forward’ girl with the musical, though unpronounceable name. What was she?”19 Densmore’s inability to “fathom” her and his question of what, rather than who, she was, underscores Cogewea’s attempt to challenge racial and gender categories and to live on her own terms.20 The name of Cogewea’s horse, Wan-a-wish, means “rushing water,” and in the tradition of the western the horse is closely associated with its rider. Wan-a-wish is also called Outlaw and is one of many characters, along with the ménage of ranch hands, who confound boundaries throughout the text. As the novel opens, Cogewea is portrayed as a woman with tremendous freedom to traverse various physical and social territories: “An ambitious girl, and, although having passed through the mill of social refinement, she was still—thanks to early training—whole hearted and a lover of nature. . . . Since her return from school her everyday companions had been the cowboys of the range. With them or alone, she took many a thrilling dash on Wan-a-wish, across the swelling plains or among the buttes and coulees of the broken uplands. Fond of books, the best authors claimed her attention when she was not riding or helping with the routine work of the house.”21 Her primary occupations are threefold: riding the range, reading her books, and working in the house; for Cogewea, these acts are interconnected both physically and spiritually. As the novel unfolds, her entanglements with Densmore increasingly threaten her free passage through these various sites, in a pattern that equates domestication with containment. Indian occupation—in its double inflection of place and labor—has been a site of contest between the settler-national domestic and the tribal-national domestic from the early days of the Republic. The first treaties with a young United States offered spinning wheels, woven textiles, and domesticated animals in exchange for shared occupancy of land.22 Through the mid-nineteenth century the exchange of domestic and agricultural goods for land functioned as

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“tools of reform rather than examples of reciprocity.”23 Around the 1830s the U.S. Supreme Court took up the definition of Indian occupation in the Marshall Trilogy, the foundational rulings in Indian law.24 In crafting those early Supreme Court rulings, Chief Justice John Marshall affirms that Indian nations have real claims to land, even as their full exercise of power was “impaired” by European colonization.25 In the ruling of 1823 that establishes title by conquest, or what is known as the Doctrine of Discovery, Marshall argues that the European powers recognized not Indian title but merely Indian occupancy of North America: “While the different nations of Europe respected the right of the natives, as occupants, they asserted the ultimate dominion to be in themselves; and claimed and exercised, as a consequence of this ultimate dominion, a power to grant the soil, while yet in possession of the natives.”26 This construct of Indian occupancy rather than outright ownership provides a very limited concept of property rights for Indians; it vests absolute property rights with occupying forces under the Doctrine of Discovery. Marshall’s ruling attempts to reconcile the fact of Indian presence in the Americas with the goals of a young U.S. empire in expanding its own land claims. Still, it is not complete abrogation; the legal scholar Charles Wilkinson argues that despite being “well short of complete fee ownership,” the concept of a “right of occupancy” represents “a unique real property interest” that is a “compromise between tribal rights and the prerogatives of the discovering nations.”27 Marshall writes that the United States did not invent the Doctrine of Discovery but inherited it, yet inheritance of this system does not entirely justify it. Here Marshall rationalizes the violent conquest of Indian lands as incumbent upon the indigenous occupants themselves. The idea of title by conquest, according to Marshall, is justified by the “character and habits of the people whose rights have been wrested from them.”28 The native peoples of the continent were not, after all, docile subjects who would easily amalgamate with their new rulers, but defiantly independent. Marshall’s ruling formulates the vastness of the land in inverse relation to the inferiority of the native population,

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drawing explicitly on the language of Indian savagery: “But the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest. To leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness; to govern them as a distinct people, was impossible, because they were as brave and high spirited as they were fierce, and were ready to repel by arms every attempt on their independence.”29 Here the interwoven nature of the term occupation is revealed as both place and labor. While Marshall intended only the second meaning (“[their] occupation was war”), it is compelling to consider the ways in which this ruling and the larger body of federal Indian law have conflated the two. According to Marshall and many policymakers who would follow, Indians did not deserve to occupy the land because they did not know what to do with it: To leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness. And land that was not put to use by the terms of a civilized nation (that is, by the terms of the free-enterprise market economy) could not be tolerated under U.S. settler colonialism. By 1879 more shifts in Indian occupations were on the horizon. In 1879 the United States adopted a policy of forcibly removing Indian children from their homes and families to attend distant boarding schools, training them in the English language and domestic and manual labor trades through military-style regimens.30 Bringing together the land claims and labor, the General Allotment Act of 1887 (the Dawes Act) divided communally held reservation lands into sections, then assigned as individual title to Indian men, women, and children. As part of the act’s “civilizing mission,” the individual landowners were eligible for U.S. citizenship, under certain conditions.31 Once the reservation lands had been allotted to individual Indians, the surplus land was made available to nonnative homesteaders and business interests such as railroads and irrigation projects. Through this process the Indian reservation base was decimated, as more than ninety million acres—or two-thirds of the total land base—passed out of Indian hands. D. S. Otis argues that the

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allotment process was carried out with “extreme haste” for two primary reasons: the pressure of land speculators and business interests to open up the West, and a belief on the part of the Friends of the Indians that private property would, by design, make citizens of Indians. As Otis writes, “This prevailing faith in the almost automatic efficacy of allotment made it possible for the Government to yield in this instance to irresistible pressures with a clear conscience.”32 In other words, private property could do the work of domestication that military conquest alone could not.

The Dialectic of Preoccupation In the same way that various definitions of occupation coalesced under assimilation-era Indian policy, the term preoccupation also took on multivalent meanings. In Cogewea, the notion of preoccupation is animated in two ways, which point to interlocking meanings: preoccupation in the sense of anxiety or an engrossing concern that excludes other thoughts; and preoccupation in the sense of having previously occupied a place.33 Cogewea displays anxiety throughout the text, and given the constant shifts in Indian law and policy, not to mention the ongoing threat of settler violence in Indian country, she is right to be nervous. Yet she also reflects practices of preoccupation of the territory, in the sense that her movement through the land and her musing over Indian pasts and futures, at times portrayed as haunting, inscribe alternative spatial and economic relationships to land that arise through longtime indigenous possession. In this way, preoccupation as it relates to anxiety and preoccupation as it reflects land claims and autonomy are intertwined and mutually reinforcing in terms of the politics of Indian sovereignty. As the legal scholar John Borrows has written of native relations in Canada, “Aboriginal peoples have a pre-occupation. It is of land. They occupied land in North America prior to others’ arrival on its shores. Over the past twohundred and fifty years Aboriginal peoples have been largely dispossessed of their lands and resources in Canada. This dispossession

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has led to another Aboriginal pre-occupation. It is with land. It is crucial to their survival as peoples. Its loss haunts their dreams. Its continuing occupation and/or re-occupation inspires their visions.”34 Borrows further links the tension between aboriginal memory (as a prevailing psychic presence, a preoccupation) and the historical amnesia of the dominant society with traumas and frustrations that produce overt, often militarized conflicts over land. He argues that both natives and settlers have used armed occupation and blockades to express land and political rights and suggests a set of best practices in which native voices of preoccupation (in both their physical and psychological senses) can be heard and registered, particularly within the legal system. Within this framework, Cogewea’s musings and preoccupations on and off the range serve a much larger political purpose. In terms of land claims, Cogewea’s preoccupations serve the project of bridging the past and the future; her engrossing visions of loss from the past and anxiety for the future operate within the continuity of land occupation. She asserts two forms of landownership: ancestral-kinship claims and allotment title, or double title to the range. This inheritance is multiplied at the end of the text, when she becomes the beneficiary of her long-lost Scottish father’s wealth. The trauma of loss of ancestral lands, of the buffalo, and of lifeways exists within the same site as the promise of continued occupation, an occupation that is refigured in cultural, temporal, and physical ways. As Borrows suggests, preoccupation, to the extent that it expresses an ever-present and urgent yearning for reoccupation, is inextricably linked to occupation in struggles to express indigenous political and economic autonomy. The various expressions of preoccupation operate as a literary aesthetic in what I term the dialectic of preoccupation. Similar to other aspects of Native American literary aesthetics that are shaped by the ongoing processes of colonialism,35 the dialectic of preoccupation contains an unstable contradiction: it is at once the iteration of sovereignty—in the sense that Native Americans pre-occupied the land prior to colonization—and that which contests it, to the extent that preoccupation is a form of anxiety

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produced by the reality of colonization. In this way, the text’s figuring of preoccupation reflects a concept of indigenous sovereignty that is both durable and contingent. The Okanogan characters—Jim, Cogewea, and her grandmother, Stemteemä—are worried about a number of things. Cogewea is primarily preoccupied with her future. In one characteristic passage, she contemplates her fate as “the despised breed”: “The sun dipped lower, as Cogewea, gazing out over the undulating hills to the west, dreamed on. What had the future in store for her? What would it bring? Would it, through her, illuminate the pathway of others? Could she fill any sphere of usefulness; or would she, like the race whose hue she had inherited, be brushed aside, crushed and defeated by the cold dictates of the ‘superior’ earth-lords?”36 Cogewea is preoccupied with the prospect of occupation, both in the physical sense of occupying the land and in questioning her own “sphere of usefulness.” A recurring motif has Cogewea arriving at a vista, surveying the landscape, and projecting the loss of Indian lifeways or fretting about an uncertain future. While she often despairs over her social location (or lack of it) as a “ ’breed,” the fact remains that she is, at the same time, occupying a specific physical, social, and temporal space. The dialectic of preoccupation reflects the instability of political sovereignty for aboriginal societies within ongoing colonial projects in the United States and Canada. But this preoccupation is productive rather than pathological; anxiety is tempered by ancestral claims to land. One of the ways the book constructs the overlapping geographies of settlement and displacement is by traversing various interior spaces, including the domestic sites of the ranch, the house, and the imaginative space of memory. Chapter 3, “A Range Idyl,” takes place almost entirely within the ranch house but reflects the interpenetrations of psychic and physical space. The house features “large airy rooms” and a living room that is “commodious, with leather upholstered chairs and divan. The floor was bare, save for the buffalo, bear and mountain lion skins scattered about.” A great open fireplace is stocked

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with “rustic wood,” and a “case of books, and a center table with a lamp” constitute the remaining pieces of furniture. The walls are decorated with paintings of wildlife and the mounted antlers of deer and elk. Among these many representations of the wild exterior world marking the domestic space of the home is one great trophy: “the mounted head of a mighty buffalo bull,” towering above the bookcase.37 While such a prize can be read as the celebratory evidence of the conquest of the range, Cogewea cannot turn her eyes upon it without feeling sadness: “Cogewea never looked upon this trophy without a pang of regret. The fixed glassy eyes haunted her, as a ghost of the past. With her people had vanished this monarch of the plains. The war-whoop and the thunder of the herd were alike hushed in the silence of the last sleep—and only the wind sighing a parting requiem.”38 Despite the elegiac tone of this passage, Cogewea’s refusal to regard the buffalo head as a trophy—she sees it rather as a symbol of history, an agent of haunting—gives rise to the notion of domestic disruption. That is, rather than representing triumphant conquest, the buffalo head testifies to a former presence, a preoccupation, of both Indians and buffalo upon the land. The head disturbs Cogewea; its “glassy eyes haunted her.” Cogewea, the Indian, has not vanished but is right there in the living room, reoccupying the space of the range. The buffalo head’s presence in the room—with the illusion of the animal’s upper torso bursting through the wall, as though the rest of the body would be found on the other side—is a keen symbol of the ways in which the preoccupation of the land by Indians will continue to trouble the order of the domestic space of both the house and the nation for some time to come. And Cogewea’s ongoing spiritual preoccupation with Indian history will continue to animate dreams of reoccupation and continuity. The buffalo as a trophy, as the symbol of domestic containment of the animals, the Indians, and the range itself, belies a history that Cogewea ponders later in the book: the buffalo aren’t indeed dead but instead have been removed to Canada. So there is something true and haunting in the idea that at the same time the mounted head is

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disrupting the interior, the “balance of the body” exists just on the other side of the border—in this case, a national border which is equally as constructed as the ranch house wall. As other scholars have noted, the buffalo is a significant “spirit helper” to Cogewea, particularly because in the final chapter of the novel, as she realizes her love for Jim and resolves to marry him, she hears a guiding voice (“as it comes only to the Indian”) arise from an old buffalo skull.39 In both the haunting presence of the buffalo head in the house and in the spiritual utterance of the buffalo skull, histories of removal come to life. And it is possible that these acts are evoking not an irretrievable loss but a more complicated political and cultural reality of Native American diaspora. The significance of understanding the removal of the buffalo to Canada as a reflection of diaspora rather than complete loss is that it enables visions of reunification and counters narratives of Native American extinction (or vanishing) that were so popular at the turn of the century. In 1908 Mourning Dove witnessed the roundup of the Pablo herd of buffalo in Montana for sale in Canada; a description of the event forms the heart of a key chapter in the text, “On the Old Buffalo Grounds.” In this chapter Cogewea rides out to Buffalo Butte with Densmore in order to contemplate his marriage proposal to her. She is not convinced of his sincerity, especially because he has asked to be married by Indian rites rather than by the courts, and the voice of Stemteemä, warning her against him, is on her mind. Cogewea ascends the butte in advance of Densmore—she purposely spurs her horse, leaving him behind with “no cohesion with his saddle”—and, as she surveys the land, her mind turns to the past: “The far stretching prairies, the flats and coulees now decorated by the six-by-ten shacks of homesteaders, were once this animal’s domain. Was it any wonder that the old Indians were soul-weary, preferring to go the shadowy way, where again the buffalo may roam unmolested by the invasion of the white man. . . . A few more generations at most, and the fullblooded Indian shall have followed the Buffalo—not those sold to the Canadians—but those of the sunset trail.”40 In this passage the

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conflicting narratives of Indian extinction and Indian diaspora come directly into contact. The narrative of voluntary extinction (“preferring to go the shadowy way”) fits the template of “Hiawatha,” Hobomok, and any number of popular fictive depictions of Indians in early American literature (see chapters 1 and 2). But this vision of a mythotragical conclusion is disrupted by the insertion of a rather mundane exception: “not those sold to the Canadians.” The exception admits the possibility of survival, a different axis for viewing Indian futures, one dependent not on an east–west pole (manifest destiny, the frontier, the sunset trail) but on a north–south one. This is in no way to replace the romantic vision of Indian extinction with an equally romantic vision of hemispheric salvation, but to suggest that Mourning Dove’s depiction of the range is complicated by real histories coming into contact with mythological ones. In fact, the sale of the Pablo herd to the Canadian government is directly connected to both allotment in the United States and nationalization for both the United States and Canada. The process not only renders the wild into the domesticated, but also serves to mutually reinforce the dominance of the colonizing governments. On the heels of the mid-nineteenth-century destruction of buffalo herds by U.S. settlement, the Pablo buffalo herd was started in 1884 on the Flathead reservation by two tribal members, Charles Allard and Michel Pablo. After Allard died in 1895, the herd became known by its sole manager, Pablo, whom Cogewea describes as “The Buffalo King of the Flathead.” She explains that “his ancestors hunted buffalo on these same grounds, as did mine of the Swa-netk-qha, who made annual trips here.”41 Cogewea links indigenous histories and economies with the practices of place making, again affirming “lived topographies” or Indian occupations in multiple senses.42 The Pablo herd, which had supplied buffalo to various zoos and shows throughout the United States, became dispossessed of its range through the allotment of Flathead lands in 1906. Without the land base to sustain the herd, Pablo sold the animals in 1908 to the Canadian government, which relocated them to Elk Island and Buffalo national parks in

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Alberta. The sale of the buffalo to the Canadian national parks was seen as an affront to American culture and pride, and the reaction among American conservationists reflects the significance of the buffalo in the American national imaginary. In 1905 a group of eastern conservationists organized the American Bison Society to secure adequate public lands to maintain national buffalo herds that were, like the Indians in popular parlance, vanishing in the West. As President Theodore Roosevelt, an early supporter of the society, wrote in 1907, “I feel real and great interest in the work being done . . . to preserve the buffalo—the biggest of the American big game, probably, on the whole, the most distinctive game animal of this continent, and certainly the animal which played the greatest part in the lives of the Indians, and which most deeply impressed the imagination of all the old hunters and early settlers.”43 Roosevelt and the American Bison Society understood the significance of the national imaginary in constructing public space, and the wild buffalo herds were the key component to remapping the Flathead Indian reservation as national preserve space. In 1908 the American Bison Society successfully lobbied Congress to establish an eight-hundred-acre bison preserve in Montana to replace the Pablo bison herd that had been squeezed out through allotment. Ironically, the preserve was knit together out of former Flathead reservation lands, now reconstructed as U.S. public commons. In the report to Congress, the recommendation acknowledged that five Indian allotments would have to be extinguished or exchanged in order to establish the preserve. The transactions involving the buffalo metaphorically and also materially reveal how indigenous economies were sacrificed to remap U.S. and Canadian national space. The coconstitution of national symbolism and containment of indigenous economies can be seen in the production and circulation of the Indian head–buffalo head nickel during roughly the same period, 1913–38. Cogewea’s ruminations, in which she not only occupies the space of the old buffalo grounds, but also narrates the pre-occupation of indigenous histories and practices,

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constitutes a form of resistance at the level of the imaginary. While the buffalo may metonymically reference indigenous communities as objects of nation-state regulation, these processes are not complete; in the midst of mourning loss, an exception appears. This mapping of the range as a multinational domestic space shaped by aboriginal histories and occupations reconstructs through the dialectic of preoccupation a vision of alternative indigenous futures. The novel recognizes the role of the imaginary in contests over space (and, in a sense, sovereignty) and actual mappings of the land. In the same way that the American conservationists employed the buffalo as markers of national domestic space, Cogewea asserts an alternative indigenous imaginary that ties past practices with future possibilities, yet remains riddled with anxiety. Such are the political and aesthetic dimensions of preoccupation.

Competence and the Performative Taxonomy of Citizenship Indian occupation is linked to citizenship through performance. The boarding schools played a central role in establishing the performance of labor and the performance of patriotism as key indices of American citizenship. The schools themselves were pre-occupational, designed to train Indian boys and girls for future employment as manual laborers and domestic workers. In a memo of 1889, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Morgan instructs agents and superintendents of Indian schools to inculcate U.S. patriotism among the students, given that “Indians are destined to become absorbed into the national life, not as Indians, but as Americans.”44 The Dawes Act explicitly linked U.S. citizenship with land, producing changes in the status of both, even for those Indians who sought to retain land and political subjectivity within the tribal-national space. The goals of settlernational domestication, that is, the settling of lands and individuals under U.S. authority, were pursued through a process that coproduced an individual citizen with a discrete plot of land. The original Dawes bill included a twenty-five-year waiting period between allotment and

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the receipt of land title with citizenship, allowing allottees to demonstrate their ability—deemed competence—at homesteading and conducting their affairs. In 1906 Congress passed the Burke Act as a follow-up to the Dawes Act to ensure that only competent Indians would be assigned title to their allotments and citizenship at the same time; those deemed incompetent would remain under government wardship until declared competent. Under the Burke Act, the category of industry, not blood, became a dominant measurement of competency. In the first years after Burke, competency was determined primarily by the Indian agent on the reservation, who would forward written applications from individual Indians to the Washington office for approval. A report from 1908 found that this system was fraught with fraud and land loss to speculators for the Indian allottees.45 In 1909 Secretary of Interior Robert Valentine created the first “competency commission” of two men to work with the local agent to determine individual competency and issue patents. Under this process the commission relied upon a set of performances of competency based on each applicant’s mastery of certain skills, including use of English, adoption of Christianity, style of hair and dress, age, education, marital status, domestic and manual labor skills, and sobriety. These bodily submissions were deemed by officials as both part and product of the national domestication process for Indians.46 In the competency reports, domesticity operates as an index of fitness for citizenship and land allotment, which were linked under the Dawes and Burke acts. Two representative examples of competency reports from the survey of 1916 at Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, read as follows: This allottee, John W. Lehnes, has a wife and 10 children. He is a bright and progressive man who is residing on 40 acres of his original allotment which he transferred to his wife by deed approved April 22, 1915 and upon which he has a 6 room frame house, frame barn 16 × 32 ft. with two additions thereto,

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each 16 feet square, a 30 ft. well with pump, and cultivates 400 acres of land which is all in crop this year, a considerable portion of which he leases from Indian allottees. He owns 18 horses, 2 milch cows, several sets of harness, wagons, and all necessary farming implements, also a Cadalac (sic) automobile. His wife received fee patent for her 80 acre allotment about a year ago and owns it yet. This allottee is in every respect a white man other than his degree of Indian blood, and as he is fully competent to transact his own business affairs equal to the ordinary white man we recommend that patent in fee be issued to him for his restricted tract, which we value at $25.00 per acre. (T)his allottee, Emma White, is the wife of Charles White, an educated half-blood allottee of this reservation. They have three children and are living on the husband’s land, upon which they have a 2 room frame house, and frame barn 16 × 20 feet. Have 3 horses, 1 farm wagon, 1 buggy, 1 set double harness and a single harness, also sulky plow, drag, mower and other necessary farm implements. This allottee does not speak English very well but is otherwise bright and a good housekeeper. Her husband is capable and quite bright, being frequently employed as official interpreter in U.S. Courts, and believing this allottee competent to transact her business affairs we recommend that patent in fee be issued to her for her allotment, which we value at $15.00 per acre.47 As the reports reveal, the competency process relied upon domestic inventories that measured citizenship through the production of specific, gendered forms of homemaking and land management. While these reports show exact dimensions of buildings, the accrual of domestic animals and tools, and even symbols of American status consumerism (a Cadillac car), other reports listed the number and

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type of household appliances, musical instruments such as pianos, and phone lines. The measure of competency, plainly stated, was “an ordinary white man” who served as the patriarchal head of a nuclear family unit; analogously, Indian women were measured against the expectations of white women’s domesticity. The degree to which the criteria for citizenship were unstable and overlapping is revealed in the report on Emma White, in which good housekeeping stands in for the ability to speak English. A range of domestic practices, from animal husbandry to housekeeping to bilingualism, produced what I term a performative taxonomy of citizenship. The performative taxonomy of citizenship recognizes the construction of citizenship as a set of dynamic categories that are measured against the normalizing gaze of the state. The performative aspect identifies the bodily submissions that are required in the movement from subject to citizen, while at the same time affirming the multivalent meanings made possible through performance. Under the classificatory eye of the state, performances of competence that are centered on domestic categories invert the domain of public and private space. Under the competency commissions, individual homes and bodies were analyzed and measured against “degree of Indian blood.” Private domestic spaces and intimate relationships served as the locus of a public, civic identity. The calibration process itself, that is, the making of the taxonomy with its various weighted categories, produced a type of citizenship that made public specimen and spectacle of Native American bodies. For Indians at this time, the inversion of private domesticity with public identity was concurrent with the making of communal, reservation lands into private property. In other words, the reservation—the tribal-national domestic space—was made private through a process that made private domesticity—the family home—a public site of state scrutiny. Bodies and territories alike were measured, surveyed, and individuated. As has been widely recognized by students of governmentality, liberalism allocates a form of freedom to its citizens, but this form of freedom will be granted only to those who

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measure up. What remains to be more fully explored is the extent to which one’s private, domestic affairs qualify one (or not) for full membership in the liberal public of citizen-subjects and the extent to which this type of political agency is desirable. Indians who resisted the fee patent system distinctly understood the performative nature of the citizenship evaluation process. One way to resist the patent was to perform incompetence, as Chief Rush Roberts of the Pawnee did by saying through an interpreter that he could not read, write, or speak English and did not want a fee patent. The commissioners rejected his claim and issued the patent anyway. Others made eloquent appeals to the commission, insisting that the patents would result in the loss of land through white swindlers and taxation. Unfortunately, the rubric of competency was structured in such a way that those Indians who could make the best arguments against the patents only proved their competency. Not surprisingly, the competency commission’s work in assigning patents resulted in huge land loss and the impoverishment of indigenous families across the country.48 More than a demonstration of fitness for citizenship, performance became a way to produce political subjectivity. Beginning in 1916 the competency commission began to stage citizenship ceremonies on reservations to mark the passage from Indian to citizen.49 Something beyond symbolic enactments, they were also the site through which the patents were issued. This event effectively linked the representation of state power with the material product; individuals were handed their land title along with their citizenship. In these staged performances Indian men would shoot a “final arrow” to mark the end of their resistance to the United States, then place their hands upon a plow and vow to take up agriculture. The secretary of interior would present the men with purses to symbolize thrift, and all would place their hands on a flag and the men would recite: “For as much as the President has said that I am worthy to be a citizen of the United States, I now promise this flag that I will give my hands, my head, and my heart to the doing of all that will make me a true American

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citizen.”50 As a symbol of their differently constructed domesticity, Indian women would receive small sewing kits and commemorative pins. The land patents as well as the props, including the arrows, were issued by the government.51 Yet from the very first ceremony onward, Native Americans participated in and modified the ceremonies in ways that served their own, rather than strictly U.S. national goals.52

Working the Range: Gender, Citizenship, and Performance It is within the performative taxonomy of citizenship that Cogewea animates working the range, not only as occupation but as performance. This theme emerges strongly in chapter 7, “The ‘Ladies’ and the ‘Sq—w’ Races.” While many scholars have interpreted the chapter’s portrayal of separate horse races for ladies and sq—ws as discourse on race and gender,53 I will extend the analysis to consider the politics of performance by framing the horse race in the context of the surrounding chapters, “The Fourth of July” and “The Indian Dancers.”54 These chapters, taken together, reveal native selfconsciousness about the requirements of performing multiple Indian identities within the politics of the time.55 Rather than viewing the horse race chapter as a singular representation of race discourse, I examine the chapter as one of a range of multiple gendered and raced performances that reflect Indian responses to assimilation policies. The temporal setting of chapter 6, “The Fourth of July,” immediately suggests a multiplicity of performance agendas. In federal boarding schools, where inculcation of patriotism was an integral aspect of the curriculum, Indian students found ways to perform their indigenous cultures as a constitutive part of patriotic observances. On reservations as well, the strategy of performing patriotism as a cover for maintaining traditional Native feast days and ceremonies soon became a tradition; dancing on the Fourth of July in particular was considered “much safer, if not the safest form of dancing because it seemed to laud the goals of ‘civilization.’”56 Between 1880 and the early 1930s government officials sporadically

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outlawed and suppressed Indian dancing as oppositional to the goals of assimilation or even a direct threat to the dominance of the settler state, as in the case of the Ghost Dance and the Sun Dance among the Plains Indians.57 Yet Indians found that they could perform restricted dances under the noses of agents if the practices were knit into a larger narrative of U.S. national identity. In “The Fourth of July,” as the ranch hands and Cogewea’s family make preparations to attend the gathering at Polson, Cogewea affirms these subversive uses of patriotism as she describes her grandmother’s interest in attending the celebration: “I know why she is going. It is not for the firecracker celebration of the Declaration of Independence—which is not for our race—but for the Indian pom-pom. She is thinking of the olden days when she was younger than now. The joy of her heart is participating in the war dance and the medicine dance.”58 The text shifts tone as it goes on to say, “These ceremonies, held sacred by the more primitive tribesmen, are now, shame to say, commercialized and performed for a pittance contributed by white spectators who regard all in the light of frivolity.”59 These statements reflect multiple performance expectations for Indians during the time. On one hand, performing Americanness or patriotism by organizing around the Fourth of July allowed Indian communities to retain traditional intertribal celebrations and cultural and economic practices. At the same time, performing Indianness by pandering to audience expectations created space for indigenous subjects to express their difference and resistance to American imperialism in ways that comforted, rather than concerned, dominant publics by evoking emotions such as “imperialist nostalgia,” to borrow Renato Rosaldo’s term.60 Audience demand for the shows was one of the reasons that agents and government officials found it difficult to suppress the dances and other Indian exhibitions, such as Wild West shows. Manipulating this uneasy, unspoken alliance between the divergent interests of Indian dancers and non-Indian consumers relied upon self-conscious performances of Indianness as nonthreatening, contained, and elegiac.

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While certain performances were highly calibrated to audience expectations, the novel suggests that Indian communities were able to construct alternative sites on the periphery of the major arenas of public consumption. As Stemteemä prepares for the celebration, she packs “several blankets, a bag of dried meat, berries, and roots,” the staples of the nonagrarian Salish economy. When the family arrives at the fairgrounds, the members go their separate ways: Cogewea to enter the horse races, her sisters to the fairway to buy ice cream for the children, and Stemteemä to join “a large number of Indians, men and women, who were engaged in native gambling games under a long, improvised shed roofed with pine and cottonwood boughs.”61 From this point on, the performance of Indian gambling is out of the novel’s view, as it was largely outside of the view of non-Indian publics. John Troutman’s analysis of the political dimensions of music during the assimilation period constellates Indian participation in fairs, rodeos, and other events along with other forms of dissent, such as forming delegations and responding through religious movements. He argues that, following James Scott, such activities produce “hidden transcripts” of everyday resistance.62 This approach to understanding the multiple dimensions of political response calls upon the “hidden” moments in the text to be brought into account with the more explicit: the out-of-view gambling games and the dramatically drawn out horse races. Although the gambling games are not represented—or perhaps precisely because they are not—they nonetheless constitute a dissenting expression of Indian performance. The most ubiquitous gambling game across the high Plateau is stick game, a team enterprise in which one team passes a set of bones through their hands while the other team guesses which hand has a particular bone. The holding team sings, drums, and chants in order to distract the guessing team. According to an analysis by Bill Brunton, the game serves multiple functions: it is recreational and fun and also a mechanism to redistribute wealth, express social relationships, and create power. The best stick-game players use the game to conjure spiritual power or “make medicine” and are understood as having

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shamanlike abilities to heal others. Brunton suggests that historically stick game has served as “a metaphor and substitute for war,” allowing aggression between former enemies to be channeled into competitive gambling. In modern times, playing stick game also serves as a way to validate and affirm Indian identity: “No matter what they do the rest of the week, the weekend powwow and stick gaming allow Plateau people to be Indian. It can also be considered a paradigm in that engaging in stick gaming permits a person to ‘work through’ being Indian, thus satisfying a need to behave in a culturally salient manner.”63 Playing stick game is a matter of performance, a performance that produces indigenous subjectivity within established cultural frameworks. In the novel, the improvised arbor produces a space that can be understood as both alternative to and circumscribed by the larger context of the Fourth of July celebration. The arbor, the racetrack, the arena, and the concourse together constitute a multifarious public space of Indian performance, each calibrated differently and operating concurrently. Through the depictions of these various social geographies, the novel offers a complex portrayal of the competing demands and responses of Indian subjects during the assimilation era. In “The Fourth of July” Cogewea broaches the discussion of performance when she consults with Jim about which horse to ride, the White Star or the Bay Devil, in the upcoming race. Jim assumes she will enter the “ladies’ race” and says, “[I] want to see you put it over them there high toned white gals who think they can beat the Injun gals a ridin’.” At this point, Cogewea decides to ride the White Star in the sq—w race: “I’m part Injun and can participate in that as well as in the ladies race. They can’t stop me from riding in both races, can they? If there’s any difference between a sq—w and a lady, I want to know it. I am going to pose as both for this day.”64 By stating that she is “part Injun” and entitled to participate in both races, she evokes the discourse of blood quantum. The race judges can’t stop her, she reasons, because she has the blood quantum to back it up—or can they?65 The novel suggests that blood itself, when racially

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construed, has a performative aspect. In deciding to “pose” as both sq—w and lady “for this day,” she offers her body as the mediating surface upon which “any difference” is to be explained. Her status here as a “mixed blood” disrupts the colonial binary of race and civilization; her body testifies to the notion that boundaries of race and class are inherently problematic. As the next chapter opens, Cogewea garbs herself in patriotic colors for the ladies’ race, wearing a fitted blue riding habit and adorning her hair with red, white, and blue ribbons. Viewed contemptuously by her white competitors, Cogewea is the victim of attempted sabotage but nevertheless wins the race by a length. Still flush from the competition, she must now pose as Indian for the second race. She goes to the Kootenai encampment to “rent a buckskin dress” and soon appears in full regalia. The novel hints that she has exaggerated her Indian look, as “Indian children saw [her] and giggled among themselves” when she emerges from a tipi in full dress complete with paint on her face. Even her own ranch hands recognize Cogewea only by her horse.66 While dressed in her blue riding suit for the ladies’ race, Cogewea does not draw the attention of the judges, yet in buckskin trappings she is marked as a target of sexual violence. As she pays her $2.50 entry fee for the sq—w race, the judge, “supposing that the Indian girl did not understand English,” turns to his companion and says, “Some swell looker for a Kootenai sq—w, eh? Mighty good pickin’ for a young feller like you.” The younger man’s answer was of “sinister import, and then they began conversing in lowered tones.” Cogewea’s eyes fill with tears, and she broods over the “constantly light spoken words of the ‘higher’ race regarding her people” and “the incessant insults offered the Indian women by the ‘gentlemen’ whites.”67 The consequences of what Cogewea has done for sport, namely, to pose as a sq—w, suddenly become clear; no longer protected by the cloak of white (women’s) privilege, her body is read by the judge and his companion as foreign, linguistically unintelligible, degraded, and available for “pickin’” by white men. By showing the difference

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between the embodiment of lady and sq—w, Cogewea reveals the ways in which the social construction of sq—w against the normative category of lady carries the threat of sexual violence against Indian women. As a competitor in the sq—w race, Cogewea is again maligned by the other riders, and a Kootenai woman tells Cogewea “sharply in good English” that she has “no right” to be in the race because “this race is for Indians and not for breeds.” Cogewea is wounded by these words but charges forward and barely wins the race. When she reappears before the judge to collect her prize for winning the race and addresses him in “perfect English,” he is taken aback that “this breed girl was not the type he had figured,” and he is even more alarmed when she asks for her winnings in the ladies’ race.68 The judge refuses to award Cogewea the prize money except for the sq—w race. When Jim enters the fray, a crowd of white men surround them, as the judge becomes increasingly agitated: “I have decided it and she has been given all the money that she will get” was the emphatic reply. “No Injun can come around here and dictate to me in regard to judging these races. Do you savey that?” “The white man’s rulin’ is law,” rejoined Jim calmly, “but maybe you’ll tell the little gal just why she’s not to have this here prize she won so fairly in the ladies’ race.” “Because,” sneered the now irate judge, “she is a sq—w and had no right to ride in the ladies’ race. I would advise you,” he added in a menacing tone, “to get away from here if you do not want trouble. This thing is settled and settled for keeps!”69 Soon the white men in the crowd, including one whose “hand rested dangerously near his pistol’s grip,” begin to threaten Jim. Jim remains unflappable, even as one of the men proclaims he will back the judge “to the last cartridge.” Jim says to the judge, “I take it that the little gal

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bein’ a sq—w, she can’t be a lady! Is that it? She’s waitin’ to hear you say that.” As he waits, Jim looks “into the eyes of his antagonist with exasperating calmness,” and the judge “chok[es] with livid rage.”70 Soon a man wearing a “police badge of exaggerated dimensions” arrives to arrest Jim. The judge rants, “Here, Marshal, put the irons on this rider and lock him up as a dangerous character! He is charged with malicious interference with an honest distribution of race awards, by coming here armed and attempting intimidation of the program officials. There will be plenty of witnesses to make the complaint stick, and he can consider himself fortunate in spending a few months behind bars rather than dangling at a rope’s end, which would have happened within a very few seconds had you not so opportunely arrived.”71 In this scene, extra-state violence in the form of mob lynching is portrayed as a normalized adjunct to governmental rule. The mock jury casts doubt on the possibility of receiving a hearing by a jury of one’s peers, even in formal proceedings. The weight of the law is unequally distributed, as represented by the multiplication of judicial power—the judge and “plenty of witnesses”—as well as the “exaggerated dimensions” of the police badge worn by the marshall. Exactly what has Jim done to deserve imprisonment or lynching under the eyes of the law? What has Jim or Cogewea done but to compete fairly under the rules of the race, stand before the judge, and represent themselves? Their predicament reveals a central problem faced by Indians during the assimilation era: Indians were expected to perform American identities that would resemble but not displace white identities. As the novel suggests, any performance of a social identity that threatens white dominance could be addressed by law, violence, or both. In Cogewea’s case, she not only performs but outperforms her peers in both races. Her offense, according to the judge, is that she has no right to enter the ladies’ race. By invoking the language of rights, the judge suggests that Cogewea’s legal status is in question. Under the performative categories of citizenship under the Burke Act (blood quantum, education, English fluency, industriousness, etc.)72 Cogewea would be deemed legally competent and eligible for

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the rights associated with citizenship; in fact, she holds this legal status, as she describes later in the book.73 Thus the matter of rights has to do with cultural, rather than strictly legal, citizenship. When Cogewea, who intends to define her own subjectivity by posing as both lady and sq—w, is told by the judge that she has no right to take part in the ladies’ race, she is being told that despite her legal standing she cannot socially transcend the identity of sq—w, and as such must remain an object of sexual violence. As Iris Marion Young notes, systemic violence is an aspect of group oppression, and members of certain groups “live with the knowledge that they must fear random, unprovoked attacks on their persons or property, which have no motive but to damage, humiliate, or destroy the person.”74 When systemic violence intersects with cultural imperialism, members of oppressed groups who reject dominant categories and assert their subjectivity or who unmask the constructed nature of so-called universal traits face the risk of violence. As Young puts it, the “dissonance generated by such a challenge to the hegemonic cultural meanings can also be a source of irrational violence.”75 The threat of irrational violence, signaled by the judge’s apoplexy and rage on one hand and the formation of a threatening mob on the other, is met by Jim with calm confidence. In fact, his rationality fuels their fury. Although not taking part in a race as Cogewea does, Jim is nonetheless in a contest as he “looks into the eyes of his antagonist.” The judge experiences a maddening dissonance because Jim, while deferring to the rule of law, nonetheless claims a space of equal representation. Yet this novel is a western, after all, and the formula requires the characters to periodically find themselves in perplexing, dangerous situations. This scene is one of a number of close shaves in the book. The point of this close reading is to understand how the stakes are organized and legitimated by the structures of Indian policy and the social construction of racial and gender hierarchies. The tension of the scene is produced by Jim’s and Cogewea’s choosing to perform social identities that, despite being legal, are not tolerated by members of the dominant society. In Jim’s case, the legacy of wardship has

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produced structures of power that disavow his claim to represent himself as a man, with fully recognized personhood under the law. In Cogewea’s case, she has disrupted the power produced through the construction of the lady/sq—w binary. Cogewea treats the two categories as being completely independent of each other by paying separate entry fees, wearing different outfits, and even riding different horses. She also claims each prize as distinct. However, the judge cannot allow the two categories to be unhinged, thereby revealing how power is produced through the constructed interdependence of the terms. As Judith Butler argues regarding the male/female binary, “Power seemed to be more than an exchange between subjects or a relation of constant inversion between subject and an Other; indeed, power appeared to operate in the production of that very binary frame for thinking about gender.”76 Cogewea attempts to splinter the frame of lady/sq—w and in doing so disrupt the production of power. If power were simply a matter of moving between categories, Cogewea might have competed in only one race—yet she performed in both, and she demanded separate recognition for mastering each one. At the critical moment in this scene, as the marshall prepares to shackle Jim, Cogewea resolves the crisis at her own expense. With “swift dexterity” she throws the prize money from the sq—w race “full in the face of the fuming judge” and exclaims, “Take your tainted money! I do not want to touch any thing polluted by having passed through your slimy hands!” After speaking to Jim in their native language, Cogewea rides away with Jim, neither looking back at their “gun-bestudded enemies.”77 In tossing the cash in the judge’s face, Cogewea rejects not only the terms of the contest but the cash economy that is linked to the individuation process. This act is not to be confused with a rejection of money itself; indeed, in the very next chapter, “The Indian Dances,” the ranch hands are busy placing bets on the broncobusting competition. Throughout the novel Jim’s history as a performer in a Wild West show remains in view, attesting to his worldliness, his rejection of Dawes-mandated domesticity, and his excess of masculinity. His

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association with the Wild West show marks him as having a back story, one that is cosmopolitan and knowing, unlike the physically bumbling but smooth-talking Densmore. In addition, it substantiates his understanding of the politics of performance, above all, performances of masculinity. Such a display is evident when Jim enters the broncobusting competition. So calm that he “was complacently fanning himself with his sombrero” as the wild horse twisted and bucked, Jim continues to intensify his performance: “In the midst of the most frightful plunging, Jim drew his watch and called the time of day; the audience screaming its delight.”78 In this self-conscious scene, Jim displays absolute control over his body, the untamed horse, time, and the audience. An early description of Jim as having a “scanty mustache adorn[ing] his sensitive lip” hints at a lack of manliness, but the text is quick to explain that his employees know that any time he pulls or twists his facial hair he is angry, and this is a sign of danger.79 The depiction of Jim captures the ambiguity and contradictions of the Wild West Indian performer: someone who is both dangerous and contained at the same moment: “As a rider he had no equal on the range and was an artist with the rope. Quicktempered and a dead shot, with his suspicious Indian nature, he was not regarded as a safe man to cross; although the handle of his sixshooter at his belt bore no notches. . . . [H]e was a typical Westerner—a rough nugget—but with an unconscious dignity peculiar to the Indian.”80 The fact of Jim’s participation in the Wild West show suggests a resistance to the aims of domestication expressed in the allotment act. Eastern reformers such as the Indian Rights Association, along with various so-called red progressives, objected to Indians’ participation in the shows, considering them exploitive and regressive for glorifying savage behavior among the Indian performers, who were sometimes treated poorly by the shows’ producers. Reports prepared by the Indian Rights Association in 1899 and 1900 argued against Wild West shows: “It is worse than folly for the Government to say to the Indian child, through the school: Think, dress, act like a civilized white man; and then to say, through the show

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business: Think, dress, act like a savage Indian. The show business teaches the Indian that what the white man really wants of him is amusement furnished by exhibitions of picturesque barbarism; not the acquisition of those sober, unpicturesque but absolutely necessary qualities which alone can make him equal to the battle of life, and able to endure even the humblest forms of competition with the white man.”81 Among the objections to the touring shows is that they took Indians away from their home reservations and farms to venues throughout the United States and Europe. To the reformers, this aspect of Indian participation was troublesome, and the historian L. G. Moses explains that resistance to the shows intensified after the passage of the Dawes Act: “Out from under the watchful eyes of their agents, Indians were again free to do as they pleased. Polite, middleclass reformers already harbored deep anxiety toward the unsettled gypsy life of traveling entertainers. Constraints that bound others to civilized society’s conventions failed to subdue show people. Unless they were compelled to stay home, “show Indians” might be lost to assimilation, the reformers reasoned. They might never be tamed and then tethered by Euroamerican customs.”82 The uncontainable quality of show people that makes them impossible to tame and tether is their ability to perform multiple identities, identities that should be discrete in the gender and racial system of settler colonialism. Perhaps what was most disconcerting to assimilationist policymakers wasn’t the nature of the performance (savage) but the contingency of performance itself. As Butler explains, gender can be understood as performative in that the bodily acts, gestures, and signs “suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts . . . are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality.”83 Assimilation as a form of performance undermined the dominance of white status in the racial hierarchy of the United States of the early

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twentieth century. The racial and gender imaginary of settler colonialism relied upon a matrix that separated Indian men from white men and Indian sq—ws from white ladies. Whatever the stated policy goals of assimilation and citizenship, white figures as represented by the judge and impromptu jury/posse would not countenance any loss of white privilege brought about through Indian assimilation. The race/gender system became increasingly less ontological, in Butler’s terms, precisely as Indians became legal citizens and visibly bicultural, biracial, and cosmopolitan. Indians were expected to accept the settler colonial race/gender system, and their actions were policed so as to foreclose resistant performances like Cogewea’s and Jim’s that called the entire race/gender script into question.

Authorship and Authority in Cogewea Fittingly, the relationship between Mourning Dove and Lucullus V. McWhorter began at a rodeo, the Frontier Days Celebration at Walla Walla, Washington, in 1914. According to Dexter Fisher’s introduction in the republished novel, Mourning Dove had completed a draft of Cogewea and a mutual friend encouraged her to seek McWhorter’s help in securing a publisher. McWhorter had arrived in the Northwest from his home in West Virginia in 1903 and considered himself a defender of Indian rights.84 Mourning Dove, who was a fan of dime novels from her childhood, hoped to publish such a work from an Indian point of view.85 The collaborators were optimistic that the reading public would respond to the first western written by a Native American woman. McWhorter heavily edited the text in line with his conceptions of producing cultural and historical authenticity as well as advocating (rather heavy-handedly) for Indian rights as he understood them within the context of his times. The resulting narrative is uneven in pitch and moves abruptly through various genres. Although Mourning Dove’s original manuscript was completed in 1914, the editing by McWhorter continued for several years, and the publication didn’t take place until 1927.

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The novel represents an episode of collaboration that provides one way of thinking about the complicated writing partnership between Mourning Dove and McWhorter. In the novel, as Densmore is recovering from his broncobusting injuries, he calls for his nurse Cogewea to write a letter for him: After dinner and the kitchen work disposed of, Cogewea joined her patient under the pines. She sat near him on the river bank, writing material in her lap. With his left hand Densmore was awkwardly tossing pebbles into the water. “What do you want me to write?” she asked cheerily. “A letter to my mother,” and by way of emphasis, he pitched a larger stone further into the stream. “All right! You rangle and I’ll use the brandin’ iron.”86 Densmore goes on to dictate a letter to his mother, stating that “a friend is writing this for me.” He explains the accident and notes that his nurse is “kind and affectionate.” He flirts with Cogewea as she writes, continually expressing and then backing away from suggestive comments about her. In response, Cogewea coldly asks, “Shall I add a post-script and say that your nurse wrote this and that she is an Injun sq—w?” Densmore stammers: “N—no! I—I hardly think it is necessary at this time” and “Mother might not understand.”87 On the basis of the extant correspondence between Mourning Dove and McWhorter, I would suggest an analogy between the letterwriting scene and the working relationship of the co-authors, with some important distinctions. Cogewea’s statement, “You rangle and I’ll use the brandin’ iron” reflects a process in which McWhorter heavily edited and dictated the text and relied upon Mourning Dove’s identity as a Native American woman writer to produce the authenticity of the work.88 In this way, while McWhorter wrangled words, Mourning Dove was more than using a brandin’ iron—she was the brandin’ iron. The text, to be marketable, required her mark upon it. At the same time, Cogewea’s use of ranching metaphors

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highlights the labor of writing and portrays her as the one carrying out the work. While Cogewea writes, Densmore lounges beside the river, idly tossing stones; he assumes an “easy position” as he begins his dictation. At the conclusion of the writing session, Cogewea departs to “go and help sister with the children and the house work,” revealing the domestic double shifts that defined Mourning Dove’s life.89 Mourning Dove and McWhorter inhabited very disparate social positions, positions which shaped (and were shaped by) their differing relationships to native communities, the dominant culture, the text, and their divergent expectations of the cultural work of the novel.90 In the unpublished correspondence McWhorter struggled to name precisely his role in the production of the text.91 Mourning Dove understood herself to be the author of the novel but acknowledged that some of McWhorter’s editing—some of which she did not see until the work was published—made the text unfamiliar to her.92 The lack of clarity even among the principals is reflected on the cover page: cogewea The Half-Blood A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range By hum-ishu-ma “Mourning Dove” Given through Sho-pow-tan With notes and biographical sketch by lucullus virgil mcwhorter The doubling of names for the title and both authors, variations in font, and the multiplicity of the terms of production (“By,” “Given through,” “With . . . by”) reflect the complexity of the collaboration process, in which roles and identities are not stable but in flux. Another reading of the dictation scene can be understood to offer a

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potential critique of the informant-writer paradigm that shaped so many assimilation-era “as told to” native texts. In the above scene, the letter to Densmore’s mother is “given through” Cogewea: the roles of informant and scribe are reversed. As in real-life collaboration, a certain amount of negotiation takes place outside of the text—in the scene, Densmore obscures Cogewea’s racialized identity, saying that his mother wouldn’t understand. Like the letter, the novel too was destined for an East Coast audience that might or might not accept an unfamiliar brand. Beyond minor traces extant in their correspondence, it is impossible to know what kinds of negotiations took place between Mourning Dove and McWhorter outside of the text. Despite their diverse positions, the McWhorter archive reveals a shared commitment by both authors to see the text published, and both were willing to personally and literarily perform western identities (of cowboys, Indians, adventure, and romance) in ways they believed would suit the New England–based publishing industry. In the letter-writing scene between Densmore and Cogewea, both characters speak of Cogewea in the third person. In the same way, it appears that both McWhorter and Mourning Dove accepted the abstraction of Indian (or Indian novel or Indian woman novelist) as an inevitable performance required by the publishing market. In McWhorter’s initial pitch of 1916 to the publisher J. P. MacLean of Franklin, Ohio, McWhorter describes the novel, in part, as follows: The story is a true depiction of events there at that time. It graphically portrays the social status of the Indian, especially the half-bloods: or “breeds.” It is given from the Indian standpoint and by one well qualified to write on the subject. Morning Dove [sic] rode the great roundup of the buffaloes sold to the Canadian Government; and is well versed in the ways of the range. Cogewea is a wild-natured girl, a graduate of the Carlisle Indian School. . . . An eastern adventurer comes along and

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wins the affections of the Cogewea [sic]; and tries to induce her to marry him according to the old Indian custom. This she refuses to consider, since he is a white man. . . . In the meantime, a half-blood rider of the range has sought the hand of Cogewea; and of course there is no love lost between the rivals. Stemteema (grandmother) . . . endeavors to dissuade the girl from having anything to do with him. She narrates to her the coming of the first whites, the “Black Robes” and the fate of “Green Blanket Feet,” who was beguiled into marrying a white man. This is a thrilling story of the adventures of the poor woman; and it is a true, though unwritten narrative. . . . All through the story, the writer has stuck close to her theme and all her characters are real living subjects.93 In the same letter, McWhorter offers to annotate the book. For the collaborators, authorial authority was constructed and performed in different ways that conformed to raced and gendered expectations of Indian experience. Mourning Dove’s publicity photos from 1916 feature separate wardrobes and settings; in one she appears with braids and moccasins in a Yakama buckskin dress, in the other she wears her hair in a bun with a black dress and a hand-crocheted lace collar.94 Though initially resisting McWhorter’s strategy of using her personal biography as a marketing device, she eventually accepted it. Ultimately, the text was shaped not only by the collaborators’ separate and shared investments, but also by what each one understood as the political and cultural requirements of Indian performance during the assimilation era. The novel portrays its Okanogan characters (Jim, Cogewea, Stemteemä) as self-consciously aware of the stakes and possibilities of performance, and this provides a rubric for reading the work of the text itself as well. Mourning Dove’s labor as Indian woman novelist was multiplied in ways that McWhorter’s was not—while he occupied the space of an author at his home in Yakima, Washington, Mourning Dove supported herself as a migrant

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farm laborer, even at times typing on a crate in her tent.95 At one point she beaded a pair of moccasins for a literary agent who was trying to place the work with a publishing house.96 It was Mourning Dove’s gendered and raced body that was made to visually and materially produce and reproduce notions of Indianness that underwrote the text.

Acts of Ambiguity Indian performances—of labor, gender roles, culture, and competition—determined access to a range of formal and informal rights during the assimilation period. Allotment policies relied upon the conflation of terms of occupation—as place, labor, and military presence—that began in the Supreme Court rulings of the 1830s and earlier treaties. The federal boarding and day schools were in some sense the instantiation of these meanings, with their curricular focus on manual labor and domestic service, forced displacement of Indian children from their families, and military-style regimens. Occupation became linked with performance as competency tests became the standard through which property rights and citizenship rights were assigned through allotment policy. These weighted categories of citizenship relied upon domestic inventories and performances as the measure of competence to occupy land and political rights within U.S. domestic rule, establishing a performative taxonomy of citizenship. But performance, as expressed in the novel and in life, offers a broad vocabulary for resistance and ambiguity. Despite the pressures of assimilation, performance sites that opened up through the schools, show business, and a robust publishing culture gave Indian intellectuals and artists opportunities to tell complex, even contradictory, stories and to imagine future occupations. Cogewea participates in these visions by figuring a range of occupations that iterate claims to land. Moreover, the novel introduces an important aesthetic in Native American literature: the dialectic of preoccupation, which links pre-occupation of land to

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current colonial occupations to dreams of future reoccupation or alternative routes of survival. The making of the novel itself represents the struggle—and the ambiguity—of the requirements of Indian performance. The photograph of Mourning Dove that illustrates this chapter reflects the complexity and productivity of this ambiguity. Taken by McWhorter as a publicity photo, it exposes the bare apparatus of the studio: the edges of the backdrop show, and the fabric drapes over a wooden bench. There is no question that this moment is staged. Mourning Dove is dressed in full regalia, a plaited quirt in her hands, her beautiful face a bit downcast. Beyond the descriptive details, very little can be ascertained of the nature of this photograph. Is she actually worried? Or is she performing preoccupation, the kind that one would expect of “a despised breed” or “a vanishing race”? Is she working, that is, posing? Or is this a moment of repose? Is this the intended photo? Or is this a moment between photos? These ambiguous acts make the motifs of this chapter—occupation, preoccupation, performance—larger and more urgent in terms of understanding Native American experiences during the assimilation period.

Augustine Dimier, S.J., with Flathead Reservation Indians Group, c. 1900. Jesuit Oregon Province Archives, Special Collections, Foley Center Library, Gonzaga University, #120.3.06a

4. t h e lo ng a r m of lone wolf Disciplinary Paternalism and the Problem of Agency in D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded

th e l an dsc ape of d’a rcy mcnickle’s dark novel, The Surrounded, is storied before the novel begins. The frontispiece points to long histories of the place through an epigraph: “They called that place Sniél-emen (Mountains of the Surrounded) because there they had been set upon and destroyed.”1 The epigraph, positioned outside of the narrative, bears both historic and prophetic properties. In a Salish history of the Treaty of Hellgate, the term Si-ni-el-le-em is defined as “surrounded” or the “place that is surrounded.” It is “thought to take its name from a sheltered place enclosed by mountains. Tradition relates that a band of Blackfeet Indians were surrounded by the Flathead [Salish] Indians there, and that deer and elk were hunted by surrounding them there. Another version is that the name was given the place because it means meeting place or rendezvous.”2 According to Thompson Smith of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, “most accounts in the recorded oral history say that the name comes from an incident when tribal people were experiencing a time of scarcity, and tribal hunters found a group of elk near the present town of St. Ignatius, surrounded them, and killed them, providing meat for the people.”3 A history of the St. Ignatius Mission notes that the valley abounded with game, fish, roots, and berries and was a meeting place not only for the Salish but also for neighboring tribes. The fertile valley, so rich in indigenous economic and cultural resources, was seen by the Jesuit fathers as an ideal setting for their transformative mission to the Indians.4 Sniél-emen is also a place of binding: in the summer of 1855 Gov. Isaac Stevens of Washington Territory summoned the chiefs of the 133

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Flathead, Pend d’Oreilles, and Kootenai tribes to the area to sign the Treaty of Hellgate, ceding vast territories of tribal land to the United States and establishing the boundaries of the Flathead reservation. According to Salish historians, the chiefs came to the meeting unaware of Stevens’s intentions; they believed that the purpose of the meeting was to arrange for brokering peace between the Salish and Kootenai people and their longtime enemies, the Blackfeet.5 None of these narrations of Sniél-emen is incompatible with the others. The layers of history mapped through the epigraph speak to a long-term engagement by the Salish and other native communities with that place, and the decisive events that transpired there. The epigraph is a palimpsest of the ways in which the novel enters and builds upon native narrations of history and the land. The epigraph contains stories of entrapment, salvation, starvation, reunion, loss, and hope. The same is true of the novel. In the opening scene of The Surrounded, the protagonist, Archilde Leon, returns home to the Flathead reservation in Montana one last time. Now a young man, Archilde has been away at Indian boarding school in Oregon, where he has learned to play the violin. He has decided that he wants to make his way in the world as a musician and wishes only to say a final farewell to Catherine, his mother—and perhaps to Max, his father—before he leaves for Europe. But even before McNickle reveals Archilde’s sauntering figure, unhurriedly making his way from the stage road to Max’s house and Catherine’s cabin, the text hints that this return may be his last. As the epigraph suggests, Archilde is walking into a trap, or rather a set of traps, and the novel questions the extent to which it is possible to escape any of the snares that await him. The novel is set in 1914, and Archilde is reentering a world that is bounded by multiple cultural and legal discourses: the Salish inhabitants of the mission town of St. Xavier are economically destitute, and Indian agents, police, and game officials constantly patrol the boundaries of Indian social, cultural, and economic life. The language of salvation and damnation, brought by the Catholic fathers whose church and mission school occupy the

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center of the town, circumscribes social roles—in this world and the next—in an effort to foreclose alternative visions and possibilities. Various characters, including the Indian elders, Archilde’s father, and an elderly French priest, struggle with the limitations of telling complex and contradictory histories within known conventions. Never far beyond the physical or imaginative reaches of the reservation, the border between the United States and Canada generates its own narratives of escape and entrapment. The world of Sniél-emen is a bounded space—bounded by mountains, histories, and law. During the assimilation era, dominant public sentiment and legal discourse alike relied on the structural metaphor of domesticity that figured Native Americans as dependents and wards to a powerful federal government. Under the rationale of care, a structure that I term disciplinary paternalism emerged as a legitimating framework for a range of policies, including assimilation-oriented boarding schools and land allotment in severalty, and visited tremendous violence upon indigenous families and domestic economies at multiple scales. A key to asserting federal jurisdiction was the displacement of internal systems of regulation that constituted Indian reservations as distinct geographic and tribal national spaces. In 1885 Congress passed the Major Crimes Act, which extended federal jurisdiction onto Indian reservations for cases involving Indian-onIndian crime and claimed internal (that is, tribal domestic) affairs as being within its purview, based on its guardianship role. The exercise of punitive power over indigenous domestic affairs represents disciplinary paternalism at the scale of the reservation. At the same time that congressional and executive power, the latter executed primarily through the secretary of interior, brought the force of law to bear upon Indian communities, the Supreme Court produced a pair of rulings, United States v. Kagama (1886), and Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903), that positioned Indian communities as inescapably subjected to federal authority.6 In Lone Wolf, the Court assigned the unrestricted plenary power of Congress over the tribes, asserting the power to carry out allotment without tribal consent, as required by treaty, and

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claiming that the power to abrogate treaties is and always has been held by Congress. Moreover, drawing upon the language of Kagama, the ruling argues that Indian subjection to federal power is a direct result of their state of dependency vis-à-vis the United States. The argument is circular, however, in that it acknowledges that the government largely created the conditions that it would then claim as the source of its power to address: “These Indian tribes are the wards of the nation. They are communities dependent on the United States. . . . From their very weakness and helplessness, so largely due to the course of dealing of the Federal government with them and the treaties in which it has been promised, there arises the duty of protection, and with it the power. This has always been recognized by the Executive and by Congress, and this court, whenever the question has arisen.”7 Not only are the structural conditions and legal rationale circular, but so is the ruling’s temporal reach. By claiming plenary power as “always” understood and exercised by Congress, the ruling reaches back across history to destabilize political relations that were originally grounded in a broader sense of indigenous national autonomy. As Vine Deloria and David Wilkins show, the ruling defies historical record; from the early days of the Republic to the ruling in 1903, the United States “was reasonably restricted in its power to affect the use and status of Indian lands,” and even under the Marshall rulings it was understood that the federal government’s responsibility was to protect Indian control over their own lands.8 The tendency in federal Indian law to discursively entrap indigenous subjects within the nation’s imperial logic has its roots in the antebellum period. As Mark Rifkin argues, “Internalized peoples are presented within U.S. legal discourses as always-already having accepted their place within national space, a process that involves constructing subjectivities for them that confirm the obviousness of U.S. administrative mappings.”9 In Lone Wolf, the Court opinion rhetorically relies upon disciplinary paternalism to manufacture this alleged acceptance: not only are Indian tribes described as wards and dependents in need of federal protection, but government benevolence is assumed:

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The power exists to abrogate the provisions of an Indian treaty, though presumably such power will be exercised only when circumstances arise which will not only justify the government in disregarding the stipulations of the treaty, but may demand, in the interest of the country and the Indians themselves, that it should do so. When, therefore, treaties were entered into between the United States and a tribe of Indians it was never doubted that the power to abrogate existed in Congress, and that in a contingency such power might be availed of from considerations of governmental policy, particularly if consistent with perfect good faith towards the Indians.10 In this excerpt from the ruling, unrestricted congressional authority is constructed as benevolent and reasonable, asserting that Congress would break treaties only when circumstances demanded, “in the interest of the country and the Indians themselves,” as though these interests were coextensive. This form of putative consent is underwritten by a unity produced through the familial metaphor; it is the kind of acceptance expected of children, not of equals, that is, full legal persons. By constructing Indian interests as integral rather than oppositional to U.S. domestic policy, Indian resistance is silenced, and plenary, that is, absolute administrative power is vested in a self-described benevolent Congress that claims to operate “with perfect good faith towards the Indians.” The idea of unity of interests is pivotal in the concept of disciplinary paternalism because it subsumes all paternalism under the rubric that violence can only be conceptualized as beneficial and carried out in the interests of the ward. That is, it claims that all acts are done for the Indians’ own good, rationalizing violence as fatherly discipline. The closed circuit of legal discourse represented in Lone Wolf that forecloses Indian opposition is precisely a form of surrounding and thereby provides a critical context for examining the motif of entrapment and escape in The Surrounded. Analyzing themes in the text, this chapter asks: what possibilities exist for escaping the intertwined narratives and mechanisms of entrapment?

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In The Surrounded, the central plot involving Archilde reflects the limits of Indian agency within the circumscriptions of the law. To summarize this plot briefly, Archilde extends his stay at home into the autumn, and his mother, Catherine, asks him to accompany her on a deer hunting trip to the mountains. Archilde and Catherine are briefly joined by Archilde’s brother, Louis, who is on the lam from the law for stealing cattle and selling them across the Canadian border. At their hunting camp, the three are confronted by a game warden who accuses them of illegally bagging a doe; Archilde insists that as Indians their hunting rights are protected by treaty. The confrontation escalates until Catherine, speaking Salish to her sons, urges them to pack up their things and break camp. Louis follows his mother’s order and reaches for his gun; the warden responds by fatally shooting Louis in the back. The next moment Catherine retaliates by striking the warden in the head with a hatchet, killing him. Archilde, who has done nothing throughout this exchange, is left to dispose of two dead bodies; he digs a shallow grave for the warden and takes his brother’s body back home. During the long winter Archilde is named as a suspect in the case of the missing warden, and Max Leon dies, leaving his estate to his son. In the spring Catherine renounces her Catholicism and reconstructs her spiritual identity through ceremonies carried out among Salish elders. The Indian agent, Parker, views Archilde favorably but in light of the murder case reluctantly jails him briefly. Archilde refuses to offer any defense or to implicate his mother in the unfortunate events; eventually, however, Archilde is coerced by the local priest to go to the authorities with the story. The priest confronts Archilde with Catherine’s earlier confession of killing the ranger. When Archilde tells the story to Agent Parker, Parker assures him that he will be cleared of wrongdoing in a simple hearing. Parker goes to Catherine’s home to get a statement from her corroborating Archilde’s story, but by this time she is on her deathbed. When she dies without clearing the record with Parker, Archilde’s future is uncertain.

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Archilde’s girlfriend, Elise La Rose, a smart, uncontainable Flathead woman and fellow former student of the boarding school system, convinces Archilde to flee through the mountains rather than put his fate in the hands of the Indian agents, the police, and the judicial system. Archilde’s young nephews, Mike and Narcisse, who have been struggling throughout the text to heal the scars they bear from boarding school, join Archilde and Elise at their mountain camp. In a final standoff, Sheriff Quigley enters the camp, and Elise, disguising her aggression as hospitality, fatally shoots him. But this too is a trap: Agent Parker and the Indian policeman Joe La Ronde step forward to make their arrests. Parker is angry at what he considers a betrayal on Archilde’s part: “You had everything, every chance, and this is the best you could do with it! A man gets pretty tired of you and all your kind.” In the background, the sound of Mike and Narcisse riding off on horseback captures the attention of the agent. The novel concludes as follows: “Mr. Parker swore. ‘Why, those little fools! How far do they expect to get?’ To Archilde he said, as La Ronde approached with the handcuffs, ‘It’s too damn bad you people never learn that you can’t run away. It’s pathetic—’ “Archilde, saying nothing, extended his hands to be shackled.”11 This darkly ambiguous conclusion to the novel holds out only modest hope for future generations of Native Americans. Far from being exonerated, as promised, by the American judicial system, Archilde is more deeply implicated than ever in crimes in which he was merely a bystander. While his younger nephews escape (albeit against Parker’s prediction that they, too, will be caught) it seems unlikely that Archilde will ever again move beyond the reservation boundaries, much less realize his dream of going to Paris. This final scene repeats a motif found throughout the text: while there may be hope for the next generation, the current generation, Archilde’s, remains caught in the inescapable forces of history and the circumscriptions of the law. Previous scholarship on The Surrounded has drawn upon historical, cultural, and legal contexts to analyze Archilde’s story as a

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bildungsroman. These productive readings nonetheless elide the corresponding subplots, particularly those featuring Catherine and Elise.12 William Bevis reads Archilde’s return home as an act that rejects the values of self-invention (emblematized by Huck Finn’s “lighting out for the territory”) in favor of an affirmation of Salish history and cultural values, a “homing in” motif.13 James Ruppert argues that the novel conforms in many ways to American naturalism by showing the forces of fate at work in the protagonist’s life and the tragic consequences of misunderstandings between white and Indian cultures. Louis Owens has read the text as a prototype of contemporary mixed-blood narratives, in which the protagonist engages in “a search for Indian identity and order in the chaos between worlds.” While Owens presents a fatalistic reading, other scholars have seen the text as more productive or optimistic. John Purdy places The Surrounded within the context of Salish and Cree oral traditions and views the revisions to earlier manuscript drafts as a reflection of McNickle’s growing appreciation for indigenous cultural forms. He argues that the text has two plots: a murder plot, which is pessimistic, and an indigenous survival plot, which is optimistic. More recently, Robert Dale Parker has suggested that the novel addresses and challenges the gendered nature of work in a market economy, and he links one of the novel’s central events, the killing of the park ranger, to an actual event in Montana history.14 Archilde’s story, as the dominant narrative of the novel, engages the questions of historical forces and the reach of the law throughout; however, the subplots involving the protagonist’s mother, Catherine; his father, Max, and Father Grepillioux; the young nephew Mike and the elder uncle Modeste; and Elise, develop these themes in relation to the question of escape in rich, complex ways. Much of the scholarly work on the novel has focused on Archilde’s narrative; however, this chapter, which places the novel within the context of competing narratives of Salish history and the Lone Wolf ruling, adds to these readings by analyzing how multiple legal and policy texts have created dominant discourses around government paternalism and Indian agency as well as Indian efforts to

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escape the circumscriptions of those narratives. I pay particular attention to the stories of Catherine and Elise, whose models of resistance have not received sustained attention. I examine multiple, overlapping narratives of entrapment and escape—much like the stories that animate the land of Sniél-emen itself.

The Only Good Father: Paternalism, Plenary Power, and Narratives of Transcendence A dominant theme in the novel is the question of paternalism, and the possibility for Indians to ever fully transcend the circumscription of paternalistic government policies in their lives. This issue is introduced the moment Archilde returns home. In the process of saying farewell to the place where he had lived as a child, Archilde (the arch-child) both reveals and questions his manhood. He must come to terms with the multiple fathers who have shaped his life: his biological father, the Spaniard Max Leon (the Big Lion); the French fathers of the Catholic church and mission school; and the American fathers who wield the power of the federal government over Native Americans—the agents, game officials, and police. Although Archilde intends to stay at St. Xavier for only a few days, he gradually becomes drawn into the activities of his family, working on a harvest crew for his father, fishing with his nephews, and going on a hunting trip with his mother. As he extends his stay, Archilde visits the mission church and plays his violin there, enjoying the rich texture of the sound it makes in the sanctuary. Later, walking through the building, he ruminates on the role of religious education in his life. In a pivotal scene in the text, Archilde explores the interior of the church, drawing up images and incidents of religious indoctrination from childhood that emphasized “the perpetual tyranny of the life-everlasting.” He struggles against the irrationality of childhood fears, which “lodged unnoticed in the mind, took root, sent out branches; and in proper season the sweet or bitter taste of its fruit flavored everything.”15 Each memory, however, is countered by an alternative vision. Archilde

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recalls, for instance, the Punch and Judy puppet shows performed by Father Etienne, in which “happy sinners” were hit on the head by Satan. Such plays were intended to instill moral lessons, yet for Archilde they undermined the authority of the church: “One looked askance at the unsuspecting Father Etienne when he was not indulging in his puppetry; one wondered if he were cruel, if he would hit a real sinner on the head. One went to sleep thinking about it and dreamt of sacrilegious puppets as large as men walking around and hitting priests on the head.”16 With the artifice of performance stripped away, Archilde perceives the smallness, here portrayed as cruelty or meanness, of the unsuspecting Catholic father, who remains unaware of Archilde’s subversive thoughts. In the alternative site of dreams, Archilde reverses the terms of the morality play, imagining “puppets as large as men” who express their own agency against the priests who would otherwise manipulate them. In the church, Archilde continues to revisit his past impressions, recalling another event which had “given rise to disturbing thoughts and dreams.”17 As a student at the mission school, Archilde had been playing with other children in the yard when a curious cloud drifted across an otherwise clear sky. The cloud shifted and gradually took on a new shape, “in the reflection of the setting sun, a flaming cross.” The prefect took notice of the cloud, and began to yell at the children: “‘The Sign! The Sign!’ he shouted. His face was flushed and his eyes gave off flashing lights—Archilde did not forget them. “‘The Sign! Kneel and pray!’”18 The students fell to their knees, some of them nearly in tears with fear. The sign, they believed, was “to announce the Second Coming of Christ, when the world was to perish in flames.”19 In this passage, the trope of the puppet show is repeated. The children are at play, and the prefect commands their actions. He is the puppet master, a mortal man calling upon a grand narrative to manipulate the players. And again Archilde recovers an alternative vision. While “others knelt with bowed heads, ready to be struck down,” Archilde observes the cloud, which again changes shape and dissipates into the blue sky.

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Archilde feels free of its power. However, it is not the dissolution of the cloud that releases him, but Archilde’s observation of a bird flying across the sky: “At the very instant that the cross seemed to burn most brightly, a bird flew across it. Actually the bird was much lower, but it appeared almost to touch the cloud. It flew past and returned several times before finally disappearing—and what seized Archilde’s imagination was the bird’s unconcernedness. It recognized no ‘Sign.’ His spirit lightened. He felt himself fly with the bird. When he looked at the priest again he saw in him only darkness and heaviness of spirit. He would never feel at ease around the prefect after that; and he would never fear him.”20 Archilde’s experience of seeing the priest in a different light is a result of reaching beyond the circumscriptions of the narrative in which he, Archilde, is trapped. He sees that the bird was not bounded by the story; the sign is in fact empty. Its meaning is a mere projection by Father Etienne, who himself is weighted down by it.21 Archilde transfers the power of signification to himself when he reassigns the power of the sign to the bird, just as his spirit lightens in inverse proportion to the prefect’s “heaviness of spirit.” In this, he insists upon his ability to see and make sense of the world, and he makes himself an agent and creator of meaning, as sovereign as the priest. When Archilde “felt himself fly with the bird,” his spirit effectively escapes the trap of the dominant discourse by creating an alternative narrative, one that recognizes the weight of the cross for Father Etienne but not for himself. Rather than fixing upon the cross, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, as a “site of hybridity” to be resignified as a “subaltern sign of the native,” Archilde sees the entire sky and apprehends the signs beyond the cross;22 in his case, resignification involves the erasure of the dominant sign as it is assimilated into a different, perhaps distinctively Salish, sense of the world. Both the bird and Archilde’s spirit occupy a space outside of the cross and its narrative: they recognize no Sign. As the cloud shifts, the sign fades away, corresponding with the dissipation of the power of the Sign. The chapter ends on an ominous note, however, as Archilde is completing his tour of the empty church. While Archilde

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examines a painting, again performing a visual inspection, a bat suddenly emerges and flaps about his head. Archilde is filled with an irrational fear and hastily exits, stopping briefly to genuflect at the altar. Only when he is outside in the sunlight does he feel calm again. McNickle’s novel is filled with such cycles of entrapment and escape, anxiety and relief. It is marked by various characters’ efforts to create physical and spiritual routes out of the snares formed by the discourses of fathers through the circumscriptions of political and religious laws. As Archilde’s experience with the Sign suggests, escape at the spiritual level is possible through acts of vision and resignification, suggesting that indigenous resistance finds a base in alternative imaginaries that recognize no Sign. The political potential for literature resides in its ability to produce this liberating imaginary within a field of materially bounded conditions. Such scenes produce the outside space that links the imaginary or spiritual field with the material world. Within this framework, the narratives of Catherine and Elise as well as those of Modeste and Mike offer visions and practices of escape that produce changes in material realities. The need to produce this alternative imaginative field is a reflection of the intensely bounded material conditions, legal structures, and armed surveillance that characterized Indian communities during the assimilation period. The multiplicity of the rule by fathers reflects the exponential power of paternalism exerted upon indigenous domestic spaces at both tribal-national domestic and intimate familial scales. The narrative trap produced through such rulings as Lone Wolf relied upon a structure of patriarchal family relations to collapse opposition through a discourse of unified interests. As Anne McClintock argues, the family of man metaphor that flourished in the mid-nineteenth century became a tool for organizing global colonized societies under European control. The trope of the family as an organizational structure offered an indispensable figure for sanctioning social hierarchy within a putative organic unity of interests. Because

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the subordination of woman to man and child to adult were deemed natural facts, other forms of social hierarchy could be depicted in familial terms to guarantee social difference as a category of nature. The family image came to figure hierarchy within unity as an organic element of historical progress, and thus became indispensable for legitimizing exclusion and hierarchy within nonfamilial social forms such as nationalism, liberal individualism, and imperialism.23 As the novel shows, the organizing structure of paternalism was exerted through not only governmental but also religious institutions, and these agents of domination reinforced each other. Relying upon the assumed rationale of unified interests, assimilation-era policies extended the control of the United States deep into tribal domestic affairs where it previously held no jurisdiction. Yet in legal texts such as the Major Crimes Act, Kagama, and Lone Wolf, the guardianwardship structure functioned to exclude the idea of legal overreach by attaching the ward’s interests to the guardian, whose power was underwritten not only by absolute control but also by assumed benevolence. Significantly, the novel disrupts this narrative of unified interests by portraying tension and distrust between Max and Archilde and allowing Archilde to challenge Max’s dominance. The novel does not ascribe to the U.S. nationalistic paradigm of tribal-national and familial domestic spaces fitting tidily within U.S. domestic rule, each form repeating itself like a set of nesting dolls. From the opening scene, Archilde confronts a multiplicity of domestic spaces: he walks to his Spanish father’s ranch on his Salish mother’s reservation; he avoids “the big house, where his father would most likely be sitting, and made for the dirt-roofed log cabin which occupied lower ground,” where he would find his mother.24 For Archilde, going home is a multivalenced task, for home is located in multiple physical and cultural sites. The complicated narratives produced by long histories of Indian–white relations are reflected in the domestic situations of Archilde’s family members: his domineering father, a

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successful farmer, lives in the big house, alienated from Archilde’s pious Salish mother, who lives in a small cabin by the creek and continues traditional economic practices. Archilde’s sister, Agnes, a young widow with two small sons who are annually wrangled away to boarding school, lives in the shadow of Max’s presence in the big house. Agnes performs domestic chores and mediates Max’s strong personality with other family members. Archilde’s brother, Louis, accused of stealing horses and running cattle to Canada, lives in the woods as a fugitive from the law and its vigilante enforcers. These various models of domestication represent complex social geographies, geographies in which the intimate members of a family only partially and intermittently share domestic spaces. These sites reflect the ways in which U.S. national domestication policies splinter and remap the tribal domestic and indigenous familial spaces and relations, and in so doing expose the complexity of policing such varied locations. The example of Louis, who lives outside both the law and conventional domesticity, is perhaps most dramatic. His outlaw acts of running cattle to Canada defy national borders and assert an alternative vision of Indian history and economy, one in which the fluidity of Indian movement that preceded the imposition of the border is affirmed. The name Louis bears an obvious reference to the Metis leader, Louis Riel (1844–85), who influenced indigenous movements as a spiritual and political leader on both sides of the border. Riel led two rebellions and was executed by the Canadian government for his leadership in the North-West Rebellion of 1885. The association of Louis Leon with Louis Riel recalls real histories of Indian resistance and survival as well as cycles of violence.25 The routes traveled by Louis in the novel challenge nation-state demarcations imposed upon traditional Indian geographies and illuminate patterns of violence that are suppressed by nationalistic narratives of history. Louis subverts the imposition of a colonial agrarian economy; he not only operates in the border-crossing black market (a subversive form of selfemployment), but also relies upon his mother’s traditional food stores for sustenance. Further, when the game warden kills Louis, initiating

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the series of violent events in the text, the homicide echoes Riel’s swift execution, which is understood by some, to this day, as martyrdom.26 As Archilde passes through these multiple domestic sites, his sense of himself as well as his sense of power shifts. He has difficulty at first in recovering a sense of comfort in being home. In his initial reunion with his mother, he feels awkward: “They sat in silence for some time. It was useless to speak of fiddle-playing, and for a while Archilde could think of nothing that was not equally useless. When you came home to your Indian mother you had to remember that it was a different world. Anyhow you had not come to show your money and talk about yourself.”27 Archilde’s sense of alienation, his experience as an alien subject, is underscored by the shift to second-person narration. He relies upon another, albeit internal, voice to tell himself who he is: when you came home to your Indian mother. The acts of showing money and talking about oneself belong to a “different world,” not only culturally and economically but legally as well. To the extent that assimilation-era Indian policy was focused on the process of “individualization,” Indian students like Archilde had been trained in boarding school to present themselves as self-supporting, particularly in the trades or agriculture, and as protocitizens within a liberal democratic system that accords rights to individual, rather than collective, bodies. Upon his return home, Archilde must recalibrate himself as a different subject: as his mother’s Salish son and a defender of an alternate legal and economic system based in treaty rights. This is evident in Archilde’s defense of treaty provisions to the game warden on the hunting trip and in his frequent fishing trips on his own and with his nephews. In fishing and hunting he defends the “usual and accustomed places” protected by treaty and articulates himself within an indigenous system of political rights. When Archilde visits his father’s house, he struggles to prove himself as a man on his father’s terms, again rendering the legal predicament of government paternalism. The problem of Indian will versus the power of the Great Father is animated in Archilde’s early encounters with Max. Archilde is a man whose will is weakened—but

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not broken—by his father’s stern treatment. After Archilde visits his mother in her cabin, he realizes with dread that he must also see his father in his house: “That dread was something which went back a long time, and Archilde, who was growing into a man now, was disturbed by it. It ought not to be.”28 The notion of manhood and the potential of assimilation policies to make men of Indians deeply infused the rhetoric of the period, while the legal standing of noncitizen Indians as domestic subjects, coupled with Supreme Court rulings such as Lone Wolf, repeatedly denied the possibility of “growing into a man” and the political and social rights that such manhood would entail. Manhood, as a concept deployed by the Indian Rights Association, encompassed both legal personhood within the liberal democracy and the recognizable performance of labor within the market economy. The following excerpt is drawn from an informational pamphlet of 1884: [The Indian Rights Association] aims to secure for these “Wards of the Nation” education, law, and a protected and individual title to land. It aims to make the Indian first a man and then a citizen, subject to the responsibilities and endowed with the privileges accorded to all other citizens of the United States. This Association would have the Government adopt toward the Indian a policy wise, firm, and continuous, neither capricious nor vacillating, cruel nor sentimental. It recognizes the agency and reservation system only as a temporary expedient, which must in time be completely abandoned as the Indian shall be fitted by practical training to take his place among the whites, and to earn his bread by his own labor.29 The paternalistic structure of white–Indian relations, in which white citizens could unite “irrespective of party or creed” to advocate policies in the name of the disenfranchised “Wards of the Nation” created white as well as Indian political identities. Disciplinary

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paternalism functioned as an ideology that could transcend “party and creed” differences among whites and helped define the institution of white, male citizenship. In this formulation, manhood was a critical first step toward citizenship, and manhood was defined through relationships to private property, labor, and nuclear family structures. Yet the document reveals its ambivalence about the prospect of Indian agency, suggesting that “the Indian shall be fitted” as though the Indian were a machine made of interchangeable parts. Archilde wants to be recognized by his father as a man, not a dependent, and struggles not to be dominated by him. Archilde tells Max that he has been supporting himself by playing music in Portland; the father is somewhat dubious. Archilde studies his father and wonders, “What was it in that face that could so dominate one who was no longer a child? Archilde gazed steadily at his father and tried not to show his irritation.” Max suggests that Archilde is a gambler, but when Archilde denies this, his father asks, “What kind of Indian are you, then?”30 Archilde feels his confidence wilting under Max’s interrogation and finds himself speechless: “It was just as it had always been in recent years; after a few more thrusts from Max he would be helpless before him. He had thought it would never happen again.” In this exchange Archilde cannot find a space of equal discourse with his father; when he attempts to show himself as a man (who, equal to Max, can support himself in the white world), his father badgers him with negative Indian stereotypes, to which Archilde offers no reply. Finally, when Max demands to know if Archilde has any money from his work, Archilde angrily shows him the bills. Max responds, “You better let me put it in the bank for you.” “No. I’ll keep it.” “So! You have learned nothing! You will blow your money on a good time and then go on living off me!” It was more than Archilde could stand. He had to speak out in anger and so confess his helplessness.

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“I didn’t come to live off you, God damn it! I came to see my mother, not you, and in a few days I’m going again. Keep your stinking money!” He knew it was the answer of a child. Old Leon laughed. “I see you’re getting a good opinion of yourself.” He said it insultingly, and yet his eyes looked closely at the boy. At least he had not slunk away like a whipped dog.31 Archilde’s experiences in his mother’s house and in his father’s house reveal two very different models of manhood/personhood, but both are defined in terms of usefulness. It would be of no use for Archilde to talk of himself or his money to his mother; on the other hand, such talk is demanded by his father. The extreme positions represented here place Archilde in a mediating position and introduce a major theme in the text: the question of how one should act. In his interaction with his father, Archilde finds himself acting out, like a child. This dynamic is key to understanding the critique of paternalism in the text; while Archilde acts with autonomy, he nonetheless feels the psychological and spiritual pressure of his father’s influence. Max has forced Archilde into a corner, and despite Archilde’s act of talking back—in what he considers the terms of a child—it is Max who has controlled the terms of the debate. And yet this interaction produces a turning point in Archilde’s relationship with his father because it marks the assertion of Archilde’s will. It is possible to see in this exchange at least two characteristics of the paternalistic federal–tribal relationship symbolically enacted. The first is the power of the father to control the terms under which the child may talk back. Archilde, the Indian, cannot maneuver his way out of a defensive position, cannot speak on equal terms with his white father. Archilde’s moment of talking back is not empowering because he still feels like a child or, worse, even more like a child. Taking action or talking back amplifies, rather than relieves, the position of powerlessness, and this dynamic has implications for interpreting Archilde’s silence at the conclusion of the work. Second, the passage provides a clear reference to the federal trust relationship

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with the tribes, when Max views Archilde’s earnings and easily suggests, “You better let me put it in the bank for you.” Max frames this as though he is naturally acting in Archilde’s best interests; when the son resists, Max articulates the logic of the trust relationship, namely, that Indians are incompetent caretakers of their resources and need a father to hold their assets in trust. Combining a legal concept with a negative cultural bias, Max adds insultingly that Indians prefer, by choice, to subsist on handouts. If Max’s parental protection of Archilde slides easily into abuse, the federal trust relationship over Indians is equally slippery.32 As Frank Pommersheim points out, the trust relationship can be understood to originate with treaty clauses that promise to secure Indian land and resources against predation by non-Indian interests. He writes, “Yet this limited view of the trust relationship ultimately was transmogrified into a generalized (indeed, limitless) federal power, uncoupled from treaties and the Constitution, that justified wide-ranging congressional (and judicial) initiatives that clearly were not beneficial to tribes. This most unfortunate legal development crystallized into Indian law doctrine with the announcement of the plenary power doctrine in the 1903 decision of Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock. The shield of the trust relationship became the sword of plenary power.”33 The trust relationship as the extension of federal paternalism again seeks to unify federal and Indian interests and exclude opposition. Under the trust relationship, the terms of consent are reversed; it is the guardian, not the ward, who must consent. In the text, Archilde shows resistance to this relationship through his skepticism—what may be read as distrust— and his ultimate refusal to surrender his resources to his father’s management. Yet the novel doesn’t treat disciplinary paternalism as an immutable structure in the same ways that Kagama and Lone Wolf do. Rather, the novel portrays the possibility of creating unified interests through the dissolution of disciplinary paternalism, as Archilde and Max reconcile and learn to view each other in more positive terms. Max’s attitude toward Archilde softens when Max

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comes home from town one day to find his son harvesting a field along with the hired men. Agape at the sight, Max asks Archilde, “Why didn’t you say you’d help? Now I got an extra man.” “You didn’t ask me.” That made Max snort. “You got eyes! You saw this field ready to be cut! You saw the men start!” “But you didn’t ask me.”34 In this exchange, the matter of consent is fundamental to adjusting the terms of the relationship. Although manual, agricultural labor was touted as a reformational tool by proponents of assimilation, it is not Archilde’s performance of the labor but Max’s recognition of Archilde’s action that produces a change in Archilde’s standing. Following this encounter, Archilde and Max interact in various ways that ultimately lead to their reconciliation, followed shortly thereafter by Max’s death. The relationship between Max and Archilde both reproduces and reimagines the terms of federal paternalism in a number of ways. First, by showing Max and Archilde as fundamentally different subjects with conflicting interests, the novel produces an oppositional space, one characterized by dread, lack of trust, and distance, that is foreclosed in the narrative logic of Lone Wolf. While the law narrates a unity of interests, the novel shows that the father and son are metaphorically and materially not of the same house. Second, the change in the relationship is dependent upon the concept of Indian consent that is decimated through Lone Wolf. The Lone Wolf case involved the Kiowas and Comanches, whose treaty-guaranteed rights to consent were violated through the federal allotment process. The plaintiffs showed that Indian consent was produced by government agents through fraudulent and destructive means and asserted the tribes’ vociferous opposition to allotment. The court ruling not only dismissed the charges of fraudulently produced consent, but also eliminated the requirement for Indian consent of any kind. By figuring consent as a fundamental

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requirement of equality, the novel reflects earlier models of political relationships based in treaties as mutually secured rights and recuperates consent as a category. Finally, the novel imagines the dissolution of paternalism through the death of the father. Max is allowed a good death in the sense that he is reconciled to his son before it occurs. The reconciliation between Max and Archilde allows Max to get his papers in order so that the family land is legally transferred to Archilde as the heir. This plot development gives the lie to the foundation of Indian policy that perpetuates Indian wardship. In an era when Indian land was being transferred away from Indian ownership at an alarming rate through administrative techniques facilitated by policies that locked Indian political units in permanent wardship status, the novel reverses it all: the son grows up, the father dies, and the land returns to Indian hands.

Talking across the Land: Competing Discourses of Indian Rights The problem of tribal voice in the regulation of Indian affairs is keenly addressed in The Surrounded. The novel expresses the graphic predicament of the tribes and also of individual Indians in relation to the federal government. Archilde’s uneven relationship with his father is only one trajectory explored in the text. In that relationship, Archilde’s position vis-à-vis his father improves as Archilde becomes able to negotiate; Max begins to recognize his son as a man when Archilde, at several key moments, is able to set his own terms. While this strategy works with his father, it is less viable for Archilde when he is caught in the institutions that regulate life on the reservation, that is, the game patrols, the police, the Catholic fathers, the Indian agents. In his encounters with these forces, no amount of negotiation will improve his situation, and in the end his sole expression is silence as he presents his hands to be shackled in the final scene. Archilde’s first confrontation with these authority figures occurs when he and his mother begin their hunting trip and encounter

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Sheriff Quigley, who is searching for the outlaw Louis. Archilde attempts to make small talk with the sheriff: “We’re looking for game. See anything?” Archilde felt himself being scrutinized by eyes that possibly suspected him of the whole calendar of crimes. The Sheriff only grunted, as if game-hunting were beneath the notice of anyone who enjoyed his kind of hunting. “I’m looking for a horse thief. Don’t suppose you saw one?” This was said with a hard, humorless grin. The Sheriff enjoyed mentioning things that, like death, made people uncomfortably aware of life’s threats.35 For Archilde the roles of hunter and hunted never shift throughout the text. Quigley’s power over Archilde can be felt in the sheriff’s gaze and in his language. The sheriff is aware that he exudes a level of intimidation, if not outright violence, against the Indians. Quigley, the embodiment of the law, remains a dark, threatening figure until the final scene. In the last moments of the novel Archilde and Elise are in the mountains attempting to outrun the law. Quigley walks into their camp, and Elise fatally shoots him. But even as he dies, two other officers appear in his place. The law, far from dying in the face of Indian agency, multiplies in force. After the initial encounter with Quigley, another figure rides into the family camp: “another arm of the law—a game warden. The woods seemed to be full of Guardians of the Peace.”36 The warden sees that Louis has shot a doe and accuses the family of breaking state hunting laws. Again Archilde argues, “We’re Indians, and we’re free of game laws.” “I guess I’d know you was Indians.” The voice turned sharper. “But far’s I know there’s no exemption on female deer.”

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Archilde pretended to be sure of his ground, though he really knew nothing about it. At some time or other he had heard the game laws discussed. “Indians are free from all game laws by special treaty.” “Well, that’s a point I’ll let the judge settle. I’ll take you out and you can talk to him about it.” It was clear by now that there was no leniency in the voice.37 Archilde and the warden stake their claims in competing jurisdictional systems: Archilde argues for freedom through treaty promises,38 while the warden claims a right to remove the Indians and bring their case before the court. Archilde, despite being unsure of his ground (a signal that treaty rights are ever contingent upon the consent of the dominant party), stakes a place outside of state or federal jurisdiction; however, the warden’s formulation places Indians in the position of always being under surveillance. From the perspective of the law as expressed through the ward, Indians cannot move outside of systems of control but only between state and federal jurisdiction. These unequal exchanges reveal the uneven jurisdictional mappings of indigenous territories under colonial administration. Archilde’s argument is based in long-term indigenous economic and cultural practices and their subsequent promises assured through treaty provisions. Archilde calls upon federal power to trump state jurisdiction. Yet, as the warden makes clear, the jurisdictional gap between federal and state regulation allows Indians to be exploited by state power. These gaps and dangers are expressed through the exchange in which the arguments on each side fail to find a common ground; each side talks across the land in competing discourses of rights. Tribal territory and sovereignty as defined in treaties are fundamentally inconsistent with assimilation-era policies that undermine the integrity of both; Lone Wolf and treaties cannot logically coexist. At this point another register of speech enters the exchange, and the perplexity of the situation increases. Louis tells the warden that Archilde had shot another deer up creek. In fact, Archilde had failed to kill the deer and had only been joking with his brother that there

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was another one. When the warden demands that Archilde produce the deer after he denies that it exists, Archilde responds, “Well, see for yourself, then! We’ll wait here.” The warden was losing his temper. They were not only lying to him but getting impudent. He swung into the saddle. “You’re under arrest, all of you! Get busy and break camp! Tell the squ—w to clean out that deer and be careful how she cuts it open. Tell her!”39 Again, the situation is strained because Archilde and the warden are speaking across each other; while Archilde defends himself, the warden resorts to the force of law to address his impudence. Impudence is a characteristic that can be embodied only by a subordinate, and the warden’s interpretation simultaneously diminishes Archilde and the legal claim he makes. The imbalance is emblematized by the warden’s swinging into the saddle, claiming higher ground physically as he exerts unequal force. In this scene, any contestation of state authority is swiftly punished, further illustrating the problem of talking back. The chaos of the scene increases as yet another discourse is introduced: the Salish language. Catherine scolds Louis in Salish, telling him to pack up his things, while the warden watches warily, suspicious of what he cannot comprehend. Louis, submitting to both his mother and the warden, begins to pack his things, reaching first for his rifle to pack it up, “still talking in that rough voice of his.” Louis has his back to the warden, and his “fingers had scarcely closed on the rifle when there was a shattering explosion. Then the officer’s voice: ‘Damn you! Stand still, all of you! One more move like that and there’ll be none left!’”40 As the warden bends over Louis’s body to confirm that he is no longer breathing, Catherine deals him a deadly blow with a hatchet. Archilde, stunned, is left to sort through the incomprehensible situation. Archilde, who has merely been a witness to these events, is reluctantly jailed by the Indian agent, Parker, when they return home.

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During the short investigation Archilde lies to the agent and later to Quigley about the site of their camp. Archilde’s decision to lie suggests a deep distrust of the system of justice for Indians. His “small talk” with Quigley is met with big talk by the sheriff, and his defense of his treaty rights to the warden is first subordinated, then silenced. Why should he have any faith that his words have standing with the authorities that surround him? But Agent Parker is sympathetic to Archilde, and given that the warden’s body has not been recovered from the mountains, the agent releases Archilde from jail. Late in the novel, when Archilde, coerced by the local priest, agrees to confess to Parker, the agent supports Archilde, albeit reservedly, and promises that the matter will be quickly resolved in Archilde’s favor. Archilde must agree to fully cooperate with the authorities. At this point, Archilde does something completely unexpected, perhaps even to himself. He allows Elise to lead him in an attempt to escape through the mountains. In this act, Archilde rejects the conditions laid out by Agent Parker and again searches for an alternative physical and legal space. He refuses the rules of the game; he transgresses the boundaries of control. And when he is eventually captured he offers nothing in self-defense but his silence.

Taking Action, Challenging Agency: Gender, Vision, and Power Although Archilde’s struggles are central to the plot of The Surrounded, his story does not unfold in isolation from other plots in the book. The text explores multiple alternatives for escaping or remaking legal, social, and religious narratives of entrapment. Among the most profound is the story of Catherine’s renunciation of Catholicism through the reinscription of what I am naming the Kateri narrative. “Kateri” refers to Catherine Tekakwitha, a seventeenth-century Mohawk woman who survived smallpox as a child, converted to Catholicism, and is known today as the only Native American convert to be named a saint by the pope.41 She is venerated by Native American

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Catholics as an intercessory figure. By “Kateri narrative” I am referring to Catherine’s embodiment of spiritual, transformative powers that move between worlds in ways that mirror the stories of Kateri. By embodying a figure central to native Catholicism, Catherine affirms native spirituality in its multiple, complex, and syncretic forms. Her experiences constitute an alternative model of resistance, one that incorporates the dream life and traditional native practices in structuring counternarratives. In embodying the intercessory figure of Kateri, Catherine moves between temporal and spiritual worlds to reconcile the strained and fractured narratives of Salish history and culture. Catherine’s story is interlinked with the healing narrative between the young Mike and the elder Modeste. The blind Modeste, a close kin relation to Catherine, facilitates her ceremony and acts as a mentor and teacher to Mike, who bears deep psychological, spiritual, and likely sexual abuse scars from his boarding school experience.42 Mike’s path toward healing, and his escape with his brother Narcisse at the end, is the most hopeful episode of the novel. Another meaningful trajectory in the book is the story of Elise La Rose. Like Catherine, Elise is an agent in that the two women are the actual killers of the lawmen. Like Louis, Elise, whose name is assonant with his, is an outlaw figure who is always on the move.43 Catherine and Elise play roles as actors whose movement expresses autonomy and resistance even as it challenges the terms of agency within an individual rights system. Catherine’s trajectory represents spiritual agency and the ability of Indians to work within their own traditions, including a syncretic Catholicism, to address colonial problems. As a Kateri figure, Catherine represents indigenous intercession as movement between worlds. Elise is also defined by movement, particularly sexual and physical action. A rule-breaker and runaway from boarding school, she subverts the assimilationist program of domestication by performing domesticity not as a measure of civilization but as a weapon. Taken together, Catherine and Elise, whose roles have been underexamined in scholarship, demonstrate aspects of Indian resistance that involve action and imagination and

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give greater salience to the escape by Mike and Narcisse at the end of the novel. At the same time, their actions resist assimilation-era models of agency within the liberal democratic system. At the beginning of the novel Catherine is portrayed as a fiercely devout Catholic, the granddaughter of the chief who initially invited the so-called Black Robes to live among the Flathead people. When Archilde first returns home and asks her about Louis, she says that he has stolen some horses and is living in the mountains. Archilde replies, “He’ll go to the pen if they find him.” Catherine responds, “He’ll go to hell!” This exchange places legal and spiritual consequences as both competing and overlapping discourses. The narrative continues, “His mother knew nothing but the fear of hell, for herself and her sons.”44 But as the novel unfolds it is revealed that Catherine knows a great deal more than “the fear of hell,” from which she finds release. Catherine “had been obedient to the fathers always. Her memory did not go beyond them, it began with them.”45 She was four years old when her father welcomed the priests to Sniél-emen and made a feast to celebrate their arrival. Devout in her attentions to the church, she was soon called Faithful Catherine by the priests and members of the community.46 When she was fourteen years old four nuns from Montreal arrived to establish a school, where Catherine studied religion and domestic arts until she married Max at the age of twenty.47 Now, as an old woman, Catherine lives alone in her cabin, estranged from Max and struggling against physical deterioration. Although she is “a little deaf, and a little blind,” she nonetheless tunes her senses to the world around her, and finds “a chaotic world—so many things dead, so many words for which she knew no meaning; her sons developing into creatures such as had never lived in her childhood. . . . What had come about since that day of the planting of the cross? How was it that when one day was like another there should be, at the end of many days, a world of confusion and dread and emptiness?”48 After a lifetime of obedience to the fathers, Catherine finds herself looking upon a culturally fractured and economically devastated Indian world.

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On a personal level Catherine finds that the church does not have answers for her soul’s most haunting questions: why her son Louis was shot down, and what it means that she, too, has blood on her hands for killing the warden. Over a long winter of confessions and penance, she feels the limits of the church’s ability to restore her spiritual wholeness. Catherine’s physical blindness (a characteristic found in several of the novel’s characters, including the elderly Modeste) exists in inverse relation to her supernatural vision. In her dreams Catherine travels to the spirit world, where she finds her solution: to renounce her baptism and reclaim native practices, to once again live by the laws defined by Indian people. To do this, she must gain the cooperation of her fellow tribal members, who meet “for the purpose of holding court” during the annual midsummer dances. Catherine has asked the small group of elders to grant her request to be punished in a traditional way—through whipping—in order for “the whip to cover the fault.”49 She believes this will free her troubled soul and in the process reinstitute Indian rule over Indian behavior. She makes her argument by recounting her dreams, in which she dies and travels to the spirit world. She arrives in Heaven, and it is exactly as the fathers have described it: Everybody was happy and they said to me, “You just be happy now.” I said yes I would be happy pretty soon but I would look around. It was all strange. . . . I could not understand it. I saw none of my friends or relatives there. There were no Indians there at all. I walked some more, but it was no use. These white people had everything they wanted, big houses all painted, fine garments like they wear, rings on their fingers and gold in their teeth, they had it all; but there were no animals to hunt and when I looked in the rivers there were no fish there.50 Most terrifying in this scene is the sterility of the fishless river, a stark expression of an otherworldly dystopia. The absence of fish and animals implies the complete loss of traditional lifeways in which

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spiritual and economic practices of hunting and fishing are expressed. By extension this dystopian vision figures the death of treaty rights to hunting and fishing. In the dream Catherine’s unhappiness eventually comes to God’s attention. The white God is “a kind man,” and he says she is free to go to the Indian heaven if she wishes. Catherine departs for the Indian land and reports that upon her arrival, “I could hear them singing. Their campfires burned and I could smell meat roasting. There were no white men there at all. I asked to come in but they told me no.”51 They instruct her to give up her baptism. This is the end of her dream. For three days and three nights Catherine is consumed by the vision. During the day she ruminates upon it, speaking to no one. At night the dream recurs. After the third night she awakes in the knowledge that she must follow the wisdom of the dream and change her relationship to the church. Catherine’s prophecy can be understood within a longer tradition of Native American political activism inspired by dreams and visions. For example, Handsome Lake, an eighteenth-century Iroquois leader (1735–1815), awakened from a near-death experience relating urgent messages of spiritual and economic rebirth for native people. In his dreams he encounters various messengers who issue warnings for the future and instructions for proper behavior. Handsome Lake’s teachings, the Code of Handsome Lake, prompted a spiritual revival among the Iroquois by calling for the rejection of alcohol and the preservation of land, dances, and other ceremonies.52 In 1889 the Paiute prophet Wovoka (1858–1932) was guided by a dream in which he enters heaven, sees his relatives, and receives instruction from God. His teachings, which included a call to continue the traditional round dance, became the basis of the pan-Indian Ghost Dance or Dreamer religion that moved across the West in 1889–90, ending tragically in the Massacre at Wounded Knee.53 Catherine’s dream, like those of Handsome Lake and Wovoka, implicates Christian deities and corresponds to Christian belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus, who rose from the grave three days after his death. In Catholic liturgy Jesus is said to have traveled to hell to wrestle with the devil

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during this time. Catherine, too, travels across landscapes of the afterlife, and her subsequent awakening is both physical and spiritual. When she tells the circle of elders of her dream, they grant her wish to relieve her spirit through traditional means. That night “the old lady, with the red stripes of the whip on her back, slept without dreaming.”54 In the character of Faithful Catherine, McNickle presents a Kateri figure, a unique, powerful spiritual intercessor in the Catholic Indian tradition. I argue that the adaptation of the Kateri narrative— as an iconic reference of spiritual transcendence and transformation— is a distinctly Native American literary aesthetic that first appears in The Surrounded but can be seen in multiple Native American texts. Kateri is a revered figure among Catholic Natives, and Kateri statues, often adorned in full beaded regalia and eagle feathers, are ubiquitous fixtures in reservation Catholic churches in the United States and Canada.55 The historical person, Kateri Tekakwitha, was known for her good works among her community, devotion to the church, and miraculous transfiguration. Born near Albany, New York, in 1656 to a traditional Mohawk father and a Catholic Algonquin mother, Kateri was four years old when she survived a smallpox epidemic that killed many in her village, including her immediate family. Although she survived, the disease disfigured her, leaving her face and body pockmarked, her constitution weak, and her eyesight nearly destroyed. She lived somewhat unhappily with surviving members of her extended family until the age of twenty, when she was baptized and given the name Catherine (Kateri in Mohawk) and soon joined the Christian Mohawks at Kahnawake near Montreal at the St. Francis Xavier Mission in 1677. At the mission she followed Catholic rituals with extreme devotion. Her arrival coincided with the rise of convert ascetics, and Catherine’s practices of self-flagellation and physical punishment, such as walking barefoot in snow and sleeping on a bed of thorns, were severe. She also secluded herself with a handful of young Iroquois women who abstained from alcohol and sex, a practice that resonated with earlier Iroquois traditions of “secluding maidens in order to garner the spiritual power of their virginity for the benefit

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of the community.”56 Christopher Vecsey suggests that this action may have been a response to the deadly influence of alcohol on indigenous communities and that some modern theorists believe Kateri “was resurrecting an Iroquois custom even as she imitated the Christian asceticism of the Hospital nuns and Jesuits.”57 Even at her young age Kateri’s reputation as a powerful spiritual figure increased. Allen Greer writes that in 1680, shortly before her death, “she reported a great light surrounding her as she was whipping herself.” Two Jesuit priests investigated and confirmed the report. Soon “word spread that the sickly young woman possessed extraordinary spiritual powers, and people began seeking her out. . . . Predisposed by what they had heard, no doubt, those who approached her came away with the sense of being warmed by a ‘sacred fire’ that radiated through her eyes, her gestures, and the words she spoke.”58 What Kateri achieved in death was even greater than what she achieved in life. As the end of her life drew near, it is said that her last words were in Mohawk: lesos konoronkwa, or “Jesus, I love you.” Moments after she died, it is said that her face suddenly became radiant as the pockmarks disappeared. This reported miracle, along with the witness of her spiritual devotion in life, is the basis for her large following among Native American Catholics, who see her as both a model of spiritual syncretism and an intercessory figure.59 The campaign to name her a saint began almost immediately and lasted more than three hundred years; she was beatified in 1980 and declared a saint in 2011. Today, among Native Catholics in the United States and Canada, Kateri is a ubiquitous figure whose influence is felt far beyond the religious sphere where her story originated.60 Certain details of Kateri’s life bear a striking similarity to those of Catherine. Both were four years old when their lives changed dramatically, and both received training from nuns as young women. In a historical convergence, the nuns who established the school in the real St. Ignatius had been dispatched from the St. Francis Xavier Mission at Kahnawake, Quebec, where Kateri had lived, and this may have been the inspiration for McNickle to name his fictional town

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St. Xavier. The major North American shrine to Kateri is located at St. Francis Xavier Church at Kahnawake. Both women were afflicted with weak or failing eyesight, and both exercised unique spiritual insight and practices. Saint Kateri has demonstrated powers of intercession; Catherine, too, through her dreams, is a spiritual mediator. The last words of Kateri and Catherine contain great meaning. When Catherine is felled by a stroke late in the novel, she manages to emerge through the veil of silence to speak, in English, two words: “No priest.” At first, Archilde, who has just arrived at her side, can’t believe that “Faithful Catherine” would deny the final unction.61 Archilde fetches both the doctor and Father Jerome, but later he realizes his mistake, in part because she has repeated her command in Salish, leaving no doubt of her intentions. Archilde tries to prevent Father Jerome from offering the rites, but he carries on, undeterred. Archilde yields, as “it was not that he feared speaking his own mind, but he saw the uselessness of it. The priest would have his way—and let him! It was empty. It meant nothing. Only his willfulness kept him from understanding that the power of the two sticks, the Somesh [cross] which Father Grepilloux had carried over the mountains, was dissolved.”62 As in Archilde’s schoolyard vision, the cross as a symbol and as a structure of power dissipates. The rites are emptied of meaning. And, like Kateri’s, Catherine’s transformation is accomplished via passage into the next world, allowing new narratives to emerge. Kateri’s transfiguration, a recovery of fullness as her pockmarks disappear, is reimagined in Catherine as a form of emptiness. That is, the rites, like Catherine’s body, are transformed into hollow vessels. When Catherine says, “No priest,” she is also saying, “No rites” bestowed by the father. She manages to escape the circumscriptions of paternalism, emblematized in her story through the Catholic fathers. In the character of Catherine the novel embodies the Kateri narrative in order to offer an alternative spiritual vision. While Catherine rejects Catholicism for herself, she nonetheless views the white God as kind; it is not Catholicism itself that is problematic for her. As an expression of Indian self-determination, the resonance of Catherine’s story with

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that of Kateri reiterates an indigenous creation. It is in multiple ways an Indian response. It suggests hope in the process of working through and then beyond circumscribed narratives, arriving at a place outside of the reach of the law. Catherine’s narrative serves as a critique of agency because it throws into the question the possibilities of conversion. Catherine embodies a figure central to native Catholicism in order to empty Catholic rites. The assimilation-era policies promoted the individual conversion of indigenous domestic subjects into U.S. citizens—as their own agents within a liberal democracy—while simultaneously reinforcing paternalism through such rulings as Kagama and Lone Wolf. In the earlier scene between Archilde and the game warden, Archilde posits Indian agency as being free of game laws; the warden sees agency as the right to defend oneself before a judge. Catherine’s rejection of Catholicism (“No priest”/no rites) echoes Archilde’s iteration of being outside the reach of rights assigned by American law; both Catherine and Archilde stake themselves in Salish systems of rites/rights. Catherine’s subversive embodiment of Catholicism’s most famous Indian convert serves as a reminder that conversions are not fixed conditions but unstable and open to multiple possibilities. This is true of the historical Kateri’s role in indigenous Catholicism as well. Vecsey’s discussion of her influence among Indian communities notes that Kateri has long functioned within the non-Indian Church as an ideal convert who purportedly left behind her native culture to participate in Catholic behavior. . . . For many American Indian Catholics, however, it is her identity as an Indian, not necessarily as a Catholic, that they find so appealing. The Church wishes Kateri to be a means for them to enunciate their Catholicism; many Indians find her a means of asserting their Indianness. They call her “Saint Kateri” . . . even without approval from the Church, because she epitomizes ideals “the people” have canonized for themselves. One

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Mohawk woman told an observer that she did not believe in the Christian God, but she did have faith in Kateri.63 In the same way, the Kateri narrative in The Surrounded can be understood to validate Indianness and indigenous forms of power, women’s power. The assimilation-era policymakers believed that successful conversion, that is, individualization, of Indians would affirm state modes of citizenship, in which one’s political agency— voting, defending oneself in court, and exercising other individual rights—would always serve to reinforce the dominant system.64 However, Catherine shows that taking action to move outside of the system can challenge the terms of agency as construed within a liberal democracy. Catherine’s story offers a vision of Indian self-determination that suggests Indian responses to colonial problems. Like Archilde when he experiences the early vision in which he considers all of the signs in the sky, then sees the bird cancel out the sign of the cross, Catherine seeks to transcend narratives of domination. Catherine’s experiences of spiritual renewal, in which she draws upon a syncretic Catholic system of symbols to reassert indigenous epistemologies and practices, ultimately empties the power of the priest’s words as he offers the final unction at her deathbed. Her journey to be free of the law of the church suggests a measured vision for federal–Indian relations in which acts of the father over the Indian (political) body can be reduced to empty gesture. Elise La Rose also defies narratives of containment, particularly as related to gendered domestic roles and the racialized force of law. Like Archilde, she is generationally trapped by the law, but, unlike Archilde, she puts up a spirited fight. Of all the characters in the book, including Louis, she most obviously defies the law and expresses a fearlessness of the consequences. She is characterized by constant motion. The first time Archilde sees Elise he is riding home, and she “dashed past, giving her horse the heel just as she came abreast.”65 In dashing past him, Elise engages Archilde in a horse race. Like Cogewea, Elise is a physically and sexually confident woman: “She turned her face toward

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him, her head inclined to the wind, laughing. She rode easily, her skirt gripped under her thighs, and her short hair flying like a black banner.” Archilde follows her down into a rocky canyon. When they stop to talk Archilde says he remembers Elise as a little girl at boarding school, and she tells him she “had to run away to get home again.” When Archilde warns that officials will seek her out and send her back, she answers, “Like hell they will! The old man doesn’t care, now I’m home. And the Agent will have to catch me.” Soon Elise asks him for a cigarette, telling Archilde that she used to smoke at boarding school. Although Archilde wonders if Elise is bragging, he “soon became convinced that she was daring enough to have smoked at school, where if she had been caught no doubt they would have broken her neck.” From this first encounter Archilde, captivated by her sexual and physical confidence, allows Elise to drive their actions: “She drew the smoke in deeply, with a look of enjoyment, and exhaled it lingeringly. His eyes were constantly on her; he had begun to wonder why she had raced after him, what she expected of him, what he was to do next.”66 Elise pursues Archilde by enticing him to chase her; this encounter ends with Elise asking for Archilde’s kerchief, then bounding across the river on her horse. Archilde does not follow but watches as she reaches the far bank, “waving her trophy.”67 Archilde’s next meeting with Elise takes place at a dance hall in Polson during the Fourth of July powwow, concurrent in the book’s chronology with Catherine’s meeting with the elders. Archilde, fresh from an unpleasant encounter with Sheriff Quigley, is in no mood to dance with the townfolk, but Elise convinces him to join her. After some halfhearted dancing, Elise declares she is interested in getting some drinks. Archilde, ever law-abiding, does not know where to get alcohol since it is banned on the reservation. But “Elise knew all about it. She knew everything about matters of that sort, just as at school she had known how to fool the matrons, how to get cigarettes, and how to sneak out of the dormitory. To some people nothing is ever hidden and they live by habit in a world beneath the surface of things which most people never suspect even exists. Elise was such a person;

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she amazed Archilde.”68 Here the novel distinguishes Archilde’s sense of a familiar world and Elise’s world “beneath the surface.” Archilde, although attracted to Elise, is ever aware that she will lead him into trouble: “He wasn’t afraid of her, he told himself, but now that she had hold of him he was feeling the way he felt just before climbing into the saddle on a bucking horse. Something was going to happen.”69 The sexual overtones to Archilde’s anxiety foreshadow the “something” that happens; after they drink, they return to the dance, where Elise flirts openly with him, taking obvious pleasure in the seduction. Soon “Archilde and Elise were so unheeding of everything but the heat which passed between their bodies that they saw no one,” although many of the dance hall patrons are watching them and whispering about “the Leon boy” and “one of those La Rose sluts.” The novel continues, “There were lamentations among the old women that his father hadn’t been buried six months. The money wouldn’t last much longer. ‘He’s just getting started on it. Wait till he gets going good.’ Whenever an Indian had money to spend the talk was always the same—how long would it last?” In this scene, the structure of Indian– white relations is shot through with the paternalistic and moralistic language of assimilation-era policy. The excesses of Archilde’s and Elise’s behavior are understood as such because of the failure of Indian policy to contain them; Elise is deemed “a slut” for her sexual confidence, and Archilde is labeled a profligate spender because he has been drinking. The latter suggests that categories of social control are so intertwined that one, drunkenness, can easily stand in for the other, financial recklessness. The older women in the dance hall demand, “Somebody’s got to stop it, or I’ll take my girls home. The idea!” At that moment Elise is whispering in Archilde’s ear, and he turns to kiss her on the lips. The punishment for this gesture is immediate and devastating. A group of men jump Archilde, and although he fights back they soon overpower him and beat him. They drag him outside and strike him from behind “with something harder than a fist,” so that he lands “in a loose heap in the dusty road.” Elise emerges from the crowd, “fighting and swearing, her own clothes

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torn as men had held her from wading into the group. . . . Then she stood in the road and wished them all in vitriolic hell. She drove Archilde home, but she could never explain how she got him into the car.”70 The novel’s depiction of Elise as a sexually, physically, and verbally powerful woman bears a striking distinction from earlier portrayals of Indian women as formidable and rational, yet socially contained, such as Pauline Johnson’s and Alice Callahan’s quite proper heroines. If Johnson and Callahan overcompensated in creating desexualized, matronly characters in response to the ways in which social and legal discourses coalesced against indigenous women’s agency, naming all agency as sexual (as I argue in chapter 2), then the depiction of Elise can be understood as another level of response. That is, while Johnson’s “Catherine of the ‘Crow’s Nest’” and Callahan’s Wynema remove the perceived threat of indigenous women’s sexuality by transcending, in a sense, their sexual identities, the figures of Mourning Dove’s Cogewea and McNickle’s Elise make the threat explicit. Elise is something of an extension of Cogewea, whose physicality and social forwardness only hint at a sexual nature. In Elise, however, sexual aggression and the embrace of sexual pleasure are made explicit and correspond to defiance of social and legal codes. She is, in short, a threat to the state. Proud of the fact that she broke the rules and ultimately ran away from Indian boarding school, Elise understands the force of domesticity. At the end of the novel, as Elise, Archilde, Mike, and Narcisse are holed up in the woods, she performs domesticity—that is, she acts as a proper, genteel hostess—to enable one last chance at escape. After the four have eaten dinner, the sheriff enters their camp unannounced. Elise is uncharacteristically silent and continues working around the fire: “Had your supper, Sheriff?” she asked coolly. “If you got some coffee left, I’ll take a cup. Thanks.” Elise was leisurely about filling his cup and passing

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canned cream and sugar to him. She put the coffee pot on the fire again.71 The sheriff calmly tells the group that he will be arresting them and taking them in. As Archilde prepares to go, Elise removes the coffeepot from the fire and offers the sheriff one last cup. Archilde wants to stop her but can’t bring himself to do it: Elise had but one more step to take. The Sheriff was reaching out with his cup. Then her hands dropped down—and up! She had kicked back the lid—and the coffee was hurled into the Sheriff’s face! She needed only that moment while he dashed his hands to his face to whirl about and reach the camp goods. Then she had a rifle in her hands and was shooting—from the hip—one—two—three explosions. The Sheriff never got his gun from the holster. He was down with three shots in the chest, each one jarring him as it hit.72 In this scene, Elise has embraced the gendered domesticity inculcated by the boarding schools, that is, acting as a demure, proper hostess, for her own ends: to use it as a weapon. The rifle replacing the coffeepot is an enduring image of domestic subversion. In the immediate moments after the shooting Archilde and Elise imagine they can still escape through the woods, eventually taking a train and living the rest of their lives in exile. This fantasy is short-lived, as Agent Parker and Joe La Ronde, an Indian police officer, emerge from the trees to arrest them. Still, Elise’s actions have allowed Mike and Narcisse to escape on horseback; against the silence of Archilde “extend[ing] his hands to be shackled” rumble the hoofbeats of the younger generation. The escape by Mike and Narcisse offers the only glimmer of hope in the dark conclusion of the novel.

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Impossible Agents Does Archilde’s silence represent the failure of agency? Or is his silence the only agency possible, given the closed circuit of law? Archilde’s story links the problem of agency with the impossibility of self-representation during the assimilation period. His life and, more broadly, his subject position are characterized by a structural deficit of agency; the law invests legal agency not with Indians but with Indian agents, such as Parker. The structure of wardship meant that Indians could not represent themselves in court but were dependent upon agents to act on their behalf. This structure foreclosed the possibility of self-representation. Through the course of the novel Archilde witnesses—that is, he becomes an unwilling accomplice—to two homicides. Through the structure of the law, actions that he did not commit can be attached to him, and his defense likewise lies outside of himself, dependent upon the bodies and wills of others. Through its multiplication of father figures, the novel challenges the conceit of unified interests that underwrites the Kagama and Lone Wolf rulings as well as disciplinary paternalism more generally. In particular, the novel emphasizes the contingent, unstable nature of these fatherly relationships. Up until the final scene the interests of Archilde and Parker are potentially aligned; at times, the priests are allies; and the intimate relationship between Archilde and Max moves from a state of estrangement to one of solidarity. The novel illustrates the possibility of alliance but shows that it is feasible only through self-representation, through the act of defending oneself, of telling one’s story. The most dramatic example of such solidarity is seen in the reconciliation between Archilde and Max, which is made possible through the mutual sharing of stories. If reconciliation is understood as a form of accounting, in which two sides must be balanced or reconciled to each other, then the equal standing of parties becomes an essential characteristic. Such equality is foreclosed in the structure of wardship, which constructs an impossible form of agency for domestic subjects. That McNickle published the novel in 1936,

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twelve years after the Indian Citizenship Act and two years after the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act, suggests that these laws did not entirely alleviate the problem of Indian agency. Indeed, the status of “domestic dependent nations” continues to render Indian rights ambiguous and contingent under the terms of federal paternalism. The constellating of Archilde’s struggle for self-representation along with alternative forms of action, such as those displayed by Catherine and Elise, offers a powerful critique of the problem of Indian agency, particularly after Lone Wolf. While Elise is openly defiant of legal boundaries, Archilde is keenly attentive to them. The pairing of Elise and Archilde produces the grim argument that one’s posture in relation to the law has very little to do with its ultimate effects. The novel shows the incommensurability of legal discourses that are based oppositionally in treaty law and in U.S. juridical law. In the terms of the novel, the legal loop of Lone Wolf is a mechanism that surrounds indigenous lands and subjects, while various characters attempt to chart the escape routes. Catherine, for example, envisions and affirms a form of traditional governance, yet she bears a great burden—the death of her son, Louis. Both Elise and Louis openly defy the imposition of U.S. law, yet the personal price they must pay is to become outlaws, or marked as such. Archilde attempts to work within the system of federal trust, yet his experience only proves that the ward can never be certain that the guardian will deliver on his purported benevolence. And his attempt to articulate himself as a full legal person under an alternate legal system, the treaty, shows not that he is without law, but that the dominant law cannot accommodate alternate claims. The actions of these multiple characters, responding both within and beyond the system of individual rights, offer a critique of the possibilities of Indian agency during the assimilation period and question the concept of agency itself.

c o n cl us io n th r o ugh out t h is book i have sought t o advance a central claim: Indian wars are wars on Indian families. During the assimilation period the Indian family home and relations served as the locus of settler-national efforts to diminish or eliminate the tribal-national polity. Policies such as child removal, compulsory boarding school, marriage regulation, and land allotment shattered Indian families and homelands alike. In revealing the violence of the assimilation era, I have tried to illuminate the responses of indigenous writers and the critical role they played in articulating critique, creating alternative visions, and producing anticolonial imaginaries. These writers both drew upon and expanded available genres and tropes and established distinct aesthetics that would continue to shape Native American literature in years to come. While literature is only one of a vast range of cultural and political responses, its power as critique extends from its ability to draw upon the same metaphors, plots, and language that construct the law’s rationale and expression. This rich intertextuality, evident in the works from early to contemporary Native American writers, makes visible the force of law in the most central and ordinary acts of everyday life: whom and how we love. In this conclusion I extend the claim in this way: Indian wars are wars on Indian family structures, and this assault has consequences for all state subjects. To illustrate this point I turn to “The Housing Poem,” a contemporary poem by the Tanana Athabascan writer Dian Million that animates the resilience of indigenous kinship structures against ongoing state interventions and disruptions. In my analysis I will chart a trajectory between the laws aimed at racialized and minority communities of the assimilation era and the seemingly

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neutral language of contemporary policy. I will consider the continuity of domestic themes in contemporary Native American literature and the ongoing critique it offers for the “domestic subjects” that trouble the American nation today. “The Housing Poem” opens with these words: “Minnie had a house / which had trees in the yard / and lots of flowers.” At this point, Minnie lives alone in the house but not for long. Soon her brother, Rupert, and his wife, Onna, arrive to “set up housekeeping in the living room,” and then “the house warmed and rocked / and sang because Minnie and Rupert laughed a lot.” The house continues to transform with the arrival of Rupert’s and Minnie’s mother, Elsie, followed by the twin cousins Dar and Shar. Minnie gives up her room to sleep on a cot and the twins pitch a tent “under the cedar patch in the yard / and could be heard singing around the house / mixtures of old Indian tunes and country western.” As winter arrives, Elsie returns to Moose Glen to fetch her mother, Sarah, who finds a place in front of the stove, either in a chair or cooking a pot of food for the household. As time goes by, Rupert and Onna have a baby named Lester, “and they were glad that Elsie and Sarah / were there to help.” The poem concludes, One night the landlord came by to fix the leak in the bathroom pipe and was surprised to find Minnie, Rupert and Onna, Sarah and Elsie, Shar and Dar all singing around the drum next to the big stove in the kitchen and even a baby named Lester who smiled waving a big greasy piece of dried fish. He was disturbed he went to court to evict them he said the house was designed for single-family occupancy which surprised the family because that’s what they thought they were.1

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As the poem opens, Minnie seems to be living the dream of the nineteenth-century reformers: she occupies a rental house with trees and flowers in the yard, perhaps suggesting that she is amenable to gardening. But almost immediately Minnie’s family is drawn into the house, and each addition brings cultural and economic transformations: singing, drumming, cedar, dried fish, elders, and a baby. Soon four generations occupy the house, and the Indian family has reconstituted a range of kinship and economic structures that had been attacked through assimilation-era laws. There is no stable or apparent head of household in this structure, and participation in the cash economy, evidenced through the paying of rent, is supplemented by indigenous economic activity, such as singing, drumming, and fishing. These activities, in conjunction with geographic references such as Moose Glen, subtly reference the ongoing existence of tribalnational domesticity. Million’s poem identifies the challenge that indigenous families continue to face in asserting cultural and economic systems of kinship against legal definitions that legitimate the isolated nuclear family as the only thinkable domesticity. The primacy of “single-family occupancy” as defined legally and socially has served as the grounds for multiple evictions and the splintering of native families, begun systematically during the assimilation era and continuing today. The poem’s use of the term occupancy evokes foundational concepts of Indian occupation as always contingent and unstable as a property right as well as histories of removal and forced relocation both before and after the assimilation period. In the poem the landlord responds to the encounter with Minnie’s family in two ways: “he was disturbed” and “he went to court to evict them.” While these lines narrate two separate events, their ideological underpinnings are the same: the belief that the construction of the Native American family as an extended kinship system is fundamentally aberrant and cannot be tolerated either psychically or legally. This underlying concept is directly resonant with the espoused views of the nineteenth-century Indian policy advocates, the Friends of the

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Indians, who viewed the patriarchal, nuclear family as “God’s unit of society.” When the case goes to the courts, the charges are not based in an Indian Act, antipolygamy legislation, Indian Office policy, or any other type of racialized legislation; rather, the family is evicted through the neutral language of housing regulation—the single-family unit. The trajectory I want to draw out here is that the concept of the singlefamily unit becomes naturalized and deracinated over time in part through the earlier explicit naming of racialized and marginalized subjects under the law. To understand more fully the construction of the single-family unit and the citizen as an individuated agent under law requires a broader constellation of analysis, one that views such laws as Indian allotment, antipolygamy, and Asian exclusion as interconnected parts of a larger whole. A goal of this book, in highlighting the relationship between intimate and national domesticities, is to make such future comparative analysis more visible, urgent, and possible. The indigenous writers considered here, particularly Johnson and Oskison, refused to position Indian policy as an isolated set of regulations that applied only to Indians, the named subjects of the law. In the contemporary poem, policies that no longer explicitly name indigenous subjects nonetheless continue to underwrite policies that pathologize and criminalize nonnuclear family structures. I frequently teach “The Housing Poem” in my introductory Native American literature course, and each time at least one student will say, “This is exactly like my family.” Invariably, Minnie’s family in the poem is “exactly like” the immigrant family of a first-generation university student. In many ways Native American experience is distinctly resonant with immigrant experience in relationship to larger forces of national domestication. The critical difference resides in the contest over the tribal-national domestic. As Native American experience becomes more central to American studies scholarship, this difference must maintain its visibility and significance in order for fruitful comparisons to emerge. Two contemporary debates seem especially apt for consideration in light of this book: gay marriage and the DREAM (Development,

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Relief, and Education of Alien Minors) Act. The anti–gay marriage rhetoric deployed in campaigns and codified in a number of state and tribal-national laws frequently specifies that marriage is between one man and one woman. This phrase, with its explicit rendering of one, is haunted by the antipolygamy campaigns of the nineteenth century. The current anti–gay marriage campaigns rely on a history of social anxiety related to polygamy and its nonconforming structure as a threat to the Union. Now, as in the past, the explicit disciplining of minority communities functions to distribute rights to all members of society and legally produce definitions of family and allegedly proper domesticity. At the same time, critics within the gay community have questioned whether heterosexual marriage is an acceptable model of legal conjugality and its attendant rights. That is, some have argued that gay marriage based on the model of heterosexual marriage can obscure or even damage established forms of queer sociality, belonging, and home. The concept of entwined consent may be useful in making visible the stakes of alternative domesticities. As I argue in chapter 1, the Indian Act was structured in such a way that love and death were twined, and an Indian woman could not assent to marry a white man without committing a form a legal suicide to her band status. This voluntary death moved aboriginal subjects and territory out of the tribal-national domestic and into the settler-national domestic under the rubric of consent. Could entwined consent also apply to gay marriage from the point of view of those who see its agreement as a form of assent to a set of rights that simultaneously disciplines or even extinguishes forms of queer domesticity? Ongoing debates over citizenship and immigration draw upon performative expectations and bodily submissions that were established in part through the regulation of Indian citizenship prior to 1924. The weighted categories of citizenship I describe in relation to the performative taxonomy of citizenship may be useful in parsing current discourses of citizenship. The latest version of the federal DREAM Act, which would grant citizenship to certain undocumented

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immigrants who came to the United States as children, includes provisions that an applicant must submit “biometric and biographic data” and demonstrate that he or she “has been a person of good moral character since the date the alien initially entered the United States.”2 What is the distance between “degree of Indian blood” and “biometric and biographic data”? How can “good moral character” be defined and measured? Who would be authorized to carry out such evaluations? The appearance of such ambiguous and yet takenfor-granted language in legislation suggests that the United States as a society has a shared and coherent understanding of what citizenship requires for those who wish to move across its exclusive boundary. Does “good moral character” need to be spelled out? Or has it already been limned over the past century through the bodies of domestic subjects and illegal aliens? I raise these topics as a gesture to the kinds of questions I hope this book will provoke among American studies scholars. At the same time, the book’s central commitment lies with understanding the specific forms of violence and creative response that defined the assimilation period for indigenous communities in the United States and Canada. Throughout the book, in my effort to trace the law’s named and unnamed domestic subjects, I have relied on an interdisciplinary approach to reading literary and legal texts. In doing so I have argued for a more robust appreciation of the literary histories and aesthetics evident in these assimilation-era works that articulate indigenous domesticities. These intimate and tribal-national domesticities challenge the imposition of the foreign domesticity of settler nationalism. Million’s wonderful poem is one of many contemporary examples that suggest a continuity of these themes across time. Although the poem ends with an eviction, the centripetal force that draws the family together remains present, suggesting the resilience of the family in reconstituting itself after the current displacement. The poem’s deft ending, which portrays the surprise on the part of the family, denaturalizes legal definitions of “single-family occupancy,” thus revealing the foreign aspect of settler-national domesticity.

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Yet renderings of the indigenous family, tribal-national entity, and settler-national polity in literature and law have changed in meaningful ways since the assimilation period. While federal wardship has ended, the tribal-national entity nonetheless remains within the disciplinary scope of the settler-national domestic. And even as the tribal-national domestic has come under direct attack through such policies as termination in the 1950s, institutionalization of tribal-national polities within the settler-national domestic has opened up new fronts of struggle in regulating interlinked domesticities. Controversies over blood quantum requirements, conflicts over the definitions of indigeneity and enrollment, and struggles over the distribution of tribal resources continue within the tribal-national domestic itself. In this new context Native American literature opens up these spaces of dissent, taking part in the vibrant life of an ever-changing tribalnational body. A complex rendering of domestic subjects will characterize Native American literature as long as the contest between settler-national and tribal-national domesticities exists. And Native American literature, along with other cultural forms, will continue to play a central role in imagining indigenous futures, asserting alternative subjectivities, and making the world of homeland and home.

Kamiah, 1960. Elizabeth Penney Wilson and Haruo Aoki, working on the Nez Perce Dictionary. Haruo Aoki, personal collection

Acknowledgments

th i s projec t h a s benefited from the adv i c e, support, and guidance of many mentors, friends, and colleagues. I offer their names here as a gesture of gratitude and recognition, along with the caveat that any failings or errors in this volume should reflect not on them but solely upon me. I was exceptionally fortunate to begin this project at Stanford University under the guidance of my dissertation adviser, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, whose rigor, generosity, and commitment greatly shaped this book and my life in the academy. My committee members, Richard White, Bryan Wolf, and Shari Huhndorf, contributed substantively to the development of this project, as did David Palumbo-Liu. I am deeply indebted to each of these scholars for the high standards set by their scholarship and ever grateful for their teaching, friendship, and support. I wish to acknowledge the Ford Foundation for a three-year predoctoral fellowship and the Whiting Foundation for a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities dissertation award that helped support my graduate work. At the University of California, Berkeley, a number of wonderful and insightful colleagues have offered feedback on the manuscript. A great debt is to my senior colleague Thomas Biolsi, for patiently and expertly responding to drafts of every chapter. For commenting on various chapters, I am grateful to my faculty colleagues Michael Cohen, Brian DeLay, Kathleen Donegan, Shari Huhndorf, Steven Lee, Juana Maria Rodriguez, and Hertha Sweet Wong. I am grateful to the Ford Foundation for a nine-month postdoctoral fellowship and to my department for allowing me to accept the fellowship. Much-admired colleagues at other institutions offered critiques on various chapters and advice. My gratitude goes to Chadwick Allen, 181

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Lisa Brooks, Lauren Stuart Muller, Mark Rifkin, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Jane E. Simonsen. I wish to make special mention of the kindness, support, and sharp analysis offered by my friend and mentor, the late Jim Tarter, whose untimely death ended our conversations far too soon. The opportunity to work with graduate students has informed and enriched this project. I benefited from the excellent assistance of three graduate student researchers: Tim Molino, Jennifer Reimer, and Tala Khanmalek. John Dougherty provided critical assistance with teaching as I completed my final revisions. For commenting on chapters, I thank Erica Boas, Juan Herrera, Funie Hsu, Tristan Josephson, Tala Khanmalek, Gwendolyn Leachman, Janey Lew, Laura Nelson, Jennifer Reimer, Susan Woolley, and Hentyle Yapp. Special thanks for the writerly energies and terrific insights of the Writing Across Genre graduate seminar: Wanda Alarcon, Monica Bland, Erica Boas, Ashley Brock, Julia Chang, Funie Hsu, Javier Huerta, Tala Khanmalek, Margaret Rhee, and Julie Thi Underhill. In addition, Matt Baxter provided kind assistance at a critical stage in the revision process. Librarians everywhere deserve more praise and thanks. In particular, I thank the following specialists for their kind and expert assistance: Cheryl Gunselman, Trevor James Bond, and Mark O’English at the Washington State University Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections; Peg Schroll of the Idaho State Historical Society Archives; and David Kingma of Gonzaga University Special Collections. At Berkeley, I am grateful for assistance from Corliss Lee, the American studies specialist at Doe Library. Enormous thanks are due to Ned Blackhawk for his support of this project and for his vision for the Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity at Yale University Press. I am deeply grateful to the anonymous readers of the manuscript for their detailed, cogent reports. At Yale University Press, I wish to recognize and thank Christopher Rogers, editorial director, and Christina Tucker, assistant editor, for their steady guidance and hard work in bringing this book into existence.

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For years of selfless dedication to the continuity of Nez Perce language, and for offering me a path to that world, I thank my cherished teacher Haruo Aoki. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Penney Wilson, Harry and Ida Wheeler, Sam Watters, Agnes Davis, and all of the titílu who carried our language and culture through the assimilation era and beyond. QeҌciyéwҌyewҌ himé·qҌis. Friends and family provided love, encouragement, food, and pleasant distractions over the long journey of writing and revising this book, for which I am immeasurably grateful. For years of unwavering love and support I especially thank my parents, Carl Hege and Anne Eagle Hege; and my brothers, Daniel Hege and John Hege, and their families. I also recognize my late aunt, Theresa Eagle, for insight and encouragement. Above all I thank Scott Byram and our beautiful children, Twyla and Diego, for supporting my work; my love and thanks to you for all you do to make the whole of life more divine.

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Notes

Introduction 1. This photograph, titled “Lapwai Schoolchildren,” was taken by E. Jane Gay and can be dated to her time at the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho in 1889–92. The photograph is itself produced by the process it documents; Gay served as the assistant to the allotment agent Alice Fletcher. The girls are identified in Caroline James’s study Nez Perce Women in Transition (184) as (from left to right) Elizabeth Penney Wilson, Jane Pankin, and Jane Swan. For more about the allotment process carried out on the Nez Perce reservation by Fletcher, see E. Jane Gay, With the Nez Perces; Simonsen, Making Home Work; Greenwald, Reconfiguring the Reservation. 2. Fischbacher, A Study of the Role of the Federal Government, 126. 3. Coercion characterized boarding school attendance from the beginning. Fischbacher notes that prior to the assimilation period, some midcentury treaties required school attendance and attached penalties to parents and guardians who did not comply (A Study of the Role of the Federal Government, 125). The founder of Carlisle, Richard Henry Pratt, while on a recruiting mission, was ordered by a government official to remove children specifically from the allegedly hostile Lakota agencies of Spotted Tail and Red Cloud, making clear that the children would serve as hostages to ensure good behavior (Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 202). David Wallace Adams notes that in 1893 Congress gave the Indian Bureau the authority to “withhold rations, clothing, and other annuities” from resistant families to ensure compliance with the policy (“Fundamental Considerations,” 3). In 1895 the Hopi community of Oraibi resisted sending their children to the boarding schools, resulting in the incarceration of nineteen villagers at Alcatraz from January until August (Archuleta, Child, and Lomawaima, Away from Home, 47). 4. In 1887 Congress passed the General Allotment Act, which created a twotiered system for the breakup of reservation lands. Under the act, parcels ranging between 40 and 160 acres were allotted to individual Indians, and the title was held in trust by the federal government for twenty-five years. In 1890 an amendment provided for plots to be 160 acres for each allottee. At the conclusion of this trust period, Indians would receive title in fee simple and become U.S. citizens. A small number of tribes, including the Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Seminoles, Osage, Miamis, Peorias, and Sac and Fox of the Indian Territory, were excluded from the original provisions of the act of 1887. In 1898 Congress passed the Curtis Act, which authorized allotment without consent throughout the Indian Territory. For more on allotment, see Debo, And Still the Waters Run; Deloria,

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Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties; Hoxie, A Final Promise; Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands; Prucha, The Great Father. 5. Hoxie, A Final Promise, 11–12. 6. A number of historical works address the assimilation period in the United States and Canada, among them Hagan, The Indian Rights Association; Harring, White Man’s Law; Hoxie, A Final Promise; McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian; Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens; Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands; Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis; Prucha, Americanizing the American Indians; Prucha, The Great Father; Smith, Liberalism, Surveillance, and Resistance. 7. See, for example, the following: Boydston, Home and Work; Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race; Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture; McClintock, Imperial Leather; Romero, Home Fronts; Ryan, The Empire of the Mother; Simonsen, Making Home Work; Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire; Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire; Welter, “Cult of True Womanhood”; Wexler, Tender Violence. 8. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 21–74. 9. Wexler, Tender Violence, 101. 10. Ibid., 105. 11. Romero, Home Fronts, 19. See also Wexler, Tender Violence; Carby, Restructuring Womanhood; and Mance, Inventing Black Women. 12. Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, 1. 13. Here I juxtapose domestic and intimate to mark the incommensurability of terms; while the United States has made the tribal-national domestic through territorial and political expansion, the tribal-national cannot militarily overtake the U.S. national in the same way. Thus intimacy marks the intense closeness, deep knowledge, and vulnerability of this relationship. 14. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. 1 (1831). 15. A number of studies analyze the production and circulation of these texts. See, for example, Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire; McClintock, Imperial Leather; Simonsen, Making Home Work; Smith, American Archives; and Wexler, Tender Violence. 16. Merrill E. Gates, “Land and Law as Agents in Educating Indians,” qtd. in Prucha, Americanizing the American Indians, 50. 17. Ibid., 52. 18. Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light, 99. See also Adams, “Fundamental Considerations”; Lomawaima and McCarty, To Remain an Indian; Simonsen, Making Home Work. 19. In the antebellum United States, African Americans also shared an anomalous position, as “neither citizen nor alien.” See Wald, Constituting Americans. 20. U.S. House of Representatives, Digest of the Official Opinions of the AttorneysGeneral of the United States, Comprising All of the Published Opinions Contained in

notes to pages 8–19

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Volumes I to XVI, Inclusive, and Embracing the Period from 1789 to 1881. 48th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1885, H. Doc 15, 57. 21. Rifkin, Manifesting America. 22. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 4–5. 23. Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post)Colonial Studies,” in Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire, 24. 24. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 12. 25. See Shari Huhndorf’s excellent critique of this problem in her monograph Mapping the Americas. 26. See, for example, Carlson, Sovereign Selves; Carpenter, Seeing Red; Konkle, Writing Indian Nations; Parker, Changing Is Not Vanishing; Senier, Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance; Justice, Our Fire Survives the Storm; Warrior, The People and the Word. 27. Recent scholarship has scrutinized these aspects of Native American literary nationalism, including Huhndorf, Mapping the Americas; and Rifkin, Manifesting America. 28. Romero, Home Fronts, 6–7. 29. For more on photographic practices of this time, see Sandweiss, Print the Legend; Simonsen, Making Home Work; Wexler, Tender Violence; Williams, Framing the West.

One. Entangled Love Epigraphs: Said, Culture and Imperialism, 3; Johnson, The Moccasin Maker, 123. 1. Johnson, “A Strong Race Opinion,” 179. 2. In addition to Wacousta and An Algonquin Maiden, Johnson cites the following texts in her essay: Charles Mair, Tecumseh (1884); Bret Harte, M’Liss: An Idyll of Red Mountain (1873); Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona (1884); and Jessie M. Freeland, “Winona’s Tryst” (1892). 3. Emily Pauline Johnson was born in 1861 on the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ontario, the daughter of the Mohawk chief and interpreter George Henry Martin Johnson and the English-born Emily Susanna Howells. She grew up in a multicultural and cosmopolitan household and began performing her poetry shortly after the death of her father in 1884. Johnson supported herself through her writing and stage performances and was well known throughout Canada, England, and the United States. She published six books of poetry and prose and numerous articles. She died of cancer in Vancouver, B.C., in 1913. For more on Johnson, see StrongBoag and Gerson, Paddling Her Own Canoe; Gerson and Strong-Boag, E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake. 4. John Milton Oskison was born in 1874 near Tahlequah, Indian Territory, the son of a Cherokee mother, Rachel Connor Crittenden, and an English immigrant,

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John Oskison. He was a classmate of Will Rogers at Willie Halsell College in Vinita and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree at Stanford University in 1898. He completed one year of graduate work in the English department at Harvard University. He published numerous short stories and articles and worked as an editor for the New York Evening Post and Collier’s. He served in the military during World War I. During his lifetime he published two biographies and three novels. His final novel, The Singing Bird, was released in 2007. He died in 1947, leaving behind an unpublished autobiography. For more on Oskison, see the foreword and introduction to The Singing Bird; Ronnow, “John Milton Oskison,” Handbook of Native American Literature, 271–75; Littlefield and Parins, “Short Fiction Writers of the Indian Territory,” 23–38; Justice, Our Fire Survives the Storm, 108–19. 5. According to John Milloy, the first of a series of laws aimed at national consolidation was put in place under British rule: the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857. The act, which formed the base of future “enfranchisement” laws, made private property ownership a precondition to securing political rights within the state. The law would grant aboriginal individuals the same rights as nonnative settlers under the British system, provided that the aboriginal persons would hold private property and forsake all tribal affiliations. Following Canadian Confederation in 1867, the next major policy, the Act for the Gradual Enfranchisement of the Indians (1869), solidified and extended the British policy, granting the federal government extensive powers over every level of aboriginal domestic affairs. The Indian Act of 1876 gave the federal government authority to completely control aboriginal governments, enabling the Indian department to further carry out its designs for enfranchisement. See Milloy, “The Early Indian Acts,” 56–64. 6. Johnson, Moccasin Maker, 103. 7. Ibid., 105. 8. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 163–64. See also Appadurai, Modernity at Large; and Neu and Graham, “The Birth of a Nation,” 47–76. 9. Johnson, Moccasin Maker, 108. 10. Ibid., 112. 11. Ibid., 114. 12. Ibid., 115. 13. Ibid., 117. 14. Ibid., 117. 15. Ibid., 118. 16. Harring, White Man’s Law, 10. 17. Johnson, Moccasin Maker, 118. 18. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, 263. 19. Johnson, Moccasin Maker, 122. 20. Ibid., 123. 21. Ibid., 124.

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22. Ibid., 126. 23. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 777–95. See also Biolsi, “Birth of the Reservation,” 28–53. 24. Simonsen, Making Home Work, 7–8. 25. Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 22. 26. Cott, Public Vows, 56–76. 27. Johnson, Moccasin Maker, 124. 28. Ibid., 124–25. 29. Child, Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians, 150. Child (1802–80) earned fame with the publication of Hobomok, and the works she published in that period “helped define the conventions of [American] short fiction, besides turning the genre into a vehicle of social protest.” Her work centered on Indian rights and the abolition of slavery; the latter caused her literary reputation to suffer. Her works were also characterized by a critique of patriarchy and the suggestion that white women shared an alliance with people of color against male dominance and white supremacy (Karcher, “Introduction,” ix–xx). 30. Child, Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians, 140. 31. Ibid., 150. 32. Ibid., 141. 33. Deloria, Playing Indian; Huhndorf, Going Native. 34. See, for example, Cott, Public Vows; Pascoe, What Comes Naturally; Carter, The Importance of Being Monogamous; Gillis, For Better, For Worse. 35. Cott, Public Vows, 11. 36. Carter, “Creating ‘Semi-Widows’ and ‘Supernumerary Wives,’” 137. 37. Statutes of Canada. The Indian Act, 1876, 39 Vict, c18. 38. Cott, Public Vows, 11–12; Carter, “Creating ‘Semi-Widows and ‘Supernumerary Wives,’” 137. 39. A statute of 1869, Act for the Gradual Enfranchisement of Indians, defined the internal workings of the band by denying women the right to vote in band elections and bestowing the superintendent general of Indian Affairs with power over internal legislation and enforcement. See Tobias, “Protection, Civilization, Assimilation,” 127–44; Lawrence, “Gender, Race, and the Regulation of Native Identity,” 1–31. 40. Statutes of Canada. The Indian Act, 1876, 39 Vict, c18. 41. Lawrence, “Gender, Race, and the Regulation of Native Identity,” 6. 42. Ibid. 43. Johnson, Moccasin Maker, 102. 44. Cott, Public Vows, 15–16. 45. Pascoe cites the work of Eva Saks, Derrick Bell, Cheryl I. Harris, George Lipsitz, and Patricia J. Williams in What Comes Naturally, 345n78. 46. Ibid., 77–108. 47. Oskison, “The Problem of Old Harjo,” 235–41.

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48. See Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis; Fritz, The Movement for Indian Assimilation. 49. In 1890 this rule was amended to provide 160 acres to each allottee. 50. Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands, 83. For more on allotment, see Hoxie, A Final Promise; Prucha, The Great Father; and Deloria, Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties, 9–13. 51. Debo, And Still the Waters Run, 21. 52. Ibid., 23–33. 53. Oskison, “The Problem of Old Harjo,” 235. 54. Ibid., 236. 55. See U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Privileges and Elections. Proceedings before the Committee on Privileges and Elections of the United States Senate in the matter of the protests against the right of Hon. Reed Smoot, a Senator from the State of Utah, to hold his seat. Vol. I–IV. 59th Cong., 1st Sess. S. Doc. 486, pt. 1–4; U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Privileges and Elections. Reed Smoot. 59th Cong., 1st Sess. S. Rpt. 4253 pt 1 & 2. 56. Oskison, “The Problem of Old Harjo,” 237. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Littlefield and Parins, “Short Fiction Writers,” 24. 60. Oskison, “The Problem of Old Harjo,” 237. 61. Ibid., 238. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 239. 66. Ibid. 67. Prucha, The Great Father, 621–22. 68. Ibid., 622. 69. Carter, “Creating ‘Semi-Widows’ and ‘Supernumerary Wives,’” 131–59. 70. Debo, A History of Indians of the United States, 287. 71. The story of Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus is recorded in Acts 9:1–19. 72. Harjo’s story echoes the biblical story of Abraham, whose childless wife, Sarah, suggests that he sleep with Hagar. It is curious that Oskison ends the analogy there; the absence of Indian children in this story has sobering implications. 73. Oskison, “The Problem of Old Harjo,” 239. 74. Chambers, “Prejudice and Polygamy,” 3. 75. Oskison, “The Problem of Old Harjo,” 240. 76. Carter, “Creating ‘Semi-Widows’ and ‘Supernumerary Wives,’” 137–38. 77. Oskison, “The Problem of Old Harjo,” 240. 78. Ibid.

notes to pages 44–52

79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

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Ibid., 241. Littlefield and Parins, “Short Fiction Writers,” 36. Ibid., 36. Cott, Public Vows, 72–73. Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?, 165.

Two. Unnatural Children Epigraph. Thomas J. Morgan, “Compulsory Education,” from Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian (1892), in Prucha, Americanizing the American Indians, 256. 1. A number of excellent works have been published on the history of boarding and residential schools in the United States and Canada, including Adams, Education for Extinction; Archuleta, Child, and Lomawaima, Away from Home; Child, Boarding School Seasons; Coleman, American Indian Children at School; Ellis, To Change Them Forever; Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race; Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light; Lomawaima and McCarty, To Remain an Indian; Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision; Milloy, A National Crime; Riney, The Rapid City Indian School; Trafzer, Keller, and Sisquoc, Boarding School Blues; Trennert, The Phoenix Indian School. 2. An oft-cited example is Thomas J. Morgan’s speech, “A Plea for the Papoose,” reprinted in Prucha, Americanizing the American Indians, 239–51. Speaking on behalf of Indian infants, Morgan states, “I am sure these helpless innocents for whom I plead would, if they had words in which to express their thoughts, appeal to us with a pathos inexpressibly touching to save them from the doom that awaits them if left to grow up with their present surroundings. . . . The only possible way in which they can be saved from the awful doom that hangs over them is for the strong arm of the Nation to reach out, take them in their infancy and place them in its fostering schools; surrounding them with an atmosphere of civilization, maturing them in all that is good, and developing them into men and women instead of allowing them to grow up as barbarians and savages” (ibid., 243). 3. Prucha, The Great Father, 687–715. 4. Callahan, Wynema; Johnson, Moccasin Maker, 86–101. 5. Lindsey, Indians at Hampton Institute, 132, 199. 6. Gravatt, The Record of Hampton’s Returned Indian Pupils, 4–5. 7. The animalistic metaphor appears again later in the report, when Gravatt compares the capture of wild buffalo to live among domesticated cattle as “the Indian question illustrated.” He suggests that the buffalo can no longer survive in the wild and remain safe only because “they were caught when young, were trained to live with the civilized cattle, and now they adjust themselves to their surroundings. . . . The Indian cannot be hunted anymore; there is too much Christianity in the land for that. But unless he is taken young and taught to adjust himself to his surroundings he will always be oppressed, and there will always be trouble.” Gravatt doesn’t mention

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that domesticated buffalo are not ultimately safe; they merely await their inevitable slaughter in the company of equally captive cows. 8. Forcey and Orr, “Motherhood,” 581. 9. See Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race; Pascoe, Relations of Rescue; Prucha, The Great Father; Milloy, A National Crime. 10. See, for example, Deloria, Playing Indian; Huhndorf, Going Native; Wald, Constituting Americans. 11. The myth of Pocahontas is the archetype of this narrative; see Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex,” 698–714. 12. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, in her introduction and notes to the 1997 edition of Wynema, points out some of the novel’s ethnographic inaccuracies, such as the opening scene in which the Muskogee Creek community is depicted as living in tipis (xxxiv) and Lakota characters are assigned non-Lakota names like Chikena (xlviii) and Horda (112). Ruoff suggests that the novel’s artistic shortcomings are offset by its contribution as “a moving and powerful call to action, which reveals the author’s intelligence, knowledge of current issues, sensitivity to native people, and commitment to justice” (xliii). A more strident critique comes from Craig Womack, who assesses the strength of the novel in terms of its production of a Creek national consciousness in his text Red on Red. Through this rubric, Womack finds the novel lacking “because of its failure to engage Creek culture, history, and politics. I make this claim based on the novel’s erasure of Creek voices, the characters’ rejection of Creek culture, the many instances of cultural misrepresentation throughout, the lack of any depictions of the nuances of Creek life, the protagonist’s repudiation of Muskogean matrilineality, and the author’s choice of a non-Creek and non-Indian viewpoint” (107). 13. See Womack, Red on Red, for a critique of the novel’s representation of aspects of Creek society. 14. For an interpretation of the novel as a model of cross-cultural education, see Mollis, “Teaching ‘Dear Mihia.’” 15. Callahan, Wynema, 4. 16. Ibid., 63. 17. Ibid., 4. 18. Ibid., 5. 19. Many Christian organizations rightfully deplored the graft and abuse carried out by corrupt Indian agents and actively sought to replace them with workers who would ethically and earnestly protect the Indians. The concept of replacing corrupt agents with Christian mission workers was also the cornerstone of Grant’s Peace Policy, carried out roughly between 1869 and 1879. Contemporary readers of the novel would have recognized, if not supported, this effort. See Prucha, The Great Father, 501–33; Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis; and Keller, American Protestantism. 20. See, for example, Ruoff, “Two Ideas Above an Oyster;” Ruoff, “Justice for Indians and Women”; Mollis, “Teaching ‘Dear Mihia’”; and Ryan, “The Indian Problem as a Woman’s Question.”

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21. Callahan, Wynema, 55. 22. Ibid., 55–56. 23. This plot development mirrors a news report of the Lakota infant Zintkala Nuni (“Lost Bird”), who was found alive four days after the massacre, protected by the body of her dead mother. According to a report in The Indian’s Friend, the infant was adopted by a white man (Gen. L. W. Colby) and renamed Marguerite Elizabeth. See “The Waif of Wounded Knee,” The Indian’s Friend, vol. 3, no. 8 (April 1891): 4. The tragic life of Zintkala Nuni is the subject of a biography by Renee Samson Flood and a documentary by PBS. 24. Callahan, Wynema, 102. 25. Allen, Blood Narrative, 16. 26. Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment, 6. 27. Callahan, Wynema, 72–73. 28. Ibid., 73–74. 29. Tatonetti, “Behind the Shadows of Wounded Knee,” 9–10. Tatonetti’s essay gives a thorough discussion of Hadjo’s voice in the novel. 30. Ruoff, “Notes to the Text,” Wynema, 105–13. 31. Callahan herself briefly served in an editorial role at the weekly Methodist Episcopal paper, Our Brother in Red (see Littlefield and Parins, American Indian and Alaska Native Newspapers, 290–93). 32. According to Littlefield and Parins, tribal newspapers (those printed as official tribal organs) were small in number until 1924 and published only by the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Minnesota Chippewas. The great proliferation of publications were “nontribal newspapers, those that were not tribal organs in any sense but were Indian owned, operated, or edited, sometimes in opposition to tribal leaders. Indians or Natives involved in publishing these newspapers were for the most part professional journalists whose motive was profit. Theirs was a freer press than the tribal press, which was bound to a large degree by tribal appropriations, official tribal perspectives, and political appointments.” Littlefield and Parins, American Indian and Alaska Native Newspapers, xiii. 33. Ibid., xiii–xiv. 34. Ibid., xv. 35. See Littlefield and Parins, American Indian and Alaska Native Newspapers. 36. Callahan, Wynema, 50. 37. Senier, “Allotment Policy and Tribal Discourse,” 427. 38. The incendiary nature of the allotment debate among Indians should not be underestimated. For example, the independent paper The Indian Progress, founded at Muskogee in 1875 by the Cherokee journalist Elias C. Boudinot, came out in favor of allotment: “The tribal governments so opposed his advocacy for opening the Indian Territory and allotting lands that the Creeks threatened to seize his press and forced his removal to Vinita, Cherokee Nation.” The paper soon failed, as did the Vinita Vidette (1878), a progressive paper.” Littlefield and Parins, American Indian and Alaska Native Newspapers, xv.

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39. Ibid., xvi. 40. Callahan, Wynema, 97. 41. The Cherokee Telephone has a fascinating history, as recounted by Littlefield and Parins. Briefly sketched, it was founded by B. H. Stone as the Telephone in Tahlequah, Cherokee Nation, in 1887. Stone, a photographer and attorney, was married to a Cherokee woman. Stone opposed allotment, and the Telephone carried a great deal of political news. It was critical of the official paper of the Cherokee Nation, the Cherokee Advocate. During a highly contested Cherokee Nation election in 1887, Stone supported the non-National party candidate for principal chief. As a result, the then-editor of the Cherokee Advocate, Elias Boudinot, shot and killed Stone. Stone’s widow, Emma Stone, then became editor for a short period; she sold the paper in 1888 to a stock company, the Telephone Publishing Company. For a few years the tone and content of the paper were less political, yet the editor and most writers were Cherokees. In 1890 the Cherokee journalist Augustus E. Ivey took over and soon renamed the paper the Cherokee Telephone. Ivey’s leadership was “more political, attacking other papers and editors” and advocating “English in the Cherokee schools, for changes in the educational system, opening the Cherokee primary schools to the children of noncitizen whites in the nation, and allotting lands in severalty” (388). Ivey departed when the paper changed hands in 1894; it was purchased by John Henry Dick, a Cherokee. For a short time the paper was known as the Arrow-Telephone following a merger with the Indian Arrow of Vinita; this merger lasted only four months. In January 1895 the Telephone Publishing Company again resumed as publisher, but it struggled. In June, Elias Boudinot, the man who had shot the original owner, purchased the paper and replaced Dick as editor. Publication halted for a time but was resumed in October 1895 as The Weekly Capital, edited by Sallee (Jones) Dick, the Cherokee wife of John Dick. The paper closed down in 1896. See Littlefield and Parins, American Indian and Alaska Native Newspapers, 386–90. 42. Callahan, Wynema, 98. 43. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 62. 44. Bernardin, “On the Meeting Grounds of Sentiment,” 214. 45. Callahan, Wynema, 45. 46. Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions, 7. 47. Koven and Michel, Mothers of a New World, 1–42. 48. Sklar, “Historical Foundations of Women’s Power,” in Koven and Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World, 51–52; Romero, Home Fronts, 14. 49. Koven and Michel, Mothers of a New World, 6. 50. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 57–58. 51. See Mathes, “Nineteenth Century Women and Reform,” 1–18; Hoxie, A Final Promise, 11–12. 52. Quinton, “The Annual Address,” The Indian’s Friend, 3. This editorial was the transcript of the presidential address given at the convention in 1888.

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53. Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions, 8. 54. Editorial, The Indian’s Friend, 1, no. 1 (March 1888): 2. 55. Wexler, Tender Violence, 101. 56. Ibid., 105. 57. Ibid. 58. As Jacobs points out, this practice existed during American slavery, when child removal and threats of removal functioned as a common form of controlling slaves (White Mother to a Dark Race, 55). 59. Ibid., 84. 60. Ibid., 85. 61. Ibid., 85, citing Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 202. 62. Callahan, Wynema, 90. This language echoes the contemporary news report of the New York Times: “The engagement lasted fully an hour and a half. To the south many took refuge in a ravine, from which it was difficult to dislodge them. The Indians from cover kept up a constant fire on the soldiers, who replied, picking off the redskins at every opportunity. The Hotchkiss gun was also run up so as to command the ravine, and its withering fire was poured upon the reds. . . . The Indians were shot down wherever found, no quarter being given by any one.” From “A Fight with the Hostiles,” New York Times. December 30, 1890, 1. 63. The novel emphasizes the ways in which the invented binary of a “degraded” Indian society and a “civilized” white society are spurious. Early conversations between Gerald and Genevieve, for example, regarding Creek practices and beliefs prepare the reader to accept the idea that communal traditions, a core aspect of Indian domesticity, are not only acceptable but in some ways superior to the traditions of white civilization. 64. Johnson, Moccasin Maker, 86. 65. Ibid., 86–87. 66. Ibid., 91. 67. The spelling of Kootenai in the original is Kootenay; I have chosen to modernize the spelling. 68. Johnson, Moccasin Maker, 95. 69. Ibid., 96. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., 97. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 100. 74. Ibid., 101. 75. Ibid. 76. Some examples include the heroines Esther in “As It Was in the Beginning,” Christine in “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” and Lydia in “The Derelict.” These stories are all included in The Moccasin Maker. 77. Romero, Home Fronts, 4.

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78. See, e.g., Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 111–31; Pascoe, Relations of Rescue, 56–59; Miller, Skyscrapers, 254–82; Sandweiss, Print the Legend, 237–39. 79. See Barman, “Taming Aboriginal Sexuality,” 237–66; Miller, Skyscrapers, 254–82; Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 118–19. 80. Barman, “Taming Aboriginal Sexuality,” 264. 81. Ibid., 258–61. 82. Biolsi, Organizing the Lakota, 7–10. 83. See, for example, Barman, “Taming Aboriginal Sexuality”; Carter, The Importance of Being Monogamous; Pickles and Rutherdale, eds., Contact Zones; Smith, Liberalism, Surveillance, and Resistance; Kelm and Townsend, eds., In the Days of Our Grandmothers. 84. Brownlie, “Intimate Surveillance,” in Pickles and Rutherdale, eds., Contact Zones, 165. 85. Ibid., 167. 86. Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 28–52. 87. Stephens, Malaeska, 88. 88. Ibid., 239. 89. Ibid., 243. 90. Ibid., 253.

Three. Preoccupations Epigraph: Mourning Dove, Cogewea, 21. 1. Mourning Dove, Cogewea, 21. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. See, for example, Allen, The Sacred Hoop; Owens, Other Destinies; Wilson, Writing Home; Krupat, Red Matters. 5. Lukens, “Mourning Dove and Mixed Blood,” 409. 6. Viehmann, “My People . . . My Kind,” 207. 7. Mourning Dove, Cogewea, 137. 8. Ibid., 157. 9. Ibid., 254. 10. U.S. Statutes at Large, 25:392. Cited in Prucha, Documents, 175. 11. For an account of the Osage Head Wars, see Fixico, The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century, 27–53. The topic is also treated by Linda Hogan’s novel, Mean Spirit. 12. Mourning Dove, Cogewea, 44. The novel represents the word sq—w fully. However, I choose to represent it with a dash that bears the mark and memory of violence. This is to say not that all uses of the term produce violence—a fact that is supported in the novel, as at times Jim affectionately refers to Cogewea as “little sq—w”—but rather that the term bears the weight of violence across multiple

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contexts. I would compare the use of “sq—w” to the use of “the N–word” in African American communities; even when used ironically or politically, it retains the element of racial violence that produced it. In fact, the power of such rearticulation is produced in part by this quality. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Bigart, Getting Good Crops, 220–21. 16. I adopted this Salish spelling and translation through consultation with the language preservation program of the Colville Confederated Tribes. I am grateful to Haruo Aoki and Milton Davis Jr. for their assistance. 17. Mourning Dove, Cogewea, 16. 18. Ibid., 18 19. Ibid., 48. 20. At the same time, the novel dwells significantly upon Cogewea’s status as “a despised ‘breed,’” or tragic mixed-blood. 21. Mourning Dove, Cogewea, 17. 22. Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 9–14. 23. Ibid., 11, quoting Anderson, Kinsmen of Another Kind. 24. Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823); Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. 1 (1831); Worcester v. Georgia. 31 U.S. 515 (1832). 25. Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823). 26. Ibid. 27. Wilkinson, American Indians, Time, and the Law, 39. Wilkinson points out that in the 1970s and 1980s some Indian nations used the right of occupancy (also known as Indian title, original title, and aboriginal title) to argue—with some success—that native lands acquired by states without the permission of the federal government were invalid agreements and thus the land should revert to native possession (40–43). 28. Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823). 29. Ibid. 30. Historical accounts of Indian boarding and residential school experiences in the United States and Canada continue to grow. Among the excellent volumes now available are Adams, Education for Extinction; Archuleta, Child, and Lomawaima, Away from Home; Child, Boarding School Seasons; Coleman, American Indian Children at School; Ellis, To Change Them Forever; Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race; Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light; Lomawaima and McCarty, To Remain an Indian; Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision; Milloy, A National Crime; Riney, The Rapid City Indian School; Trafzer, Keller, and Sisquoc, Boarding School Blues; Trennert, The Phoenix Indian School; Troutman, Indian Blues. 31. General Allotment Act. U.S.S. XXIV 388–91. 32. Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands, 83. 33. The former meaning (anxiety) usually calls upon the noun preoccupation, and the latter (an engrossing concern that excludes other thoughts) usually invokes

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the verb preoccupy. These meanings came into use in the mid- to late sixteenth century, and both arise through the suggested Latin root of praeoccupare, “seize beforehand.” 34. Borrows, “Crown and Aboriginal Occupations of Land,” 5. 35. See, for example, Chadwick Allen’s discussion of “treaty discourse” in “Postcolonial Theory and the Discourse of Treaties.” 36. Mourning Dove, Cogewea 17. 37. Ibid., 31. 38. Ibid. 39. See Lukens, “Mourning Dove and Mixed Blood,” 415; Halverson, “Redefining the Frontier,” 118; and Karell, “The Story I Am Telling You Is True,” 454. 40. Mourning Dove, Cogewea, 139–40. 41. Ibid., 147–48. 42. Rifkin, Manifesting America, 108. 43. Senate, To Establish a Permanent National Bison Range, 60th Congress, 1st Session, 1908, Report no. 467, 8. 44. House Executive Document no. 1, 51st Congress, 2nd Session, serial 2841, p. clxvii. Cited in Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, 179. 45. McDonnell, Dispossession of the American Indian, 89. 46. See Prucha, The Great Father; McDonnell, Dispossession of the American Indian. 47. McLaughlin Papers, reel 7. 48. McDonnell, Dispossession of the American Indian. 49. McDonnell notes that these rituals became the inspiration for the naturalization ceremony for immigrants becoming U.S. citizens. Ibid., 96. 50. Ibid., 95. See also Prucha, The Great Father, 687–715. For a discussion of other forms of performance, pageantry, and Indian citizenship, see Maddox, Citizen Indians; Deloria, Playing Indian, 120–27. 51. McLaughlin Papers, reel 7. 52. Both official and unofficial records tell of unscripted Indian performance. According to the McLaughlin Papers, at the very first ceremony in Yankton, South Dakota, on May 13, 1916, the first man to step forward, a Lakota named Tunkansapa (Blackstone or Joseph T. Cook), sang a song. The transcription and literal translation, recorded by Tunkansapa at the agency the next day, is as follows: “He Tunkansinayanpi kin he wasicun mayasi e wana eca mukte, he Tunkansapa he heyinna, he tokaheya ecamu we.” / “The President wants me to become a white man. I am going to. I, Tunkansapa (Blackstone) say so and lead.” Below this literal translation, the agency notes the following “English Interpretation of the Song”: “The President of the United States desiring competent Indians to become citizens, I, Blackstone, one of the recommended class, have been selected to lead the patentee Yankton Indians in this ceremony which gives to them the privileges of white citizens” (McLaughlin Papers, reel 7). The layers of translation and competing meanings in the record of

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this one event suggest that the citizenship ceremonies were far from unidirectional expressions of power and were richly imbued with Indian perspectives and practices. A second source that recalls Indian performance was related to me by a Lakota elder, Wilma Crowe. She told me that during the ceremony her father shot the arrow, but he refused to put his hand on the plow. Certainly the archives within Indian families and communities hold many stories like these. 53. See Owens, Other Destinies; Krupat, Red Matters; and Cheyfitz, “The (Post) Colonial Construction of Indian Country,” in The Columbia Guide, 1–124. 54. The archival record is scant in revealing the distinct contributions of Mourning Dove and McWhorter; however, it appears that Mourning Dove originally intended the race chapter and the dance chapter to be a single chapter. In a letter of February 20, 1916, addressed to Hum-ishum-ma, McWhorter writes, “Well I am now on the XIX chapter. I work till midnight some times. I divided the VII chapter where the description of the war dance begins. You know we talked of this but let it go. I am enclosing the verse I placed at the head. I added some to this chapter but I am sure that you will not object. I spoke more about the dance, what it represented. I tell it through the interpreter just as you did. I rewrote one page so as to make the division. I may add a note to this chapter.” The letter is signed, “He-mene Ka-wan.” The letter includes a few questions for clarification with Mourning Dove’s handwritten responses. McWhorter Papers, cage 55, box 46, folder 443. 55. For more on Indian performance during this period, see Deloria, Playing Indian; Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places; Maddox, Citizen Indians; Raheja, Reservation Reelism; and Troutman, Indian Blues. 56. Archuleta, Child, and Lomawaima, eds., Away from Home, 75–76. For more on Indian dance, music, and federal assimilation policies, see Ellis, A Dancing People; Ellis, “We Don’t Want Your Rations, We Want This Dance;” and Troutman, Indian Blues. 57. See Ellis, A Dancing People. 58. Mourning Dove, Cogewea, 59. 59. Ibid., 59–60. 60. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, 68–87. 61. Mourning Dove, Cogewea, 60–61. 62. Troutman, Indian Blues, 20. 63. Brunton, “The Stick Game,” 573–83. 64. Mourning Dove, Cogewea, 58–59. 65. For a discussion of blood quantum discourse in Cogewea, see Krupat, Red Matters, 76–97. 66. Mourning Dove, Cogewea, 64–65. 67. Ibid., 65. 68. Ibid., 67. 69. Ibid., 68.

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70. Ibid., 69. 71. Ibid., 70. 72. See McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian. 73. Mourning Dove, Cogewea, 256. 74. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 61. 75. Ibid., 63. 76. Butler, Gender Trouble, xxx. 77. Mourning Dove, Cogewea, 70. 78. Ibid., 73. 79. Ibid., 18. 80. Ibid., 18–19. 81. Indian Rights Association, “Condemnation of Wild West Shows.” Qtd. in Prucha, Americanizing the American Indians, 313–16. 82. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 68. 83. Butler, Gender Trouble, 185. 84. One character in the novel, Silent Bob, appears at least somewhat autobiographical for McWhorter. Silent Bob “hailed from the mountain regions of West Virginia. Proud of his Southern blood, he ever insisted that he was a ‘Virginian’ proper; and that the new State was not a legitimate child of the Union, since it was born in the throes of war. He lamented the division of the ‘Old Dominion,’ and refused to recognize but the one State” (36). Another passage reads, “Silent Bob had been with the Horseshoe Bend family so long that he had become as one of them. He at least liked Cogewea. . . . [He] understood her perhaps, better than did any of his companions” (42). Throughout the text, Silent Bob translates cultural differences and quietly registers power dynamics. 85. In her autobiography (edited by Jay Miller) Mourning Dove describes learning to read not through the school system but from her adopted brother, Jimmy Ryan, a white orphan who ran away from his uncle’s house as a teenager. He made his way from Butte, Montana, to the Colville reservation to work the mining claims that had been opened by the Mineral Law of 1896. Although he was never formally adopted by Mourning Dove’s parents, they called him their son, and he lived with them at intervals over many years. She writes, “Jimmy was a great reader of yellowback novels. It was from one of his books that I learned the alphabet. I could spell the word Kentucky before I ever had a primer because it occurred frequently in the novel Jimmy taught me from. One day Mother papered our cabin with Jimmy’s novels. When he got home, he made no protest, but got busy and continued to read from the wall, with me helping to find the next page. Mother used to secretly scold me for being so interested in books” (186). 86. Mourning Dove, Cogewea, 85 87. Ibid., 86. 88. A number of critics have been stridently critical of McWhorter’s role, suggesting that he obliterated Mourning Dove’s participation almost entirely. For

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example, Paula Gunn Allen in The Sacred Hoop argues that Mourning Dove was “caught between the contradictory imperatives of her editor’s desires and tastes and her knowledge of how an Okanogan story should go” and that her “attempt to satisfy both white and tribal literary requirements resulted in a maimed—I should say martyred—book” (83). Elizabeth Ammons, in Conflicting Stories, refers to Mourning Dove as Humishuma and argues that “her voice as a novelist was muffled, perhaps even hopelessly buried” by McWhorter’s editing. She concludes, “Simply stated, what McWhorter did was rewrite Humishuma. He took over her story to make it his” (138). 89. Mourning Dove, Cogewea, 87. 90. Dee Garceau captures some of these tensions in her discussion of Mourning Dove’s and McWhorter’s divergent goals—and legal claims—regarding the work (“Mourning Dove: Gender and Cultural Mediation,” 115–16). 91. An undated letter to McWhorter (addressed to Shopowtan) from his friend Martha McKelvie of Lincoln, Nebraska, suggests the language of the title page. She writes, “Now as to your part, of course, you are really the father of this manuscript. It is more your work than the Dove’s. I hardly know what word to use to designate your part. Editor, will not do. Don’t like that. Would it do to say, under the title and the Dove’s names as author, ‘Given through Showpowtan.’ That would be a bit different and would be honest. It would have a subtle meaning. Place you as co-author and not as translator.” McWhorter Papers, cage 55, box 46, folder 448. 92. In prepublication publicity articles and circulars, Mourning Dove is clearly identified as the author. McWhorter Papers, cage 55, box 46, folder 447. In various letters McWhorter comments on changes and additions he has made and asks for her response. In a letter of 1922 Mourning Dove writes, “I am sending you back the things you wished for me to sign. And finding nothing to correct I am sending it back to you. Don’t you think that it is rather a little too ‘high toned’ language. I cannot understand it all unless I go back to old Webster for help” (folder 444). An oft-quoted letter in the published scholarship relays Mourning Dove’s response upon receiving the novel, in a letter dated June 4, 1928: “Dear Big Foot, I have just got through going over the book Cogeawea [sic], and am surprised at the changes that you made. I think they are fine, and you made a tasty dressing like a cook would do with a fine meal. I sure was interested in the book, and hubby read it over and also all the rest of the family neglected their housework until they read it cover to cover. I felt like it was someone else’s book and not mine at all. In fact the finishing touches were put there by you, and I have never seen it” (qtd. in Fisher, “Introduction,” xv). 93. McWhorter Papers, folder 449. 94. The Spokesman-Review article, dated April 9, 1916, describes Mourning Dove as follows: “While her features are typically Indian, Morning Dove [sic] has eyes of unusual depth and luster, and her skin is rather more golden in tint than the usual dark, swarthy, colorless hue of the average red woman. She dresses with good taste, ignoring the gaudy colors to which her kind are usually susceptible. She wears a large fur-trimmed black hat and patent leather shoes that reveal a foot not unusually large

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or flat, such as one notices in the usual squalid, moccasined [sq—aw]. She is probably above average weight for her height, but not at all to be placed in the category of plumpness. She has the appearance of a girl who could hold her own in a rough and tumble encounter with man, beast, or cayuse” (“Colville Indian Girl,” 3). McWhorter Papers, folder 447. 95. As Mourning Dove was working on the collection of traditional stories that became Coyote Stories (1933), she wrote on June 8, 1930, to McWhorter, “I am very tired and busy all day on this legends and between my spare time I have worked on it so as to have you get it back soon. I have had too much to do outside of my writing. We got work apple thinning at Brewster, Wash., it is about thirty-five miles south of here, and after working for ten hours in the blazing sun, and cooking my meals, I know I shall not have the time to look over very much mss, but fire them on, and between sand, grease, campfire, and real apple dirt I hope I can do the work. . . . We came home last evening, and as soon as I get this work off to you, I am packing up to return back to camp to work or rather prepare for work tomorrow morning. I need the money, I have so many things I need and owe lot of small bills around town that needs care. . . . We are working for American Fruit Growers, about a mile and half from town. Nice people, glad they don’t know I write. I am one of the rest of the Indians there working” (folder 444). 96. McWhorter Papers, folder 444.

Four. The Long Arm of Lone Wolf 1. I was interested in the congruence between the Salish and English terms. A scholar of the Spokane language, Barry Carlson of the University of Victoria, explained that the term “is based on yir (Spokane)/yal (Kalispel) ‘round.’ It is used in forms like yr-míl, ‘things are in a circle, like tipis at a pow-wow.’ The – men looks like the instrumental suffix. The s- n- is the nominalizer and the locative ‘in.’” Thus “the place of surrounding” or “the surrounded (place)” are strong equivalents. Email correspondence to Haruo Aoki and author, 6 April 2007. 2. Bigart and Woodcock, eds., In the Name of the Salish and Kootenai Nation, 64. 3. Smith, Thompson, “Re: Salish Question.” Email correspondence to author, 8 May 2007. 4. In A History of St. Ignatius Mission, Davis writes, “The country was the habitat of the Upper Kalispels and was called by them Sinielemen (rendezvous).” Davis quotes S. J. Palladino’s history of 1894 to describe the valley: “A favorite resort of other tribes [during] winter and summer, since it abounded in game, fish, roots and berries, the staples of Indian life, and furnished the best grazing for their ponies” (20). 5. Bigart and Woodcock, In the Name of the Salish and Kootenai Nation, 1–2. In Article II of the treaty, the So-ni-el-em River is listed as the eastern boundary of the new reservation.

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6. The Major Crimes Act of 1885, passed as part of an appropriations bill, extended federal jurisdiction onto reservations in cases involving Indian-on-Indian crime, thus displacing internal legal structures and local indigenous jurisdictional power. In United States v. Kagama (1886), the constitutionality of the Major Crimes Act was challenged, calling upon the commerce clause, which exempts Indian tribes and foreign countries from regulation, as the basis for placing internal affairs of Indian tribes beyond the reach of federal jurisdiction. The Supreme Court upheld the Major Crimes Act, arguing that congressional authority over the tribes exists given their geographic location within the United States and their state of dependency. The Lone Wolf case drew significantly from the language of Kagama in asserting extraconstitutional plenary power over Indians. See Clark, Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock; Getches, Wilkinson, Williams, Cases and Materials on Federal Indian Law; Harring, Crow Dog’s Case; Pommersheim, Broken Landscape. 7. Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 187 U.S. 553, quoting from United States v. Kagama, 118 U.S. 375. 8. Deloria and Wilkins, Tribes Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations, 29. 9. Rifkin, Manifesting America, 14. 10. Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock. 11. McNickle, The Surrounded, 296–97. 12. Although The Surrounded was well received by critics at the time of its release, it was a financial failure with the public and was not reprinted after its initial run (Purdy, Word Ways, 79). It languished in obscurity until the University of New Mexico Press bought the rights to reprint it in 1978. The unique history of the text locates it in two distinct moments of American Indian literary production: both as an early twentieth-century text and as part of the florescence of native writing from the 1960s onward. This latter moment, somewhat problematically termed the Native American renaissance by Kenneth Lincoln, begins when N. Scott Momaday was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for House Made of Dawn. I would argue that Lincoln’s term places too much emphasis on the process of writing rather than on the effects of the market in producing a florescence of native literary production and has the potential to unjustly elide the works of earlier native writers in English, such as McNickle, Mourning Dove, Charles Eastman, Ella Deloria, Zitkala-Sa, and many others. 13. Bevis, “Native American Novels: Homing In,” 580–620. 14. Ibid.; Ruppert, D’Arcy McNickle, 18–23; Owens, Other Destinies, 77–78; Purdy, Word Ways, 34–81; Parker, The Invention of Native American Literature, 51–79. 15. McNickle, The Surrounded, 100. 16. Ibid., 101. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 102. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 103.

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21. Father Etienne’s name is significant for its reference to Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who was stoned to death. In Catholic iconography Saint Stephen is often portrayed in priestly vestments with three stones on his body—thus bearing weight in a more literal sense. Archilde perceives the weight of this history upon Father Etienne. 22. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 121. 23. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 45. 24. McNickle, The Surrounded, 1. 25. McNickle himself was a descendant of followers of Louis Riel who were given sanctuary with the Flathead Indians after Riel was captured and executed in 1885. According to Dorothy Parker’s biography, Singing an Indian Song, McNickle’s grandparents, Isidore and Judith Parenteau, were wanted by the police for sympathizing with Riel. Escaping across the border, they lost their land in Canada and arrived at the Flathead reservation with their five children (a daughter became McNickle’s mother) and little more than the clothes on their backs (1–6). 26. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, 251–52. For more on Louis Riel as an icon, see, for example, Reid, Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada; Braz, The False Traitor; Flanagan, Louis “David” Riel. 27. McNickle, The Surrounded, 3. 28. Ibid., 5. 29. Indian Rights Association. “The Indian Rights Association,” 3. 30. McNickle, The Surrounded, 6. 31. Ibid., 7. 32. As David Wilkins and Tsianina Lomawaima point out in Uneven Ground, the federal trust relationship is a complicated legal concept. While most scholars place its origin in the Marshall rulings of the 1830s, a minority argue that it is a more recent notion, as late as the 1970s. Its slipperiness is further reflected in legal debates over the nature of the relationship—some scholars argue that the federal government was legally bound to act in the interests of tribes, others say it is merely a moral obligation to act on behalf of tribes, and still others claim that federal powers of trust are unlimited by any legal, much less moral, constraints (64–65). 33. Pommersheim, Broken Landscape, 112–13. 34. McNickle, The Surrounded, 81. 35. Ibid., 117–18. 36. Ibid., 124. 37. Ibid., 125. 38. This is secured in Article III of the Treaty of Hellgate: “The exclusive right of taking fish in all the streams running through or bordering said reservation is further secured to said Indians; as also the right of taking fish at all usual and accustomed places, in common with citizens of the Territory, and of erecting temporary buildings for curing; together with the privilege of hunting, gathering roots and berries, and pasturing their horses and cattle upon open and unclaimed land.”

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39. McNickle, The Surrounded, 126. 40. Ibid., 127. 41. Many miracles have been attributed to Kateri, and the Catholic Church has officially recognized two. The first was an early eighteenth-century healing of Joseph Kellogg, who suffered from smallpox. This miracle was authorized by Pope Pius XII. The second miracle was the 2006 healing of a young boy, Jacob Finkbonner, who nearly died from a flesh-eating bacteria infection that attacked his face. This miracle was authorized by Pope Benedict XVI. The campaign for Kateri’s canonization began in 1882. In 1943, Pope Pius XII declared her venerable. She was beatified on June 22, 1980, by Pope John Paul II. In 2011, upon the authorization of her second miracle, Pope Benedict XVI announced that she would be canonized in Rome in 2012. 42. The possible sexual abuse of Mike is not explicitly named but strongly implied in the text. 43. I thank Ifan Wei for his excellent undergraduate paper in my fall 2007 course that analyzed Elise as always “on the move.” 44. McNickle, The Surrounded, 4. 45. Ibid., 21. 46. Ibid., 22. 47. Ibid., 168–69. 48. Ibid., 22. 49. Ibid., 206. 50. Ibid., 208–9. 51. Ibid., 209. 52. See Parker, “The Code of Handsome Lake.” 53. See Hittman, Wovoka and the Ghost Dance. 54. McNickle, The Surrounded, 211. 55. Vecsey’s The Paths of Kateri’s Kin offers insight from an interview with Sister Marie Therese Archambault, a Hunkpapa Lakota nun, describing the depth of Kateri’s significance to Indian communities: “[Kateri] was orphaned, persecuted, made a refugee, and damaged by disease. She wore her suffering on her face in her pockmarkings; she died an early death. Sister Archambault says that her Indian people are scarred, too, so they identify with the Lily of the Mohawks. They suffer from alcoholism; they get into fights, and their faces are scarred from these episodes. They wear broken noses, cut lips, and deep scars of pain. So, when they hear in litanies that Kateri is ‘scarred but beautiful,’ they feel themselves akin to her. She is a human symbol of their hurt humanity.” Archambault also suggests that Kateri represents divinity and self-sacrifice, and that her “relational, feminine” qualities “are appealing to Indians for whom the earth, the circle, and the giveaway are expressions not only of native holism, but also of the Mystical Body of Christ” (106). 56. Ibid., 98. 57. Ibid. 58. Greer, Mohawk Saint, 145. See also Archambault, “Kateri Tekakwitha.”

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59. In 1939 the Tekakwitha National Conference was founded; it continues in existence today, with headquarters in Great Falls, Montana. Native American Catholic churches around the country organize Kateri Circles, Lily of the Mohawk Circles, and Tekakwitha Circles, which are groups committed to prayer, social service, and Native American issues. 60. Marquette University maintains an archive devoted to stories of Kateri’s intercessions from indigenous Catholics in the United States and Canada. I argue that The Surrounded is the first appearance of a Kateri narrative in Native American literature, although a number of references now exist. I have argued elsewhere that Sherman Alexie’s novella Flight (2007) features a dominant Kateri narrative, and works of Louise Erdrich also figure Kateri within Indian Catholic contexts. 61. McNickle, The Surrounded, 259. 62. Ibid., 274–75. 63. Vecsey, Paths of Kateri’s Kin, 107. 64. In the novel Catherine’s refusal to cooperate in a trial involving Max and their oldest son, Blasco, is named by Max as the source of the couple’s estrangement. Max explains that although he could have been hung for Blasco’s misdeeds (like Louis, Blasco was running cattle across the border), Catherine refused to speak English in the courtroom to defend him. Max explains that when an interpreter was brought in, she “just sat there and cussed him and me and everybody. The judge pounded with his hammer and did some swearing himself but she pretended she didn’t understand. When the interpreter repeated what the judge said, she told him he ought to be ashamed for going against his own people” (162). In this scene Catherine refuses to enter into the terms of American citizenship; she not only renders the English codes incomprehensible but also asserts Salish language and affiliation as alternative structures of meaning. 65. McNickle, The Surrounded, 200. 66. Ibid., 201. 67. Ibid., 202. 68. Ibid., 226. 69. Ibid., 223. 70. Ibid., 230. 71. Ibid., 292. 72. Ibid., 294–95.

Conclusion 1. Dian Million, “The Housing Poem,” in Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird, eds., Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, 164–66. 2. 112th Congress, 1st Session, SB 952, May 11, 2011.

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Index

Act for the Gradual Enfranchisement of the Indians (1869, Canada), 188n5, 189n39 Adam, Graeme Mercer, 17 Adams, David Wallace, 185n3 Adoption: in Callahan’s Wynema, 12, 53–55, 60–62, 73–74, 87–88; of infant survivor of Wounded Knee massacre, 193n23; in Johnson’s “Catharine of the ‘Crow’s Nest,’” 12, 53–55, 74–88; and pan-Indianism, 61–62, 73, 74 African Americans, 186n19 Alexie, Sherman, 206n60 Algonquin Maiden, An (Adam and Wetherald), 17 Algonquins, 162 Allard, Charles, 107 Allen, Chadwick, 61–62, 198n35 Allen, Paula Gunn, 201n88 Allotment policy: in Callahan’s Wynema, 64–65, 67, 69, 74; and citizenship, 92, 101–2, 109–10; and competency process, 110–13, 120–21, 130; debate on, among Indians, 193n38; and farming, 98; and Indian Territory, 185n4, 193n38; laws on, 1–2, 7, 13, 36–37, 101–2, 109–10, 185n4, 190n49; and Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 135–37; and property rights of Indian women, 93–96; speed of carrying out, 101–2 American Bison Society, 108 American Revolution, 34 Ammons, Elizabeth, 201n88 Anderson, Benedict, 20, 66–67 Aoki, Haruo, 180 Archambault, Sister Marie Therese, 205n55

“As It Was in the Beginning” (Johnson), 195n76 Assimilation: contradictions of assimilation-era Indian policy, 43–44; and disciplinary paternalism, 14, 49–50, 81–82; and dissolution of Indian rights, 22–23, 27; and domesticity, 4–9; goal of, 36–37; and marriage, 23; in Oskison’s “The Problem of Old Harjo,” 43–44; as performance, 124–25; and performative taxonomy of citizenship, 124–25, 130–31; and political agency, 166; violence of policies on, 56; and Wild West shows, 124. See also Allotment policy; Boarding and day schools; and specific literary works Augustine Dimier, S.J., with Flathead Reservation Indians Group (photograph), 132 Barman, Jean, 81 Benedict XVI, Pope, 205n41 Bernardin, Susan, 67 Bevis, William, 140 Bhabha, Homi, 143 Biblical references, 39, 41, 44, 47, 79, 190nn71–72 Bigart, Robert, 98 Bildungsroman, 139–40 Biolsi, Thomas, 81 Bison. See Buffalo Blackfeet Indians, 133, 134 Blood Narrative (Allen), 61 Boarding and day schools: and assimilation generally, 1–3, 81, 109; Carlisle Indian School as, 1, 92,

221

222 Boarding and day schools: (continued) 185n3; and disciplinary paternalism, 49–50, 185n3; and domesticity, 98, 170; as extension of military campaigns against Indians, 72–73; for Hopi children, 185n3; justification for removal of Indian children to, 12, 49–52, 54, 69, 72, 191n2, 191–92n7; for Lakota children, 51–52, 73; in McNickle’s The Surrounded, 134, 135, 139, 146, 147, 158, 167, 169–70; military-style organization of, 7, 101, 130; in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, 92, 98; negative impact of, on children in, 158; opposition of Indian parents to, 49–52, 73–74; and outlawing of Indian cultural practices, 81; pre-occupational training in, 13, 101, 109, 130; punishment for resistance to, 185n3 Borrows, John, 102–3 Boston Indian Citizenship Committee, 2 Boudinot, Elias C., 193n38, 194n41 British Columbia, 81 Brownlie, Robin Jarvis, 82–83 Brunton, Bill, 116–17 Buffalo, 103, 105–9, 191–92n7 Burke Act (1906), 110 Butler, Judith, 122, 124, 125 Callahan, S. Alice: as editor at weekly Methodist Episcopal paper, 193n31; and sentimental genre, 10, 12–13, 50, 53, 55–56, 62, 64–65, 67. See also Wynema (Callahan) Canada: Borrows on native relations in, 102–3; Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) in, 82–83; landless status of Native people in, 32; laws on aboriginal persons in, 188n5, 189n39; North-West Rebellion (1885) in, 146;

index polygamy in, 43; railroads in, 53, 75–76, 87–88; relationship between empire and colony in, 34; removal of buffalo to, 105, 106–8. See also Indian Act of 1876 (Canada) Carby, Hazel, 3 Carlisle Indian School, 1, 92, 185n3 Carlson, Barry, 202n1 Carter, Sarah, 41, 42–43 “Catharine of the ‘Crow’s Nest’” (Johnson): adoption in, 12, 53–55, 74– 87; autonomy of Catharine in, 76–78, 83; beginning of, 75–76; biblical references in, 79–80; Catharine as asexual in, 12–13, 54, 75, 82, 83, 86, 88, 169; compared with Stephen’s Malaeska, 84–86; domesticity in, 83; family of Catharine, Wingate, and Margie in, 79, 84, 86–87; home versus work camp in, 76–80, 83, 87–88; motherhood in, 12–13, 54, 74–84, 86–87; on railroads, 75–76, 87–88; and sentimental genre, 87, 88; tiered maternalism in, 12, 75; unnatural children in, 12; Wingate’s child in, 77–80, 83–87 Catholicism: and Archilde in The Surrounded, 134–35, 141–44, 153, 166, 204n21; and asceticism, 162–63; Catherine’s rejection of, in The Surrounded, 138, 157–66; photograph of priest, 132; and St. Kateri, 157–66, 205n41, 205n55, 206nn59–60 Cherokee Advocate, 194n41 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 5, 100–101, 197n24 Cherokees: exclusion of, from General Allotment Act, 37, 185n4; forced migration of, 53, 58, 87; tribal newspapers of, 193n32, 193n38, 194n41 Cherokee Telephone, 194n41 Chickasaws, 37, 58, 185n4

index Child, Lydia Maria, 27–28, 107, 189n29 Children. See Adoption; Indian children; Unnatural children Chippewas, 193n32 Choctaws, 37, 58, 185n4, 193n32 Citizenship: benevolent citizenship of white women, 68–71; ceremonies for, 113–14, 198n50, 198–99n52; competency process for, 110–13, 120–21, 130; disciplinary paternalism as ideology defining white, male citizenship, 148–49; and DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education of Alien Minors) Act, 177–78; and General Allotment Act/Dawes Act (1887), 92, 101–2, 109–10; intersubjective or relational citizenship, 70–71; and manhood, 148–49; in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, 93, 114–25; for Native Americans, 8–9; and patriotism, 109, 114–18; performative taxonomy of, 13, 109–14; and sentiment, 49–50, 54, 62–67 Civil War, 58 Cogewea: The Half-Blood (Mourning Dove): acts of ambiguity in, 130–31; authorship and authority in, 92, 93, 125–30, 200–201n88, 201nn90–92; broncobusting competition in, 122–23, 126; buffalo in, 103, 105–9; citizenship and performance in, 93, 114–25; Cogewea’s autonomy and self-definition as both lady and sq—w in, 98–99, 117–22; Cogewea’s horse in, 99; competence and performative taxonomy of citizenship, 13, 109–14; cover page of, 127; Densmore in, 92, 94–97, 99, 106, 123, 126–28; and dialectic of preoccupation, 13, 93, 102–9, 130–31; domestic work in, 91, 126, 127; on farm versus ranch, 97–98; “Fourth of July” chapter in, 114–18;

223 fragmented structure of, 93; gambling in, 116–17, 122; gender roles in, 91, 98–99, 114–25; “half-blood” or “mixedblood” identity in, 93–94, 117–18, 197n20; horse race in, 114, 116–22; Indian occupations in, 13, 91–93, 97– 102, 130–31; indigenous imaginary in, 106–9; Jim LaGrinder, 92, 94, 96, 104, 106, 117, 119–23, 125, 129; letter-writing scene in, 126–28; love triangle in, 92, 94–96, 99, 106; marriage in, 92, 94–96, 106; McWhorther’s editing of, 92–94, 199n54, 200–201n88, 201nn90–92; property rights in, 94–96; publication of, 125; ranch house in, 104–5; roundup of horses in, 91; scholarship on, 93–94; sexuality in, 118–19, 169; Silent Bob in, 97–98, 200n84; skills of ranch hands in, 94–95; “sq—aw” as term in, 97, 114, 117–22, 125, 126, 196–97n12; summary of, sent to publisher, 128–29; threats of violence in, 96, 118–22; uneven aesthetics of, 92; western plots of, 91–92, 94–97, 128–29; Wild West show in, 122–23; working the range in, 114–25 Colby, L. W., 193n23 Colonialism and colonization, 7–9, 21–22, 100–104, 107, 118, 124–25 Comanches, 152 Competency process, 110–13, 120–21, 130 Consent: in Canada’s Indian Act of 1876, 24–25; and coercion in law, 23–25; and conversion in Oskison’s “The Problem of Old Harjo,” 36, 38–47; entwined consent, 12, 18, 46–47, 177; in Johnson’s “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” 23–25, 29, 34, 46–47; and Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 152–53; and marriage, 23–25, 29, 34, 45; in McNickle’s The Surrounded, 152–53; and sentimental genre, 29

224 Cooper, James Fenimore, 28 Corruption of Indian agents, 110, 192n19 Cott, Nancy, 29, 34, 45 Coverture, 30–31, 42 Coyote Stories (Mourning Dove), 202 Creeks: and allotment policies, 37, 185n4, 193n38; in Callahan’s Wynema, 56–67, 192n12; forced migration of, 53, 58, 87; polygamous marriage among, 12, 37–38 Crowe, Wilma, 199n52 Curtis Act, 37, 185n4 Dances by Indians, 63, 81, 114–15, 160, 161 Davis, William L., 202n4 Dawes Act. See General Allotment Act/Dawes Act (1887) Dawes Commission, 37 Debo, Angie, 41 Deloria, Ella, 203n12 Deloria, Philip, 28 Deloria, Vine, 136 Department of Indian Affairs (DIA), Canadian, 82–83 “Derelict, The” (Johnson), 195n76 DIA (Canadian Department of Indian Affairs), 82–83 Dialectic of preoccupation, 13, 93, 102–9, 130–31 Dick, John Henry, 194n41 Dick, Sallee Jones, 194n41 Disciplinary paternalism: and boarding school policies, 49–50; definition of, 14, 49, 54, 135; as ideology defining white, male citizenship, 148–49; and Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 136–37, 145, 148, 151, 152, 165, 171, 172, 203n6; in McNickel’s The Surrounded, 13–14, 141–53, 171–72; and punishments for criminal and civil offenses, 81–82; on reservations, 135; and

index tiered maternalism, 54; and unity of interests, 137, 152, 171 Divorce, 81–82 Doctrine of Discovery, 100 Domesticity: and assimilation, 4–9; and boarding schools, 98, 170; and competency process, 110–13; foreign domesticity, 3–7; as ideology, 3, 5; Indian domesticity, 4–5, 51–53, 70–74, 195n63; Indians as domestic subjects, 7–9, 179; in Johnson’s “Catharine of the ‘Crow’s Nest,’” 83; and maternalism, 69; in McNickle’s The Surrounded, 169–70; scholarship on, 3–4; and sentimental genre, 25; subjugation of nonwhite populations by white domesticity, 71–72; Victorian cult of, 3; and wardship of Indians, 135. See also Families; Intimate domestic; Motherhood; Settlernational domestic; Tribal-national domestic Domestic subjects, 7–9, 179 Dominion magazine, 20 DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education of Alien Minors) Act, 176–78 Dreams, 160–62, 164 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 39 Eastman, Charles, 11, 203n12 Education. See Boarding and day schools Entwined consent, 12, 18, 37, 46–47, 177 Erdrich, Louise, 206n60 Families: in Callahan’s Wynema, 12, 53–55, 60–62, 73–74; Euro-Canadian definitions of, and outlawing of native cultural practices, 23–24; and extended kinship network of Indians, 6, 41, 173–76; in Johnson’s

index “Catharine of the ‘Crow’s Nest,’” 12, 53–55, 74–84, 86–87, 88; in McNickle’s The Surrounded, 134, 138, 141, 145–53, 171; opposition of Indian parents to boarding schools, 49–52, 73–74; patriarchal, nuclear families, 82, 112, 144–45, 175–76; single-family unit, 175–76, 178. See also Adoption; Intimate domestic Federal trust relationship, 150–51, 204n32 Finkbonner, Jacob, 205n41 Fischbacher, Theodore, 185n3 Fisher, Dexter, 125 Fishing. See Hunting and fishing Flathead (Salish) Indians: agriculture by, 98; buffalo herd of, 107, 108; photograph of, 132; and Louis Riel, 204n25; and Sniél-emen (place that is surrounded), 133–35, 141; and Treaty of Hellgate, 133, 134, 204n38. See also Cogewea: The Half-Blood (Mourning Dove); Surrounded, The (McNickle) Fletcher, Alice, 185n1 Flight (Alexie), 206n60 Flood, Renee Samson, 193n23 Foreign domesticity, 3–7. See also Settler-national domestic Foucault, Michel, 24 Fourth of July, 114–18, 167–69 Friends of the Indians, 2–3, 49, 102, 175–76 Gambling, 116–17, 122 Garceau, Dee, 201n90 Gates, Merrill, 6–7 Gay, E. Jane, 185n1 Gay marriage, 176–77 Gender roles: and boarding schools for Indians, 98; Butler on, 122, 124, 125; in families, 144–45; of Indians, 6, 7; and male/female binary, 122;

225 and manhood, 123–24, 141, 148–53; in McNickle’s The Surrounded, 140, 157–70; in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, 91, 98–99, 114–25; patriotism inculcated by, 109, 114; taking action and challenging agency in, 157–70; and “true womanhood,” 25. See also Indian women; Motherhood; Paternalism; Sexuality; White women General Allotment Act/Dawes Act (1887), 2, 36–37, 92, 95, 96, 101–2, 109–10, 124, 185n4 Ghost Dance, 63, 115, 161 Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 (Canada), 188n5 Grant, Ulysses S., 192n19 Gravatt, Rev. J. J., 51–52, 73–74, 191–92n7 Hampton Institute, 51–52 Handsome Lake, 161 Harring, Sidney, 22 “Hiawatha” (Longfellow), 27, 28, 107 Historical romances, 17–18, 26–29 Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times (Child), 27–29, 107, 189n29 Hopi, 185n3 House Made of Dawn (Momaday), 203n12 “Housing Poem, The” (Million), 173–76, 178 Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 140 Huhndorf, Shari, 28 Hump, Chief, 51–52 Hunting and fishing, 138, 147, 153–56, 160–61, 204n38 Immigrants, 8–9, 30–31, 69, 177–78, 198n49 Imperialism, 3, 115 Imperialist nostalgia, 115

226 Indian Act of 1876 (Canada): categories of consent in, 24–25; definition of “person” and “Indian” in, 31–32, 80; enfranchisement of Indian women by, 30–36; impact of, on Indian women, 10–11, 12, 18, 19, 24–26, 29–36, 86, 177; impact of, on non-Indians, 34–35, 47; Indian rights extinguished by, 27, 30–31; and indigenous landholdings, 32; on interracial marriage, 12, 18, 19, 24–26, 30–32, 35, 46–47, 177; and Johnson’s “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” 12, 19, 24–26, 29–37, 46–47, 86; in Johnson’s works generally, 10–11; and legal whiteness as form of property or capital, 36; provisions of, 188n5; removal of band status under, 30; white men as unnamed subjects of, 35, 47 Indian agents, 110, 192n19. See also Surrounded, The (McNickle) Indian Bureau, U.S., 185n3 Indian children, photographs of, x, 1, 4–5, 48, 185n1. See also Adoption; Boarding and day schools; Unnatural children Indian Citizenship Act (1924), 9, 172 Indian Progress newspaper, 193n38 Indian Removal Act (1830), 58 Indian Reorganization Act, 1, 172 Indian Rights Association (IRA), 2, 6, 51, 123–24, 148 Indians: compared with immigrants, 30–31; competency process for citizenship and land allotments for, 110–13, 120–21, 130; competing discourses of rights of, 153–57; dances by, 63, 81, 114–15, 160, 161; and Doctrine of Discovery, 100; and domesticity, 4–5, 51–53, 70–74, 195n63; as domestic subjects, 7–9, 179; gender roles of, 6, 7; and

index imperial work of domestication, 3; matrilineality of, 31, 192n12; nationhood of Indian tribes, 5–7; occupations of, 13, 91–93, 97–102; outlawing of cultural practices of, 23–24, 81, 114–15; status of, as “domestic dependent nations,” 172; treaties between U.S. and, 99–100, 130, 133, 134, 136–37, 155, 172; in Wild West shows, 115, 123–24. See also Allotment policy; Assimilation; Families; Indian children; Indian women; Interracial marriage; Native Americans; Wardship; and specific tribes Indian’s Friend, 70–71, 193n23, 194n52 Indian Territory: acculturation of Indians in, 64; and allotment policy, 185n4, 193n38; in Callahan’s Wynema, 57–58, 60–67, 74; illegal settlers in, 64; independent Indian press in, 63–66; in Oskison’s “The Problem of Old Harjo,” 37–39, 44–46; popular representation of, 44–45 Indian Wars, 2–3, 56, 72 Indian women: and Canada’s Indian Act of 1876, 10–11, 12, 18, 19, 24–26, 29–36, 86; competency reports on, 111, 120–21; enfranchisement of, under Canada’s Indian Act of 1876, 30–36; federal vocational and domestic education of, 7; Johnson on portrayal of, in literature, 17–18; love of, for white men in literature, 17–18; marriage between fur traders and, 83–84; as mothers, 12–13, 50–54, 70–74, 88; and outlawing of Indian cultural practices, 23–24, 81; photographs of, 16, 48; political agency of, 82–83, 88; portrayal of, as helpless victims, 81; property

index rights for, 30, 93–96; and protection discourse by dominant culture, 23–24, 81; sexuality of, 12–13, 50, 54, 55, 57, 81–83, 88; “sq—w” as term used for, 97, 114, 117–22, 125, 126, 196–97n12; suicidal trope of, in historical romances, 17–18, 26–29, 31, 32, 55; threat of sexual violence against, 118–19; and tiered maternalism, 12, 54, 70–74. See also specific literary works Interracial marriage: in Child’s Hobomok, 27–29; between fur traders and Indian women, 83–84; Indian Act of 1876 (Canada) on, 12, 18, 19, 24–26, 29–32, 46–47, 86, 177; in Johnson’s “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” 12, 19–26, 28, 31–35, 46–47; legal impact of, on Indian women, 18, 19, 29–33, 177; and property rights, 30, 36, 95; in Stephen’s Malaeska, 84–86; U.S. laws on, 35, 95. See also Marriage Intimate domestic: and Callahan’s Wynema, 75; Cott on, 29; and Dawes contract, 43; interconnections between settler-national domestic, tribal-national domestic and, 4, 19, 37, 46, 176, 186n13; and maternalism, 68–69; meaning of, 2, 4, 9; and Million’s “The Housing Poem,” 178; and Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, 98–99; and Oskison’s “The Problem of Old Harjo,” 37, 43, 46; and paternalism, 144; and sentimental genre, 58; surveillance of, by Office of Indian Affairs, 81–82. See also Adoption; Families; Interracial marriage; Marriage IRA (Indian Rights Association), 2, 6, 51, 123–24, 148 Iroquois, 161, 163 Ivey, Augustus E., 194n41

227 Jacobs, Margaret, 69, 72, 73, 195n58 Jesuits, 133, 163 Johnson, E. Pauline: biblical references in works by, 79–80, 195n76; biographical information on, 187n3; liminal space of, 25; on portrayal of Indian women in literature, 17–18; and sentimental genre, 12–13, 23, 29, 46, 50, 53; on suicidal trope of Indian women in literature, 17–18, 26–29, 31; writings by, 187n3, 195n76. See also “Catharine of the ‘Crow’s Nest”’ (Johnson); “Red Girl’s Reasoning, A” (Johnson) Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, 9 Johnson v. McIntosh, 197n28, 197nn24–25 Jones, William, 44–45 Kamiah, 1960 (photograph), 180 Kaplan, Amy, 4 Kellogg, Joseph, 205n41 Kellogg, Laura Cornelius, 11 Kinship. See Families Kiowas, 152 Kootenai people, 134 Koven, Seth, 68–69 Labor. See Occupation Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indians, 2 Lakota: boarding schools for children of, 51–52, 73, 185n1; in Callahan’s Wynema, 60–62, 73, 192n12; and citizenship ceremonies, 198–99n52; criminal and civil cases involving, 82 Lapwai Schoolchildren (photograph), x, 1, 4–5, 185n1

228 Law: competing systems of tribal-national and settler-national laws, 22–23; and consent used to produce coercion, 23–25; Gates on, 6–7; impact of, on named and unnamed subjects of, 19, 34–35; intertextual reading of, in literature, 10; and legal suicide of Indian women through interracial marriage, 18, 31, 32, 177. See also specific laws and legal cases Lawrence, Bonita, 32 Legal wards. See Wardship Lehnes, John W., 110–11 Liminality, 24, 25 Lincoln, Kenneth, 203n12 Literary realism, 39, 44–45, 46 Littlefield, Daniel, 39, 44–45, 64, 65, 193n32, 194n41 Lomawaima, Tsianina, 7, 204n32 Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 13–14, 135–37, 140–41, 145, 148, 151, 152, 165, 171, 172, 203n6 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 27, 28 MacLean, J. P., 128–29 Major Crimes Act (1885), 135, 145, 203n6 Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter (Stephen), 84–86 Manhood, 123–24, 141, 148–53 Marquette University, 206n60 Marriage: and assimilation, 23; in Callahan’s Wynema, 57, 59–60; Canada’s Indian Act of 1876 on, 18, 19, 24–26, 29–32, 35, 86; in Child’s Hobomok, 27–29; and consent, 23–25, 29, 34, 45; and coverture, 30–31, 42; gay marriage, 176–77; of Indians generally, 6; in Johnson’s “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” 12, 19–26, 28, 31–35, 46–47; legal regulation of, 29–31, 35; marriage license for Indians,

index 81; in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, 92, 94–96, 106; nineteenth-century marital rights of men, 25; in Oskison’s “The Problem of Old Harjo,” 12, 36–47; and property rights, 29–31, 35, 42, 94–96; sexual rights within, 25–26; statehood as metaphor for, 38; traditional rites of Indian marriage, 20–22, 33–34, 36. See also Interracial marriage; Polygamous marriage Marshall, John, 100–101, 136, 204n32 Maternalism. See Domesticity; Motherhood Matrilineality, 31, 192n12 McClintock, Anne, 3, 144–45 McDonnnell, Janet A., 198n49 McKelvie, Martha, 201n91 McNickle, D’Arcy, 11, 203n12, 204n25. See also Surrounded, The (McNickle) McWhorter, Lucullus Virgil, 92–94, 125–31, 199n54, 200n84, 200–201n88, 201nn90–92, 202n95 Melville, Herman, 44 Miamis, 37, 185n4 Michel, Sonya, 68–69 Miller, Jay, 200n85 Miller, J. R., 23–24 Million, Dian, 173–76, 178 Milloy, John, 188n5 Mineral Law (1896), 200n85 Missionaries: in British Columbia, 81; in Callahan’s Wynema, 58; on Indian women’s sexuality, 81; in Oskison’s “The Problem of Old Harjo,” 38–45, 47; support of polygamous marriages by, 42–43. See also Catholicism Moccasin Maker, The (Johnson), 195n76 Mohawks, 31, 162 Momaday, M. Scott, 203n12 Montana, 108, 140 Montezuma, Carlos, 11 Morgan, Thomas J., 49, 109, 191n2

index Mormonism, 37, 38, 45–46 Moses, L. G., 124 Motherhood: of Indian women, 12, 50–54, 70–74, 88; in Johnson’s “Catharine of the ‘Crow’s Nest,’” 12–13, 54, 74–84, 86–88; and justification for forced removal of Indian children, 50–54; and nineteenth-century maternalism, 68–69; opposition of Indian mothers to boarding schools, 51–52, 73–74; racially stratified depictions of, 51–53; Republican Motherhood, 52–53, 68; and sentimental genre, 53; in Stephen’s Malaeska, 84–86; tiered maternalism, 12, 54, 70–74, 88. See also Adoption; Domesticity Mourning Dove: anticolonial imagery in works by, 11; Coyote Stories by, 202; cultural identity of, 93–94; and learning to read, 125, 200n85; as migrant farm laborer, 129–30, 202n95; photographs of, 90, 129, 131; physical appearance of, 201–2n94; relationship between McWhorter and, 92–94, 125–31, 199n54, 200n84, 200–201n88, 201nn90–92, 202n95; and removal of buffalo to Canada, 106; and western genre generally, 10. See also Cogewea: The Half-Blood (Mourning Dove) Native American extinction, 106–7 Native American literary nationalism, 11, 56 Native Americans. See Indians; Indian women; and specific tribes Native American studies, 10 Naturalism, 140 Newspapers: in Callahan’s Wynema, 62–67, 88–89; independent Indian press, 63–66, 193n32, 194n41; readership of, 66–67; tribal

229 newspapers, 193n32, 194n41. See also specific newspapers New York Times, 195n62 Nez Perce, photographs of, x, 1, 4–5, 16, 48, 185n1 Nez Perce at Meal Time (photograph), 16 Nez Perce Women and Child (photograph), 48 Ngai, Mae, 8–9 North-West Rebellion (1885), 146 Nuni, Zintkala, 193n23 Occupation: and boarding-school training for Indians, 13, 101, 109, 130; definitions of, 92–93, 98, 101, 102, 130; indigenous property rights as right of, 93; and Marshall Trilogy, 100–101, 136, 204n32; in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, 13, 92–93, 97–102, 114–25, 130–31; as place and labor, 92, 99–101, 130; working the range as, in Cogewea, 114–25 Office of Indian Affairs, U.S., 64, 81 Oklahoma, 19, 37–38, 45, 53, 56. See also Indian Territory Oregon, 35–36 Osage, 37, 95, 185n4 Oskison, John: biographical information on, 187–88n4; literary realism of, 39, 44–45, 46; themes in works by, 12; writings by, 188n4. See also “Problem of Old Harjo, The” (Oskison) Otis, D. S., 101–2 Owens, Louis, 140 Pablo, Michel, 107 Paiutes, 161 Palladino, S. J., 202n4 Pan-Indianism, 61–62, 73, 74 Pankin, Jane, x, 1, 185n1 Paquet, In re, 35–36

230 Paquet, Ophelia, 35–36 Parenteau, Isidore and Judith, 204n25 Parins, James, 39, 44–45, 64, 65, 193n32, 194n41 Parker, Arthur, 11 Parker, Dorothy, 204n25 Parker, Quanah, 41 Parker, Robert Dale, 140 Pascoe, Peggy, 25, 35 Patents, 110, 111, 113 Paternalism: Canadian paternalism, 80; disciplinary paternalism, 14, 49–50, 54, 81–82, 135; in families, 144–45; and federal trust relationship with tribes, 150–51, 204n32; and Indians’ status as “domestic dependent nations,” 172; in McNickle’s The Surrounded, 13–14, 141–53; and plenary power doctrine, 136–37, 151, 203n6; and wardship of Indians, 13–14, 50, 54–55, 70, 80, 110, 121–22, 135–36, 145. See also Indian Act of 1876 (Canada) Patriotism, 109, 114–18 Pawnees, 113 Peorias, 37, 185n4 Performative taxonomy of citizenship: and assimilation, 124–25, 130–31; and competency, 109–14, 120–21, 130; definition of, 13, 112; and Fourth of July, 114–18; and horse race in Cogewea, 114, 116–22; and Indian dances, 63, 81, 114–15; in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, 13, 109–25; and patents, 110, 111, 113; and patriotism, 109, 114–18; and political subjectivity, 113–14; and working the range in Cogewea, 114–25 Pius XII, Pope, 205n41 Plains Indians, 115 Plenary power doctrine, 136–37, 151, 203n6 Pocahontas, 192n11

index Polygamous marriage: in Canada, 43; among Creeks, 12, 37–38; laws against and criminalization of, 19, 23, 41, 81–82; missionaries’ support for, 42–43; of Mormons, 37, 38, 45–46; in Oskison’s “The Problem of Old Harjo,” 12, 36–47; Quanah Parker on, 41 Posey, Alexander, 11, 39, 44–45 Pratt, Richard Henry, 72–73, 185n3 Preoccupation: and anxiety, 93, 102–4, 109, 197–98n33; dialectic of, 13, 93, 103–9; meanings of, 102–4, 197– 98n33; in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, 13, 93, 102–9, 130–31 Private property. See Allotment policy; Property rights “Problem of Old Harjo, The” (Oskison): and allotment laws, 36–37; on assimilation, 43–44; biblical and Christian references in, 39, 41, 44, 47, 190nn71–72; conversion and consent in, 36, 38–47; dialect in, 39–40; final words of, 44, 47; literary realism in, 39, 45, 46; marriage in, 36–47; Miss Evans as missionary in, 38–45, 47; on Mormonism, 37, 38, 45–46; and Oklahoma statehood, 19, 37–38; publication of, 36 Property rights: and coverture, 30–31, 42; and General Allotment Act (1887), 36–37, 92; of Indian women, 30, 93–96; and interracial marriage, 30, 36; in marriage, 29–31, 35, 36, 42, 94–96; and right of occupancy, 93, 100–101, 197n27; and surplus property, 42; and title of conquest, 100–101. See also Allotment policy Puerto Rico, 4 Purdy, John, 140

index Railroads, 53, 75–76, 87–88 “Red Girl’s Reasoning, A” (Johnson): autonomy of Christie and her estrangement from Charlie in, 24–26, 29, 31, 32, 33, 35, 47; biblical references in, 195n76; on colonization, 21–22; consent in, 23–25, 29, 34, 46–47; and Indian Act in Canada, 12, 19, 24–26, 29–37, 46–47, 86; interracial marriage in, 19–26, 28, 31–35; liminality in, 24; occupations of Charlie and Joe McDonald in, 20; publication of, 20; racial identity of Christie in, 33–34; and sentimental genre, 12–13, 23, 25, 29; sexuality of Christie in, 25–26, 29; traditional marriage rites of Christie’s Indian parents on, 20–22, 33–34, 36; workforce employment by Christie in, 24, 25 Republican Motherhood, 52–53, 68 Richardson, John, 17 Riel, Louis, 146, 147, 204n25 Rifkin, Mark, 8, 45–46, 136 Roberts, Rush, 113 Rogers, Will, 39 Romero, Lora, 3, 11, 80 Roosevelt, Theodore, 108 Rosaldo, Renato, 115 Rowlandson, Mary, 53 Ruoff, LaVonne Brown, 192n12 Ruppert, James, 140 Ryan, Jimmy, 200n85 Ryan, Susan, 68, 70 Sac and Fox, 37, 185n4 Said, Edward, 17 Salish. See Flathead (Salish) Indians Samuels, Shirley, 62 Scott, James, 116 Seminoles, 37, 58, 185n4 Senier, Siobhan, 65

231 Sentimentalism: Callahan’s use of, 10, 12–13, 50, 53, 62, 64–65, 67, 87, 88; domesticated heroines in genre of, 25; ending of novels in genre of, 60; functions of, 62, 64, 71–72; Johnson’s use of, 12–13, 23, 25, 29, 46, 50, 53, 87, 88; and motherhood, 53; racialized limits of, 86–89; and structure of consent, 29; and subjugation of nonwhite populations by white domesticity, 71–72; and suicidal trope of Indian women, 17–18, 26–29, 31, 32, 55 Settler-national domestic: in American literature, 53; and assimilation policies attacking tribal-national domestic, 29–30, 43, 49–50, 173; and Callahan’s Wynema, 65–67, 69, 88– 89; changes in, following assimilation era, 179; and entwined consent, 37, 46, 177; goals of, 19, 22–23, 109–10; and Indian occupation, 99–100; interconnections between intimate domestic, tribal-national domestic and, 4, 19, 37, 46, 176, 186n13; and Johnson’s “Catharine of the ‘Crow’s Nest,’” 80, 83; meaning of, 4; and Million’s “The Housing Poem,” 178; and Oskison’s “The Problem of Old Harjo,” 43, 46–47; and Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, 53; and Stephen’s Malaeska, 85. See also Assimilation; Indian Act of 1876 (Canada) Settler nationalism, 4, 7–12, 18–19, 31, 37, 124–25, 178. See also Indian Act of 1876 (Canada) Sexuality: in Child’s Hobomok, 27–28; criminalization of, 82, 88; of Indian women, 12–13, 50, 54, 55, 57, 81–83, 88; in Johnson’s “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” 25–26, 29; in Johnson’s “Catharine of the ‘Crow’s Nest,’”

232 Sexuality: (continued) 12–13, 54, 75, 82, 83, 86, 88, 169; in McNickels’ The Surrounded, 166–69; in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, 118–19, 169; and suicidal trope of Indian women in historical romances, 17–18, 26–29, 31, 32, 55 Sexualization of dissent, 82–83 Simonsen, Jane, 25 Site of hybridity, 143 Slavery, 195n58 Smith, Thompson, 133 South Africa, 43 Sq—w, ix, 97, 114, 117–22, 125, 126, 196–97n12 Standing Bear, Luther, 11 Stephen, Ann, 84–86 Stephen, Saint, 204n21 Stevens, Isaac, 133–34 Stick game, 116–17 Stoler, Ann, 9, 10 Stone, B. H., 194n41 Stone, Emma, 194n41 Subjection, 24 Suicide: in Child’s Hobomok, 27–29; legal suicide of Indian women through interracial marriage, 18, 31, 32, 177; suicidal trope of Indian women in historical romances, 17–18, 26–27, 29, 31, 32, 55 Sun Dance, 81, 155 Surrounded, The (McNickle): Agent Parker in, 138–39, 156–57, 170, 171; alienation of Archilde in, 147; Archilde as witness to murder in, 134, 138–40, 155–57, 170, 171; Archilde’s family relationships in, 134, 141, 145–53, 171; Archilde’s return home in, 134, 141–46; arrest and imprisonment of Archilde in, 156–57, 170; autonomy of Catherine and Elise in, 157–70; blindness in, 158, 159, 160;

index boarding school experiences in, 134, 135, 139, 146, 147, 158, 167, 169–70; Catherine in, 14, 134, 138, 140–41, 144, 147, 150, 153–54, 156–67, 169, 172, 206n64; Catherine’s rejection of Catholicism in, 138, 157–66; Catholicism in, 134–35, 138, 141–44, 153, 157–66, 204n21; competing discourses on Indian rights in, 153–57; conclusion of, 139, 159, 170; consent in, 152–53; disciplinary paternalism in, 13–14, 141–53, 171–72; domesticity in, 169–70; dreams of Catherine in, 160–62, 164; Elise in, 14, 139–41, 144, 154, 157–58, 166–72, 205n43; entrapment and escape motifs in, 134, 135, 137–41, 143–44, 156–59, 170; epigraph of, 133, 134; fight scene in, 168–69; game warden in, 138, 146–47, 154–56, 165; gender, vision, and power in, 140, 157–70; horse race in, 166–67; hunting and fishing in, 138, 147, 153–56, 160–61; impossible agents in, 171–72; Kateri narrative in, 157–66, 206n60; on legal circumscriptions extending from government paternalism and wardship, 13–14; and Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 13–14, 135–37, 140–41, 145, 148, 151, 152; Louis as outlaw in, 138, 146–47, 154–56, 158–60, 166, 172; manhood in, 141, 149–53; Max in, 134, 138, 140, 141, 145–53, 159, 171, 206n64; Mike and Modeste in, 140, 144, 158–60, 169; murder plot in, 134, 138–40, 155–58, 160, 170, 171; opening scene of, 134–35; paternalism, plenary power, and narratives of transcendence in, 141–53; plot of, 138–39; publication of, 171–72; reprint edition of, 203n12; reviews of, 203n12; Salish language in, 138, 156, 164, 206n64; scholarship on,

index 139–41; sexuality in, 166–69; Sheriff Quigley in, 139, 153–54, 157, 167, 169–70; and Sniél-emen (place that is surrounded), 133–35, 141; survival plot in, 140 Swan, Jane, x, 1, 185n1 Tatonetti, Lisa, 63 Tekakwitha, Catherine (Kateri), 157–66, 205n41, 205n55, 206nn59–60 Tiered maternalism: and Callahan’s Wynema, 12, 70–74, 88; definition of, 12, 54; and disciplinary paternalism, 54; in Johnson’s “Catharine of the ‘Crow’s Nest,’” 12, 75 Tillamook, 35–36 Treaties between U.S. and Indians, 99–100, 130, 133, 134, 136–37, 155, 172 Treaty of Hellgate, 133, 134, 204n38 Tribal-national domestic: assimilation policies attacking, 29–30, 43, 173; and Callahan’s Wynema, 66–67, 69, 88–89; changes in, following assimilation era, 179; and Dawes Act, 109; and entwined consent, 37, 177; as hostile to settler states, 49; and Indian occupation, 99–100; interconnections between intimate domestic, settler-national domestic and, 4, 19, 37, 46, 176, 186n13; and marriage and property, 19, 22–23, 29–30, 177; and McNickle’s The Surrounded, 144–45; meaning of, 2, 4; and Million’s “The Housing Poem,” 175, 178; and Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, 98–99; and Oskison’s “The Problem of Old Harjo,” 43; and paternalism, 144; and reservations, 112, 135; and Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, 53. See also Assimilation Tribal nationalism, 5–11, 37, 42, 65 Troutman, John, 116

233 “True womanhood,” 25 Tunkansapa (Blackstone), 198–99n52 Twain, Mark, 39, 140 United States v. Kagama, 13–14, 135, 136, 145, 165, 171, 203n6 Unity of interests, 137, 152, 171 Unnatural children: in Callahan’s Wynema, 12, 53–55, 60–62, 73–74; definition of, 12; Indians as wards of the state, 12, 50, 55, 80, 87; in Johnson’s “Catharine of the ‘Crow’s Nest’,” 12, 53–55, 74–89; violence producing, 75. See also Adoption Utah Territory, 37, 38, 45–46 Valentine, Robert, 110 Van Kirk, Sylvia, 83–84 Vecsey, Christopher, 163, 165–66, 205n55 Vinita Vidette newspaper, 193n38 Violence: and assimilation, 40–41, 56; in Callahan’s Wynema, 52, 58, 60–62, 74; against Indian families, 2–3, 173; against Indian women, ix, 118–19; and murder plot in McNickle’s The Surrounded, 134, 138–40, 155–58, 160, 170, 171; systemic violence, 121; threats of, in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, 96, 118–22; and unnatural children, 75; in Western fiction generally, 96. See also Disciplinary paternalism Wacousta (Richardson), 17 Wardship: end of, 179; and impossibility of self-representation, 171; legal structure of, regarding Indians, 50, 54–55, 70, 80, 87, 110, 121–22, 135–36, 153; and Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 135–37, 145; in McNickle’s The Surrounded, 13–14; and power of guardian, 145, 172

234 Wei, Ifan, 205n43 Western fiction, 96, 99, 121–22. See also Cogewea: The Half-Blood (Mourning Dove) Wetherald, Ethelwyn, 17 Wexler, Laura, 3, 71–72 Wheeler-Howard Act, 1 White, Emma, 111, 112 White women: and benevolent citizenship, 68–71; boarding schools supported by, 69; and Indian advocacy organizations, 2, 69–71; and maternalism, 69–70; as missionaries in Oskison’s “The Problem of Old Harjo,” 38–45, 47; as property in marriage, 29, 35, 42; rights and suffrage for, 25–26, 59–60, 67, 69; and tiered maternalism, 12, 54, 70–74, 88. See also Gender roles Wild West shows, 115, 122–24 Wilkins, David, 136, 204n32 Wilkinson, Charles, 100, 197n27 Wilson, Elizabeth Penney, x, 1, 180, 185n1 Winnemucca, Sarah, 11 WNIA (Women’s National Indian Association), 2, 69–71 Womack, Craig, 192n12 Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA), 2, 69–71 Women’s rights and women’s suffrage, 25–26, 59–60, 67, 69 Worcester v. Georgia, 100–101, 197n24

index Wounded Knee massacre, 53, 56–58, 60–61, 63, 73, 74, 87, 161, 193n23, 195n62 Wovoka, 161 Wynema (Callahan): adoption in, 12, 53–55, 60–62, 73–74, 87–88; on allotment policy, 64–65, 67, 69, 74; broken engagement of Genevieve and Maurice Mauran in, 59; ethnographic inaccuracies in, 192n12; friendship and kinship ties between Wynema and Genevieve in, 56–57, 67–68; on Ghost Dance, 63; on Indian women as mothers and as sexual agents, 12–13, 54; irony in, 60, 64, 88; marriage in, 57, 59–60; missionaries in, 58; on oppressive Indian policies, 60–67; pan-Indianism in, 61–62, 73, 74; political debates focused on newspapers in, 62–67, 88–89; publication of, 60; and sentimental genre, 10, 12–13, 50, 53, 55–56, 62, 64–65, 67, 87, 88; shortcomings of, 56; South as setting of, 57–60; and tiered maternalism, 12, 70–74, 88; tripartite structure of, 58–60; on women’s rights and women’s suffrage, 59–60, 67, 69; Wounded Knee massacre in, 53, 56–58, 60–61, 63, 73, 74, 87 Young, Iris Marion, 121 Zitkala-Ša, 11, 203n12