LocoMon

On March 3rd, 1879, Congress passed the Civil Appropriations Bill authorizing $20,000 to establish a Bureau of Ethnology within the Smithsonian Institute.  The next day the Anthropological Society of Washington D.C. met to hear its first paper on “Relic Hunting” by Frank Cushing.

These two events mark the emergence of professional anthropology in the United States of America, focusing attention on this emerging scientific educational discipline relative to understanding ideas and issues of Indigenous Native American Nations in America, is the key for this analysis.

It was a scientific emergence that went hand-in-hand with European hegemony on indigenous people of this continent.  Measuring and interpreting the American indian by white civilization’s first contact with them is as cold and separate as two oceans that kept them apart for millenniums.  With this intent, I shall attempt to address this social, political and economic phenomenon, called the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), on the future of Native Americans on ”their” lands.

Launching scholars exclusively commited to the examination, study and genocide of a human indigenous population is what BAE is about.  It is interesting to analyze the ways anthropology, an American Science, went from an individual fascination, privately financed, to a research institute.  A controversial bond is forged between the newly-evolving, and politically motivated, Euro-american scientist, and the desire to interpret indigenous Native American Indian nations from this perspective to politics.  Indeed, the most interesting specimens for anthropologic inquiry in the area of American ethnology during the last quarter of the 19th century were the Native American Indian tribes of North America.  The science links early anthropology, and its sub-branch in ethnology, onto Native Americans Indian Nations of North America.  This relationship produced the much-needed ”Indian Expert.”  Anthropologists functioned as “Indian Experts.” problem solvers for Indian Removal during a period in time in which they were much needed to legitimize this illegal removal and retraction of the early treaty-making process.

Its primary purpose of the BAE was to assist government policy-making toward Native Americans during the period 1870 to the 1920′s.  The popular image of Native Americans created in the late 19th century and early 20th century, were prefigured with words that any soldier, lawyer, or politician, could understand at the time.  Indian ”tribes”, they believed, had to be brought into the yoke of civilization, whereby massive tracts of land, held title by Native Americans through laws of imminent domain during the treaty-making process, and separation periods of the first half of the 19th century, were usurped  and developed.  These same self-serving interests and preconceptions were derived by American policy-makers who had long viewed the policy of racial separation through the treaty-making process as practical and humanitarian if the policy of Indian separation was to be abolished and replaced with the policy of assimilation in order to appropriate all their lands.  And the American Anthropologist functioned as the “New Guide.”

The emerging professional in the field of anthropology, grounded with a new social evolutionary hypothesis, furnished an endgame debate to the question of indigenous autonomy during last quarter of the 19th century.  Theorists like John Wesley Powell, Lewis Henry Morgan, Hubert Howe Bancroft, and Edward Tylor, were themselves evolving their understanding of Native American Indian ways through papers communicated to each other.  The suggestive prose developed in early texts, like that of Morgan”s Ancient Society, traced the development of intelligence, government, family, and the idea of property, through human history.

Native American civilizations and practices were portrayed as primitive, mere incipient forms of culture in comparison to European civilization.  The problem then, or more the solution forward, was for early anthropologists to develop the emerging field of Ethnology as an inter-disciplinary approach in understanding Native Americans albeit a very ethnocentric view based on what was left of precontact Native American societies.

19th Century ethnologists believed that three phases had occurred in ”indian” existence on the American continent with respects to the European-American, they are:

1)  Pre-contact

2)  Contact

3)  Post contact

and concluded the benefits of the latter far outweighed the disruption of Native American Indian societies prior to contact.

Ethnology hence became a system of study and information whereby one checked the historical reconstruction produced by ethnologists.  Anthropology itself during the final quarter of the 19th century was a gradual evolving sociocultural force, an entity that was itself experiencing much change.  These changes made the field of  anthropology go through stable long-term relationships with particular environments, for example, adapting to enormous Euro-American population increases and territorial expansionism in the “New World.”

It was a science tied to an evolutionary framework involved in general principles of human behavior, and an ecological approach that explained cultural features as a concept of a process of organic adaptation and self-sufficiency.  It was predictable though, because in examining, measuring, and judging what Native American Indian communities were,  Euro-American scientists were in effect finding out what Euro-American civilization were NOT, and thus the need for indigenous expulsion from these territories.

Through the theories of evolution a Man-Nature relationship was finally linked to a great many things, including Anthroplogy.   The evolutionary theory associated biological existence and social development with a differentiating natural selection process, whereby adaptation became the normative in explaining human development.  Intellectual findings in geology, by Joseph Prestwich, archaeology, by Edward Tylor, and biology, by Thomas Huxley, moved the lifeline of human existence on earth ever so backwards, presenting the irritable reality that indeed cultures evolved over very long, long periods of time, resulting in remarkable biological diversity of plants and animals.

It is this scientific chronology that seriously threatens biblical chronology.  Biblical chronology could not weather the eons of time it took the earth to create life on itself.  These mutable biological transformations, it was eventually concluded, were universal, operating under uniform laws of constant change thoughout time.  Natural law retained its conformity, but timeless existence, man in relation to God (One recalls that Prometeus is bound for all eternity – The Titan God who stole fire from Olympus and gave it to humans), and all these meta-physical beliefs, was exchanged for a dynamic evolutionary hypothesis. (2)

The destruction of a bibilical chronology gave science the edge it needed for the social sciences to trace human development, to ascertain  that place which humankind occupies in nature, to understand human relationship to the universe of things, and thus the call for anthropology came just in time to save Western Civilization from the boogey-man of nothingness.  The perpetual void.

People were brought in to believe, empirically, that the past, before written records, was long and vast, and maybe even attainable through the understanding of archaeology.  That it was possible to measure the enormous time scale backwards into when human beings lived in commonality with animals, that were now extinct, in caves.  It is students of Native America Indian cultures during this period that believed the gap between savage and civilized man was more apparent than real.  Civilization was viewed in the scope of biological and social growth patterns rooted in the belief that society progressed through the processes of barbarism, savagery and civilization.  (3)

A very absurd reality when projected to Native Americans of this country. The social evolutionist before the 1870”s believed that perception must precede reflection and objection must precede reason, known as the Baconian method this method no longer held ground in an evolving world of conjectural sciences.  An inferring process of theorizing and proving was deployed, the new method of being subjective instead of objective was developed.  Scientific philosophy before Darwin had become purely objective, and mythology and metaphysics subjective, and in a quick turn in teleological consequences, astronomy and cosmology merge, genesis and geology merge, and we have the circular paradigm of explanation and experimentation in the late 1870”s. (4)

Archaeological evidence pointed to a supposed fact that indeed human development and its societies of human cultures had emerged slowly, advancing and enjoining along the way certain inherited biological superior cultural traits or differences, incorporating these cultural traits or differences were responsible for a fundametal change in human existence, ie. live-stock raising, fire, tools, bipedalism.   But the solution to the problem was missing, How did these cultural characteristics or changes occur?  Evolutionary anthropology during the last quarter of the 19th century offered many advances and inspiration to the solution of this question, but the methods of the social sciences were revealing a contradictory picture towards fully understanding human difference.  Emerging first as an intellectual discipline, and then as an academic specialty, American Ethnology became the method in understanding human development and/or differences.  It is interesting to note though, on a cross-cultural perspective, that Native Americans viewed this as an impossibility, for how could one understand the great Wakan Tanka?  Where everything within the great Wakan Tanka is traditionally presented as “The Great Incomprehensibility” by way of knowing what it truly is.

How could a field in anthropology, a human science, defined as a comparative study of different societies, a process that involves attempts to reconstruct general principles of human behavior, ever fully understand the great awe of knowing who we are, why we’re here, and where we’re going after we die?(5)

Native Americans were constituted as the most interesting specimen for anthropological study in North America.  Militarily defeated, confined to reservations, and close at hand.  “Indians” were visualized as vastly inferior intellectually, the reverse of their white counterpart.  The “Indian Savage” when compared to “Western Civilized Man” was one stage below barbarism and many below civilization when compared through the eyes of anthropology.

Anthropologists viewed Native Americans as the ”vanishing Indian breed,” and during this period of ”Indian” ethnology, the 1880′s though the 1920′s, the last of the great buffalo hunters saw their food source quickly exterminated and replaced with annuities.  Interestingly, United States government policy-makers tended to lump all Native American Nations conveniently into one word, “Indian.”  A major distortion, non-representative of the vast diversity of Indian Nations found in the United States of America alone. Without regard to language, culture, and organization, Native American Indian people were portrayed as ”fastly disappearing.”  By the end of the 1870′s, the bond between scientists and their specimen, “The Indian savage,” was strongly established.

Many of the men and women that staffed the new Bureau of Ethnology by the late 19th century, had more in common with Native Americans than just  a professional or fascination for them, they shared a common intellectual interest ie. hunting and fishing patterns, war apparel, kinship ties, … .  Many came from widely held backgrounds with very little training in the field of ethnology, but they shared an understanding in accepting social evolution as the general principle towards understanding human behavior.  Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-81) was a leading figure in ethnology with the publication of his League of the Iroquois, in 1879.  He drew close connections between man, evolution, and civilization.  He became the America’s most widely respected anthropologist .  He was the first to use field research as a methodology in tribal studies with Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family in 1871.  The study presented comparative kinship studies to ethnology.  Morgan”s work Ancient Society was also an instant hit in 1877, merging quite well with the idea of ”Indian Primitivism.”   It traced the devopment of intelligence, family, government, and the idea of property through all of human history.  Major John Wesley Powell, the founding director of the Bureau of American Ethnology, was so enthusiatic about the book that when he got his advance copy he spent the night reading it.  (6)

As Native American people were viewed as vastly decreasing in numbers, evolutionism became the way to make it fit in American Consciousness.  The efforts to preserve this indigenous cultural record was assigned to ethnology, the respective inter-disciplinary field of anthropology.  It is here that we see American policy-makers, with the recommendation from anthropology to acculturate the ”Indian,” proposing assimilationist policies.  The scientific racial theorist described them in terms of a movement from simplicity to complexity and thus the need to bring them ”up” to civilization.  But  Euro-Americans rejected and violated the policy of racial separation brought about by the Treaty-making process, they wanted the “Indian’s” land, all of it.  And it is for this reason that a policy requiring new guidelines for future action is put forth from these sciences.

Assimilating them to civilization became the new ideal, they were labeled savages, but that was not enough, war and removal were not enough steps along the way to progress, they also had to take on the Euro-American notion of modernization, and it is here, in the late 19th century, that American Indian policy takes a major turn for acculturation.  These ideas were enhanced by people like USA Vice President Charles Curtis, a  mixed-blood indian of the Kansas-Kaw, who was a token Indian Cogressmen in the 1880′s and yielded much political clout to passage of the Dawes  Act.

The Dawes Act of the 20th century dispossessed much Native American sovereign Treaty negotiated land.  A clear violation of constitutional law since the Treaty is the Supreme Law of the Land. It is these processes that separated Indians from their Lands.  Making treaties with American Indian Nations, and now the process of acculturation.  Euro-American Acculturation policy, like the Dawes Act, carried with it a hidden agenda.  The attempt is again the dilution of Indian lands just because their Indian.

For Lewis Henry Morgan, the main indicator of societal achievement and advancement was the private ownership of land, a very important phenomenon in European culture.  He believed strongly in the Savage to Barbarian to Civilized model, presented in his book, “Ancient society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization.”  Thus cultures were not static but in stages of development , change could be enforced in a “positive” way.  One of these changes was belief in private ownership of property.

Thus, the recommendation was changes in societal development, were contingent on adapting to a higher model, that being the Euro-American one, ergo “one” had to change the way Native Americans looked at the land.  It was thus believed that by changing the way Native Americans viewed the land that one could change the savage intent or relationship to their land.

But how to do this became the biggest question?  How could one civilization believe that it could move another civilization up the ladder of development.  In a world based on racial animosity, economic uncertainty, and national chauvinism, everything is possible. And Ethnologists seemed to be justifying this through social evolution, the exploitation in the belief of a “backward” people needing change by a higher level civilization.   In 1893, the Bureau of Ethnology because the Bureau of American Ethnology, and the Anthropological Society, and with professionals like Lewis Henry Morgan had a profound impact on Anthropology as an evolving field.  His argument that private property as the key to movement from one stage of development to the next proved crucial in showing that societies were not fixed, but open to advancement up the evolutionary ladder in response to Euro-American efforts.  His ideas inspired the growing field of anthropologists of the late 19th century.  Two who were directly affected by this influence, and who were directly involved in the formulation of  Indian Policy, is John Wesley Powell(1834-1902) and Alice Cunningham Fletcher (1838-1932).  Powell was confined to written comments and private lobbying efforts.  Fletcher was an activist, advocating specific legislation, ties to prominent reformers, and later became an Bureau of Indian Administration Agent herself.        Powell who for two decades dominated anthropological study in the emerging Bureau of Ethnology, expanded his direction as the chief director and sponsor within that post of scholarly research within the discipline of ethnology. Powell believed that, “when society shall have passed to complete integration in the unification of all nations, and differentiation is perfected in universal liberty, then the sole philosophy well be science.” (7)

Powell added a fourth stage to Morgan’s stages of human development, –enlightenment, which accounted for modern industrialization.  In 1874 he gave written arguments to a Congressman requesting information in the House Indian Affairs Committee regarding the Numic peoples.  He states that the Numic peoples of the Great Basin were nomads who should be forced to a higher stage of culture, believing that the sooner the region is entered by ”white people” and the game destroyed so that the Indian finds other subsistence methods the better.

Thus Powell used the Bureau of Ethnology as a vehicle to organize anthropological research in America folowing the traditions of his predecessor Lewis Morgan.  ”Indians,” in both Powell and Morgan”s view were primitive, subject to study before progress forced them to change forever.  Social theories influenced Powell and contributed to his growing interest in Indian assimilation.  First he was in charge of the professional field of anthropology.  His employees founded the Anthropological Society of Washington and helped organize the American Anthropological Association in 1902.  The American Association for the Advancement of Science established a section of  anthropology in 1876.  Thus Powell’s notions of social evolution with respect to cultural stages, continuous progress, and inevitable transformation in American Indian life became the dominant viewpoint and set the terms legislating Indian affairs in the 1880′s.  His effect was on reformers and policy makers in Washington.  It was his hope that the bureau would be used by Congress as a source of objective information, his impact on native land cessions in 1879 promised to be a first addressing “the effect of the presence of civilization upon savagery.”  (8)

He  lobbied extensively and maintained a close contact with key committeemen and Interior Department  officials.  In 1880, Sen. Henry Teller wanted information about an Ute agreement before Congress, a major piece of legislation which would set a precedent in American Indian affairs. Powell replied with an essay on three principles that should guide all future government actions. They are:

1)  separated Native Americans from their lands

2)  Break-up their lands

3)  Bring them into civilization.

The chilling consequence of the social evolutionist’s bluebrint  is in brief contained here, that is, first, to separate Indians from their home and their past, second, divide their land into individual parcels, and third, to make them citizens and draw them into American mainstream society.  J.W. Powell remained a firm advocate for Indian assimilation throughout the 1880”s.  The increase “Indian” artifacts at the Smithsonian were a sure sign of the progress in the Indian process of assimilation, and Powell believed “a new phase of Aryan civilization (is) being developed in the western half of America”; and this is an effort he took pride in. (8)

In expressing the process of change for Native Americans, Powell states that, “Migrations and enforced removals placed tribes under conditions of strange environment where new customs and institutions were necessary, and in this condition civilization had a greater influence, and the progress of occupation by white men within the territory of the United States, at least, has reached such a stage that savagery and barbarism have no room for their existence, and even customs and institutions must in a brief time be completely changed, and what we are yet to learn of these people must be learned now.”  He further goes on to state, that ”in pursuing the studies of these changes caution is needed in not discriminating between that which has been acquired by Indians from the white man, and that which the primitives had before the processes of acculturation.” (9)      Powell”s belief of Indian societies was patriarchial, that the senses of the savage were dull in comparison to the civilized sense, stating, “A savage sees but few sights, hears but few sounds, tastes but few flavors, smells but few odors; his whole sensuous life is narrow and blunt, and his facts that are made up of the combination of sensuous impressions are few.  In comparison, the civilized man has his vision extended away toward the infinitesimal and away toward the infinite; his perception of sound is multiplied to the comprehesion of rapturous symphonies; his perception of taste is increased to the enjoyment of delicious farmlands; his perception of smell is developed to the appreciation of most  exquisite perfumes; and his facts that are made up of the combination of sensuous impressions are multiplied beyond enumeration.  The stages of discernment from the lowest savage to the highest civilized man constitute a series the end of which is far from the beginning.”  He believed that the Indian was naive and growth-less, thus in savagery, the Euro-American philosophers disputed over the immediate creation or development of the individual, while in civilization they argued over the immediate creation or development of races.

Social scientists in the last decade of the 19th century had become social evolutionary racists from a modern perspective, and the opportunity afforded to them in the American continent to study Native American peoples was one which meant a study of a people in large-scale academic institutions. This brought in the last, “but very much needed” important information and vestiges of indigenous Native American Nations as this extermination philosophy progressed.  Euro-American Scientists thought the American Indian was in the process of extinction and should be examined through professional and academic circles.  Academic analysis included a labeling along the way, and a viewpoint of a ”barbaric” cultural groups was argued and recorded.  It collected modern ethnographic materials; information and evidence regarding the process of Native American extinction.   This new anthropological professional research was framed around the notion of evolution and accumulated and deduced directly that the findings led to the of questioning of this field.

By the first decade of the 20th century, the older anthropological method became challenged and a new version of cultural pluralism and relativism emerged. (11)  Culture was the great evolutionary question of the late 19th century; some cultures were dominant while others were recessive.  It was not presented as dynamic process until the turn of the century when cultural anthropologists started to question the hierarchical ranking of  societies according to ethnocentric views.  When people like L. Tylor and J.W. Powell considered culture a product of man alone, they confused culture with biology.  Adapting this racial characterization with the diversification of human beings on earth is difficult, but the understanding of the impact on Native American Indian policy-making is quite sure to demonstrate a catastrophic reality when sovereignty is taken away, language is not taught, annuities are distributed by a corrupt BIA, previous subsistence patterns are no longer available, and laws that are not obeyed.

It is ridiculous today to study this motivation; studies for future historian to find out how far this expectation of Indian inferiority was led through the power of guide and action should be looked at instead.      In accordance with the view of  Euro-Americans that American Indians faced some sort of deficiency unable to make proper use of the land, uneducated,…etc, farmers of the period began their assault on the Native American Indian reservation lands.  Homesteading by European immigrants became a homogenous problem for Native American Indians, in fact it prevented the ”Indian” as a whole from the degree of acculturation and conditioning the policies were being made for.  Policy-makers never consulted with Native Americans on policy issues that affected them directly, for to them the ”Indian” was incapable of knowing what was best for him, and European Ameican interest was for the ”Indian” and the land, but always the land over the people.

The Indian reform movement culminated in congressional passage of the General Allotment Act of 1887 Sen. Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts sponsored the compromise of 160 acres per native family head of existing reservation lands, the remaining reservation lands were to be purchased by the federal government with Indian consent, and the sale price held in trust for the “education and civilization” of tribal members.  The patent to the land was to be held in trust for 25 years by the Secretary of Interior.    The effectiveness of the Dawes Act is measured in the period of its enactment in 1887 and its reversal under the so-called Indian New Deal in 1934.  Of the 138 million acres available to them originally over 60 percent was lost through sales of lands declared as surplus after allotment, and another 20 percent through the disposal of allotments.  Add another amount of leased alloted land and the total is as devastating as to any other preemption policy in American politics, that is the taking of Indian lands through legislative and legal graft; old practices were perpetuated under a new guise.

President Theodore Roosevelt had said in his first annual message to Congress in 1905 that the General Allotment Act was “a mighty pulverizing engine to break up tribal mass,” thus characterizing this theft as, ”allotment for land transfer to Whites” in the guise of acculturation policies towards Native Americans.  Euro-Americans could no more doubt the desirability of both sides of the coin in the 20th century, Indian lands and non-Indian lands, and they legitimized its appropriation as they had done in the previous century. (12)

In the 1890s the Cherokee Commission was set up to negotiate with tribal peoples on the value of their reservation lands and the implementation of allotment. The Jerome Agreement of 1892 with the Comanche Nation, supposedly reached this agreement, even though it was vehemently contested for eight years by the Comanche people, it was eventually authorized by Congress, and allotment of Comanche lands began in 1900.  Since the 1890s, Euro-Americans were a continual problem for Comanche people.  Euro-Americans were interested in quick profit off of Native American Indian land swindles, often by the same Commissioners internally reaching these agreements, in that eleven years leading up to allotment they became more numerous and more difficult to control.  Pouring into the reservation system in violation to the Treaty of Medicine Lodge guaranteeing these lands to the Comanche people.  Frank Cushing a researcher for J.W.Powell in the Bureau of Ethnology first exposed the land swindle of the Zuni in 1880.  When the illicit deal showed signs of embarassing Illinois Senator John Logan, Powell immediately recalled his fledgling bureau researcher. (13)  John Powell’s contact with key policy makers is quite active during 1885 and 1888.  Powell stated, “the part which the General Government, representing public sentiment, has done in the extinguishment of the vague Indian title to lands in the granting to them of lands for civilized homes on reservations and in severalty, in the establishment and support of schools, in the endeavors to teach them agriculture and other industrial arts–in these and many other ways justice and beneficence have been shown”. (14)

Anthropologist Franz Boas began to question the easy correlations made on race, cultures, languages, and societies which were the foundations of race and evolution, and hence Native American Indian policy in the start of the 20th century.  For Boas, the savage mind was equivalent to the civilized mind.   Boas separated the connections between biology, the physical environment, cultural traits, language, and social organization.  The conjectural approach to anthropology was replaced by an empirical one.  Factual history was stressed over conjectural history showing a wholeness of culture through cross cultural comparisons.  The basic web of relativity, plurality, and functionality of Boasian became more significant after the first World War.  The major change was looking at culture pluralisticly rather than singularly.  Singular meant civilization as a whole in some sort of hierarchical moral structure, while plural meant ”the stress on the diversity of cultures manifested by human groups and dropped the moral ranking in favor of moral relativism in a phase called Cultural Pluralism. (15)

The post-modern conceptions of Native Americans was finally transformed in research on localized cultural groups and traits shared by all.  To get to know the people anthropologists had to get to know the people from the inside, analyze from within to get a feel of culture in relationship to one’s own. Ethnographic analogies and ethnohistorians emerged doing cross-cultural analysis begun by evolutionary processes, the new goal in anthropology and history merged.   And in such the cultural conception of the Indian became the cultural study according to its own in Euro-American society.

The new scientific understanding or image of “Indian” became the grounds in which other imagery became judged.  It combined normative and descriptive degrees of learning into an intellectual rap serving ideological purposes.  Scholars will continue to judge that which they do not understand based on words that fit, or make up ones that do.

So much for the empirical jewell of wisdom.’),

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