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Timothy Shannon
Transcript hello history 230 students welcome to a video in which we're going to talk about Native Americans during the reservation era which we are going to date from 1880 until 1920 by 1880 armed resistance by Native Americans to the federal government had pretty much ended there were still some places along the us-mexico border lands in which the Apache Indians were resisting federal authority but for the most part the era of the Indian Wars after the Civil War had come to an end and Native Americans were now confined to reservation lands granted to them by the federal government and these lands were going to become prisons for them during this era as the federal government confined Indians to them and used federal troops and federal officials to surveil to keep an eye on Indians enforce their assimilation into American society but during the same period these reservations were going to become homelands to these Indians Indians would adopt these reservations as places where they could continue to cultivate and preserve their tribal identities they would defend these homelands as places in which Indians had sovereign Authority and the reservations even though they were imposed upon the Indians by the federal government became associated with the preservation of a distinct Native American identity within larger American society this image that we see here is very much evocative of life on the plains before the era of the reservations we see that it is from a Lakota encampment near Pine Ridge in 1891 so this is the reservation era but the reason I'm including it here is I think it does a very good job of telling us what the Plains Indians valued about their life before the reservations and that was the freedom of movement we see the horses watering themselves here in this riverbed and then your eye extends to the horizon and we see this encampment made up of teepees extending all the way to the horizon teepees of course were mobile homes for the Plains Indian hunters and we see them arranged in this kind of circular format that is very much a part of the spiritual world of the Plains Indians they arranged the interior of the teepee in a circle they arranged the teepees themselves into a circle when they encamped or when they had their village sites now compare that image that previous image to this image here taken from roughly the same air a photograph of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota from the late 19th century and we still see teepees arranged here in the foreground but now the most imposing structure in this image in this landscape are these buildings that loom here in the background and those represent the imposition of federal authority this would be the agency buildings of the reservation and the agency buildings were where the federal Indian agent who was in charge of distributing rations and annuities on the reservations where he would would have lived also it may have housed missionaries from Protestant or Catholic churches that were establishing schools on the reservation for Indian children there very well may have been a federally sponsored school or a mission school in this complex of buildings as well as a model farm and so these larger fixed buildings on the landscape come to symbolize the imposition of federal authority over native peoples during this era and the realities of life on these reservations for Indians at this time were not good during this period life on Indian reservations was associated with high rates of disease with malnutrition with chronic violence in factionalism among these Indians with armed resistance in some cases to federal authorities and with very high mortality rates according to the u.s. census by 1900 there are approximately 250,000 or a quarter of a million Native Americans living within the United States and that represents the nadir or low point a Native American population in the United States over the course of the 20th century that population is going to slowly recover but it tells us something that around 1900 in the mid point of the reservation era Indian populations were at their lowest clearly the policy of forced assimilation had as a flip side to it a policy of extermination or eradication that Indians who did not assimilate were going to die out at least that was the perception from the federal government in modern American English we often use the phrase going off the reservation to describe someone who is not thinking according to conventional wisdom or behaving according to conventional standards the late 19th century going off the reservation actually had a very literal meaning it meant Indians who left the reservation without permission from federal authorities on that and that became an issue that defined relations between Native Americans and the federal government during the 19th century did the federal government have the power to forcibly confine Indians to reservations Standing Bear was a Ponca Indian who challenged federal authority in this way in 1879 the pocke Indians originally came from the northern plains in 1868 they had accepted a reservation in the Indian Territory in modern Oklahoma from the federal government and so moved down there but Standing Bear and members of his family and some of his wider circle of friends were not pleased with the quality of the land that they were allotted in Oklahoma and so in 1879 Standing Bear led a group of about 30 fellow paka Indians off the reservation northward into the Nebraska territory where he wanted to settle again on his ancestral lands he was apprehended by General Crook in Omaha in current confined him in his associates to jail with the aid of some people who were sympathetic to the Native American cause Standing Bear sued in federal court for his freedom saying that he had been illegally arrested and imprisoned by General Crook in the federal judge who heard the case made a ruling that was actually sympathetic to Standing Bear and challenged some of the authority of the federal government was claiming over these native peoples he ruled that Standing Bear was a person and of course that sounds strange to us today obviously he was a person but in the context of late 19th century American law this was an issue whether the federal government was obligated to deal with Indian peoples in a way that acknowledged their personhood he also ruled that Standing Bear and other Native Americans had the right of habeas corpus which is a civil liberty regards your control over your own body habeas corpus is most often invoked as a way of protecting people from unlawful arrest and imprisonment it's the habeas corpus that prevents the government from imprisoning you indefinitely it means that if you're arrested you have to be brought to trial and you can only be put in prison if you've been convicted of a crime well this federal judge ruled that Standing Bear had the right of habeas corpus that it had been violated by General Crook and therefore he was allowed to go free after this landmark decision Standing Bear toured several eastern cities giving lectures talking about the plight of American Indians living on reservations back on the plains federal agents on reservations often got around this ruling by saying the Indians who were confined on reservations were prisoners of war or that they had voluntarily agreed when they sign treaties to remain on reservations but nevertheless this this issue of movement on and off reservations was going to be won the Indians and federal agents fought about throughout the reservation era now for many federal policymakers the purpose of the reservations was not just to confine Indians to fix them on the land but also to Americanize them to force their assimilation into American society this again sounds very ironic to us that Native Americans had to be Americanized but federal policymakers of the late 19th century had very specific objectives in mind in this regard reservations were going to be temporary they were going to last only a generation or so as Indians of the younger generation were raised in ways that would assimilate them into American society visually that's depicted in this photograph by American Civil War photographer Mathew Brady depicting a father in son of the Sauk and Fox Indians in here you see the older generation dressed in traditional native garb leather leggings and moccasins pipe tomahawk bear claw necklace and a feathered headdress and then standing next to him his son who is dressed in what is called citizen dress the dress of any American citizen living in the late 19th century and this is a visual depiction of what federal policymakers thought reservations were going to do within a generation it was going to turn American Indians or Native Americans into Indians who were American citizens and in that process did it work there was always the option of coercion many of these reservations had contingents of US troops on them troops that would be sent to apprehend Indians who went off reservation federal Indian agents would also withhold rations and annuities as a means of compelling Indian families to do what he wanted them to do this was especially true in the case of Indian families having to surrender their children to go to school otherwise they wouldn't receive the rations that they depended on to feed themselves and the creation of reservation police forces one of which you see depicted in this photograph reservation police forces were established to maintain law and order on reservations and if you are a young Indian male of this era this was an appealing form of employment because it meant you could be armed as you see is the case with the Indians who are represented here of course these were warrior cultures and in a previous generation young men what if hunted would have made war as a way of proving their worthiness is men in the reservation era serving on a reservation police force was one of the few ways in which a young man could legally armed himself now reservation police forces also became sources of violence and factionalism within these Indian communities it was reservation police that arrested and killed Sitting Bull for example during the agitation of the Ghost Dance movement so rather than preserving law and order on these reservations these police forces oftentimes became highly politicized in sources of division and violence within these reservation communities and Indians did find ways to resist forced assimilation during the reservation era ways that were subtle in ways that were oftentimes more obvious the image that you see here is by Amos bad heart bull and he was a Sioux Indian artist who during the reservation era did drawings in ledger books ledger books could be acquired from a an Indian agent they were account books used by traders and other people on reservations to keep track of accounts but Amos bad bull knew a bad heart and bull used his ledger book to record a visual history of his people during this era and so historians have often used these images to talk about the persistence of some traditional Native American customs and practices into the reservation era in this case you see some Indian men who are dressed in their traditional regalia carrying some traditional weapons like lances here riding on horseback this is something that was probably done as a result of a holiday or a parade on a reservation Indians liked to celebrate the 4th of July because it was a holiday that the federal agents endorsed but Indians would also use it as a way of continuing to practice the Sundance or some other Native American ceremonies kind of under the guise of exhibiting their patriotic citizenship in the same way Christianity would be practice but also provide cover for continuing some traditional Native American spiritual beliefs and then in the 1890s and early 1900s you have the emergence of some revivalist religious movements that specifically rejected Christianity the Ghost Dance movement and also the peyote cult both of which we will talk about a little later in the semester when we talk about Native American religion during this particular era so that's a general introduction to life on the reservation era in the next video we're going to talk a little bit about the Dawes Act which was a major federal Indian policy of this era aimed at breaking up the land claims that Indian nations were able to make on these reservations
