Adapted from CONTINENTAL RECKONING: The American West in the Age of Expansion, published by University of Nebraska Press.
Recent revelations about abuses on Native American reservations and in boarding schools and the efforts of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) to confront them ought to encourage us to consider the roots of that disturbing chapter in our national story. Some parts of the story are well enough known—the forced separation of families, the impoverishment of reservations, and the appalling rates of disease and death in boarding schools.
What is less familiar is the breadth of participation in the concerted effort to dispossess, confine, and transform Native peoples in the years after the Civil War. Among the more vigorous actors were members of America’s intellectual and scientific community, including some of its leading lights.
John Wesley Powell is best known for leading the first non-Native descent of the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon in 1869. From there the veteran Union officer—he lost his lower right arm at Shiloh—became an internationally admired geologist whose study of the Colorado Plateau was a long stride toward understanding the ancient forces that have shaped the earth.
“The Major” was also a prominent figure in what he called the “Science of Man,” the newborn social science of anthropology. As the first head of the Bureau of Ethnology (1879) he oversaw and organized field work across the West to document the life ways of Native peoples, from their houses and family arrangements to their cosmologies, burial practices, and much more.
Powell’s own work focused on the scores of Native languages in the West. He played a prime role in grouping them into families based on similarities of words and syntax, just as European tongues are classified as Germanic, Romance, Slavic, and others. It was a remarkable accomplishment, one that holds up well today, but it had a deeper motive.
To Powell, studying Native languages was an early step in the necessary work of destroying them. They were too often used to convey “sorcery” and “baneful superstitions,” he wrote, and were wholly inadequate to express “the ideas and thoughts of civilized life.” A fellow linguist ranked them by their sophistication and judged that anyone speaking those lower on the scale could have “no real human culture.” Powell and others believed that Native peoples could hope to rise above their primitive lives only by swapping their own languages for a truly advanced one—namely English.
Destroying Native tongues in turn was a key to the government’s wider goal of destroying Native identities. A commission traveling among western tribes in 1868 stressed the need to blot out “barbarous dialects” in order to erase differences among the dozens of separate peoples and to fuse them “into one homogenous mass.” Only “uniformity of language will do this,” they wrote: “Nothing else will.”
The destruction of their cultures, it was argued, was for the tribes’ own good. Left as they were, each distinctive people would inevitably be overrun, or would somehow magically melt away, in the face of the advancing superior peoples flooding into the West. Their sole hope was to abandon their ways of life, adopt those of the white invaders, and blend in with the new cultural regime.
That was the assumption behind the small army of social scientists who fanned out to work among western Native peoples, many under Powell’s Bureau of Ethnology. They were documenting languages, styles of dress, tools and clothing, familial relations, and much more as data in the wider study of Powell’s “Science of Man,” American particulars in a global portrait of evolving human cultures. And the need was pressing because, the thinking was, such inferior ways of life were destined, naturally and properly, to disappear. In that process, the social scientists themselves were lending a heavy hand.
The laboratory for that transformation was the reservation. On dozens of them Native Americans were to be schooled in the ways of white society and pressed into roles in its economy, farming in particular. The rising generation would be educated in the new life in reservation classrooms and in distant boarding schools, and in the latter they would be forcibly shorn of their previous cultures, starting with their traditional long hair.
But the reservation’s role was more fundamental than that. Powell understood what it was. When two strangers from different Native groups in the Great Basin met, he wrote, one did not ask the other his name or tribe but “to what land do you belong?” Identity was inseparable from homeland. And the lesson that Powell took from that? Pick up Native peoples and move them onto reservations elsewhere or confine them to a small part of their native land as the rest of it was made over for the new order. Severing the bond between person and place, like extinguishing languages, was essential to merging many distinct identities into that “homogenous mass” compatible with the wider America.
In 1878 an Omaha elder pled to the commissioner of Indian affairs that “to deprive us of our land would be just like killing us.” That, in one sense, was exactly the goal. “Kill the Indian and save the man” was the often quoted principle of the founder of the Carlisle Indian School, Richard Henry Pratt. The dictum applied to the government’s programs as a whole, a project of cultural genocide aided and justified by leading social scientists of the day.
Native peoples, as always, responded with remarkable resilience, and under the New Deal Washington dramatically reversed its policies, restoring tribal governance, funding the purchase of lost lands, and promoting the preservation of cultural life. Legislation in 1978 and 1993 protected the practice of Native religions. Nonetheless the damage to scores of our nation’s peoples, and to their cultures rooted millennia deep, has been immeasurable. Despite some government support, Native languages in particular remain desperately threatened.
In a wider context the government’s cultural assault, seemingly sensible to so many at the time, abetted by leading intellectuals and strongly supported by much of the public, reflected questions that had been there since the republic’s birth. Who qualifies to be members of the national family? What if any are the limits of beliefs, faiths, customs, tongues? How pluribus should be our unum? Those questions today are as pressing and contentious as ever.
Secretary Haaland is reminding us that the story of Native peoples can show us what dark and destructive turns the answers to those questions can take. Only by starting with an honest look backward can we hope to avoid them today and in the future.