Benson Tong
University
of Oklahoma Press, 2000
Betraying
the Omaha Nation, 1790-1916
By
Judith A. Boughter
University
of Oklahoma Press, 1998
Imperfect
Victories: The Legal Tenacity of the Omaha Tribe, 1945-1995
By
Mark R. Sherer
University
of Nebraska Press, 1999
Reviews
by Kirk Zebolsky
Benson
Tong’s book thoroughly documents complicated conflicts between
cultures as it recounts the work of an intriguing cultural broker.
Tong focuses on a woman, Susan La Flesche Picotte, with heroic virtues—the
first American Indian woman college-trained to be a physician.
Picotte
was born on the Omaha reservation in 1865 or 1866, a time of armed
conflict on the Great Plains, but she saw nothing of the Plains
Indian Wars. As Tong writes, many Omahas, including Picotte’s
father, Chief Joseph La Flesche, “chose to journey toward acculturation
and the selective adoption of Euro-American culture.”
Descended
from Native American grandmothers and from grandfathers with European
roots, Picotte was educated by Presby- terians and Quakers on the
Omaha reservation, at the Elizabeth Institute For Young Ladies in
New Jersey, at Hampton Institute in Virginia, and at Woman’s
Medical College in Philadelphia. Her extended family included those
who recommended adaptation and education for Indians, such as her
father, and others who refused to speak English unless they had
to, including her mother. Picotte missed out on the important Omaha
ritual of the “naming ceremony” in childhood, and in her
own words she came “from the tepee to civilization.” Yet,
as Tong writes in his final paragraph, “she never lost her
Indianness.”
As
a “cultural mediator,” Picotte advocated temperance, work,
Christianity, and the land rights she claimed for her family and
other Omahas. She often represented the Omahas in their efforts
to protect and manage their properties. “In this capacity,
Susan’s brokerage attempts were less on behalf of Euro-American
‘civilization’ and more in the interest of Indian rights,”
Tong writes. “Ironically, her efforts would promote the dispossession
of the Omahas.”
Her
dilemma was similar to that of her father, who endorsed education
by whites and was at times spurned by fellow Omahas. She called
for Indian autonomy but also for federal protection from land-hungry
capitalists. After Omahas were allotted land in the 1880s, they
lost control of much of it in the following decades by selling or
leasing it.
Picotte
lobbied against government delays in paying Omahas for their land,
land grafters maneuvering Indians into “fraudulent land transactions”
through the use of alcohol, and a syndicate’s land- grabbing
tactics.
As
physician to the government boarding school, she talked to students
about physiology and hygiene and gave lessons in English and math;
she also sang hymns, made scrapbooks, told Euro- American folktales,
and practiced marching skills with the students.
Tong
shows how she used her connections to raise funds for a reservation
hospital—her “life-long aspiration”—which was
named for her.
Tong
touches on Omaha history and cultural traditions before giving Picotte’s
family history. He recounts interactions that occurred after the
arrival of Europeans in Omaha territory, including cross- cultural
relations that shaped the lives of her parents and grandparents.
In addressing the policy of assimilation and the doctrine of manifest
destiny, Tong explains how they helped cause excessive alcohol use,
the decreased practicing of traditional culture, and poverty among
the Omahas. Photographs depict Susan, her family, and some of her
contemporaries.
What—besides
a hospital—did Picotte get for her activism? Surely she experienced
frustration, seeing that “much of her work had been in vain.”
But society gained a lot from her example, which shows that a life
lived between cultures can be difficult and exacting, yet valuable
and important.
Judith
Boughter writes in Betraying
the Omaha Nation, 1790-1916 about the depletion of Omahas’
lands, injustices committed by whites, and the tensions between
traditional and progressive forces.
Boughter
makes it clear who she thinks is to blame for the Omahas’ dispossession.
“White settlers and land speculators resented Indian ownership
of fertile northeastern Nebraska lands and, beginning in the early
1850s, used every means at their disposal to separate the Indians
from their real estate,” she writes, “Unfortunately, Nebraska
senators and congressmen worked closely with land speculators to
promote special legislation that—little by little, law by unfair
law—encouraged Indians to lease, and eventually sell, most
of their land.”
Boughter,
who was a graduate history student in Nebraska, calls this book
“basically my master’s thesis.” In it she assaults
the dominant culture’s shortcomings in dealing with the Omahas.
Sadly, she writes, the government’s granting land forever to
the Indians meant nothing.
Boughter
addresses politics, trading, treaties, land sales, annuities, and
land allotment, followed by the leasing and selling of allotments.
According to her accounts, the Omahas received pitifully little
in return for lands they considered theirs. Tax breaks were one
benefit, but white Nebraskans sometimes objected to Indians being
off tax rolls. Such concerns of whites were sometimes placated.
She
writes that the 1825 Fort Atkinson Treaty “marked a surrender
of Indian rights and sovereignty and set a precedent by which the
U.S. government took from the Indians and gave little in return.
The Omahas had already lost so much. The buffalo were disappearing,
many lives had been lost to enemy raids and disease, and thanks
to the fur trade, Omaha values had changed and their culture was
in disarray.”
In
1854, Omahas agreed to a treaty that ceded much of their ancestral
land; they also agreed to move to a reservation. Fears of the Sioux
kept them from the reservation: “Once again, they became a
wandering nation in search of a safe, permanent home. Their suffering
at the hands of the government had only just begun.”
By
about 1880, the Omahas “no longer feared the Sioux, but they
did fear the future,” according to Boughter. “For nearly
30 years they had been cheated, lied to, and forced to surrender
many of their old ways. Promises had been made and broken, and their
tribal government had been dismantled …they had been asked to
farm without money or machinery.” After allotment in
severalty in the 1880s, “The door was open to white greed,”
according to Boughter. “The Omahas, who were now citizens without
recourse to law and were owners of valuable agricultural lands,
would be victimized in the 1890s by unscrupulous whites hovering
about the reservation fringes.” Yet the commissioner of Indian
Affairs was sure the Omahas’ allotment would be a model for
other tribes to emulate.
The
1854 treaty made with the Omahas was invoked in court through the
Indian Claims Commission and an award ensued. The Omahas’ ICC
claims were considered over 14 years—a legal process examined
by Mark R. Scherer in Imperfect
Victories. Sherer also describes the Omahas’ legal battles
to recover land now on the east side of the Missouri River and to
survive Public Law 280, which temporarily gave the state of Nebraska
civil and criminal jurisdiction on the Omaha reservation.
Scherer
accuses the federal government of using the Omahas as guinea pigs
for new policies. He gives a great deal of detail in depicting the
trials that resulted in some compensation for the ill effects of
such policies. Without much focus on personalities, these accounts
can be dry reading. But Scherer does give good introductions to
them, as well as strategies, arguments, and the outcomes.
According
to Scherer, the government was headed in the right direction early
in the 20th century when it issued the Merriam Report, which named
allotment and strict acculturation as the major causes of deplorable
conditions on reservations. The “Indian New Deal” called
for the cessation of the allotment process and implementation of
a new system of Indian sovereignty and self-government. That led
to the ICC, through which Indians could collect money for lost land.
But the ICC was “undermined…by the burgeoning terminationist
ideology, as tribal claims became enmeshed with and co-opted by
the assimilationist aims of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations,”
Sherer writes.
The
ICC became an instrument of termination policy under which Indian
nations lost federal support. Through PL 280 the federal government
abandoned law enforcement in Thurston County, leading to deteriorating
law-and-order conditions on the Omaha reservation.
Scherer
reports that the Omahas gained several million dollars through the
ICC and, as one of the first nations to test the ICC, prompted the
“Omaha Rule,” used as a guideline for subsequent claims.
The Omaha Rule required an open hearing, among other provisions.
Money
from ICC claims was distributed to individual Omahas and for various
projects. The Omahas also won land on the Iowa side of the Missouri
River, on which they operate a casino.
Scherer,
who calls the Omahas “legal warriors,” writes in the introduction
that they have achieved “a prominence in the annals of federal
Indian relations.” “…it was the Omahas’ perceived
success on the reservation during the 1860s and 1870s that would
lead to further government attempts to undermine their tribal identity
through assimilationist ‘reforms’.
“Beginning
in the 1870s, and continuing virtually to this day, the Omahas have
borne more than their fair share of the burden of shifting government
policies. Indeed, since the establishment of the reservation in
northeast Nebraska in 1854, the Omahas have served involuntarily
as sociological guinea pigs in the laboratory of federal Indian
policy, with each new program contributing, until recently, to a
cumulatively disastrous effect on the tribe’s culture and economy…government
bureaucrats and assimilationist advocates touted the Omaha experiment
as a success, paving the way for the landmark 1887 Dawes Sever-
alty Act, which extended the allotment program nationwide.”
Scherer
includes an account of the Omahas’ history as background for
their 20th century legal struggles. He also gives helpful historical
context when discussing the origins and widespread effects of federal
policies. Z
Kirk
Zeblosky has a bachelor of journalism degree and a master of arts
in English.