The Society of American Indians (SAI), founded in 1911, has become a useful vantage point upon which to build a Progressive Era history that places American Indian people as active and visible agents of their own destiny. It has all the right elements: a cheeky sense of humor (visible in the choice of date and location—Columbus Day in Columbus, Ohio); a robust written archive, in the form of a Quarterly Journal and correspondence records; and a complex set of issues, including race and representational politics, tribal and pan-Indian social organization, and citizenship and rights. The organization's self-conscious interest in reform puts it in the thick of Gilded Age and Progressive Era concerns. And it offers an array of compelling and complicated lead characters: Seneca intellectual Arthur C. Parker (who might have been an academic but chose the fading path of museum professionalism instead); Oneida activist and author Laura Cornelius (who mixed organizing prowess with a delicious criminal record); Charles Eastman and Carlos Montezuma (American Indian doctors who took evocative paths in negotiating cross-cultural complexity); and Zitkala Sa (nationally recognized author and activist, and as close to being part of our literary and historical canon as any American Indian writer of the period), among others. These figures came of age during the late nineteenth century, and their careers exemplified the difficult (but also unexpected) leap that many Indians took from tribal upbringings into the thick of modernity.Footnote ¹

To focus on the SAI, however, might lead us to tell a story that focuses on a small Native elite, in which “pan-tribal” bears some affinity with “detribalized” (not to be confused with “assimilated”) and misses the experience of the majority of Indian people. Indeed, one of the oldest critiques leveled against the SAI has been its disconnection from reservation people and tribal concerns. And yet, the organization's opening salvos suggest that the leaders envisioned a broader field of action. At one of the first planning meetings, organizers drafted a letter to be sent to Indians across the country.

“Dear Fellow Indian,” the letter begins. “What is to be the future of the American Indian?”Footnote ² Their answer to the question was optimistic; the future lay in organizing across tribal lines. “The Association expects every progressive Indian to become an active member,” the group wrote in a statement of principles. And then, in the letter itself: “Personal freedom and personal advancement are dependent upon racial rights and racial advancement. This is your opportunity to help your people. Become an ACTIVE member of the organization.”Footnote ³

In the official conference proceedings, just before the letter itself, readers will find one of those odd jiggles that call out to the historian: “The following communication was mailed to about 4000 Indians.”Footnote ⁴ Really? That is about 1.6% of all the Indian people living in the United States at the timeFootnote ⁵–this is a lot of Indians. Imagine ten contemporary scholars of Native America sitting down and churning out that many Indian names. Even given the advantage of Facebook, I suspect the task might be a challenge. Could there really have been that many “progressive Indians” in 1911? After all, only forty-four active members are listed in the program as being in attendance at the conference. And that number was drawn from a little more than 100 active members in total. The non-Indian Associates (125 of them) actually outnumbered the Indians. Can one really imagine another 3,900 Indian people amenable to receiving the invitation?Footnote ⁶ This seemingly substantial gap between reality and possibility did not stop the organizers from thinking big and throwing down the gauntlet to both members and associates. “Before the next conference,” they wrote, “there ought to be at least 1000 active members of the American Indian Association and 1000 associate members. Which thousand will be made up first?”Footnote ⁷ In retrospect, it seems like so much crazy dreaming.

But maybe you could imagine that many Indians. In 1911, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School had been in existence for three decades, sometimes serving as many as 1,000 students. Haskell Indian School: a quarter-century, teaching 600 students in some years; Chilocco Indian School: 25 years; and Sherman Indian School: almost 20 years. And then, consider all those other places where Indian children were taken: those church schools, those other boarding schools, those mainline American schools and colleges, all exemplars of the late nineteenth-century policy that sought to “educate” Indian people out of their societies and cultures.Footnote ⁸ Maybe, after all, you could imagine 4,000 people to whom you might send invitations.

My great-grandfather, Philip J. Deloria, received one of the invitations. Tending to the Episcopal mission at Standing Rock, South Dakota, he was one of those rural, reservation Indians with whom the SAI failed to connect. He came to the first meeting in Columbus, Ohio, though he must have been quiet. He shows up in the official record in only one place: on the Sunday morning of the conference, Indian ministers attended local churches, letting white congregations know of their progress on the Christian road. Philip Deloria was one of the preachers who fanned out across the town, talking about the issues that mattered to the Society.Footnote ⁹

Those four thousand Indians reflect an unexplored—and significant—cohort of American Indian people who likely shared many of the concerns of the SAI leadership: land, allotment, the Indian Office, religious freedom, autonomy, and “civilization.” Chief among these concerns was the particularly pointed issue of citizenship: what did it mean for individuals and for tribes? Was citizenship a force of political empowerment or a tool of disempowerment? Something to demand or something to resist? The passage of the Indian Citizenship Act thirteen years later would produce mixed reactions among individuals and tribes: some embraced American citizenship, others doubled down on the concept of the tribal citizen, and some did both. And so citizenship offers a point of paradox and contradiction in American Indian histories of the period, one that makes those Indian histories central to the stories we tell about the broader sweep of U.S. historical practice.

The question of Indian citizenship leads me to revisit an old but still-useful historical analytic: that of the “master narrative.” A blurry categorical line separates the narrative arcs that frame the many stories of U.S. history—and those things we might call master narratives (of which there are relatively few). An exploration of this particular category, its analytical uses, and the legacy of postmodern skepticism about meta-narratives (which are not quite the same thing as master narratives), is beyond the scope of this piece. Instead, I take the trope of the master narrative as a premise for what follows. When I invoke the term, I mean to refer to a “big story,” one that has grown from historiographical roots to generate such meaning and power within American culture that it often escapes the complicating work of historians, and thus bids to become the ocean of common sense in which our fellow citizens swim. We know these four familiar ones: The City on the Hill, The Pioneering Frontier, The Immigrant Struggle, and The Original Sin of Slavery and the Bloody Redemption of the Civil War. And here are two more, both of which represent counter-narratives that have taken on some “masterly” degree of evocative cultural power in relation to the multicultural impulses of the last several decades: The Progressive Movement from Slavery to Freedom to Civil Rights, and The Conquest of the Continent.

To draw some gross generalizations and radically compress meanings, in the Puritan story of America (and its variant offshoots), Indians show up as savage and backward, oppositional outsiders always on the military offensive. Their brutal attacks justify a defensive (not-quite-war) of unintentional, accidental conquest. On the Turnerian frontier, Indians are compressed into the environment itself, destined to melt away before the inevitable surge of developing American civilization. In the Sin and Redemption story, Indians are barely visible (just as slavery and the Civil War are submerged in the Puritan and Frontier narratives). In the immigrant narrative, too, they are hard to find, appearing as quirky curiosities or occasional rhetorical foils.

Those two final counter-narratives had somewhat different formative origins, emerging out of the social and intellectual struggles of groups dominated both historically and in the contemporary moment. Original Sin and Bloody Redemption centered slavery, in a way, but it did so as a white story, focused on constitutional bargains and the Civil War. Slavery to Freedom turned that frame on its complicated head. Likewise, City on the Hill and Frontier narratives made some modest room for an admission of Indian dispossession, but again, as primarily a white story. Conquest sought to invert those frames.

Indeed, while the Conquest narrative took many forms—think of Teddy Roosevelt, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Helen Hunt Jackson, among others—it emerged not simply as an alternative, but as a counter-story, perhaps most visibly through a text such as Patricia Nelson Limerick's 1987 book, The Legacy of Conquest.Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, Limerick's book is a primer for rewriting American master narratives through a particularly evocative contemporary lens, in this case that of 1980s multiculturalism. Limerick made Turner—and his story—her explicit foil, delightfully naming the frontier as “the F word” and seeking to banish it from polite company. She argued that a better narrative would recognize continuities across the temporal marker of 1890, and that it would account for various forms of out-and-out conquest—of Indian people and of Mexico, in particular. A better narrative, she suggested, would pay closer attention to women, to the Mexican border, to immigration from the Pacific, and to the powerful role of the federal government. Limerick's vision of the American West was one that sought to capture, incorporate, and be informed by ethnic studies work, particularly that found in Native American, Latino/a, and Asian American studies.

The Legacy of Conquest also endeavored to rewrite a national narrative—in the form of Turner's America—through a regional lens—but to make it speak as a national narrative. The West was, in Limerick's eyes, the best historical analogue to the American moment of the 1980s and 1990s, for it was a space of internationalization; ethnic and racial diversity; class struggle; and gender oppression, contest, and liberation. It was also a story that systematically and thoroughly placed the dispossession of Indian land front and center.

Limerick's regionalist inclinations led not simply to her vociferous reaction against Turner's bold continentalism, but also to her envy of the stature and standing of Southern history. As Limerick has suggested on more than one occasion, Turner may have been her foe, but C. Vann Woodward was her muse. “The subject of slavery,” she noted in a later reflection, “was the domain of serious scholars and the occasion for sober national reflection; the subject of conquest was the domain of mass entertainment and the occasion for lighthearted national escapism.”Footnote ¹¹ Regionalism allowed her to take locality seriously—particularly in terms of environment and social relations—and thus to make the more sober reflective claims she so admired in the histories of the South.

Limerick's observation rightly brings us to that other counter-narrative, the movement from slavery to freedom to citizenship, which centers not on white sin and sacrifice, but black agency and initiative within shifting structures of domination. Ethnic studies fields, despite their distinct genealogies and distinctive interdisciplinary constellations, have in common a long tradition of pushing back against dominant narratives in U.S. history—in this instance rebalancing a story organized around the Civil War and its consequences. Can anyone doubt that this particular counter-narrative carries an especially powerful weight and heft?

The provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, offer the political grounding for a historically situated discussion of citizenship during Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and beyond—and they have proven critical to many ethnic studies analyses. The promise of equal protection under the law has become a commonsense value. Indeed, the submersion of equal protection under the “separate but equal” doctrine articulated in Plessy v. Ferguson underpins enormous sectors of ethnic studies work concerned with struggles to eliminate institutional discrimination. In this sense, one can see how the African American experience—powerfully glossed in terms of the movement from slavery to freedom to citizenship and civil rights—gives direction and form to other narratives across both ethnic studies and women's studies. The narrative movements here are powerful: from discrimination to equal protection, from alien immigrant to national citizen, from otherness to belonging, from segregation to integration, and from dangerous inequality to equality and freedom.

I knew for certain that this narrative had moved from “counter” to “dominant” when my son returned from his third-grade classroom (several years ago) singing a faux spiritual:

Dr. King, Dr. King

Dr. King was a civil rights leader

The didactic little tune offered an anchor point around which he (and his teacher) in earnest third-grade fashion were able to explain the universal importance of civil rights for all people.

For him, there was an overarching narrative power to the story, which carried him from something bad to something better. Indeed, stories about the movement toward citizenship and rights are often embedded within a progressive structure, and they make progress central to their story lines. They emphasize agency. They have intelligible (if teleological) goals: liberty, recognition, civil rights, economic survival (and perhaps even prosperity), collective healing from historical trauma, and a more just and equitable world. Of course, not all stories end with these things. But their narrative movements frame available discourses, naturalizing the movements and the goals: of course equality is what we want; of course civil rights are shared objects of struggle and desire on the part of all groups.

But are they?Footnote ¹²

These progressive stories tend to elevate the American nation-state, which ironically has also been the long-standing target of scholarly critique and deconstruction. If the state oppresses, or tolerates oppression, it can also—with much agentic poking and prodding—prevent oppression and enable opportunity. The model that such narratives create is, by its very nature, assimilatory. Minorities without rights challenge the nation-state—but they do so in order to work their way into the nation and thus gain the desired civil rights: that is, the rights that inhere in citizenship within civil society. It has been all too easy to map American Indians into this narrative, and that would—in general terms—seem to be something of a mistake.

The Fourteenth Amendment, in a technical sense, works to pry apart African American and Native American narratives. It modifies—but also follows—Article 1, Section 2, of the United States Constitution. In the original constitutional passage, four categories of people become visible: free people (that is, “citizens”—always a contested term in that the exercise of citizenship could be restricted on the basis of gender and wealth), indentured servants, “Indians not taxed,” and “all other persons.” This last one is the oblique reference to slavery in the famous passage counting slaves as three-fifths of a person when determining congressional representation. The Fourteenth Amendment requires the counting of the “whole number of persons,” but it too excludes “Indians not taxed,” leaving intact the initial structure of the Constitution.

In this citizenship gap between black and Indian, we can see unfolding skeins of differential history that will carry us back to the moment of the SAI. The phrase “Indians not taxed” raises, first, the question of collective rights as opposed to individual ones. In excluding Indians, it insists that civil rights (at least in this case) are individual, while Indian rights—such as they are—emerge through a distinct political collective. For an Indian to be taxed (and thus, perhaps, to become a citizen), he or she had to renounce tribal membership, and take up an individual parcel of land (which was then subject to taxation). Those other Native people—“Indians not taxed”—remained part of a tribal collective, and thus outside of the narratives of rights and equality (struggled for collectively by other groups, but most often exercised individually).

Indeed, as many commentators have made clear, Indians are, in effect, extra-constitutional. As distinct and independent nations, they were never part of the original constitutional framework. To the extent that Indian political collectives exist under the rubric of the Constitution, they have been brought within its frame through other means, all of which rely upon the assertion that Congress has, in the end, absolute plenary power over Indians, as both tribal nations and—through their tribal designation as Indians—as individuals.Footnote ¹³ The Supreme Court case that clarified that power—Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock—was decided only in 1903, and is part of a series of decisions made during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, including Elk v. Wilkins (1884), which clarified that Indians could not claim U.S. citizenship on the basis of birthright, since they continued to owe allegiance to “foreign” tribal nations.Footnote ¹⁴

Many (if not most; if not all) of the members of the SAI understood that there remained possibilities in 1911 for legal and political claims that were tribal and collective, not based on the citizenship of the individual. Only a few years earlier, Indians had lost their bid to make Oklahoma a semi-sovereign Indian state of Sequoyah. In New York, Iroquois people insisted on national sovereignty and would, in only a few years, show up at the League of Nations. In South Dakota, Sioux people continued petitioning to sue the U.S. government in a nation-to-nation claim. By 1934, Congress would set a course for limited tribal self-governance in the form of the Indian Reorganization Act. Why, then, did so many of SAI members speak so eloquently about working their way into the American nation, about embracing American citizenship, and lobbying for the rights it might confer?

The answer is overdetermined, of course. In part, as Lucy Maddox has demonstrated quite nicely, SAI leaders saw citizenship as one element in a universalist practice that allowed them to make arguments focused on the equality and capability of individuals—and then to link individuals (not with the tribe but) with “the race,” which was both a pan-Indian identity and an ethnic signifier.Footnote ¹⁵ Indians were segregated and compartmentalized across a range of locations: temporally, they were firmly locked in the past, and getting more isolated there with the professionalizing developments in anthropology; spatially, they were invariably thought to be isolated on reservations; ideologically, they were believed to be vanishing, with the end right around the corner. Citizenship, on the other hand, was a tangible signifier of universalist claims, one that played persuasively upon notions of assimilation, incorporation, and patriotism attractive to white Americans.

Citizenship made good rhetorical sense. But I also think it is worth—as it is in every case in American Indian history—returning to the question of land and land loss. I have argued elsewhere that a view of American history through the lens of Indian land loss suggests at least three distinct modes of American colonial practice.Footnote ¹⁶ When the scale was continental, Europeans (and later Americans) asked Indians to negotiate treaties of land cession. The political mode was nation to nation, and indeed, the very idea of Indian polities as sovereign nations (in the European sense) originates in these treaty relations. The United States made that clear through the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790, which insisted that states and private entities could not negotiate treaties: those were legal and political acts that took place between nations.

A second mode unfolded on a regional scale, and it took its shape from the Northwest Ordinance, the Land Ordinance of 1785, the Trade and Intercourse Acts, the 1796 Trading House Act, and other legislation that was both imperial—in its expansionist political structures—and colonial—in its willingness to structure settlement across the continent. To make territories into states, Indian landholding had to be addressed at the scale of the territory, which meant clearing land of Indian people and either removing them to “Indian Country” or compressing and confining them to small reserves. Treaties (and later agreements) to cede land and/or remove Indians often followed military conflict or were spurred by military threat. The result was the form of landholding known as the reservation: a space of containment, surveillance, and discipline—but also, as Fred Hoxie pointed out long ago, homelands old and new, lands that continued to be held by the tribal-national collective.Footnote ¹⁷

The third mode is most visible in the form of the Dawes (or General Allotment) Act of 1887, which reduced the scale even further. From a continental scale focused on national boundaries … to a regional scale characterized by displacement and containment, Americans now forced Indians to give up land on a local scale. Reservations were surveyed, chopped up into 160-acre parcels, and allotted to individual Indians. Following widespread military conquest, forced land cessions, and reservation containment, Americans believed that tribal pacification also meant individual pacification—that reservation Indians posed no danger. And so this third strategy disaggregated the reservations and desegregated them, interspersing white landholders among dispersed Indians. As Indian landholders died intestate, their holdings were divided among heirs, creating inheritance parcels of land so fragmented that they lost whatever economic viability they might have had. The Federal Indian Office stepped in at that point, reuniting fractionated lands into economic units that could then be leased to whites. Indian land loss through this individual mode was of epic proportions, assisted by corrupt Indian agents and Indian Office “competency commissions,” which made racialized designations of Indian competency—any one with any “white” blood was likely to be proclaimed “competent.” And competent Indians could sell their land.Footnote ¹⁸

In 1871, Congress ended the practice of treaty making with Indian people (though they continued to negotiate “agreements”). But the nation-to-nation relationship had been thoroughly understood (and embraced) by most Indian groups, and it left behind a powerful legal residue: one could draw upon Article Six of the U.S. Constitution (concerning the superiority of international treaties) to make a claim to collective rights—not simply to reserved land but also to hunting and fishing rights or to education or to annuities and other kinds of resources. Indian people have based a century of political activism on this principle. In the moment of allotment, however—when individual landholding was being threatened in ways that involved all levels of American government—Indians also looked for a second kind of legal base, a way to make similar kinds of claims to rights at the level of the individual rather than the collective.

Citizenship, for many of the members of the SAI (and many of the 4,000 Indian people receiving invitations) seemed to hold out the possibility that it might serve as that kind of legal and political tool. Today, their wish for citizenship often looks like evidence of assimilation, particularly when we see the middle-class demeanor of the SAI members and read some of their statements about racial and individual advancement. And there were staunch assimilationists—such as Carlos Montezuma—in the SAI. But one could argue as easily that citizenship, at this particular moment, was not an enterprise designed to bring them into the structures of the nation-state. Rather, it was a tool to strengthen their claim against the nation and its agents, to preserve individual land in order to remain collectively outside the strictures of American society. Later, the desire for citizenship would take on different connotations—less oppositional, more assimilatory—but those meanings are perhaps not so easily mapped to the SAI gathering in 1911.

In that sense, the SAI's musings on citizenship encapsulated the contradictions of the history of conquest and colonization, for they sought to create a structure that evoked the collective legal rights of the tribal nation in the context of a dividing practice that meant to individualize Indians in ways that left them with almost no legal rights. The 1924 Citizenship Act proclaims birthright citizenship, but also notes “that the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.”Footnote ¹⁹

Indian Country during the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras was a place of struggles nested within struggles. Faced with individualizing practices of domination and land taking, Indian people contemplated citizenship as one strategy, not for joining the nation-state, but for combating it. Insisting on the continuing legitimacy of negotiated treaties, Indian tribes struggled to maintain collective political rights. And in groups such as the SAI emergent pan-tribal (or super-tribal) collectives engaged in an intricate cultural politics, representing Indians as people holding vital cultural knowledge—“the gifts of the race”—(particularly evocative in a moment of primitivist imperial nostalgia), but who were also modern, cosmopolitan, and capable. In building what was, in essence, the first Indian “think-tank,” they sought to create a location for hashing out positions and strategies that recognized both individual and “racial” progress as intertwined.

The leaders and attendees at the SAI meeting can be seen in a number of Progressive contexts: political and cultural advocacy, social reform, and governmental reform. These things give them a certain species-form of familiarity. But the SAI also maintained a distinct character, related specifically to the issues and debates springing out of Indian Country. Arthur Parker laid the difference out quite clearly in a Quarterly Journal article in 1916:

With these words, Parker named three master narratives: immigration, slavery, and conquest. He insisted on distinctions among them, and he and his fellows then worked to make legible the consequences of conquest, long before Patty Limerick named it as such in relation to the Turnerian story. Nonetheless, if one is ranking the relative strength of these master narratives, “conquest” is surely among the weakest—a reflection of the power of other narratives in centering other issues, the incredibly thorough ideological naturalization of Indian disappearance and American settlement, the physical separations of the reservation regime, and the demographic realities of Indian country, all of which leave us knowing W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington well, but leaving behind a less-visible imprint of Arthur C. Parker, Laura Cornelius, Carlos Montezuma, and Zitkala Sa—and an even fainter trace of the 4,000 Indians they hoped would join them as colleagues in the SAI.