A critical historiography of liberalism shows its contingent availability to specific political projects. Bhikhu Parekh has demonstrated, for example, how the work of John Locke and John Stuart Mill was available to colonizing authority. Locke judged American Indians according to the extent to which their laws and institutions realized the capacity for reason that was humanity's common heritage. In their application of reason to the use of the natural resources that God had endowed and to the designs of their laws and government, Indians were far less accomplished than the more advanced Europeans who were dispossessing, displacing and improving them. “In Locke's view, English colonization not only did [Indians] no harm, [it] also respected their natural rights and conferred on them great economic, moral, cultural, scientific and political benefits.”Footnote 1 Locke was consistently egalitarian, Parekh argues, but his truncated sense of the plurality of human flourishing meant that his “principle of equality accepted [Indians] and other ‘savage’ people as equal objects of concern but not as self-defining subjects entitled to equal and full self-determination.”Footnote 2 Turning to Mill, Parekh argued that while he saw all of humanity as having the right to liberty, he classified non-Europeans as lacking the capacity to make good use of it. Colonial authority—even when forcefully applied—could be justified to the extent that it developed that capacity. Parekh's critique, while crediting both Locke and Mill with a commitment to a common human capacity for reason and liberty, faults their liberalism for identifying the realization of those capacities too closely with the forms of life that Europeans had evolved; thus non-European humanity would have to be tutored by liberal colonists.
The idea that all subject peoples—as humans endowed with reason—could and should be instructed in the practice of a liberal way of life can be given a name: liberal universalism. In her paper “Mill and the Imperial Predicament,” Karuna Mantena has argued that the difficulties of colonial rule severely tested liberal universalism, tempting liberal improvers of humankind to revise their assumptions about the susceptibility of those whom they were trying to “improve.” As the difficulties of colonial tutelage accumulated, those of fading liberal optimism looked to racially determinist theories of native incapacity that had become scientifically respectable since the inception of racial typologies of humanity in the mid-eighteenth century. The consequent prescription was that colonial despotism must continue. Mantena's examples—Mill and James Fitzjames Stephen—exhibit the “instabilities inherent” in the liberal account of “legitimate empire.”Footnote 3
I want to draw attention to two problematic features of this critical historiography of liberalism. First, the strategy of Parekh and Mantena—typical of postcolonial scholars of liberal imperialism, and undoubtedly illuminating—is to focus on the conceptual and practical dilemmas manifest in the texts and careers of exemplary Western intellectuals; they offer a postcolonial rereading of a canon. Second, it is possible, when focused on such figures, to produce a narrative of decline. Mantena glosses her account of Mill and Stephen as the “collapse of liberal imperialism” and “the decline of liberal ideologies of imperial rule.”Footnote 4 The words “collapse” and “decline” seem to me to overstate her thesis, which is better glossed as describing an “oscillation” within liberalism. Indeed, the universalist elements of liberal imperialism seem to have survived until the era of decolonization, after the Second World War, to give ennobling narrative to the end of empire.
There were ways of continuing to believe in a universal human capacity for improvement, and there were other agents suited to sustaining this belief. Certain colonized intellectuals developed forms of liberal universalism that enabled critical commentary on prolonged tutelage. As Bayly has shown, since the year 1800 Indian intellectuals have fashioned “historicisms” that project into the Indian past demonstrations of the intrinsic potential of Indians to seize the opportunities arising from modernity and from their contact with British civilization.Footnote 5 Similarly, certain North American and Antipodean indigenous intellectuals cast the colonial conjuncture into narratives that historicized both colonized and colonizer: the colonized have pasts that show their potential, and the colonizers have not yet corrected civilizational weaknesses that compromise their conduct of the civilizing project. What such native “counterhistoricisms” imply is a standpoint of observation and historical assessment that is external to any particular culture, from which one can test and measure the progress and flaws of any people claiming to be “civilized.”
To illustrate the anticolonial resourcefulness of the liberalisms of the colonized I will quote from the writings of five indigenous intellectuals: Peter Jones (1802–53), Charles Eastman (1858–1939), Zitkala-Sa (1876–1938), Apirana Ngata (1874–1950) and William Cooper (1861–1941). While each made use of racial terminology to give accounts of his/her people's specificity, each did so within an underlying framework of universality that was rooted in two powerful strands within European thought: the concept of universal/philosophical history that all humans could and would pass through a stage of agriculture, and the Christian idea that all humans were sinful but redeemable souls before God. What makes their work part of the global history of liberalism is that they sustained an idea that was fundamental to liberalism as an imperial, civilizing project of government: the presumption or hope that all humans have the capacity for improvement.
CHRISTIANITY, LIBERALISM AND RACISM
Christianity has affinity with liberal universalism to the extent that it warrants faith that all humans are capable of improvement, regardless of their “race.” Coleman's study of Presbyterian missionaries working among US Indians in the nineteenth century is an example.Footnote 6 These Presbyterians were sure that Indians, in their heritage and in their colonized condition, were inferior, but as no human was beyond the reach of Scripture, they “saw the failings of their charges as the product of circumstances, not race,” and their understanding of Indian capacity remained resolutely “equalitarian.”Footnote 7 To dismiss the Indian capacity to advance under Christ's teaching was to set limits to the power of God; to cast some branches of humanity as beyond the reach of God's grace was a deeply un-Christian thought. As well, “the missionaries simply discounted biology” when biological paradigms of human diversity were acquiring authority.Footnote 8
Andrew Porter concedes that the “exclusivity” of racial thought “created serious problems” for missionaries as it was “at odds with Christianity's egalitarianism.”Footnote 9 However, while racial explanations of such confronting events as the Indian “Mutiny,” the Jamaica rebellion and China's Boxer Uprising held some appeal for missionaries in the second half of the nineteenth century, “missionary outlooks continued to rest on the conviction of universality,” on biblical authority. Non-Europeans’ sin was to be explained by reference to their circumstances rather than to their inherited nature.Footnote 10 In the South Pacific, writes Jane Samson, missionaries were anguished in coming to terms with the different forms of humanity. They “experienced a genuine internal struggle between their abhorrence of island cultural practices and their need to retain faith in the universal message of Christianity.” Missionaries “close to despair had to force themselves to remember that divine grace made no exceptions and had no favourites.”Footnote 11
Christianity's resistance to racial explanation may be sourced not only to steadfast biblical literalism but also—paradoxically—to Christian thought's contact with the Enlightenment. Coleman writes that while Presbyterian missionaries’ “intellectual rigidity” rendered them sceptical of racial pessimism, their Scripture-based conviction that humanity is universally sinful was buttressed by “a characteristically eighteenth-century Enlightenment faith in the unity of mankind, the sameness of human nature, and environmental explanations for human diversity.”Footnote 12 Brian Stanley argues that while Christianity up to the early eighteenth century had assumed a distinction between the rational European and the irrational savage, “what was new about eighteenth-century thought was its increasing tendency to assert the intrinsic unity and equality of all humanity and to explain the manifest differences between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ peoples in terms of the impact of the environment.”Footnote 13 He continues that “on the central question of how the ‘heathen’ were to be civilized,” nineteenth-century missionaries were shaped by the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment concern to create “the conditions for individual and collective virtue through an educational process dedicated to the imparting of rational knowledge, especially knowledge of the history of human social development.”Footnote 14
Among the indigenous writers examined in this paper—all products of Protestant Christianity—we do find concessions of native inferiority, but no concession that this condition was inherent or unredeemable. Indigenous liberal universalism historicized inferiority as a remediable, contingent phenomenon. Confidence in the native future was sustained, in each case, by the writer's own life experience: if I am the product of my own seized opportunities for self-improvement, do I not exemplify the possible trajectory of my race? The four men and one woman whose writings I describe below found an answer to the racial pessimism into which many liberals were tempted to lapse. Because they could offer (indeed embody) a confident narrative of the propagation of the capacities befitting the liberal subject, they were agents of the survival of liberal universalism.
PETER JONES, 1802–53: GAINING MASTERY OVER FATE
Peter Jones (aka Kahkewaquonaby) was born of a Mississauga mother and an English father in 1802. He was raised by his mother's family, according to the traditions of her people; then he attended school. In 1823, he converted to (Methodist) Christianity. His account of his conversion, in speeches to audiences in Leeds in 1831, associated Indians’ turning to God with their embrace of agriculture: “Since my countrymen have found the Saviour in their hearts, they are beginning to plant potatoes, sow corn.”Footnote 15 For Jones, if the bounty of nature were a manifestation of God, then to shift from hunting to ploughing—rendering the earth more productive—was to align more closely with God's plan. Civilization was as much an economic as a moral and spiritual commitment. Thus in his invitation to further mission endeavour among his people, he evoked not only Indians’ need for redemption but also the land's fecund promise to the farming Christian.Footnote 16 To give in to fatalist pessimism about Indians was wrongly to suppose that “the Supreme Disposer” had “decreed that the doom of the red man is to fall and gradually disappear, like the mighty wilderness, before the axe of the European settler.”Footnote 17 The Indian destiny was rather to join the European settler in realizing the land's goodness.
Devoting himself to missionary work among his people, at a time of rapid Indian depopulation and loss of land to immigrant settlers, Jones became a leader and spokesperson of the Indian community that farmed on the banks of the Credit River, Upper Canada. At the time of his commitment to growing crops and saving souls, the Indians of Upper Canada were witness to Britain's first project of mass settler colonization since the rebellion of the Thirteen Colonies. These conditions presented three challenges to Indians’ previous mode of adjustment to colonial authority. First, from the 1790s, Indian Territory—a borderland in which both British and US authority had been limited—had begun to fall under effective colonial rule either as Upper Canada (British) or as upstate New York and the Northwest Territory (USA). Second, the fur-trading economy (with low European population densities and a relatively autonomous Indian hunting mode of production) was being replaced by an agricultural economy (with small towns, immigrant family farms and a higher European density). Third, British authorities were becoming both more conscious of the cost of gift-based Indian policy and more ambitious to uplift Indians from dependency. In combination, these changes threw down a challenge to Indians coming into adulthood in the 1820s and 1830s: whereas their ancestors had adapted to colonization as hunters and as warrior allies with claims to British gifts, Indians were now finding it less possible to survive as hunters and were discovering themselves to be less valued as warriors. Peace between the USA and Britain and the settlement of farms on former hunting grounds were changing the options of Indian manhood.
Jones's Christian agrarianism was a project to make Indians anew. For those promoting civilizing guardianship as the duty and rationale of colonization, the Credit River community proved that Indians could convert both to Christianity and to agriculture. Jones visited Britain in the 1830s to promote his peoples’ successful adaptation and to lobby the Colonial Office to reject the pessimism of those—such as Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada (1836–7) Sir Francis Bond Head—who promoted “removal” as Native protection.
In his posthumous History of the Ojebway Indians: With Especial Reference to Their Conversion to Christianity (1861)—a compilation, by his admirers, of Jones's writings—Jones assays the strengths and weaknesses of Indian heritage. On the positive side, the customary economy and polity had stably associated people with place:
Each tribe or body of Indians has its own range of country, and sometimes each family has its own hunting grounds, marked out by certain natural divisions, such as rivers, lakes, mountains or ridges; and all the game within these bounds is considered their property as much as the cattle and fowl owned by a farmer on his own land. It is at the peril of an intruder to trespass on the hunting grounds of another.Footnote 18
Warfare among Indians, while fierce, manifested admirable qualities: leadership, courage. Jones also credited Indians with knowledge of their country, not merely possession of it: he admiringly describes Indians’ plant-based medicines.Footnote 19 He evokes precolonial procedures of chiefly authority and decision-making councils; he recalls the effectiveness of chiefs in wars with colonizing powers.Footnote 20 He describes Indians’ rituals of diplomacy and deliberation, their languages, their amusements and their naming customs, giving his own name Kahkewaquonaby as an example.
In Jones's view, while there was much Indian heritage to be proud of, the Indians’ lost world had also been blighted by fears and vulnerabilities. Memories of precolonial times must be qualified by conceding that “the pagan ideas of bliss are almost entirely sensual, and relate to the unrestrained indulgence of the animal appetites.”Footnote 21 Indians’ susceptibility to the worst influences of the colonists—most importantly “firewater”—had demonstrated their psychological and moral vulnerability. He quotes an elder who held Indians partly responsible for their current state: “The Great Spirit has hidden his face from his red children, on account of their drunkenness and their many crooked ways.”Footnote 22 Indians’ fatal flaw had been, and in many places remained, a culture of fear and unhappiness: “the Indian in his natural state is not happy.”Footnote 23 “From experience of my early life, I can truly say, that their imaginary bliss is so mixed up with everything that is abominable and cruel, that it would be vain to look for real happiness among savage tribes.”Footnote 24 So much of their religion had been fear—“everything that strikes the dark untutored mind of the Indian with awe and astonishment becomes to him an object of dread and adoration.”Footnote 25 He devotes a chapter to describing and lamenting the lingering influence of witchcraft, and he remarks, “They [Indians] have neither Heaven to attain nor Hell to escape”—a handicap to their motivation to improve themselves.Footnote 26 Jones thus presents Indians as vulnerable to the worst that the colonists offered. He lists five evils introduced by whites: drunkenness; “the habit of taking the name of God in vain”; “introduction of contagious diseases”; “dishonesty, lying and deception”; “the loss of their country and game”:Footnote 27
If it be difficult for the Christian to follow the good he knows, what must be the utter helplessness of the pagan Indian, who is destitute of all Christian privileges? This much I admit,—that the state of the red man, previous to the introduction of European vices, and the fire-waters, is superior to what it is now, when the white man's religion has not changed his heart. But the Indian, unhappily, is more prone to follow the evil than the good practices of the white man. This proves he is naturally depraved; and if Christianity has not effected all that is desirable in the suppression of vice, it is the Indian's sin, and not the whiter man's vice, that ought to be blamed.Footnote 28
Jones's presentation of Indians’ past, present and future is thus focused on the uncompleted evangelical task of improving the Indian.
Although Jones sees “civilization” as largely a Christian achievement, his book offers glimpses of a more secular, materialist understanding: “civilization” included science, political structures. “A civilised state, even without religion, is far preferable to paganism.”Footnote 29
He hails Edward Jenner's defeat of smallpox.Footnote 30 When explaining the decline in Indians’ mortality, he points to the demographic benefits of civilization.Footnote 31 Peace—including peace of mind—and good government are features of the civilized condition. Jones values Pax Britannica insofar as it enabled a continuing settlement of grievances between the Mississauga and their neighbours and former bitter enemies, the Six Nations. Orderly government, peace and authority over nature were themes of Jones's account of civilisation.
Jones did not renounce Indian government but he sought its reform and codification (particularly in the parental government of children), and its nesting within overarching colonial authority, as a relationship of father to children. Not disputing the transfer of power to the British government, his text includes his own and others’ many protestations of loyalty to the Crown:
The British Government have taken [Indians on the south shore of Lake Superior] under their paternal care; they have been taught to look up with reverence to their great Father, the Governor and the Indian agents. As a consequence the chiefs have yielded their authority into the hands of more wise and powerful guardians.Footnote 32
Jones's editors included petitions and letters presented in 1840 by the General Council of the Credit River Indian community. The text twice poses the question, are Indians now the treaty partners or the colonial subjects of the British?Footnote 33 The book's reproduction of these addresses to the superintendent of Indian affairs, to the Governor General and to the governor of Upper Canada convey some Mississauga attempts to persuade British authorities: to secure their rights to their reserved lands; to maintain Toronto as the capital of the nascent Province of Canada, where the Great Father would remain accessible to the Mississsauga; to give their children training in the manual arts; to allow individuals to shift their land entitlements from one tribe to another; and to include fishing among activities banned on the Sabbath.Footnote 34 The petitioners also wanted to know their rights to hunt. Thus these documents illustrate a moment of renegotiation, by Jones and his colleagues, of the political terms of certain Indians’ coexistence with their colonial masters. Before mass migration, the “silver chain” of British–Indian friendship had made Indians allies, not subjects, of the Crown.Footnote 35 Then settlement on a massive scale made Indians the Crown's children. However, the Crown's protective actions had been deficient, provoking Jones's and his colleagues’ recitation of rights desired and withheld.Footnote 36 The acts of self-representation reproduced in Jones's History thus align a residual Indian capacity for self-government with the welcomed, overarching power and responsibility of the British Crown. The reprinted petitions are both acts of submission and declarations of a degree of autonomous collective presence within the king's realm.Footnote 37 They are liberal in the sense that they evoke the capacities of Indian subjects who are augmenting—as Christian farmers—their arts of self-government.
THE CHALLENGE OF “SOCIAL DARWINISM”
In the one hundred years after Jones's death, indigenous intellectuals who projected a future for their people had to contend with an influential perspective on human diversity and human history in which native peoples had no future. This perspective is sometimes called social Darwinism, though we should not attribute coherence to thoughts gathered under that label.Footnote 38 The salient features of “social Darwinism” were that within human history there was a natural tendency for peoples, nations or races to compete with one another for political and material ascendancy, and that the weaknesses of certain peoples, nations or races doomed them to fail when they came into contention with stronger peoples, nations or races. One of the most popular expositions of the idea that some branches of humanity were destined to fail was Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution (1894), “an immediate and enormous success around the world.” Translated into ten languages, including Chinese and Arabic, it “tapped into the apocalyptic sense of change and crisis that marked end-of-the-century culture.”Footnote 39
For Aborigines, Maori and Native North Americans, Kidd's prognosis was bleak: “Whether wars of extermination have been waged against them, or whether they have been well treated and admitted to citizenship, they have always tended to disappear before the more vigorous incoming race.”Footnote 40 Further, “despite the great consideration shown for the rights of the lower races, there can be no question as to the absolute ascendancy in the world today of the Western peoples and of Western civilisation.”Footnote 41 In Kidd's view, such ascendancy should not be explained as the effect of racial superiority but as proof of the relative “social efficiency” of certain races. To be socially efficient was abundantly to possess “strength and energy of character, humanity, probity and integrity, and simple-minded devotion to conceptions of duty.”Footnote 42 Anglo-Saxon peoples blessed with these qualities were now in possession of North America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, having exterminated the inferior peoples of those lands either by violence or by “mere contact.”Footnote 43
It was possible for an indigenous intellectual to write from within Kidd's perspective—that is, to see human history as contention between the more and the less socially efficient—without conceding that one's own people were doomed to be uncompetitive. When the Society of American Indians (SAI) formed in 1911, it stated as the first of its aims, “To promote and cooperate with all efforts looking to the advancement of the Indian in enlightenment which leave him free, as a man, to develop according to the natural laws of social evolution.”Footnote 44
CHARLES EASTMAN 1858–1939: THE INDIAN RENEWED
The writer quoting the SAI's aims was the Sioux Charles Eastman. Eastman's father had converted to Christianity after being captured during the wars on the Plains in the early 1860s. After being reunited with his son, he urged Charles to embrace Christianity and education. Eastman followed his father's word to the extent of attending Knox School, graduating in medicine, working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) as a reservation doctor, and serving as an agent of the Young Men's Christian Association.Footnote 45 He flourished also as an author, drawing on his own bicultural experience to present Indian civilization in positive terms to non-Indian American readers. He was pleased for his Indian names to be known: Hakadah and Ohiyesa. Eastman argued that his “race” (a term he used repeatedly) was equal to the challenge of social evolution and that it should be “allowed to retain its own religion and racial codes as far as is compatible with the public good, and should enter the body politic of its own free will, and not under compulsion.”Footnote 46 That Eastman's race had not yet been given that opportunity was a defect of the USA's Indian administration, Eastman insisted; the Indians’ problems did not reflect their capacity.
Indian policy since the beginning of the republic had included the provision of reserves, and the purpose of the Dawes Allotment Act 1887 was to change the social, economic, political and cultural meaning of land to the reserves’ Indian residents. The Act authorized the government to assign allotments of 160 acres to heads of families and lesser amounts to younger persons and orphans. Reserves were to be surveyed and rolls of tribal members prepared. Indians listed on the tribal rolls were to select their own lands, but if they failed to do so, the Indian agent would make the selection for them. Then the government would hold title to the land in trust for twenty-five years; during that time allottees were supposed to acquire the competence to deal in their land as personal property; that is, as real estate. Any surplus reservation land could be sold. In 1906 further legislation allowed for allotment without the twenty-five-year waiting period: an allottee would be entitled to sell his/her land as soon as he/she gained title. Becoming an allottee and giving up tribal ways were intended to qualify each Indian for citizenship. It was assumed that most allottees would farm their land.
Frederick Hoxie argues that early optimism about the assimilation of Indians and about the dissolution of the reservation–Bureau complex could not be sustained. Assimilation at the beginning of the twentieth century was becoming a more pessimistic and less ambitious programme, in which Indians were thought to continue to need tutelage and protection or regulation. Thus both the reservation and the Bureau persisted as instruments for governing Indians. The notion of state as guardian remained plausible to those who wished the Indian well, including to Indian intellectuals such as Eastman who worked for the Bureau. Other Indians in the SAI were more critical of what they saw as the Bureau's persistent paternalism. That Indians were distinct from other Americans in heritage and status also continued to be plausible, and the persistence of the notion of Indian difference undermined or qualified the policy goal of formal equality of Indians as citizens. Indians were thought to be vulnerable in their land dealings and in their consumption of liquor.Footnote 47
In The Indian Today (1915) Eastman was sympathetic to the aims of assimilation policy but critical of its execution. “The typical red man of today is a rancher on a large or small scale,” he was pleased to note.Footnote 48 However, he thought that this development was in several ways retarded: by the poor quality of land (relative to whites’ holdings), by the continued rationing of Indians (their residual treaty right), by the inadequacy of instruction in agriculture, by the government's corrupt management of reservation forests. Nonetheless, Eastman saw progress in “the average present-day Indian”—“a man who earns his own living, speaks the language of the country, wears its dress and obeys its laws.”Footnote 49 He quoted BIA data to show that more than half the nation's 330,000 Indians had been allotted and that the allottees were increasing by five thousand per year. However, the United States did not offer good training in citizenship, Eastman argued, referring to “the pauperizing and demoralizing agency system.”Footnote 50 BIA officials included many whom Eastman described as “the political boss and the ‘little czar’.”Footnote 51 “The prevailing currents of American life” were encouraging Indians of initiative to become “diplomats of a lower type, quick and smart, but not always sound.”Footnote 52 It was tempting for Indians to look upon “the new civilization as a great, big, grab-bag.”Footnote 53 In the administered life of the Indians, the moral frailty of American civilization revealed itself: the USA, by its military strength, had acquired civilizing responsibilities before it had civilized itself. This was the historical conjuncture to which he addressed his book. “You are suffering from a civic disease, and we are affected by it. When you are cured, and not until then, we may hope to be thoroughly well men.”Footnote 54 He mentioned favourably a proposal to place the BIA under the supervision of “a commission of non-partisan men, half of whom could be Indians.”Footnote 55
Eastman's The Indian Today exemplifies the persistence among indigenous intellectuals of confidently universalist notions of guardianship and improvement. Eastman's universalism is particularly interesting because his understanding of human diversity was clearly racial. He referred to “blood” and to fractions of descent as determinants of Indians’ character.Footnote 56 When he used the term “race,” it was not merely a synonym of “people”: his commitment to biological inherence is clear. The Indian's heritage included not only virtues such as loyalty, honour and service that struggled to be enacted in the new civilization.Footnote 57 It was also physical—a strong, healthy, athletic body whose prowess is the theme of several admiring passages in The Indian Today.Footnote 58 Eastman's “counterhistoricism” included narrating the corruption of that fine body and ethos by the government's inept management of Indians’ transition from hunter to reserve-dweller. “In their state of deep depression, disease had its golden opportunity.”Footnote 59 Indian depopulation had been a contingent incident of a corrigible state of affairs, he argued, but now the census showed population recovery.Footnote 60 Eastman considered his people's future partly in eugenic terms. Although the reserve system had produced an Indian who had been “against racial type,” the Indian race was fundamentally sound, and it was benefiting from intermarriage with whites.Footnote 61 Eastman's sense of Indians’ racial continuity transcends physical criteria. The Indian is facing “the extinction of his race as a separate and peculiar people; but as a type, an ideal, he lives and will live!”Footnote 62
These eugenic thoughts were situated within a framework of racial equality. Eastman's Christianity sustained a conviction that while humanity consisted of different races, no race had a firmer purchase on “civilization” than another. In From the Deep Woods to Civilization, Eastman recalled his first contact with “the greatness of Christian civilization, the ideal civilization.”Footnote 63 In both The Indian Today and From the Deep Woods to Civilization he invoked Christianity—in essential continuity, he said, with Indian ideals—as the standpoint for evaluating what Americans called their civilization: he found it excessively materialistic and rewarding of self-interest. As he wrote in 1915, “we want the best in two races and civilizations in exchange for what we have lost”.Footnote 64 This sentence succinctly relativizes all races and civilizations from the standpoint of a position of judgement that is external to them all. While his Christian convictions fortified Eastman's confidence that such an external position really existed, an anecdote from his appearance at the First Universal Races Congress (London 1911) illustrates his willingness not to label that ethical vantage point as necessarily Christian. He recalls himself saying, “We who are met here are not all of that religion, and I would suggest that we substitute a term to which we can all subscribe, since we meet here not in the name, but in the spirit, of Christianity, of universal brotherhood.”Footnote 65 He reported with satisfaction the pleasure that this argument gave to the Congress non-Christian delegates.
The argument of this essay so far is that while certain European liberals surrendered their universalism to what seemed a realistic and scientific appreciation of the stubborn plurality of humanity and of the unanticipated difficulty of advancing some peoples, it was possible for indigenous intellectuals to sustain universalisms that worked for them in two ways: by upholding their innate capacity for acculturation (as attested in their own life courses), and by giving grounds for indigenous evaluation of their self-appointed tutors in civilization. While erstwhile European liberal universalists could look to racial science and to anthropology for intellectual accounts of native failure to “improve,” indigenous intellectuals could draw on Christianity as the framework of a robust universality. Should belief wane in the literal truth of such New Testament propositions as “God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth’ (Acts 17:26), indigenous intellectuals could point to empirical demonstrations of their own people's survival capacities: native population recovery. Vaccination and agriculture gave Jones hope that Indians could become less vulnerable to Nature; Easton cited recent US Census data.Footnote 66 Both could point to their peoples’ acculturation to “civilization.” The second decade of the twentieth century presented another testing and proving ground for indigenous acculturation: war service.
WARRIORS FOR EMPIRE AND DEMOCRACY: APIRANA NGATA AND ZITKALA-SA
Indigenous peoples in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA generally supported their nation state's mobilization in the First World War with land, money and warrior labour. In this section I will compare what Apirana Ngata (Maori) and Zitkala-Sa (aka Gertrude Bonnin, Sioux) each said about their people's commitment to the New Zealand and US war efforts.
By 1914, Maori and Native Americans were subject in different ways to state and church policies of assimilation. In New Zealand, though subject to distinct legislation about their lands and their municipal government, Maori were citizens: males had been enfranchised in 1867, females in 1893; four seats in the House of Representatives were elected by Maori. Although Maori landownership had been recognized by treaty in 1840, their estate had diminished rapidly in the nineteenth century through pressure to sell or lease acreage for Pakeha use, and some land had been punitively confiscated after the “New Zealand Wars” of the 1860s. To arrest such alienation and avoid extinction as a people, Maori modernizers sought new uses of the remnant estate. Espousing a programme of Maori self-reform, Apirana Ngata, a Maori Member elected to the House of Representatives in 1905, began to promote commercial agriculture to Maori and to advocate public policy that would ease their transition from warriors to settlers.
In the United States, Zitkala-Sa faced the situation that I have already described in contextualizing Eastman. That is, assimilation had been intensified and made more systematic by the Allotment Act of 1887. Indians were being inducted into citizenship through programmes of education and land-tenure reform managed by the BIA. In contrast with Maori, citizenship for Indians was conditional on their embracing prescribed changes in land tenure and in way of life. By 1914 their leaders—having formed the SAI in 1911—were increasingly critical of what they saw as the neglectful, corrupt intrusion of the BIA. In short, by the time of the First World War, the Maori were citizens beginning voluntary experiments in new forms of land title and land use, while the Indians of the USA—many not yet citizens—were caught up in a prolonged programme of supervised change in land tenure and land use.
In addition, the two nation states inserted themselves into the First World War in different ways and on different terms. Whereas New Zealand was a loyal dominion of Britain with troops and diplomacy deployed within an imperial war effort from 1914, a more ambivalent United States did not commit troops until April 1917, and President Woodrow Wilson's war aims espoused “democracy” and “self-determination” in terms that gave hope to peoples under European (including British) imperial rule. Both Britain and the United States presented themselves as fighting for liberal government against despotism, but whereas for Wilsonian liberals imperialism was among the Old World obstacles to the world march of democracy, for British liberal imperialists the empire would, in the long term, propagate liberal political institutions wherever the Union Jack flew.
In speeches to the New Zealand House of Representatives, Ngata presented Maori as warrior subjects of the British Empire. Thus he spoke from his lineage: his paternal great uncle and mentor Ropata Wahawaha had led Ngati Porou troops allied to the Crown in the 1860s Land Wars. “I have no doubt that as soon as the Maori understand that their services will be accepted . . . then the offers that will be made to the government will be sufficient, I think, to fill one troop-ship,” said Ngata on 1 September 1914.Footnote 67 The four Maori MPs formed the Maori Contingent Committee, promoting the deployment of a distinct Maori unit, and appealing to each tribe's pride in contributing volunteers. At first limiting the Maori Contingent to garrison duty, the British command eventually sent them to Gallipoli and the Western Front. At the war's end, Ngata celebrated a triumph for the Polynesian race. He thought it
romantic . . . that the scattered native populations of Polynesia who were under the mana [authority] of New Zealand—a race which little more than a century ago were savages or half-savages—should have realized their responsibility as citizens and responded to the call from the Mother-country of the British people of these Islands.
For their contribution, “something was due to the Polynesian people that a distinct record should be made of the organization of the contingent, their training, and the part they took in the fighting at Gallipoli and later on in France and Flanders.”Footnote 68
The war's toll raised the issue of conscription and in 1916 Parliament debated whether Maori should be exempt. Ngata's long-time political ally, Dr Maui Pomare (Western Maori), opposed Maori exemption, for conscription should “treat every man alike,” no matter what his creed, wealth or colour.Footnote 69 The Northern Maori member Mr Tau Henare supported exemption “because the Maori people is one of those small races on earth that will vanish altogether if most of the men go to the front and leave only a few behind.”Footnote 70 The following day, Ngata explained why he wanted Maori included in conscription: it was to ensure the continuing viability of the Maori Contingent and to oblige the tribes that had not yet demonstrated loyalty with a high volume of volunteers. That the Maori Contingent must remain an identifiable unit within the imperial deployment was so important to Ngata that it overrode fear for Maori population recovery: he declared Henare's argument of a “declining race” to be “sentimental.” He then added an argument which related fighting to social evolution:
That race [i.e. Maori] has declined largely because it gave up fighting . . . I have seen hapu after hapu and tribe after tribe declining in numbers because they could not fit themselves into a scheme of life where there was no fighting—fighting with their hands and bodies, not fighting with their minds. Your civilization requires fighting with brains; it requires special equipment for the battle of life. It takes more than half a century for some of these warrior tribes to accommodate themselves to these new conditions. They pine away, they die, largely because there is no fighting.Footnote 71
When Mr C. H. Poole interjected at this point that “there is an Irish element in them,” Ngata agreed. He went on to say that Maori enlistment had not at first been patriotic; they had enlisted because “the spirit of their fathers . . . called them to fight, and they went to fight. Patriotism and those other things came afterwards as excuses.” As a result of the Maori war effort. “Many misunderstandings that exist at present between the two races will disappear.”Footnote 72 Had they let the Pakeha do all the fighting for New Zealand, Maori would have lost their self-respect, and this same consideration now warranted their inclusion in conscription.Footnote 73
Thus Ngata interwove three representations of Maori: as loyal subjects of the British Empire; as a race in perilous transition from their warrior past to new, unfamiliar principles of social organization; and as fellow citizens of Pakeha, equally obliged to serve, and on the threshold of better mutual understanding. What is the relation of such evocations of Maori to the universalist confidence of liberalism whose fortunes I am considering in this essay? Here, we need to be clear about what was at stake when liberal universalism faltered in the second half of the nineteenth century: whether or not civilizing imperialists could continue to postulate non-European educability. When native peoples served effectively in the armed forces of settler colonial societies, they could be understood as demonstrating their loyalty to the nation and their aptitude for acculturation. It was the latter—their competence to be part of a more complex social organization—that made native war service a vindication of liberal universalism: with the right treatment, such as fair opportunity for war service, natives were capable of rapid improvement. Ngata presented soldiering as an opportunity for Maori development: to serve empire and nation would discharge, in a contemporary way, their inherent proclivity to be warriors, and it established a bond of shared sacrifice with Pakeha.
Ngata's speeches about Maori war service in the First World War did not articulate a political bargain.Footnote 74 While his project of Maori modernization required concessions from Pakeha authority—about land tenure and development finance in particular—he did not present war service as an item of exchange for Pakeha political concessions. Rather, Maori war service, as Ngata presented it, enacted a status already achieved and further proved the potential of Maori for racial self-development; he bargained for Maori nothing more than Pakeha respect.
* * *
In 1917 over one-third of the Indians in the USA were non-citizens; although such people (if male) were obliged to register for armed service, they could not be drafted. Nonetheless, Indians volunteered in substantial numbers. “Of the 11,803 Native Americans who registered for the draft prior to September 1918, the federal government inducted 6,509 into the service.” This amounted to 13 per cent of the estimated Native American adult male population.Footnote 75 More Indians enlisted and were inducted after September 1918, but the total number in war service is unknown. For Zitkala-Sa and her Indian associates, to the extent that Indians remained non-citizens and victims of a stifling programme of tutelage, there was a bargain to be argued: with such Indian war service, the USA could no longer withhold citizenship.Footnote 76
Born on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in 1876, Zitkala-Sa had persuaded her mother in 1884 to allow her to attend a Quaker Boarding School. Ambivalent about her experience there, she nonetheless accepted further education and for a few years taught at the avowedly assimilationist Carlisle School. Buoyed by recognition as a writer, speaker and musician, from 1900 her writing—both autobiography and political commentary—had presented her uneasy mediation of white American civilization and Indian heritage. While her public identity was unequivocally, theatrically Indian, she advocated not only more respectful treatment of Indians but also a more critical attitude by Indians towards their own heritage. For example, before a 1918 Congressional hearing, she contradicted many Indian activists by denouncing the use of the drug Peyote in neo-traditional Indian religious ceremonies.
Zitkala-Sa wrote for and at times edited the SAI's American Indian Magazine. Her Americanism, revealed in those pages, seems to have been influenced, at times, by the terms in which Woodrow Wilson projected his country's historic role. Her editorial in the July–September 1918 issue of American Indian Magazine declared that Indians were conscious of the blood that they were shedding as part of “a great united American brotherhood fighting in a common cause, the defense of world democracy.”Footnote 77 America, “the greatest of democracies,” was in this way shining its light on Europe, but “as America has declared democracy abroad, so must we consistently practice it at home . . . If [the Indian] is good enough to fight for American ideals he is good enough for American citizenship now.”Footnote 78 In the same issue, her article “Indian gifts to civilized man” celebrated the decision to integrate Indian volunteers and conscripts, rather than to segregate them in an Indian unit. She presented Indians as intensely patriotic, and she pointed out the high stakes: “when we realize that the only future hope of the Red Man is in his educated, physically strong men, we marvel at his heroic response.”Footnote 79 She thus presented Indian war service as creating an obligation to Indians of which the United States had to be reminded in the postwar world. “In the defense of democracy his utter self-sacrifice was unequalled by any other class of Americans. What now does democracy mean to him and his children?” she asked in her 1921 article “Americanize the first American.”Footnote 80
However, in two pieces written during the “Wilsonian moment,” Zitkala-Sa evoked Indian war service less as a provocation to reciprocity between Indians and government and more as Indian participation in a new internationalism.Footnote 81 At the Paris Peace Conference,
Little peoples are now to be granted the right of self determination! Small nations and remnants of nations are to sit beside their great allies at the Peace Table; and their just claims are to be duly incorporated in the terms of a righteous peace.Footnote 82
The “ten thousand Indian soldiers swaying to and fro on European battle-fields” were “mingling their precious blood with the blood of all other peoples of the earth, that democracy might live.”Footnote 83 Indians were defending not only the USA, she pointed out, but also “its democratic ideals. The Red Man of America loves democracy and hates mutilated treaties.”Footnote 84 In his “Four Points” speech on February 1918 Wilson presented the “democratic ideal” as “self-determination”—a phrase that SAI activists could understand to include what they were already demanding: the withdrawal of BIA administration and the granting of citizenship to Indians.Footnote 85 “Belgium is leading a historic procession of little peoples seeking freedom!” she wrote, and the American Indian grievance was among the “divers human petitions” that “daily ascend” to the “peace table” of the Paris Conference:
Actions of the wise leaders assembled in Paris may be guided ostensibly by temporary man-made laws and aims, dividing human interests into domestic and international affairs, but even so those leaders cannot forget the eternal fact that humanity is essentially one undivided closely intertwined fabric through which spiritual truth will shine with increasing brightness until it is fully understood and its requirements fulfilled. The universal cry for freedom from injustice is the voice of a multitude united by afflictions. To appease this human cry the application of democratic principles must be flexible enough to be universal.Footnote 86
Thus the American Indian Magazine aligned Indian war service not only with US diplomacy but also with the aspirations of “a multitude united by afflictions.” Indians’ promotion of their US citizenship was one of the many global resonances of the “Wilsonian moment.”
WILLIAM COOPER: BRITISH ABORIGINES?
In the 1930s letters, petitions, manifestos and newspaper interviews of the Australian Aboriginal William Cooper, we can see an indigenous intellectual finding terms to name the universal capacities and entitlements of humans, including his innovative and—at first sight—puzzling uses of “white” and “British.” Cooper was a Yorta Yorta man whose education in European ways came from Christian missionaries and from being a servant, as a boy, in the Melbourne household of the wealthy pastoralist whose livestock occupied his ancestral land. Cooper's career included the rural manual labouring trades that were common in his lifetime and at which many Aborigines were proficient. He was also a member of the Australian Workers Union and—like many active trade unionists—he read about the wider world. Cooper's political activism on indigenous rights accelerated after his retirement in 1931 when he moved to Melbourne. He organized a petition to the British king (1934–7) and he founded the Australian Aborigines’ League in 1936.
Transition to agriculture seemed to Cooper—as to Jones, Eastman and Ngata—to be a way for his people to advance and to survive. As long ago as the 1880s, he and other Yorta Yorta had asked for allotments for families to farm. By the 1930s he was highly critical of governments’ failures to support Aboriginal farmers with finance, infrastructure and training. Based on his own efforts at self-improvement, he believed that Aborigines would adapt and learn quickly, if given a chance. Civilization, he suggested, can be picked up in three generations.Footnote 87 He presented his views on Aborigines’ aptitude for advancement in terms of a three-part “stadial” schema distinguishing the “myall [wild] Aboriginals,” the “partly civilised and detribalised aboriginal” and the “civilised aboriginals.”Footnote 88 Each cohort in each region could claim its characteristic achievements and entitlements. The third stage—“civilised aboriginals”—was thus not merely an asserted entitlement (“we claim the right to advance to full European culture”), for such advancement was also inevitable: “the primitive culture [was] destined to ultimately perish.”Footnote 89
Like many Christians, Cooper drew from his religion the conviction that all races were equal in the sight of God.Footnote 90 However, there was also a human vantage point from which the claims of all peoples to be “civilized” could be evaluated. How “British” were Australians? For Cooper, “British” idealized—named—a standard of civility. As he stated in his petition to the king and elsewhere, the Crown had charged its colonial officials with high duties towards native people, but Australian governments had not yet lived up to these responsibilities.Footnote 91 Because Australian governments had been neglectful, “the system is pauperizing us and not helping us in any way.”Footnote 92 The failure of Aborigines to advance was largely due to the failure of Whites to accept the responsibility that the Crown had given them. Native peoples elsewhere, better treated, had flourished. He warmly cited Canadian efforts “to preserve the Eskimo race.”Footnote 93 A journalist quoted Cooper as remarking in 1937, “In Fiji, not very long ago, the people were cannibals. Now they have their own doctors and lawyers and professional men. Is it not shameful that Australia should be so backward in training her native people?”Footnote 94 His most frequent comparative case was the Maori: they had been enfranchised since 1867—why not Aborigines?Footnote 95 He was also aware that the New Zealand Cabinet included a minister for native affairs and that a Maori (Ngata) had held this position.Footnote 96 Maori were being compensated for their losses of land, he pointed out to Prime Minister Lyons, but not Aborigines.Footnote 97
That these comparative cases—Eskimos, Fijians and Maori—fell within the British Empire sustained Cooper's repeated invocation of the non-racial status of the British subject. Where the British standard of political conduct was upheld, native potential could be realized. For Cooper, the empire was a realm of universality, not in the sense that it embraced all of humanity but in the sense that it was not racially exclusive: every native people would have its chance, if British ideals were realized.Footnote 98
Within this universalist framework, Cooper did not deny the reality of “race.” He saw himself as a member of (indeed a spokesman for) his “race.”Footnote 99 The organization that he founded in 1936, the Australian Aborigines’ League, limited “full membership” to persons “with Aboriginal blood in them.”Footnote 100 He was proud of his colour, and he wanted whites to acknowledge that he and his people were not “inferior clay.”Footnote 101 He acknowledged that he was himself of mixed descent (“I have European blood in my veins”),Footnote 102 but his thinking about race in Australia tended to be dualist: there were Aborigines and there were whites, and “the coloured person” “feels more in common with the full blood than with the white.”Footnote 103 However, he emphatically opposed the racial determinism of Australian thinking about Aborigines, and he filled racial and national categories with historical and ethical content. Whites could make more effort to “think black.”Footnote 104
For Cooper, the important distinctions within the human race were cultural, not racial. But he was not a cultural relativist either: the differences that mattered to him were distinctions of advancement along a universal path of human improvement. “Culture” was the term he used to refer to a plane of recognizable and rewardable achievement in civilization; that is, he referred to “culture” as if it were something that one could lack and could acquire. He referred to “those of our race who are as yet uncultured.”Footnote 105 He imagined a time “when Aboriginal people are fully cultured.”Footnote 106 When they arose from their primitive condition, “they would scarcely be recognised as the same people.”Footnote 107 While the objects of the Australian Aborigines’ League included conserving “special features of Aboriginal culture,”Footnote 108 there is little in his writing to indicate what he thought was worth preserving, other than “certain corroboree dances, in the ways the Old World peoples have retained their folk dances.”Footnote 109 Thus when Cooper insisted that the fortunes of races were culturally determined, he was not making a plea for cultural pluralism; he was insisting that British Australians enable Aborigines to acquire the culture that he understood to be necessary to participate in civilization. Cooper's idealized “British” is a signifier for a standard by which all human conduct is to be judged. “British” was the best form of human civilization to which all Australians—Aborigines and whites—should aspire.
Cooper was addressing fellow Australians for whom “white Australia” and “British” signified racial or descent-based community and shared tradition, the “crimson thread of kinship” between white Australians and their mother country, to which Aborigines were not connected in the ethnically “imagined community” of Australia's federation.Footnote 110 Disturbing this sense of “British,” it was but a short step also to use “white” as a signifier of civilizational, rather than ethnic, characteristics. He did so by intervening in the discussion about the remote regions of the continent. White Australians then feared that they still too thinly populated their vast continent: how to occupy the regions closest to Asia? Combining eugenic and geographical thought, many Australians believed that people of British stock were poorly suited to colonizing those parts of Australia with extremes of climate: much of Australia was too hot and humid for “Nordic” people. Should Australia experiment with non-British immigration, to fill the difficult north? Cooper suggested that Aborigines were adapted to populating the north and centre of the continent.Footnote 111 “The dark race will prove an asset to Australia,” if Australia used Aborigines to fill the continent's northern spaces.Footnote 112 Those who worried that Australia might have to compromise the White Australia policy and resort to populating the north with southern European migrants were assured by Cooper that “for the purposes of this policy [i.e. using “civilized Aborigines” to populate the North] the Aboriginal is white.”Footnote 113
CONCLUSION: THE MOBILE SIGNIFIERS OF UNIVERSALITY
Mantena has argued persuasively that Mill's liberalism was unstable in a way characteristic of “the structure of imperial ideology”: the “universalist defense of empire” was easily tempted to infer from the resistance of the colonized to civilizing influence that some cultures could not join the universal march of human progress. So liberalism oscillated (and is fated to oscillate) between “universalist justifications and culturalist alibis.”Footnote 114 We can accept Mantena's instability thesis without assuming that it will manifest only in “oscillation.” While “oscillate” may describe the trajectory of particular liberal thinkers, other intellectuals remained steadfastly universalist because they found the available “cultural alibi” both personally repugnant and politically hopeless. While canonical British liberals such as John Stuart Mill could be persuaded by colonial experience, by racial science and by the nascent discipline of anthropology to see humanity as differentiated in capacity for improvement, some native intellectuals adhered to the view that the red, brown and black peoples of the earth could and would advance if offered respectful, competent and unselfish tuition by those who presented themselves as the bearers of “civilization.” So the instability that Mantena identifies may manifest not only as an oscillation in an intellectual career but also as a polarity among individuals who occupy different positions within the global field of liberalism: staunch indigenous universalists contesting metropolitan invokers of the “culturalist alibi.”
What intellectual inheritance enabled the figures studied in this essay to imagine history from a universalist standpoint? These native intellectuals drew conviction not only from their own life experience—self-improvement and recognition for it—but also from two universalist ideas that flourished in eighteenth-century Europe: the stadial explanation of human variety as manifesting the sequential development of all branches of humanity, and Christian faith that all humans were fallen souls that could be primed for the redeeming reception of God's word (whether in English or in their own tongue). When racial theories of human diversity began to permeate European thought, and even when racial thought seemed to gain credibility from advances in the biological understanding of speciation, the triumph of the idea of predestined racial hierarchy was not assured; notions of racial variety/hierarchy had to compete with these two deeply entrenched universalisms. That liberalism was contested between universalism and racial particularisms is one of the insights of postcolonial historiography; however, we should not presume that the contest was “won” by racial science. These New World intellectuals could not afford to believe that being a member of a certain race determined one's destiny. It is not that they denied the reality of racial difference or dismissed the possibility that racial traits were transmitted down the generations. Their concessions to racial notions of human variety were made within a persistent conviction that there are universal standards of human attainment and that every branch of humanity has the right, the capacity and the duty to oblige that standard. How to name the standpoint of the universal was problematic in a world where nations and empires tended to identify themselves as “civilization” itself. I have given instances of the inventiveness of Easton (at the 1911 Universal Races Congress) and Cooper (“British” and “white”). What was important about liberal universalism was that every branch of humanity, including those that colonized, must be measured against a civilized standard.
