Progressive Pan-Indigenous Political Theory

To situate Kellogg’s Our Democracy as a work of political thought, it is first imperative to read her alongside the politics of her fellow members of the SAI cohort, sometimes nicknamed the “Red Progressives” or “New Indians.” They were seeking to mobilize in the context of the nadir of Indigenous political life in the United States, when U.S. Indian policy and public discourse about Indigenous peoples rested on the premise that Indigenous peoples must necessarily “vanish” (Hoxie Reference Hoxie2001a; Holm Reference Holm2005). The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 (General Allotment) authorized dismantling of commonly held reservation lands, with Indians to receive individual land allotments in fee-simple private property, and “surplus” land opened for settlers (Royster Reference Royster1995; Genetin-Pilawa Reference Genetin-Pilawa2014). The Dawes Act and subsequent legislation led to the dispossession of 90 million acres of reserved lands. Where the Marshall Trilogy had established a precarious legal status of quasi-sovereignty for Indigenous peoples in the 1830s, the notion that they were “wards of the state” had been consolidated in key late-nineteenth century cases before the U.S. Supreme Court such as Ex Parte Crow Dog (1883), U.S. v. Kagama (1886), and Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903) (Harring Reference Harring1994). In brief, Indigenous peoples were placed under the bureaucratic authority and unaccountable police power of the Indian Bureau and its agents. In line with the “tutelary” face of settler empire now extended to the insular empire of the Pacific (Heumann Reference Heumann2009), this authoritarian regime was justified as a form of benevolent paternalism that would ultimately guide Indians towards assimilation in the form of U.S. citizenship while offering few rights, privileges, or protections in the meantime.

Despite the best efforts of the SAI’s American Indian Magazine journal editor and later SAI president Arthur C. Parker (Seneca) to offer a unifying platform (Hertzberg Reference Hertzberg1981, 176), SAI members proved divided over how best to challenge these immiserating structures, and even disagreed over the ends to pursue: Should they reform the Bureau from within or mount a vigorous external critique, excluding (even Indigenous) Bureau employees from membership? Should they emphasize the achievement of U.S. citizenship as a cure-all to the pathologies of wardship, while maintaining some sense of Indigenous cultural identity, or instead focus on Indigenous sovereignty outside of U.S. citizenship? Should they lean into allotment and seek better protections of private land ownership, or reject allotment as an assault on collective ownership and existence?

On these questions, contemporaneous newspaper reports described the SAI as having split at its first conference between a “government party” and a diffuse party of radicals (“Indian Conference Splits on Politics” 1911). The “government party” comprised those who believed that collaboration with the Indian Bureau could secure greater protections of Indian rights, such as Sherman Coolidge (Arapaho), Charles Daganett (Peoria), and Parker. Kellogg and the famed Santee Dakota intellectual Dr. Charles Eastman—the key opposition figures—countered with a demand for autonomy from the Indian Bureau.

In order to contextualize Kellogg’s position in the longer arc of these pan-Indigenous debates of the 1910s, I trace the ideas and advocacy of two highly influential Progressive Era Indigenous political theorists who were not present at this first conference: Dr. Carlos Montezuma with his politics of self-help, and Zitkala-Ša with her politics of self-defense. These two thinker-activists shared with Kellogg the radical orientation on display at that first conference, yet they also diverged in key ways that clarify what is distinct about Kellogg’s politics of self-government. Though they all produced radical critiques of the Indian Bureau, they offered differing interpretations both of the substantive meaning of Indigenous freedom from settler tyranny and the mechanics of setting about to achieve it.

From the beginning, Montezuma (Yavapai) had a complicated relation to the SAI: He attended early organizational meetings but refused to go to the first conference because he viewed members of the aforementioned “government party” as far too cozy with—even co-opted by—the Bureau. Montezuma specifically challenged Parker, for example, who supported collaboration with the Bureau, and a more gradualist advocacy of a “road to competent citizenship” (1914). In contrast to Parker, Montezuma’s 1905 review of a book by former Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis Leupp reflects his early commitment to “the complete abolition of the reservation system, including, of course, the Indian Bureau” (Newmark Reference Newmark2013, 156). In his address to the fourth meeting of the SAI, “The Reservation—Fatal to the Development of Citizenship” (1914), Montezuma advocated the total and immediate “abolition” of the Indian Bureau along with immediate U.S. citizenship for Indigenous peoples on the grounds that wardship constituted a form of imprisonment and bondage akin to slavery. In 1916, he split with the SAI and began his own journal, Wassaja (“beckoning”) (Montezuma Reference Montezuma1916), to preach a more radical rejection of the Bureau as a form of anti-democratic authoritarianism (Montezuma Reference Montezuma and Cobb2015). In the lead-up to World War I, he ran articles in Wassaja declaring that, without the protections due to citizens, Indian men should refuse to register for Selective Service for the war (Montezuma Reference Montezuma1917).

Montezuma’s opposition to what he labeled “Bureauism” led him to a specific vision of what Bureau abolition entailed (Martinez Reference Martinez2013). As an admirer of Richard Henry Pratt’s theory that Indians must immediately be removed from the environment of the reservation, educated in off-reservation boarding schools, and de-tribalized through exposure to white social norms, Montezuma believed that the gradualist efforts to “prepare” Indians for citizenship that the moderate reformers entertained actually stifled independence and initiative (Montezuma Reference Montezuma1916). Moreover, the legal status of wardship intrinsically entailed the violability of one’s rights under an unaccountable authority: The reservation, by nature, “imprisoned … the Indian … in a fixed state of helplessness to resist encroachments upon his rights” (qtd. in Newmark Reference Newmark2013, 156). Montezuma recognized the value of pre-colonial Indigenous societies, but he believed that Indigenous peoples had no future as polities: “a law for each nationality in America would be very much un-American” (Montezuma Reference Montezuma1918, 1). Montezuma demanded immediate fee-simple property and American citizenship rights for individuals as keys to freedom.

Montezuma’s program differed from that of his one-time fiancée, Zitkala-Ša, considered the greatest Indigenous literary figure in her time. Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Dakota) became more active in the SAI later on: She became its secretary in 1916 and succeeded Parker as the editor of its American Indian Magazine from 1918 to 1919. Zitkala-Ša compared the reservation system under the Bureau to a form of collective bondage and “absolute tyranny” under the guise of “sham protection,” taking up the abolition of the Bureau as a goal (Zitkala-Ša Reference Zitkala-Ša, Davidson and Norris2003e, 210; Reference Zitkala-Ša, Davidson and Norris2003c, 159). Her abolitionist commitments led in two directions: First, she was keen to promote the inherent value of some elements of indigenous cultures, including on the reservation. She explicitly rejected the civilization-savagery antithesis, which posed a “reluctance to cast aside our culture” against “untethered American citizenship” (Zitkala-Ša Reference Zitkala-Ša and Lewandowski2018a, 198). She primarily saw U.S. citizenship as a matter of advancing constitutional rights, not a developmental process of transforming backwards Indians into civilized subjects.

Second, she readily connected citizenship rights as a form of individual rights to collective self-defense, a position closer to supporting the “mutuality of [U.S.] citizenship and sovereignty” (Lomawaima Reference Lomawaima2013; see also Bruyneel Reference Bruyneel2007, 97–122; Deloria Reference Deloria2015). In this sense, she treated the goal of U.S. citizenship as one key link between individual and collective freedoms rather than as the means to personal liberty alone. Specifically, she argued that citizenship would enable the pursuit of some collective Indigenous treaty-based claims for restitution. For example, the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie treaties had long been litigated within communities through grassroots treaty councils, but were denied a hearing in the U.S. Court of Claims because the Lakota were non-citizens (Zitkala-Ša Reference Zitkala-Ša, Davidson and Norris2003b). She argued that citizenship would enable self-defense, such as the pursuit of the Lakota land claims cases to receive restitution for “mutilated treaties” (Zitkala-Ša Reference Zitkala-Ša, Davidson and Norris2003a).

As she tracked debates over representation of oppressed peoples and minority nations at the Versailles Conference in the aftermath of World War I as editor of the American Indian Magazine, she linked this collective dimension to a future-oriented demand for the “little peoples … to be granted the right of self-determination.” By the latter, she meant primarily “full American citizenship and the protection of law under our constitution!” (Zitkala-Ša Reference Zitkala-Ša, Davidson and Norris2003f). Two of her posthumously published essays written in 1923, however, show her support for a more robust political basis of Indigenous “sovereignty” (Zitkala-Ša Reference Zitkala-Ša and Lewandowski2018b; Reference Zitkala-Ša and Lewandowski2018a).

In 1926, she organized the National Council of American Indians (NCAI), a lobbying organization imagined on a wheel-and-spoke (“democracy hub”) model of grassroots, reservation communities tied to a national organization (Zitkala-Ša Reference Zitkala-Ša, Davidson and Norris2003d). The primary aim of the NCAI was to improve upon the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, an act which granted citizenship to all Indians but did nothing to eliminate their wardship status, which had been re-asserted in the 1916 Supreme Court case U.S. v. Nice (Wilkins Reference Wilkins1997, 118; Lewandowski Reference Lewandowski2016, 176). When in 1934 John Collier’s administration sought to implement the Indian New Deal, packaged as “Indian self-government” (Deloria and Lytle Reference Deloria and Lytle1998; Deloria Reference Deloria2002), she fought against the remaining veto power the Bureau retained on decisions made at the community level. She successfully lobbied her home reservation at Yankton to reject the IRA constitution in favor of a more democratic one (Lewandowski Reference Lewandowski2016, 182).

Kellogg in Contexts

Kellogg offered the most systematic project aimed at Indigenous self-government in the founding years of the SAI. To introduce Kellogg biographically, she was born outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin, on September 10, 1880, in one of the three Oneida communities of the larger Haudenosaunee Confederacy, about sixty years after her well-known grandfather Daniel Bread (Dehowyadilou, “Great Eagle”) secured Menominee land for a reservation in 1821 after removing from New York State. Footnote ³ Her focus on self-government may have stemmed from the catastrophic results of allotment at home: Already in the 1910s, federally induced land cessions; timber stripping and soil erosion; and collusive schemes to force land sales of individual fee patents from Oneida citizens had contributed to near-complete loss of the reserved land base and declining economic independence (Hauptman and McLester Reference Hauptman and Gordon McLester2006, xiv; Hauptman Reference Hauptman2008, 146; Tiro Reference Tiro2011; Kiel Reference Kiel2014, 420, 423)

Attending university at institutions including Barnard, Stanford, and the University of Wisconsin, she studied law, political science, and social work, a background that exposed her to Franz Boas, William James, and Progressive economic analyses. After she played a pivotal role in its founding, the SAI, under Arthur C. Parker’s watch, kicked her out in 1913 when she and her husband were accused of impersonating government officials; in fact, they were staging an undercover investigation of the widespread graft of Osage oil leases then only starting to become public knowledge (El Paso Herald 1913; Maddox Reference Maddox2005, 193n). She continued, however, to agitate independently for her self-government proposal, which she began to call the “Lolomi plan,” in appearances before Congress and interviews.Footnote ⁴ After she published Our Democracy and the American Indian in 1920,Footnote ⁵ she turned her attention to efforts to renew the Wisconsin Oneida’s attenuated relationship with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. She also joined with the St. Regis Mohawk lawyer James Deere in unsuccessful litigation efforts to recover lands reserved in the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix. The latter attempts formed a foundation of later Haudenosaunee “land rights strategy” (Ackley and Stanciu Reference Ackley, Stanciu, Ackley and Stanciu2015a, xxvii; Ackley Reference Ackley2008). However, accusations of fraud in fundraising and several arrests dogged her reputation. She remains a controversial figure.Footnote ⁶

Before turning to Our Democracy, I first trace Kellogg’s available speeches and writings of the 1910s, which feature her early efforts to critique and transform liberal-democratic institutions and ideals through a synthesis of Indigenous and social-democratic thought. In her 1911 speech, “Industrial Organization for the Indian,” she argued that confronting “our national problem,” entailed more “critical” evaluation of “Caucasian institutions”: The “[Indian] cannot copy everything the white man does with advantage” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015a, 140–41). She protested what she perceived as her colleagues’ “undue worship of Paleface ways,” an inclination of which she accused both the moderates and radicals like Montezuma enamored of the “Pratt ideal.” She observed that they failed to appreciate how “capital is such a terrific power in the hands of the civilized but unenlightened … in this democratic country of ours where they shout, ‘equal opportunity for all,’ and then thieve it” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015a, 144). The “general conditions” the entire Indian affairs apparatus theoretically aimed at “putting the Indian into”—here, she cites tenements, sweatshops, tuberculosis, and poverty—ought themselves to be questioned as insufficiently democratic and enlightened “for any race of people under the sun” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015a, 145–47). White society’s “intense individualism,” she sought to show, meant that “the average white man in the white labor markets lives a miserable existence” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015a, 145). “My plea,” she put it, referring to sanitary conditions in tenements, “is that we avoid the things that are killing off the majority of the laboring population in the country among the whites” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015a, 147). “I cannot see the economy,” she wrote in 1913, “in introducing the deteriorated Indian into the ranks of the civilized oppressed” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015g, 185).

Channeling the uplift-oriented mission of the SAI, she argued that any “self-respecting Indian and educator” embraced “opportunity” and stood against “Paternalism and Wardship and Reservations as a regime.” However, such a task meant refuting the fantasy that posed the viable alternatives as those between a democratic civilization of individual independence and social mobility against a supposedly stagnant tribalism (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015a, 142). Allotment and the Bureau system as a whole, she declared in a 1914 letter to Bureau secretary Lane, had turned Indians into “vagabonds begging at the door of a sham civilization” (Washington Post 1914). The practice had not rendered them independent American citizens, as promised; it instead made them “a target for exploitation,” by which she meant land dispossession, exploitation of their labor, and the general degradation of their social and political conditions (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015a, 140, 142; Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015g, 187).

Accordingly, Kellogg proposed that Indigenous peoples’ “permanent independence” would depend on collective “industrial organization.” Putting aside the issue of individual citizenship status as a secondary matter, she believed that collective flourishing hinged instead upon Indigenous peoples’ “possibilities … on the reservation,” that is, their ability to create a collective economic future based on the effort to “convert [their] wastes into industrial centers” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015a, 142). She drew inspiration in her self-government plan from Mormon cooperatives, European garden villages, and socialist ideals. Her idea was to form a kind of collectively-owned joint stock company, with restrictions on any one party gaining a controlling interest, and with all sharing in the profits (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015g, 189). She believed such a plan would allow Indigenous peoples to enter markets and compete on the basis of the current state of development of a given people, but organize production so that “the work and the advantages are communistic” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015a, 151).

Kellogg’s original 1911 speech was not discussed in the subsequent planned SAI proceedings (Ackley and Stanciu Reference Ackley, Stanciu, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 29). Though archival evidence is limited on the matter, it is likely that Parker and most other SAI colleagues took little interest in a proposal that saw the reservation as a permanent homeland, let alone as the basis for a distinct political community that embraced the “natural clannishness” of the “real Indian” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015a, 142). As the historian Hazel Hertzberg speculates, they may have “shied away from a plan” that treated the reservation “as a permanent rather than a transitional stage in Indian development” (Hertzberg Reference Hertzberg1981, 61).Footnote ⁷

In these early speeches, Kellogg brought together a sense of the value of the reservation as a reimagined space of Indigenous futures with the ideas of Progressive intellectuals and movements who embraced a social-democratic turn in American politics. Such thinkers as Walter Weyl—and, later, colleagues such as John Dewey (Reference Dewey1922; Reference Dewey1924) writing in the New Republic—were convinced that such a politics demanded that American democracy shift away from its mythological foundations in frontier individualism. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner (Reference Turner1996; see also Grandin Reference Grandin2019, 1–2, 76–82) had set off an historiographic revolution when he argued that the frontier was key to understanding how the egalitarian, individualist energies of American democracy had laid the foundations of American progress. Weyl and Dewey turned Turner on his head: They argued that the political experience of the frontier (rendered sometimes as myth, sometimes as social-scientific explanation) had actually stifled progress because it mystified the basic interdependence and reliance of people on social and political community.

For Weyl, the “conquest of the wide-stretching continent” had, contra Turner, “hinder[ed] the development of a socialized democracy … it dwarfed the common spirit”: It momentarily relieved class conflict by projecting such contradictions “outwards” through the promise of free land (Weyl Reference Weyl1912, 22, 35). Such practices “fashion[ed] … a man to conquer [the continent], and the creation of a state which would aid … the conquest,” making normative a form of citizenship that was “acquisitive, imaginative and starkly individualistic.” This mythology now prevented honestly addressing the concentrated oligarchic power and mass immiseration characteristic of early twentieth-century industrial capitalism. Only by overcoming the frontier orientation of state and citizen would the United States be able to “develop … her democracy” as a project for the common good at “home” (Weyl Reference Weyl1912, 22).

Kellogg likewise argued that the “money despotism” that influenced American policy-making restrained the democratization of the economy (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015a, 144–45). “White institutions … are neither as economic nor as equitable as they hope to be,” she argued, citing Progressive economists (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015a, 152; Adams and Sumner Reference Adams and Sumner1905). She attributed the inability to confront concentrated wealth and staggering poverty to a “selfishness” due to “intense individualism” and the age of “unprecedented prosperity” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015a, 143). In contrast to the “exploitation” endemic to the “factory system,” a “new socialism” would instead aim to use worker-owned cooperative communities to meet the material needs of workers while retaining the economic productivity of the corporate firm (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015a, 151).

Kellogg also diverged from Progressive thinkers, however, in accounting for the specificity of the Indigenous experience of democracy, and the differences the latter would entail for her Indigenous vantage point on efforts to socialize American democracy. In a July 1911 public speech upon the dedication to a Lorado Taft statue of Black Hawk, a quintessential vanishing Indian image, she adopted an historical and normative backdrop that shifted the meaning of the frontier idiom. She acknowledged the “influence” of the “hazardous frontier” as a former source of “common purpose”: the “dangers of the wilderness beyond the Alleghanies gave birth to the real American nation.” She averred, however, that “today is not war … . War and frontier are gone. The sentiments are growing out of other things: out of interests that, maybe, are more universal in their appeal” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015c, 168). In contrast to the sanitized Turnerian idiom of the past “civilizing” of a “continent,” she describes the statue as representative of Indigenous peoples’ “national tragedy” of material conquest and land theft, and not simply metaphorical grist to theorize the experiential horizon of the American nation (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015c, 168, 171). She hopes that the statue—“mute for that which has no defense”—will stand “defying injustice” and for “each, as ye pass, swell out the monstrous truth” of conquest (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015c, 171–72).

In her 1912 speech to the SAI and congressional testimony in 1913, she supplemented Progressive accounts of the effects of child labor and poverty on human development with an analysis that contested the subjection of Indigenous children to boarding school education: “I want to add to labor and poverty this other determination of the Indian service to kill the Indian into an ordinary paleface” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015d, 156; Patten Reference Patten1907, 41). Her statement repurposed the admonition of General Richard Henry Pratt, founder of Carlisle Indian School, that Indian education aimed to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man” (Pratt Reference Pratt and Prucha1973, 261); instead, Kellogg argued that the Indian education apparatus enabled cultural decimation that reinforced material hierarchies rather than equal, democratic inclusion. She observed that pervasive “discrimination [exists] against the race in educational advantages” because “we are the ‘easiest marks’ for exploitation as a class” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015d, 165). Stretching and adapting such Progressive accounts of “class struggle” enabled her to criticize both Indigenous and non-indigenous supporters of off-reservation, Indian boarding schools, who aim to “take away the child’s set of Indian notions altogether” and “tell the Indian child [that] everything Indian is to be despised” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015d, 156; Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015g, 182).

Indigenous adaptations of a Progressive, social democratic project would, then, need to acknowledge and advance the “goods … of [the Indian’s] own heritage,” and challenge settler colonialism in the political situation of that moment (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015d, 156). Kellogg’s “industrial village” self-government plan would retain “common ownership of the tribe” and aim to “citizenize the possibilities and to reorganize the opportunities of the Indian at home” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015a, 142; Stovey Reference Stovey and Hauptman2006). It would support the “common ownership of tribes” beginning with reservation lands, in line with socialist and communal ideals and the aim of “keeping an Indian an Indian” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015e, 199–200). The project entailed federal support for a “protected autonomous government,” and thus embraced differentiated Indigenous political structures as integral to a re-envisioned American democracy (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015g, 187).

“Our Democracy”: A Counter-Narrative of the “Foundations of American Liberty”

Kellogg’s 1920 Our Democracy and the American Indian, subtitled A Comprehensive Presentation of the Indian Situation as It Is Today, represented her most ambitious and detailed effort to win advocates to her Lolomi Plan. She buttressed her account of radical reform and the obstacles to it by presenting a counter-narrative of American democracy that reframed the standard settler-imperial assumptions about the contours of American democratic identity and ideals. In the opening chapter of Our Democracy and the American Indian, “To the American People,” Kellogg begins her address by narrating the origin story of the Confederacy of the Six Nations. For Kellogg, the “American Continent” birthed both “the idea of the League of Nations and Democracy.” But not in 1776 or 1783. Instead, this was “about 600 years ago. It came from an American Indian” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 71). The Confederacy of the Six Nations already practiced “our democracy” as free peoples having possessed a tradition of self-rule long before the existence of the United States. Hence, in addition to its more obvious referent to U.S. democracy, the title “our democracy” can be read as an expression of the Six Nations’ ongoing possession of a kind of democracy, albeit one distinct in its internal structures.

Kellogg goes on to tell the story of Sagoyewatha, “the Awakener of the people,” credited in her compressed narrative as the helper of Deganawidah, the Peacemaker/founder of the Iroquois Confederacy. In the midst of chaotic disorder, the Awakener places “his ear close to Mother Earth” and hears a message of peace. After extensive deliberation in council, the Confederacy “marked out the territory of each separate nation” and established conditions of internal peace and prosperity. The Five Nations created a modern system of confederal power that bound them together as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy through shared decision-making procedures under the Great Law of Peace (Kayenren’kowa). Outside, “they began offensive warfare,” and in classic imperial fashion resembling the Roman empire, “exacted the learning of the Iroquois language, and tribute for their protection” (Hauptman Reference Hauptman2008, 147).Footnote ⁸ After they “expanded westward…as far as the Carolinas, “they dreamed of finally allying themselves with the Aztecs and subduing the Great Island into a peaceful empire.” Drawing on neo-classical tropes to describe their disciplined (“Epictecan”) liberty, Kellogg narrates the establishment of the Five Nations as the enlightened birth of a westward-expanding empire committed to “organization, confederacy, government, order, [and] progress” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 72). The Confederacy thereby resolved the ancient contradiction between free political rule and vast political space long before the United States did so via its own “extended” republic (Madison Reference Madison1787).

In explicit counterpoint to settler accounts of the origins of constitutional government and the formative influence of frontier conquest, she narrated how American democracy originated with the Iroquois Confederacy. More than a rhetorical flourish, Kellogg was drawing here upon a longstanding Haudenosaunee oral history and trope in Anglo-American political thought and ethnology that narrated the Iroquois Confederacy as the first republic on the continent, and an influence upon the United States’ own constitutional republic.Footnote ⁹ “From my infancy,” she recalls, “I had been taught that we Oneidas had contributed to American liberty and civilization” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 80). Kellogg retells the influential story in a typical way, through the words of the Onondoga diplomat Canastego, who spoke in treaty councils such as the 1744 Treaty of Lancaster that Benjamin Franklin is said to have witnessed (see Fenton Reference Fenton1998, 416–35). Sending for a delegation from the Six Nations at Albany in 1754 during negotiations for the Albany Plan of Union, Franklin asked for an explanation of their constitution.

Kellogg describes Canestago’s explanation of one of the fundamental tenets of the Great Law, their “constitution,” as recorded in a “strand” of wampum: The delegate “took their wampum,” with its “five figures holding hands” and explained “how each Nation is free unto himself like a man. But when the eagle … gives the cry, then are they, one heart, one head, one man.” As Kellogg writes, “Tradition [i.e., Iroquois and American tradition] says Franklin brought his hand down on the table and said: ‘That’s the greatest wisdom I have heard among the nations of men.’” Franklin “admitted elsewhere that the idea of a separate states government within the Federal [government] was an inspiration he received from the Five Nations.” “This is the fact,” she insists, “that makes the Constitution of the United States different from another in history” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 72–74; Grinde and Johansen Reference Grinde and Johansen1991, 104, 107–8).

More subtly, however, Kellogg takes this argument beyond Haudenosaunee influence on the federative shape of the U.S. government by narrating the U.S. democratic-republic itself as a confederacy in certain key respects. Once one takes Indigenous peoples and the treaties the United States signed with them into account, Kellogg suggests, the United States is better understood as a multinational democracy in the form of a confederate union of republics. Accordingly, she writes that the historical basis of the “great democratic principles” that animate the “foundations of American liberty” are “freedom and equal opportunity to each nation, under the protection of a Confederate Government” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 73). Notice here that it is nations—not individuals in the first instance—that are endowed with “freedom and equal opportunity” under the umbrella of a confederate system of allied, self-governing republics (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 73). She cites treaties with Indigenous peoples as separate sovereignties, “98 percent” of which the United States has since reduced to “scraps of paper” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 74). Kellogg’s reference to “confederation upon qualification”—what she calls “the great note in the Iroquois constitution”—serves as a reminder of these original Indigenous foundations.

This counter-interpretation of American foundations presents a continued expectation that what she calls “self-determination” for Indigenous “nations” remains fundamental to their and to all Americans’ conceptions of liberty (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 74). In 1919, while writing Our Democracy, Kellogg had planned—like Zitkala-Ša—to take her defense of the self-determination of Indigenous peoples to the newly formed League of Nations (Milwaukee Sentinel 1919). She asks whether it “shall become necessary to beg a Supreme Court of Justice of the League of Nations to settle the most disgraceful and low-browed state of affairs ever enacted in a democracy” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 98). Kellogg’s argument was an early iteration of Haudenosaunee politics pursued in international arenas in the 1920s and 1930s in part conducted to enforce the terms of violated treaties (Epstein Reference Epstein2012, 81–117). Levi General of the Six Nations, under the Cayuga hereditary title of Deskaheh, appealed to the League of Nations against the Canadian state’s policy of compulsory enfranchisement. His claim was based on allied statehood with the British Crown secured through the Covenant Chain of treaties (Deskaheh Reference Deskaheh1924).

Instead of deconstructing U.S. conquest, as she does elsewhere, Kellogg reconceives of the core tenets of the American founding in an effort to frame U.S. democratic principles as indebted to Indigenous frameworks—“the spirit which promoted the first Awakener of the people to lay the foundations of American liberty” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 73). This shared, founding “spirit,” the “bases for a commonwealth,” ought to sustain all peoples on the continent in “the ideals which made her a republic.” She proclaims that “I love my country … I love the ideals of her enlightenment, just as my fathers, who planted the first seed of civilization in the land—just as my fathers who first dreamed of democracy on this continent—just as my fathers who bled for the liberty of the land” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 73). Such a proclamation represents the Oneida in particular as exemplary citizens and loyal defenders of democratic ideals since before the inception of the United States, and even originators of these ideals: “When the colonists were struggling for liberty [during the American Revolution], the Oneidas stayed true to the dream of Sagoyewhata, and they sent every fighting man they had to the front.” She frames the Six Nations as active creators of democratic foundations: original agriculturalists, when Indigenous peoples were represented as nomadic hunter-gatherers (“who planted”); original democratic framers, when it was thought that they had no political governance (“who first dreamed of democracy”); and co-original defenders of freedom (“who bled for the liberty”). Her love of her “country,” its “enlightenment,” and the very “land” for which her “fathers bled” may also refer—more subversively—to a love of the specific lands from which the Oneida and Haudenosaunee had been torn, or of the subsequent theft of reservation lands. She refers to her love of the “valleys” (perhaps a reference to the Oneida homelands stretching between the St. Lawrence and Susquehanna rivers) and “every rock and stream and tree.” In essence, she posits this shared, multinational founding—one that has been disavowed and continually violated—as a source of contemporary political obligation and renewal.

Democratic Decline and Bureau Despotism

Kellogg’s original, preferred title for the book was The Death of Democracy. Her account of these shared, “enlightened,” foundations sets up her claim that Indigenous dispossession is a key litmus test and material dimension of the corruption and decline of American democracy into “despotism”: “Without these bases for a commonwealth, Liberty is impossible. Without the spirit which promoted the first Awakener of the People to lay the foundations of American liberty, democracy is dead” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 73). Kellogg first describes the “awakening” of democratic modernity, then exhorts her reader to recognize the oligarchic corruption that requires re-awakening: “But what shall I say to you now, Americans of my America?” She asks whether “we departed so far from the truths of our [Haudenosaunee and U.S.] fathers that we cannot now face the facts? Have you so soon forgotten the spectacle you have created of my people, whose shortcomings were that they were rich and primitive—the spectacle indeed of Belgium and Russia [i.e., symbols of anti-democratic tyranny] in the United States?” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 73).

Drawing again upon classical republican themes, Kellogg narrates democratic decline as a systemic process that tracks the corrupted decadence of the now “rich and powerful” American people. She calls upon the avowed “Christian Nation of the World!” to “Just look over the land, and count the billions that have gone to erect your temples of worship.” Kellogg declares that these “billions” have been won by uprooting Indigenous peoples from their land. “These million ‘golden calves’ of hypocrisy” have “robbed my people of a real god,” that is, of the land itself (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 87). Kellogg uses the metaphor of “husks of corn” to symbolize the original democratic principles the American people have reduced to emptied creed and false idols, and, therefore, no longer feed the “hungry soul” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 74). The content of U.S. democratic practices have been hollowed out, which leaves only the form of dogma: “there is no corn in them.” Here, she likely refers both to the Oneida’s furnishing of corn to the American revolutionary army in time of need as a source of now-disavowed US obligations to them and corn’s earlier and ongoing significance as one of three sisters (maize, beans, and squash) that constituted the original agriculture of the western hemisphere, which remained (and remains) central to Haudenosaunee cosmology and material self-sufficiency (Glatthaar and Martin Reference Glatthaar and Martin2006; Oneida Indian Nation 2016; Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015h; Dunbar-Ortiz Reference Dunbar-Ortiz2015, 15–31; Hill Reference Hill2017, 48; Cornelius Reference Cornelius1999).

Unlike the first chapter of Our Democracy, which targets a non-indigenous readership, chapter 2 is directed towards the “American Indian.” There, she seeks to incite Indigenous peoples—“my red clan”—now in “Siberian exile” to “awaken” and “emancipate” themselves as a “fraternity of “patriots” from the despotic order to which they have been subjected. This order has “crushed spirits, broken hopes, plundered fortunes, wasted lives” and left the “young generation … intimidated into cowardice and vice” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 79). Speaking favorably of the older generations—figured as the “blanket Indian”—who condemn the “mind of this generation” as a “broken reed” incapable of challenging domination, she asks: “Has the blood of our clan turned to water that we can be bent and broken into paupers and puppets cringing before the insolent arrogance and arbitrary dictation of political bosses who rise to positions of absolute despots over us?” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 77). Likely referring to Parker and others who leaned towards more assimilation-oriented measures, Kellogg (Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 76) indicts Indigenous leaders who “have been willing to let our enemy tell you our place in history.” In 1911, she had rejected the popular term “new Indian” as “fake.” She declared to loud applause at the first SAI convention, “I am the old Indian, adjusted to new conditions” (Society of American Indians 1912, 81; Hertzberg Reference Hertzberg1981, 65). Here, Kellogg likewise demands a return to “our ancestral standards” translated into modern conditions. Such a politics, she argues, requires that “we take the blame upon ourselves” to address the “cringing” or “fawning upon the Palefaces” that characterizes psychological dependence upon the “arbitrary dictation of political bosses” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 77).

Though such rhetorical indictments linking corruption and domination to obsequious psychology certainly aim to cajole her audience, they also set up a concrete political analysis of the Indian Bureau as an authoritarian continuation of settler-colonial conquest. Kellogg explicitly analogizes the Bureau to a form of “absolute despotism” that is the institutional locus of “oppression” and “subservience and demoralization” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 75–76). Repeatedly, she compares the Bureau with Russia—in the stylized form of criticism of both Czarism and Bolshevism: “The Bureau,” she argues, “came into existence with the idea of centralizing all power unto itself. It has succeeded to such an extreme that Russia ten years before [World War I], when at the height of her despotic power, was not more depleting than the Indian Bureau” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 82). Noting the “very nature of its origin” in “control of property and person, through its Indian agents,” she addresses the Bureau’s function as the administrative side to militarized settler violence aimed at containing resistance: “when the tribes rebelled and there was a border [i.e. frontier] outbreak, the Bureau could call upon the United States troops to quell the rebellion” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 82).

Her analysis invokes several dimensions of this oppression: First, she refers to her own “persecution” when investigating the ripping-off and murders of the Osage for their oil-rich lands as part of the Bureau’s “Reign of Terror” as an example of systematic attacks on “those Indians of the reservations who have been strong and who have tried to change the conditions of our life” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 82, 87). The term “reign of terror” circulated both as a generic label for Bureau mismanagement and malfeasance and for other forms of spectacular violence done in the name of a monolithic demos to expunge its purported enemies (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015g, 180). With the Bureau primed to quell “propaganda” against it, she argues, there is “no liberty of speech on the reservations” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 87). In other words, the Bureau literally “centralized” power and repressed resistance in classic authoritarian fashion, in violation of the spirit of “confederacy” and equal nationhood she lays out in chapter 1.

Second, the Bureau creates a “School of sycophants [as] a method of destroying natural leadership in the race”: Referring to the common practice of grooming leaders as well as “pack[ing] tribal councils” to achieve voting outcomes desirable to the Bureau, she notes that “Our Lenins and our Trotskys are no accidents.” “When, therefore, people ask me why we have no leaders,” she wants to respond, “Why is Kerensky not leading the Russians today?” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 87). The “spirit-breaking Indian schools” and their “atmosphere of subservience”—in addition to the inherent harms of “indiscriminate herding of children,” “destruction of individuality,” and the violation of “child labor laws” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 105–7)—play a role in the creation of the mentality of those willing to become “warehouse Indians,” who are the tools of the Bureau’s divide-and-conquer politics (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 81, 105). “When the Bureau wishes to create factions among the tribes,” she argues, “the ‘warehouse Indians’ are its executors” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 76). She connects this problem to the long history of settler efforts to undermine pan-Indigenous unity among diverse Indigenous nations since European colonization: “These fellows were found when Tecumseh wanted to nationalize the race” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 76).

Finally, she argues, the problem with “Bureaucracy” in this setting goes beyond canonical objections to bureaucracies writ large as institutionally motivated to “augment official power” or as “lariat experts of red tape” (Bagehot Reference Bagehot1915, 298; Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 87). Instead, she focuses on the material impoverishment that directly results in the denial of liberties “under the cover of benevolence,” what she calls “starving out the man with an idea of Liberty” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 87). Ultimately, the Bureau “had made the richest people on the globe, a race of vagrants,” evidenced by “the vast resources of timber, minerals, water power, lands, now owned by individuals in the United States and which constitutes the wealth of the country belonged to the Indian” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015d, 88).

Despite her admiration for the staunch commitment of “my aunts and my grandfather and the old people” to tradition and wish that “the race restore itself to some of its traditional philosophy” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 77, 102), she nevertheless does not see a return to past forms of more absolute self-determination as a viable response to present despotism. In proposing her Lolomi Plan, she posits the pragmatic need to navigate between two extremes so as to “obtain, secure and maintain real independence in modern times” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 79). She first speaks of the “failure of that former independence to convince this age of its rights.” She asks: “How far would any order succeed which did not take this modern day into its calculations?” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 80) She may be referring here to Six Nations traditionalists, such as the Tuscarora activist Clinton Rickard, who was “anti-[U.S.] citizenship” and believed that the only way forward was a strict return to treaty relations between fully sovereign nations (Rickard Reference Rickard and Graymont1984, xxiii). However, she also rejects those who have “swung to the other extreme and not taken the man as its first consideration” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 79–80). Philosophically, then, the “Lolomi plan of self-government” aims to “combine [the] higher values” of “the red man” and “the Paleface and his civilization” and “then to weave them into the hardest-headed kind of Business.” In other words, she bases the proposal in an attempt to synthesize these elements so as to ensure real material independence. Where the goal is to create a “social order which intends to rebuild a broken people,” the “structure upon which all these things depend is the ECONOMIC one” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 81).

Foundations of Independence

Kellogg posits the Lolomi as a “uniform legislation” superior to two other systemic alternatives that go beyond “piecemeal legislation.” The first systemic alternative, “Bureaucracy,” is the current system. Where this system, like Indian boarding schools, purports to promote “civilization” via private property, its macro-effects are “dismembering the Indian domain and then creating individual titles out of it, piecemeal, for the Paleface” and the further decimation of Indigenous societies (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 91–93). “No one seems to have known that the real nature and the real object of Bureaucracy is to make inefficient and dependent men and women,” not to actually create productive members of society (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 94). Her objection to the “boasts of the Indian Office” to train Indian women into “household labor,” is that “they have trained a girl who might have become an instructor or manager of some business into being a servant of the race which has oppressed her people” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 96). She thus cites both the expropriation of land as an inherent harm and the (gendered) violence and “demoralization” of the resulting exploitation and “servitude” of the “landless laborer” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 96).

The second alternative she considers, the solution of “Dr. Montezuma and his Carlisle followers,” proposed “doing away with the Bureau without any substitution whatever, leaving the helpless Indian open to the exploitation of every grafter.” This “point of view is to break up the Indian reservation—because of the environment.” For Kellogg, this breaking up of the tribal estate will only make “the Indian lose every last possession he has” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 89). Montezuma’s vision closely connected American freedom and individuality to private property, with the likelihood that the implementation of such a theory would place “the Indian into the white man’s world of labor, after he has been stripped of his assets.”

Though vague in details, her proposed reforms began instead from the starting point that “uniform legislation” should abolish the Bureau with the aim “to secure real protection.” Such protection should first “stop the exploitation of assets, of health, of character.” “We must save those remains of these things on which to build,” meaning, at minimum, collectivizing reservation lands (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 89). Such a demand for a (real) substitute for the Bureau’s (theoretical) protections would come in the form of “federal incorporation of a self-governing body” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 89). Taking into account the sheer power of the federal state, this “protected autonomy” status sought to translate the founding spirit of confederacy as a flexible, inter-governmental relationship among separate nations into a federalist relation among entities, which accords with what Iris Young called a “more enduring and general set of procedures guiding their relations” (Young Reference Young2007, 193n). As a federal entity, Indigenous peoples would be shielded from state law and would exclude “white constituents of a state,” since “whole states are eternally clamoring now for Indian possessions” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 90).

After these key measures of the abolition of the Indian Bureau and guaranteed federal incorporation, her Lolomi Plan featured five key planks: (1) Reservation lands would be recognized as the collective title of the tribe. (2) The people would pool assets to form a worker-run cooperative enterprise, with the aim of mitigating economic dependency and creating work meaningfully related to community needs and self-understandings. (3) Citizen-workers would hold shares, with decisions made on the principle of one person, one vote. (4) Property would be held in fee simple—with underlying title in the tribe—but could not be sold to anyone outside of tribe. (5) Profits from any enterprise would fund health care, education, housing, and cooperative stores.

She argued that through “combination”—the pooling of “assets”— Indigenous peoples could begin to develop “our natural resources by ourselves” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 94–95). Here, Kellogg cited Progressive criticisms of the power of corporations governed by their most powerful shareholders. This self-governing entity would instead make decisions democratically on the principle of one person, one vote “irrespective of the number of shares” each member “may hold” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 90). Land would be held in fee simple so as to allow for taking on credit for economic production, yet could only be sold to the corporation. This meant a “legal restriction on the dissipation of his property” in order to protect “against the scheming individual, white or Indian, against Bureaucracy, against politics, against himself.” Borrowing from socialist and Haudenosaunee sources alike, she explicitly argued that such a system should aim for the separation of “personal liberty from property” in order to “free [each Indigenous citizen’s] energies” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 98).

She regarded this type of self-government as a “modernized” version of “Indian Communism” that could account for the practical problems endemic to cooperative ventures, such as merit-based pay (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 97; Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015a, 149). Moreover, communities would use profits to initiate self-governing health care, education, and housing, and would own cooperative stores to prevent the common practice of price-gouging by off-reservation merchants, since the “business and social problems of the Red Man” are “so interdependent” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 99). Though invoking communism, she took it for granted that such communistic entities would enter into a competitive marketplace: Thus, Kellogg concludes with the striking claim that “it looks like a long way between Wall Street and the Reservation, but it is not very far” (Kellogg Reference Kellogg, Ackley and Stanciu2015b, 108).