In 1882 the US Indian Office issued “Rules Governing the Court of Indian Offenses,” which made the “Scalp Dance,” “Sun Dance” and “War Dance” criminal offences, punishable by imprisonment. According to Secretary of the Interior Henry Teller, such practices were outmoded, heathenish, and warlike, and a grave obstacle to Native American survival in the modern world. Indeed, Teller's use of language set the tone for Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) descriptions of Native cultural practices, particularly dances, for the next fifty years: some dances, medical practices and economic distribution mechanisms (giveaways) were denounced as “savage and barbarous practices that are calculated to keep them in savagery.”Footnote ¹ In 1921 the government's position against “injurious and immoral” Native customs was re-emphasized with the issuance of Circular 1665 by Commissioner of Indian Affairs Charles Burke, followed by its stern Supplement in 1923.Footnote ² These regulations reminded reservation agents and superintendents of their duty to prevent those practices that allegedly distracted Native Americans from their crops, stock and families, and/or that inspired “immoral” and retrograde behaviour. And the regulations had teeth: dance practitioners found themselves on the receiving end of harsh punishments ranging from the punitive withholding of vital food and clothing rations to incarceration in the agency jail.

The attempted restriction of Native American cultural expression was part of a three-pronged policy to “assimilate” Native Americans into the dominant Euro-American society and economy. Assimilationist policymakers imposed land allotment on many reservations, in a bid to break up communal landholding and extended kinship networks, instil an individualist capitalist mindset, and free up “surplus” tribal lands for non-Native settlement. Under the auspices of the General Land Allotment Act (Dawes Act) of 1887, the allotments were held by the US in trust for twenty-five years, culminating in the issuance of a fee simple patent to the allotment holder. Crucially, the allotment holder received US citizenship upon the initial issuance of the allotment trust patent. In similar vein, off-reservation boarding schools were established to indoctrinate Native children in the beliefs and habits of Euro-American society, while simultaneously denigrating Native cultures as backward, barbaric and actively harmful.

As historian Frederick Hoxie has noted, by the early 1900s the assimilation policy did not really deserve its name: policymakers were clearly preparing Native Americans for a form of abrogated citizenship on the fringes of American society, rather than any real integration.Footnote ³ And the federal government was not averse to moving the goalposts of citizenship according to its own whims. A series of court cases in the 1909–14 period effectively granted Congress sweeping “guardianship” powers over even those Native individuals who had qualified for citizenship under the Dawes Act and who were regarded as citizens by the states in which they resided.Footnote ⁴ These rulings suggested that ordinary citizenship rights – such as the right to purchase alcohol or to sell inherited land – might not apply to certain peoples within the US, and thus provided ominous justification for government assaults on Native American civil liberties.Footnote ⁵ Furthermore, in 1906, with the passing of the Burke Act, the Dawes Act was significantly and confusingly altered: citizenship for all future allotment holders was postponed until the issuance of the fee patent at the end of the trust period, which could itself be indefinitely extended by the President.Footnote ⁶

By the early 1900s the OIA clearly held a vision of citizenship for Native Americans that entailed a lengthy and indeterminate wardship period and that was subject entirely to OIA interpretation. Even the passing of the 1924 American Indian Citizenship Act, which imposed US citizenship upon all Native Americans (ostensibly as a reward for service in World War I), did not deter the OIA from circumscribing Native rights, for the government still sought to restrict “undesirable” dances and ceremonies throughout the 1920s. As the Supreme Court noted in the United States v. Nice case (1916), “citizenship is not incompatible with tribal existence or continued guardianship, and so may be conferred without completely emancipating the Indians or placing them beyond the reach of Congressional regulations adopted for their protection.”Footnote ⁷ Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, Native American citizenship remained very limited and was rarely defined.Footnote ⁸

Native Americans were far from passive recipients of OIA policy, and many resisted assimilation in creative and concerted ways. Resistance to the dance bans took many forms, ranging from clandestine performance of the sacred Lakota Sun Dance, to open defiance of the bans, to conscious modification of proscribed ceremonies. Historians and anthropologists such as Clyde Ellis, Gregory Smoak and Loretta Fowler have demonstrated the significant cultural adaptations made by tribes in a successful bid to maintain control over, and the survival of, their cultures and community identities, as well as documenting shrewd manoeuvring tactics such as assuring the superintendent that all “objectionable” features had been removed from a particular dance, and inviting his presence as a monitor.Footnote ⁹ However, pro-dancing communities also employed the language of US citizenship and made appeals to the Constitution and US patriotism in their bid to ensure dance performance – and it is this dialogue between the overseers of assimilation (commissioners, superintendents) and Native petitioners that forms the basis of this essay. I look at Native appeals to religious freedom, and also at the efforts made by individuals to petition local Congressmen and senators to protest the curtailment of specific dances – in other words to use the tools of American citizenship to ensure Native cultural and community survival. I also examine the exploitation of private property rights (allotments held in fee patent) by pro-dancing contingents. Finally, I turn to a group often left out of accounts of the dance bans: the so-called “progressive Indians” who, for a variety of reasons, welcomed the restrictions on cultural expression and sought the OIA's help in enforcing them. This analysis shows that citizenship and identity meant very different things to the OIA and to Native Americans, and that the OIA was clearly unprepared for any semblance of what might be termed bi-culturalism on the reservations.

The petitioning of Congressional representatives indicates that some dance practitioners believed themselves entitled to use the support and lobbying mechanisms available to American citizens in order to defend Native cultural practices. In 1914 Commissioner of Indian Affairs Cato Sells received a letter from Hon. D. Stephens (House of Representatives). Stephens had been contacted by a Santee man, Edward Blacksmith, who complained that the OIA had banned traditional dances at the Santee Fair (Nebraska). Stephens pronounced himself shocked at such news: “I can hardly believe that the Department has made any such ruling, and if it has made such a ruling I think it must have been done without proper information as to the character of the dances these Indians give.”Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, Stephens valued the “public interest” that the dances provided, and was quick to defend them based upon his personal experience: “I have attended these dances myself and consider them perfectly proper and harmless and as a matter of fact they furnish an amusement a great deal more wholesome that [sic] the average entertainments that are put on during county fairs.”Footnote ¹¹ From this defence it would seem that Blacksmith had chosen his lobbyist wisely. Unfortunately, Assistant Commissioner Edgar Meritt remained unmoved and trotted out the stock argument that all dances distracted Native Americans from their agricultural pursuits. Dancing at agricultural fairs had proved particularly galling to the OIA, as “in many cases the Indians paid so much attention to dancing, racing, etc, as to neglect the most important industrial features of the fair and to lose sight of the real purpose thereof.”Footnote ¹² Stephens's appeal and Blacksmith's complaint therefore fell on decidedly deaf ears.

This dismissive approach was repeated in later appeals to Congressional representatives. In 1919 the Arapaho tribal council, via T. J. McCoy, Adjutant General for Wyoming, petitioned Hon. Frank Mondell to aid their bid for a Sun Dance “as a means of rejoicing over the complete victory of our troops” in World War I.Footnote ¹³ Mondell agreed to support the Sun Dance as a “victory celebration” and urged Commissioner Sells to permit it.Footnote ¹⁴ The commissioner remained unmoved: he reminded Mondell that the Sun Dance was banned due to its “barbaric” nature, and claimed that

In other words, the Sun Dance was seen as incompatible with American citizenship – even if it was held to commemorate an American military victory, and honour those Arapahos who had died serving the United States in that conflict. Yet the intractability of the OIA on this issue does not appear to have deterred Native petitioners, who repeatedly alerted Congressmen to dance oppression, and for their part, some Congressmen were sufficiently interested in the dance bans to inquire as to the reasons behind individual cases, even if they appear to have been very easily fobbed off by the OIA assimilationist party line.Footnote ¹⁶

The petitioning of Congressional representatives was just one example of Native Americans using the US citizenry infrastructure to protect their cultural freedom. They also sought to exploit an intrinsic citizenship right enshrined in the Constitution: religious freedom. The defence of Native faiths as bona fide religions was exemplified by the Dakota activist Zitkala Sa in her groundbreaking essay “Why I Am a Pagan” (1902). By placing Christianity and Lakota religion on an equal moral footing, and proclaiming that “the pale-faced missionary and the hoodooed aborigine are both God's creatures,” Zitkala Sa demonstrated that Lakota religion was just that – a religion – and therefore worthy of respect and protection. Indeed, Zitkala Sa went beyond a plea for tolerance: she confirmed her own preference for the Lakota Great Spirit, in the open, natural world, over Christian “dogma” restricted to the confines of a church interior.Footnote ¹⁷

A similar strategy was adopted by members of the pan-tribal Native American Church (NAC) to defend their worship practices, in particular the sacramental use of the hallucinogen peyote.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1921, the Osage NAC (Oklahoma) sent a fifty-three-signature petition to Commissioner Burke protesting that their services were indeed religious in nature, as opposed to recreational, and that peyote was an integral part of their religious observances. Indeed,

Note the NAC's insistence upon the sobriety and responsible character of their members: indeed, peyote is held to be a moral guardian preventing the lapse to “whiskey and their old habits.”Footnote ²⁰ The Osage NAC therefore defended their worship first by demonstrating that peyote was an integral aspect of a religious ceremony, and second by noting that practitioners were peaceful, clean-living and sober community members.

The emphasis on the religious nature of certain dances and practices was not confined to the Native American Church. In 1920 two Pawnee men, William Allen and Bartley White, protested attempts by their superintendent to prevent certain unspecified ceremonies. Allen and White argued that the proscribed practices were religious and were therefore entitled to respect: “When I have the ceremonies going on I am not doing anything wrong, I am praying to God when I have them doing.”Footnote ²¹ The defence achieved little: Commissioner Sells wrote a convoluted reply extolling the virtues of uninterrupted agricultural labour, the ultimate authority of the superintendent, and the allegedly malign influence of dances upon health and morality. He studiously avoided any reference to religion or religious freedom.Footnote ²²

A step beyond claiming recognition of the religious nature of a practice was the direct claim to protection under the First Amendment – in other words the accusation that the OIA was contravening the Constitution in its bid to suppress dances. Considerable scholarly attention has focused on the Pueblo Dance Controversy (c.1923–25) that stemmed from Commissioner Burke's miscalculated bid to curry favour with Protestant missionaries by suppressing the dances of Pueblo communities in New Mexico.Footnote ²³ According to historian Tisa Wenger, the pro-dancing contingents, in conjunction with reformers such as John Collier and the American Indian Defence Association, successfully promoted their cultural dances as an intrinsic component of their religion, in a bid to gain Constitutional protection.Footnote ²⁴ Yet the Pueblos were not the first to employ this strategy. In 1918 an Ojibwe community at Leech Lake, Minnesota demonstrated clear awareness of the existence of religious rights and their relation to American citizenship. The secretary of the General Tribal Council, James Wakonabo, wrote to the governor of Minnesota, J. A. Burnquist, to complain of the Leech Lake superintendent's prohibition of certain dances. Wakonabo wasted no time getting to the point:

Wakonabo did not mince words: he linked religious freedom to American citizenship and land allotment, while giving a powerful indication of tribal sovereignty and the longevity of Native rights – witness the reference to “our land.”Footnote ²⁶

The response from the Indian Office was, however, disappointingly predictable. Assistant Commissioner Meritt avoided any reference to either the citizenship status or the religious rights of the Leech Lake Ojibwes. Instead, he curtly asserted,

What could be more “modern” (Euro-American) than Wakonabo's claim to US citizenship rights and the First Amendment? The reference to the Dawes Act indicates that his community included allotment holders who had been granted US citizenship upon receipt of their trust patents, and his petitioning of the state governor indicates his understanding of the US political infrastructure. Yet Meritt's dismissive reply suggests that the OIA was simply uninterested in entering into a dialogue with Native communities about religious rights or the relationship between citizenship status and religious freedom. Rather, Meritt epitomizes the OIA's position as a de facto colonial power that believed it could ride roughshod over the Constitutional laws of its own nation when dealing with Native peoples.

Indeed, with the exception of the Pueblo Dance Controversy, it appears that appeals to religious legitimacy and religious freedom did not enjoy much success in the assimilation era. The aforementioned Osage NAC petition to protect sacramental use of peyote was not the first time they had been forced to defend their faith. In 1918 Osage leader Fred Lookout had given an eloquent and impassioned defence of the NAC and its peyote use before Congressional hearings on legislation to outlaw peyotism. Lookout confirmed that peyote was used “in the worship of God among the Osage Indians,” that they “use it like people going to church,” and that they “use it in the right way. There is no harm in it.” He moved from a religious defence to one more likely to satisfy the Protestant work ethic so popular amongst OIA officials at the time, noting that NAC members “have developed quite a good reputation” and were industrious farmers and law-abiding residents of the state of Oklahoma. Before the advent of the NAC (and its concomitant peyote use), Lookout claimed that whisky had ravaged the community, leaving a trail of broken homes and wasted farms in its wake – in other words, the same defence that was used again by the NAC petitioners just two years later. Clearly, Lookout's defence of the NAC and peyotism fell on deaf ears. This is hardly surprising given a closer analysis of the Congressional hearings. Despite the repeated claims by Lookout and Omaha anthropologist Francis LaFlesche that the NAC was a religion and that peyote was used as part of a religious ceremony, South Carolina Democrat Ben Tillman remained fixated upon the (lack of) biblical basis for the practice. To Tillman, religious authority was a static concept – if it wasn't in the Bible, it wasn't Christian (and, one suspects, wasn't a religion).Footnote ²⁸

The OIA response to Native claims to religious freedom, even after the 1924 American Indian Citizenship Act, was hardly positive. True, the very public furore generated by the Pueblo Dance Controversy did make officials wary of overtly oppressing religious ceremonies. In 1924 Commissioner Burke sought to end the performance of Indian dances at the Santa Fe Indian School (SFIS) closing ceremony. The response by SFIS Superintendent DeHuff, who incidentally saw no harm in the dances, is telling. He cautioned Burke,

Burke responded with alacrity: “I want to disabuse your mind of any thought that there is any religious question involved in the matter.” He insisted that his objection lay in the “spectacle” nature of the dances, which “did not seem to comport with the training that is given at our Government schools.”Footnote ³⁰ Interestingly, Burke eschewed the term “ceremonial” in his reply, in contrast to DeHuff's description of the dances.

The desire to avoid being labelled a religious persecutor was not confined to superintendents in the Southwest. In 1919, four years before the circulation of the Secret Dance File that sparked the Pueblo Dance Controversy, Superintendent Charles Buchanan informed the Farmer in Charge on Swinomish Reservation (Washington State), “We have never intervened upon any ‘religious’ ground as such. The average citizen and court is very zealous and jealous in protecting the prerogatives of religious liberty in this country and it is necessary to bear this in mind.” Indeed, Buchanan was careful to use nonreligious justifications for breaking up Indian Shaker ceremonies on the reservation – notably the charge that forced “shaking over” of individuals violated their personal rights and broke the peace.Footnote ³¹ In similar vein, Commissioner Burke informed Presbyterian missionary and staunch opponent of Pima dances Edward Moore, “I have not yet felt that complete prohibition of dances would be justified because some of them are held to be in the nature of religious ceremonies.”Footnote ³² Fear of public condemnation was clearly on the commissioner's mind.

Yet concern at public reaction must not be misread as any genuine OIA concern for Native religions. Charles Buchanan may have sought to avoid impressions of overt religious oppression, but his dismissal of Indian Shakerism as “purest flub-dub” suggests that he did not value it as a viable religion. Indeed, Buchanan believed that any claims to religious status by Indian Shakers were cynically motivated: Indian Shakerism was apparently “a very clever and hitherto successful form of Indian camouflage” – mere paganism “masquerading under the guise and pretence of religion.”Footnote ³³ This was no isolated interpretation: in 1921 Assistant Commissioner Meritt stated that “certain dances, which are believed to be detrimental to the civilization and industrial advancement of the Indians, are prohibited, and sometimes the Indians endeavor to hold a dance of this character under the guise of it being a religious ceremony.”Footnote ³⁴ The Indian Office therefore remained sceptical of any genuine religious nature of Native dances and ceremonies, preferring to dismiss any religious claims as mere cover for undesirable recreational activities. Such disrespect showed no signs of dissipating by the end of the assimilation era. The authors of the supposedly reformist Meriam Report (1928), despite castigating the Indian Office for the shoddy implementation of land allotment and the miserable conditions in the boarding schools, did not actually demonstrate much respect for Native religions. Indeed, the author of the report's final chapter declared confidently,

It is therefore apparent that those involved in Indian Affairs were disinclined to take Native religions and cultures seriously, right up to the dying days of the assimilation policy.

One US citizenship right did, however, prove to be an effective weapon against the dance bans: land allotment held in fee patent. In 1929, a dispute erupted over the prolonged duration of a Ponca powwow in Oklahoma.Footnote ³⁶ Superintendent A. R. Snyder drew a distinction between a permitted three-day powwow held annually by “old” Poncas, which he described as an “orderly” affair, and a second powwow which lasted indefinitely and did not meet with his approval. The latter powwow, under the leadership of George Primeaux and Frank Eagle, was held on Mrs. Frank Eagle's trust land – and so was not under Snyder's jurisdiction.Footnote ³⁷ And Primeaux knew this full well. When Snyder and his colleague, Marion Feagin, requested the powwow be stopped, the dancers coolly “told Mr. Feagin that the Government had nothing to do with their powwow as it was on Mr. Eagle's land.”Footnote ³⁸ They then disregarded letters from Snyder and Commissioner Scattergood urging them to break camp.Footnote ³⁹ Perhaps unwilling to accept that Primeaux and Eagle understood their land rights themselves, Snyder denounced them as a “low-down element” in receipt of counsel from a non-Native “adviser” in Ponca City.Footnote ⁴⁰

Incidentally, Snyder also claimed that the Ponca Tribal Council, including Horse Chief Eagle, who had successfully lobbied for the Sun Dance in 1912, protested the holding of Primeaux's powwow.Footnote ⁴¹ Snyder ascribed this to the council's desire “to work with the office in its effort to improve conditions on that reservation,” and exploited their censure to fuel his denunciation of Primeaux and Eagle's characters. However, Horse Chief Eagle and the “old” Poncas had already held a four-day powwow (with the superintendent's approval), thereby indicating that they were not opposed to powwows per se. Snyder drew a distinction between the “orderly” permitted powwow and the allegedly more licentious event convened by Eagle and Primeaux and attended largely by younger Poncas. This could be reflective of Snyder's personal prejudice against younger dance practitioners (who, the OIA believed, should be headed towards more “civilized” ways), or could indicate a rift between the older (possibly more traditionalist) Poncas and the younger generation who had modified the dances along more recreational lines. Indeed, in the OIA correspondence there is only Snyder's word that the first gathering was indeed a powwow. The sole clear point is that the Poncas as a community employed two quite distinct and successful strategies against the dance bans: the negotiation adopted by Horse Chief Eagle, and the exploitation of land rights by Primeaux and Eagle.Footnote ⁴²

Were Primeaux and Eagle wise to defy their superintendent's orders so flagrantly? A communiqué from the acting commissioner of Indian affairs in 1908 suggests yes. Superintendent George Nellis (Pawnee Agency, Oklahoma) sought “information as to whether or not I have any real authority to stop or regulate dancing by the Indians on their individual allotments.”Footnote ⁴³ The acting commissioner's reply was revealing to say the least:

The message is clear: unless Indians contravened state laws, they were free to hold whatever celebrations or activities they pleased on allotted or private land. What is remarkable is that the protection conferred by allotted land appears to have survived the extension of Congressional guardianship power granted by the Supreme Court decisions of the 1909–16 period over allotment holders: superintendents and commissioners simply did not apply rulings such as Nice and Tiger to the issue of dancing.Footnote ⁴⁵

The question arises however, whether many allotment holders were widely aware of the loophole. John Troutman has shown that “fee patent or citizen” Lakotas on Standing Rock reservation (North and South Dakota) in 1920 troubled Superintendent J. B. Kitch by claiming they had “the right to dance or costume themselves as they deem advisable.”Footnote ⁴⁶ According to Mrs. Josephine Robinson, an Ojibwe resident of White Earth Reservation, Minnesota, a Mr. Lindstrom bought an allotment in 1925 and used it as a venue for Indian dances, powwows and gatherings. Robinson recalled that it was “a good place for the Indians to get together” and noted that white people sometimes attended the dances for a fee – which Lindstrom then distributed to the reservation residents.Footnote ⁴⁷ And Edward Eastman, chairman of the Indian Committee for Celebration of Chief Made-Wa-Kan-Ton, was in 1911 branded a troublemaker by the exasperated superintendent of the Santee reservation for his successful holding of dances and festivals on his fee-patented allotment.Footnote ⁴⁸ What is interesting about the Eastman incident is that the superintendent did not view Eastman's status as a successful allotment holder as in any way an indicator of respect, and also that Eastman himself, by embracing both allotment holding and traditional dances, did not conform to the OIA's view of an assimilated individual well on the way to US citizenship.

Perhaps most significant, however, is the account provided by Arapaho singer James Warden, interviewed in 1972. Warden gave a run-down of the locations of Arapaho Sun Dances from 1919 to 1939, and the majority appear to have been held on private land (for example “Pat Mulloy's place”; “Grant Left Hand's place”) – indeed, the 1921 and 1924 Sun Dances were held “on the same allotment.” The very casual way in which the locations are described suggests that the use of allotments as dance venues was nothing exceptional, but even perhaps the norm by the 1920s.Footnote ⁴⁹ Once again, pro-dancing communities shrewdly exploited government policy in order to keep dancing.

Not all reservation residents, however, favoured dances. Many Native individuals and groups voiced opposition to dance cultures – often for very similar reasons. In 1922 Lawrence Industrious, president of the thirty-two-strong “progressive American Indians of Bullhead district,” decried the persistence of “old-time” customs on Standing Rock Reservation, which, he alleged, pauperized the practitioners. In 1923 he elaborated on this charge, informing Commissioner Burke that “we wish to have you help us, stop the dancing and running from place to place, and let us get on the level with the white man.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Concern at the negative economic impact of dances also prompted Henry Le Beau and five other Christian leaders on Cheyenne River Agency (South Dakota) to seek OIA intervention against “such Indian doings and old customs, that are a disgrace and debterment [sic] to them.” Le Beau singled out the giveaway custom as causing “very much hardship during the winter and spring” and warned that “such as this is taking our people away from civilized and self-supporting and Christian life, back in to the old customs.”Footnote ⁵¹ The arguments and language employed by these Native opponents of the dances appear to have been lifted straight from the annual reports of commissioners of Indian Affairs – so concertedly do they promote the capitalist work ethic and the incompatibility of “traditional” customs and “civilized” self-sufficiency. Indeed, many (but by no means all) opponents of traditional dances shared a government boarding-school background and thus the same Protestant work ethic of OIA policymakers. For these “progressives,” the US citizenship they were either moving towards or had been granted meant the freedom to ban dances which they found objectionable.

Given the support that the “progressives” voiced for the assimilation crusade it might be assumed the OIA valued their input and assistance.Footnote ⁵² Indeed, in 1909 an irate Commissioner Robert Valentine, incensed by reports of persistent “old time Indian practices” at Standing Rock, informed Superintendent Belden that he must “endeavor to enlist the aid of the more progressive Indians in the suppression of these evils.”Footnote ⁵³ Earlier, in 1891, the future Kiowa head chief Apeahtone was effectively recruited by agency officials to denounce the Ghost Dance and in return he received the commissioner's support for his ascent to the chieftaincy. Clyde Ellis has argued that officials “eagerly welcomed the assistance of Indians who opposed dancing.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet despite this call for a united front against dances, OIA correspondence suggests that “progressive” protesters generally came a poor second to the reservation superintendent when the Indian Office had to make a decision. In 1912 Charles Knife Chief, a Christian Pawnee, wrote to the commissioner to complain of a series of dances performed by his fellow Pawnee agency residents. The list of alleged consequences was extensive, ranging from financially ruinous giveaways to whisky consumption. Worst of all, Knife Chief perceived a correlation between traditional dances and an imprudent attitude to life, exclaiming,

Knife Chief therefore couched his plea for intervention in terms likely to appeal to the assimilationist OIA administration: a catalogue of physical, agricultural and financial woes resulting from reckless and indulgent dances. Acting Commissioner Abbott's response, however, was markedly unenthusiastic: as he confirmed, “As long as the Pawnees conduct their dances in a proper way, the Office will have no cause to interfere,” before concluding, “This matter will be referred to your superintendent who will be directed to report any improper conduct along this line.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In other words, the OIA would seek the counsel of the superintendent rather than a mere reservation resident. Knife Chief's further calls for a dance crackdown met a similar response – he was dismissed by both commissioner and superintendent as a pawn of unspecified troublemakers who wanted to exacerbate intercommunity tensions.Footnote ⁵⁷ In response to Knife Chief's request for the OIA “to do something to remove the things that hold them back,” Commissioner Cato Sells claimed to prefer voluntary assimilation, expressed anxiety over tribal factionalism, and advised Knife Chief, “It is not well to listen to outside persons, who seek to promote their own ends.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In other words, Knife Chief was not even granted the courtesy of being recognized as the author of his own opinions.

If “progressive” individuals could not count on OIA support against “harmful” cultural practices, at times they even found themselves in the superintendent's firing line. In April 1918 Isaac Greyearth, a returned boarding-school student and Christian, reported to Meritt his concerns over allegedly excessive and imprudent dances on Sisseton Reservation (South Dakota). At one dance alone, Greyearth alleged, fifty loaves of bread were scattered around; eight dollars’ worth of apples and a whole hog were consumed; horses were left outside during a blizzard; and money was recklessly given away. When Greyearth and his fellow school graduates intervened, they were unceremoniously rebuffed: “they told us that it was not of our business, it was their money and they will do as they please.” He ended his letter with a direct appeal for OIA action: “Hoping that you will sympathize with the missionaries, Christian workers and returned students of this Reservation, by stopping such an obstacle to civilization.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet Superintendent Willis Dunn offered little support, beyond agreeing that dancing had increased in popularity and some food had been trampled. Instead, he launched into a diatribe against the Sisseton Christian community, arguing, “Time is also wasted each week by the religious [i.e. Christian] people attending sewing societies, YMCA meetings, and church convocations, on week days.” Indeed, Dunn grouped these “civilized” activities alongside those of the “non-progressive and pleasure-loving element of this reservation,” as heralding a general slide into sloth at Sisseton: “Idleness is causing much poverty and suffering on this reservation and is the worst enemy progressive action has.”Footnote ⁶⁰ It seems clear that his definition of idleness encompassed the pastimes favoured by the Christian community as well as those of the traditionalists. By blaming poverty and suffering on dances and Native idleness, Dunn was also continuing an established OIA tradition of ascribing crop failure to Native shortcomings, rather than to wider economic and environmental problems.

Yet Christian Indians faced greater problems than being labelled time wasters. On Warm Springs Reservation, Oregon in 1917, the Christian community fell out with the resident missionary and opted to worship in private groups rather than in the church building. Superintendent Reynolds branded these convocations “unlawful meetings” and alleged they were a cloak for acts of “immorality.” Such was his antipathy to the private meetings that he withheld government rations from the participants – a punishment usually meted out to practitioners of the banned Sun Dance.Footnote ⁶¹ The aggrieved Christians petitioned the commissioner in protest, asking “Have we not got the same rights to our believes [sic] as the citizens of the United States has [sic].”Footnote ⁶² Assistant Commissioner Meritt responded by cautioning the community against returning to their old (presumably non-Christian) customs – blithely ignoring both the Christian status of the petitioners and the superintendent's interference in what was demonstrably a religious matter.Footnote ⁶³ In this instance Christian Indians were threatened in the same manner as non-Christians – suggesting that the key issue for both superintendent and assistant commissioner was the control of worship: both Reynolds and Meritt regarded the Christian Indians as incapable of conducting a proper Christian service away from the watchful eye of the missionary.

So “progressive” Indians had little support from the OIA in their struggle against dances, and Christian Indians found themselves branded duplicitous, inefficient and incapable of managing their own religious services. To add to this sea of contradictions was the fact that the OIA was itself confused as to who the so-called “progressives” actually were. Witness Commissioner Charles Burke's message to the “Progressive Indians of Bullhead District” in 1923: “If your association will stand fast for good morals, obedience to law, education of your children, and faithful attention to your farming, stock-raising, and home interests, you are sure to become a powerful influence for good among your people.”Footnote ⁶⁴

From Burke's description it is possible to gauge the OIA's blueprint for the perfect progressive reservation resident: a law-abiding individual interested in formal schooling, farming and home-making, and governed by a Euro-American interpretation of morality. Such criteria suggest that progressives were likely to be boarding-school graduates and Christians, and thus inclined to conform to the OIA's concept of “civilization.” The revelation that many dancers were actually returned students therefore proved problematic for commissioners and superintendents alike. Lawrence Industrious's aforementioned complaint hinged on the fact that the principal culprits had recently returned from school – indeed, he ascribed the fault to poor-quality education at the government schools:

Burke should not have been unduly surprised at this revelation, as reports of backsliding at Standing Rock had been circulating for some time. In 1909 an exasperated Commissioner Valentine wrote to Superintendent Belden to express his concern

This was no isolated phenomenon: Isaac Greyearth of Sisseton, himself a school graduate and vehemently opposed to dances, reported in 1918 that while the dance leaders may have been six “old” Indians, “the organization has grown like an obnoxious weed and it has taken many of our returned students.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In other words, the OIA education programme had failed in its bid to turn the younger generation away from tribal customs.Footnote ⁶⁸

Returned students were not the only surprise flouters of the dance bans. In the years during and after World War I, Native veterans of the American Expeditionary Force were notable participants in dances held to send soldiers off, welcome them back and commemorate the Allied victory. An agitated “government farmer” reported in 1922 that the frequency of dances on Standing Rock Reservation had increased dramatically during and after the war, while another lamented that veterans participated with gusto.Footnote ⁶⁹ Myrtle Lincoln recalled that Arapahos held a Scalp Dance at Canton in 1919 to celebrate American victory in World War I. She remembered that the dances were held the same night the soldiers returned and that local white people attended also.Footnote ⁷⁰ This clearly flew in the face of OIA expectations that war service would have a “civilizing” effect on individual soldiers.Footnote ⁷¹

The concept that “progressives” could also engage in “traditional” cultural practices was incredible to OIA officials, and reveals the complexity of Native identities in the later assimilation era. While OIA high command stubbornly refused to accept that bicultural identities could and did exist, Native communities and individuals continued to adapt their cultures to match changing realities and needs on the reservations.Footnote ⁷² Witness the request by eleven elderly Teton men at Cheyenne River in 1920, who petitioned Commissioner Sells to be allowed to hold traditional dances once a month. The men professed themselves “faithful Christians” but claimed to be “pining” for the recreational enjoyment gained from dancing: “As we are born free, in this free continent, and have always enjoyed freedom, the only enjoyment we have is dancing and this old characteristic of an Indian can not die, we therefore, think our only enjoyment is undeniable.”Footnote ⁷³ The dances had been prohibited by the superintendent on the grounds of potential crop neglect and imprudent giveaways – a stance supported by Sells.Footnote ⁷⁴ Yet what is striking is the enthusiasm for “old characteristic” dances by Christians – clearly the petitioners saw no contradiction between their religion and their recreational cultural practices, unlike Henry Le Beau and his fellow “good Christians and law abiding Indians of the Cheyenne River Reservation,” who in 1915 and 1921 lobbied the OIA to outlaw “old” dances even for elderly Indians.Footnote ⁷⁵

Also confounding OIA expectations, seventy-year-old Cheyenne River resident John Lastman petitioned the OIA five times between 1929 and 1930 for permission to hold a “Sun Dance replica” to celebrate Hoover's presidential inauguration.Footnote ⁷⁶ Lastman was dismissed by Superintendent W. O. Roberts as an elderly fantasist whose “mind lives in the olden days and he seeks every opportunity to put on some sort of dance or celebration.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Undeterred, Lastman continued (albeit fruitlessly) to lobby to show the younger generation the Sun Dance, and he also wrote to Commissioner Rhoads in 1931 to complain of a newfangled and risqué “Love Song Dance” akin to the tango that was apparently attracting the younger reservation residents.Footnote ⁷⁸ Clearly he valued what he perceived to be traditional culture and wanted it transmitted to the next generation. Yet Lastman was also a proud former Wild West Show dancer, a US citizen, a taxpayer and a Republican – in other words, he had invested in the political and economic infrastructure of the United States.Footnote ⁷⁹ Once again, pro-dancing individuals and communities defied any simple application of the “assimilated” or “traditionalist” labels.Footnote ⁸⁰

The dance bans were hardly a coherent policy, in terms of their overall lack of statutory authority and the unevenness of their implementation. Yet as a policy they reveal much about contemporary OIA and Native interpretations of citizenship, identity and, indeed, assimilation itself. While some pro-dancing communities resorted to the clandestine practice of prohibited dances, or open defiance of the bans, others turned to the very lynchpins of the assimilationists’ culture (private property rights, Constitutional guarantees to religious freedom) in order to ensure the survival of their own. What emerges also is the embracing of biculturalism by many communities, who clearly saw no contradiction between a government-school education, war service and successful allotment holding on the one hand, and participation in traditional dances, giveaways and ceremonies on the other. Indeed, this is all the more remarkable when one considers that the education programme was designed specifically to detach young Native Americans from their cultural heritage and that the allotment policy was intended to break communitarian ties and community sentiment. And Christianity was also not a fail-safe obstacle to cultural survival: whereas some Christians opposed the dances, others saw no barrier to recreational practices – in other words their Christian and Native identities were not mutually exclusive. Assimilation to these communities clearly differed from the total adoption of Euro-American beliefs and attitudes envisaged by the OIA; rather some communities appear to have favoured a cherry-picking approach whereby aspects of assimilation policy (formal schooling, land allotment) were adopted (after being imposed upon the community by the OIA) and then utilized in conjunction with traditional cultural beliefs and practices.

The OIA's response to Native interpretations of citizenship was itself contradictory. OIA officials were clearly disturbed by student “backsliding” – yet did not ask the participants why they continued to dance. The OIA claimed to value the help of progressive Indians in the assimilation crusade – yet in practice rarely took their complaints seriously. Commissioners raged fruitlessly against the use of allotments for dances – yet failed to reconcile the autonomy implicit in citizenship with the continued wardship status upon which the assimilation policy (and indeed the OIA) ultimately depended. In short, it appears that the OIA felt more comfortable with lecturing Native Americans on the duties and responsibilities of American citizenship – right down to dying in the American Expeditionary Force – than with accepting the inalienable rights of citizenship. Indeed, when pressed on the issue of religious freedom, it is notable that the OIA was motivated purely by fear of public outrage over religious persecution, rather than by actual recognition of Native religions and the right of Native citizens to practise them. OIA officials often did not even answer Native questions concerning religious freedom – prior to the very public Pueblo Dance Controversy they reserved that debate for internal discussions.

If the OIA in the early decades of the twentieth century strove to avoid acknowledging Native citizenship rights, it also tried to ignore biculturalism. Time and again OIA officials refused to accept the integrity of pro-dancing communities’ claims to American patriotism, knowledge of land rights, or even genuine religious sentiment. The Central Classified Files are replete with references to religion and American patriotism being used as a cynical “cloak” for immorality and retrograde behaviour. And, when interpreting archives and oral histories, we as historians should be wary of making similar assumptions. It is all too tempting to assign motives to Native petitioners – in particular the desire to interpret all Native claims to patriotic motivation for dances as just canny ploys to gain OIA permission. Such an approach does not allow for the complexities of identity and biculturalism that existed in Native communities in the early twentieth century, and reduces all such actions to the status of mere resistance and by extension reaction, rather than of internal cultural evolution. For example, perhaps some pro-dancing contingents wanted to celebrate 4 July, but wanted to commemorate it in a way that had resonance within their community and spoke to their distinct cultural identity.Footnote ⁸¹ In similar vein, war service in World War I and support for the war effort could combine both an “American” identity and a “Native” (tribal) identity, in that it represented solidarity with US foreign policy but also furnished a practical opportunity to revive tribal military cultures.Footnote ⁸² The story of the dance bans is a human history, and any interpretation of its impact at the grassroots level must acknowledge the complexities that are part and parcel of human behaviour – in other words, that people react to policy in individual ways and from different perceptions. The OIA, for the greater part, stubbornly refused to acknowledge the multifaceted cultural identities emerging in reservation communities, and strove to continue its aggressive drive to extinguish Native cultures and yet limit the citizenship rights of Native Americans as US citizens. How Native Americans interpreted and answered this challenge in the early twentieth century is the more complex story – and one which transcends the all-or-nothing labels of “resistance” and “assimilation.”Footnote ⁸³