Why do “they” continue to ignore “us”? This was a question raised during a series of conversations we had with colleagues working in the fields of Indigenous studies and nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history about the place of Indigenous history in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era's historiography. We whined. We kvetched. It was neither very pretty nor articulate at first. We had a sense that much of the most innovative and transformative works in the interdisciplinary field of Indigenous studies were coming out of the postbellum period, but also that few historians were paying attention. Despite the significance that Indigenous studies scholars place on the period between the Civil War and the 1920s—a period of tremendous violence perpetrated on Indigenous communities, of systematic land theft and other assaults on sovereignty, of boarding schools, illegal usurpations, and damaging cultural representations that advanced and ossified racialized ideologies—Native history has remained peripheral to academic journals such as the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and to survey textbooks, whose coverage of the period typically focus on non-Indigenous political and social history.Footnote ¹

Of course, we were asking the wrong question. One shouldn't complain about being ignored by a conversation that one is not actively participating in. Tokenism, moreover, was not our goal. Nor was our goal to claim a larger slice of pertinent textbook chapters. Instead, we wanted to show how Native history allows us to ask new and exciting questions about many of the central issues and themes of the era, and offers the possibly of posing new questions about the continuing relevance of the era today. We also wanted to show how the major themes that historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era have been wrestling with for decades should inform the work of critical Indigenous studies. We didn't want a dressing down but a conversation starter. We needed to ask better questions—both to ourselves and to other historians of the period.

We began by organizing a roundtable at the 2014 meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Atlanta to discuss the question: how does the study of Indigenous histories in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era reshape American historiography? Our premise was that over the last thirty years, scholars of the early colonial era and the Early Republic have thoroughly demonstrated why historians must consider Native experiences in constructing broader interpretations and narratives. From its humble beginnings in the 1970s and 1980s—with the so-called New Indian History—to the proliferation of Middle Grounds in the 1990s to the maturation of the field in the late 1990s and early 2000s—with the publications of books such as Jean O'Brien's Dispossession by Degrees, Susan Sleeper-Smith's Indian Women and French Men, and James Brooks's Captives and Cousins—to recent works such as Anne Hyde's Empires, Nations, and Families; Michael Witgen's An Infinity of Nations; Pekka Hämäläinen's The Comanche Empire; and Claudio Saunt's West of the Revolution, which have widened our analytical lenses for the pre-Civil War eras, the impact of Indigenous historical scholarship on the historiography of these periods has been enormous.Footnote ² It is no longer possible to write or think of early colonial North American history or the history of the Early Republic and antebellum periods without taking seriously the political, economic, intellectual, and cultural contributions and influences of Indigenous people and societies. But in the midst of this historiographical rediscovery of the importance of Indigenous history to American history, scholars studying Native histories in the post-Civil War period have struggled to bring similar arguments to bear on broader themes in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Each of the papers in our roundtable presented an argument for how scholars focusing on Indigenous experiences in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era might establish the centrality of these histories within larger narratives of U.S. development. And in this forum, we share some of them.

Our central contention is that thinking with Indigenous history pushes historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and of Native America to ask new questions, think differently about old questions, and imagine alternate narratives. It is also our contention that scholars working in both fields would benefit from a more sustained engagement with the broader themes, arguments, debates, and methodologies of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era's historiography and of the interdisciplinary field of critical Indigenous studies. It is time to bring the two fields together to enrich both.

A brief sketch of Indigenous history across the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries may be helpful: During the antebellum period, Indigenous nations faced an expansionist American empire whose vision for the future held little space for Indigenous peoples. Removal and segregation characterized the federal government's policy. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, with their visions for continental empire seemingly inevitable following the territorial gains from Mexico, U.S.-Indian policy began to shift. In 1849 Congress transferred the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA), which had originally been part of the War Department, to the Department of the Interior. Following the Civil War, and motivated by the transformative potential of the era, reformers working with Indigenous communities began to optimistically imagine the OIA as a branch of the federal government capable of transformative change. In the late 1860s, under the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, the OIA began instituting a set of programs collectively known as the Peace Policy. Designed to minimize conflict in the Great Plains and Far West, Grant's Peace Policy sought to provide opportunities for Native inclusion and assimilation. Almost simultaneously, however, postwar Americans' continuing desire for imperial incorporation limited the effectiveness of these programs as the government facilitated the spread of settlers west. This desire for a consolidated, continental empire would not be laid aside. And what followed was a period of some of the most intense violence in the history of U.S.-Indian relations. Indeed, conflicts such as the so-called Great Sioux War, Red Cloud's War, and the Modoc War, among many others, punctuated the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Despite the lofty goals of reformers, the violent consolidation of an American empire in the West, a process begun before the Civil War and that indeed had precipitated that conflict, persisted throughout the war years and beyond.

Hampered by the era's violence, the assimilationist goals of many reformers persisted nonetheless. In the 1880s, having militarily suppressed the majority of Indigenous peoples in the American West, United States policy makers, aided by newly professionalizing anthropologists and other social scientists, moved to hasten Native assimilation. They developed a policy known as allotment, through which communally held reservation lands were divided into single-family plots, in order to instill Euro-American gender norms and market-driven production and consumption. Once the reservations were fully allotted, the remaining territory would revert to public lands and be opened for non-Native settlement.  At the same time, territorial expansion west continued across the Pacific as well. In the 1890s, American sugar planters with the help of the United States military and Congress first conquered and then annexed the islands comprising Hawai'i. Native Hawaiians, however, actively and vigorously resisted these impingements upon their sovereignty, as the work of Noenoe Silva and others have recently demonstrated.Footnote ³ Finally, to make matters worse, alongside the federal government's allotment and territorial expansionist policy, the OIA created other oftentimes coercive assimilationist policies, such as mandatory boarding schools for Indian children. These policies remained in effect throughout the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

The years between the end of the Civil War and the New Deal, then, have long been considered by historians to be the nadir of the Indigenous experience in the United States. But in recent decades, Indigenous scholars have returned again and again to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, rewriting our understanding of the period. Indeed, through the work of Fredrick Hoxie, Philip Deloria, and many others, we now know that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was also a period of surprising diversity, survival, adaptation, resistance, and innovation.Footnote ⁴ For instance, in the 1910s, the generation of Native children who came of age in the boarding schools at the end of the nineteenth century banded together to form pan-Indian movements such as the Society of American Indians. These Indigenous-led organizations protested the federal treatment of Native communities and advocated for social, political, and economic development, as well as religious freedom for tribes. Thousands of Native men and women, moreover, served in World War I. And in part as recognition of that service, Congress enacted the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924. Many welcomed this expansion of the definition of citizenship, though not all Native people supported it. The 1920s also witnessed yet another reformulation of federal Indian policy. After a half century of experimentation, it had become clear that the allotment program was hugely detrimental to tribal communities. The 1928 Meriam Report, an investigation into Indian affairs by the federal government and the Brookings Institute, concluded that the program had failed miserably. Documenting the dire health and mortality statistics as well as the economic reality of reservation life, the Meriam Report's conclusions were clear: assimilationism had not improved the lives of Indigenous peoples as a whole. In the wake of the Meriam Report, a new generation of reformers, many of the same men and women who would serve Franklin Roosevelt in New Deal policy administration, rallied together to push through the Wheeler-Howard Act (known popularly as the Indian New Deal) that overturned allotment and put in its place a mechanism by which Native communities could approve a boilerplate constitution to protect some aspects of tribal sovereignty. Much like the Indian Citizenship Act, Wheeler-Howard was controversial, and many communities refused to ratify the OIA's constitutions. But a new era of Indigenous self-determination had dawned.

Indigenous histories of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era are complex and intersect with many of the major historiographical themes of the period. And while a number of influential studies over the past few decades have reshaped how Indigenous studies approach the era, their mark on the broader field of Gilded Age and Progressive Era historiography is harder to discern.Footnote ⁵ The questions this forum poses are centered on a series of keywords—important Gilded Age and Progressive Era themes—as a way to point toward a more productive scholarly discourse. These keywords are Periodization, Settler Colonialism, Citizenship, Welfare, Race, and Performance and Representation.

Periodization. The question of periodization in Gilded Age and Progressive Era scholarship remains important and vibrant, just as it does in studies of Indigenous histories, too.Footnote ⁶ When does the Indigenous Gilded Age and Progressive Era begin? When does it end? While some Indigenous studies scholars have recently questioned the importance of the Civil War as a turning point in Indigenous history, this forum suggests that major new themes do emerge out of the war to shape and change the nation, often affecting Indigenous people first. And this initially took the form of a debate over the nature and meaning of the state and the proper relationship between the individual and the state. Indeed, in the aftermath of the Civil War, several discrete but intertwined debates took place over the role and nature of the state and the federal government's obligations to it citizens and wards around the future place of Indians in the soon-to-be reconstructed nation. Even before the war ended, Indian policy reformers, those who would influence the creation of organizations such as the National Indian Defense Association and the Indian Rights Association (both founded in the 1880s) began to fight bitterly over the path that federal policy should take. These debates have long been treated as peripheral to the central narrative of state development during the Gilded Age. But as C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa argues in this forum, the OIA provided an important meeting place for debates over how interventionist the state should be and the role of public and private policy innovations in the late nineteenth century.

Settler Colonialism. If the OIA provided a laboratory for social policy, it rarely acknowledged the importance of Indigenous sovereignty to debates over citizenship and inclusion within the nation-state. Was the newly emerging state of the postbellum period—one that viewed Reconstruction as a political reunion based solely upon formal political equality and inclusion rather than economic independence and self-determination—really just an extension of American colonialism? Was the Indigenous Gilded Age merely the continuation of American wars of empire against Indigenous peoples? How are the experiences of Indigenous people in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era related to the larger historiography of American imperialism? Shouldn't it be essential to think about the American turn to an overseas empire within the context of a continuing settler colonial state at home? And, importantly, was the fledgling welfare state an agent of colonialism?

“Colonialism” and “colonization” are words often employed in Indigenous history; sometimes others adopt them without clear definitions. So what do we mean? We use colonization to mean the expansion, establishment, and exploitation of colonies. Colonization often led to various processes of colonialism, which relied upon epidemic diseases, ecological devastation, social upheaval, systemic violence, and exploitive labor practices, and allowed European and North American settler nations to develop ideological and intellectual formations such as the doctrine of discovery that legitimated their claims to sovereignty over property owned, used, and governed by Indigenous nations. As a result, by the mid-nineteenth century most North American Indigenous communities were engulfed in a particular processes of colonialism known as “settler colonialism,” by which we mean a specific colonial formation involving the elimination of Native populations; the large-scale immigration of settler populations; and the imposition of settler social and cultural conventions, governmental and legal structures, and economic systems of relations.Footnote ⁷ Settler Colonialism, moreover, is an ongoing process in North America today, one that, as Boyd Cothran highlights in his contribution to this forum, continues to structure not only American collective memory of the Indigenous experience during this era but also American understandings of the violence of imperialism at home and aboard more generally. Framing the periods in terms of settler colonialism is an important contribution that Native history can make to the historiography of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

Citizenship. Naming the United States a settler colonial society allows us to think about the relationship between the individual and the state in different ways. In the nineteenth century, citizenship demarcated who could participate in the making of the nation's laws and institutions. Throughout the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, many Americans used the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to expand this notion of citizenship. But while political participation remained limited and circumscribed, claims to “social citizenship,” or the right to belong to a national community in which a citizen was guaranteed security and economic welfare, began to emerge. We can see this emergence in institutions such as veteran's benefits and mother's pensions, but would these rights extend to Indigenous wards of the state? And more importantly, if they did, what curtailments of Indigenous sovereignty would they demand? Could citizenship in the settler nation and Indigenous sovereignty coexist? Would citizenship act as a force of liberation for Indigenous peoples? Using the Great Fire of 1918 in the Western Great Lakes, Chantal Norrgard explores the uses of claims to social citizenship in the Progressive Era as she examines the distribution of resources and aid in the disaster's aftermath as well as the tangled legal process it produced.

Welfare State. Debates over the limits of the state's obligation to its citizens were not limited to the aftermath of natural disasters. Indeed, as Cathleen Cahill demonstrates, they came to dominate debates over civil employee pension reform. While many argued that faithful civil servants deserved to retire—a minimal guarantee—others questioned the efficacy and fairness of taxing private employers to fund government largess. In the midst of these debates were the livelihoods of thousands of Indigenous employees of the U.S. Indian Service. Looking anew at the story of social welfare through the lens of the OIA and its employees, Cahill reveals the contradictory nature of Progressive Era reform, including the ways it reinforced the racialist underpinning of American society. Thinking about the welfare state as an agent of colonialism is a helpful contribution that Native History can make to an already rich and ongoing project of exposing the contradictions inherent in Progressive Era reforms while enriching our larger understanding of the era and its institutions.

Race. The meaning, making, and remaking of race in America is one of the richest themes of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era's historiography. From debates over the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments and the goals of Reconstruction and its “unfinished revolution” to the experiences of migrants and the passage of racialized immigration restriction to the development of eugenic ideas and legislation, race has proven a central concept in understanding the period. Perhaps above all others, race and the formation of social institutions such as Jim Crow segregation loom large within the Gilded Age and Progressive Era historiography.Footnote ⁸ This story is often understood in terms of blackness and whiteness with blackness being constructed in opposition to competing claims to whiteness. But what happens when we consider the ways that these tensions were more complicated than a simple racial binary leads us to believe? What happens when we consider Indianness alongside blackness and whiteness as all part of the making of race in America during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era? In her contribution, Malinda Maynor Lowery seeks to reshape, as she puts it, “a master narrative of American history that traces a story from slavery to freedom to inclusion and citizenship.” To do this, she explores the shifting racial categories and labels applied to three Lumbee Indians accused of murdering a white man in Montgomery County, Georgia. She concludes that while segregation was a “one-size-fits-all” solution in theory, in practice it emerged from small places with differing histories and local cultures and knowledge. By focusing on the ways the accused murderers employed blackface, she draws together racial and cultural history and connects her case study with the histories of minstrelsy and vaudeville. A consideration of the role Indigenous history played in the story of race in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, then, seems to unsettle the central racial binary of the era in surprising and generative ways.

Performance and Representation. The evolving culture industries of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era bring together many of the themes of this forum and the interventions it seeks to make. For instance, John Troutman, in his essay, expands the story of race and cultural history that Lowery tells by examining histories of representation and performance beyond the nation's borders. Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era have done a considerable work tracing the development of distinctly American cultural forms and institutions such as vaudeville, traveling medicine shows, circuses and so-called freak shows, exhibitionist sport entertainment, traveling Indian shows, and the lyceum to name a few.Footnote ⁹ But, by looking at Native Hawaiian performers, Troutman demonstrates how they not only confronted modernity, but disseminated new musical technology in the form of the steel guitar through an Indigenous musical tradition. Following the social networks that these performers developed on the vaudeville circuit, Troutman shows how they remade modern music and how the culture industries of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era provided Indigenous people a culturally generative as well as politically and socially significant space.

Performance and cultural representation moved beyond music and stage shows during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. And Boyd Cothran's essay demonstrates the enduring legacies of physical U.S.-Indigenous violence, suggesting that the cultural persistence of such events has provided a prism through which to view episodes of ongoing U.S. global imperialism. By surveying memorial practices in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and then comparing the legal and cultural aftermath of the Modoc War (1872–73) with the killing of Osama bin Laden, subsequent code name controversy, and the “torture memos” drafted by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, Cothran asserts that the Indian Wars of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era created a narrative of American innocence and redemptive violence that continues today.

All of these contributions could stand alone. Many are rehearsed in much greater detail in book-length monographs.Footnote ¹⁰ But taken together they seek to present a sustained call for us to consider more thoroughly the importance of Indigenous history to our understanding of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. We've each taken a different tack. Some of the essays are more focused arguments on specific issues or themes. Others provide greater historiographical overviews of broad themes. The end result of this mosaic approach is a varied, engaging, thought provoking, and, we hope, convincing case for the importance of conversations between Indigenous history and the history of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. We didn't set out to answer all the questions we asked, but we hope that by doing the asking we are opening up a path to productive discussions and collaborations.

Let the conversation begin.