BackStory; Imagined Nations: Depictions of American Indians

This is backstory. I'm Brian Ballot. Well right now there is a protest underway because of the Washington Redskins team name. Now this is what the scene looks like. That was the news from Minneapolis this month when thousands took to the streets to protest the refusal of Redskins owners to do away with what many say amounts to a racial slur. As it turns out, these sorts of slurs have a long connection to football. Consider this cartoon about a Michigan game against a team of Indian students. And it shows an Indian with a scalping knife and he's looking at a Michigan player with a helmet on. The Indian is saying, how am I going to get that fellow scalp? Today on backstory, how images of American Indians have evolved and how they've been used to justify the taking of Indian land. Indians couldn't possibly actually have any rights with specific piece of land because they just flitted around the landscape. The long and often ugly history of depicting American Indians don't go away. Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia,

the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. This is backstory with the American History Guys. Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Balla, and I'm Peter Onuf. Ed Ayers is away this week. We're going to begin today with a woman named Veronica Passfield. She's a member of the Ojibwe Bay Mills Indian community in Michigan. And I'm a mom. I'm the mom of Tyler Baron. When Tyler was in second grade, his class did a unit on the Potawatomi, a tribe with roots in the Ann Arbor area, and close connections to the Ojibwe. And so we had a whole month of these great activities, learning about, you know, our traditional ways and our language, and I came into the class every week and supplemented the curriculum with things like, you know, teaching about the drum and teaching about harvesting wild rice, things like that.

The class ended with a field trip to the local natural history museum to see dioramas of the traditional native life. And there lined up amongst the dinosaurs and the geodes and the taxidermy animals was this tablo of approximately three to four dozen little glass terrariums that were populated with these little sort of happy meal figures of tribes across North America. You've probably seen these sorts of dioramas of native life. They're all over natural history museums. Sometimes they're life-sized. Sometimes they're miniaturized. But they all these feature scenes of traditional tribal life. People trying meat in front of a poiblo, people gathering for war near their TPs, that kind of stuff. So the kids are just absolutely transfixed by this scene before them. And my son seemed kind of confused by this.

You know, being a tribal child, being a child who's active in his community, he's looking at these little people and seems a little bit more confused less enthusiastic than his classmates. Tyler's class headed back to school with one last assignment. To draw a picture of what they learned about the Potawatomi. So the drawing that my son made was of two skeletons at the bottom of very deep graves with two RIP headstones at the top. This overriding message that he got from these dioramas was that Indians were dead. And I knew at that moment that I couldn't stand by it and watch this happen. Veronica approached the museum's director and together they tried to come up with ways to update the dioramas. But after several experiments they agreed that there was a fundamental problem with the very idea of these dioramas.

The form had become popular at the end of the 19th century. That was a time when museums were frantically gathering artifacts. From what they saw is the last remains of a dying culture. And Passfield believes that the dioramas are a perfect encapsulation of what was happening to actual Indians at that very time. Tribes were being contained on reservations. And Indian culture was being actively stamped out on the grounds that it was a thing of the past. In the end the small natural history museum in Michigan decided to remove the dioramas. And that raised a whole new range of questions. I remember a really great conversation I had with the director about, well, gosh, what are we going to do now if Native people aren't in this exhibit where are we going to see them? And I said to her, you know, why is it the job of a natural history museum to talk about indigenous people? Take your students to Palau.

Take your students to an Urban Indian Center. There are countless online resources, countless movies, bring-in speakers. There are just so many ways that you can learn about a culture from the people who created the culture that the dioramas really were unnecessary. American Indians are hardly the only people whose culture has been twisted and turned in any number of grotesque fashions over the course of our nation's history. But what's unique about representations of Indians is that at their core, they relied on the notion that Indian culture no longer exists. And non-Indians in America have been telling that story for well over a hundred years. And so today on the show, at schoolchildren Don Feather Headdresses and act out the supposed first Thanksgiving meal, we're taking on the long and often ugly history of depictions of American Indians. When do the narrative of their culture's extinction take shape?

How did non-Indians depict natives before they were relegated to a thing of the past? And how have American Indians countered those popular depictions of them? We'll begin with a story from the late 19th century, the very same era in which the first of those museum dioramas we just heard about were starting to show up. It begins in 1893 at the Carlisle Indian boarding school in Pennsylvania. The superintendent of that school, a man named Richard Henry Pratt, had banned the game of football a few years earlier, after one student had broken his leg in a game. But now at the urging of a number of young men at the school, Pratt was beginning to see football in a new light. What he saw in it was a very sort of modern sport. This is historian David Adams, author of a book about Indian boarding schools. David says that in the 1890s football was widely thought of as a complex strategic and modern sport. This image was helped along by the fact that the most advanced schools,

schools like Harvard, Yale, and Brown, also had the best football teams. So his idea was that if Indians could display their equality on a football field, they in fact would display their ability to totally assimilate into the culture. And so Pratt saw this as a way of advertising his model of Indian education. Pratt's model of education had one core objective to Americanize Indians by removing them from their family cultures. I guess we would call him a radical assimilationist. He believed that Native American cultures were worthless, but he believed that there was not any inherent genetic defect in Indians. And so he believed they could be fully integrated into the American scene. And he saw football as a means of doing that. So Pratt agreed to create a team with two conditions. One, that his boys play fair.

And two, that they whipped the best teams in the country. It worked. The Carlisle Indian school team took to the gridiron and consistently beat college football juggernauts for the next 24 years. They were fast, strong, and strategic working within the loose rules of the early game. Carlisle was famous for out foxing the opposition. One of the trips when they were playing Harvard, for example, in one year, they actually shoved the football up the back jersey of one of their players and all the players could rush down the gridiron and Harvard didn't know who had the ball. And so they scored a touchdown that way. But if Pratt's main objective with all of this was to make the general public view his students as regular Americans, well, that just didn't happen. That's because the press took the spectacle of an Indian football team playing white teams and they ran with it.

They began to see football in a sense as a sort of a replaying of a frontier conflict. All of the manifold interests of present and the past, the near and the far, were collected on the instant on soldiers' field. This is from the Boston Globe when Carlisle took on Harvard in 1896. Over 500 years of education were represented by the young pale faces in Crimson while centuries of fire and sun worship, medicine men and cantations, ghost dances and mound building were flashed before the intervision by the appearances of the young men from Carlisle. The number of cartoons in which they were displaying football players going after scalps, for example, was certainly... Oh, come on. They literally were going after scalps. Yes, there's one cartoon, in fact. And it shows an Indian with headdress and scalping knife. And he's looking at a Michigan player with a helmet on, and under the cartoon, the Indian is saying,

how am I going to get that fellow's scalp? And that's, of course, because of the helmet. Oh, boy. They were fighting things like that. In spite of the setback, in public, Pratt celebrated the immense popularity of his team. After all, it turned out athletic legends like Jim Thorpe and it toured the nation, marching in parades and staying in the nicest hotels all over the country. Anytime that the games were played on neutral territory, in other words, not on the college campus of Yale or Harvard, but a neutral territory. And they were often played in New York City and Boston. The white crowd, they were always cheering for the Indians. The grand irony of all of this, as Adams, is that the team was popular precisely because it mapped so neatly onto a storyline that cast Indians as noble savages who had been vanquished in the march of Western civilization.

This is sort of the romantic image of nature's noble men, and so there was this tendency for many of the fans to identify with the Indians. And the beauty of it was that you already had the land, okay? So I mean, because football is a game about territory. And so you've been cheered. I had thought of that. Yeah, it lines and boundaries and territory. And so on, the fans could watch this game cheer for the Indians who had been terribly wronged. In the meantime, they had lost the land. So there was sort of a win-win situation. After some of the best seasons that any team of the era racked up, Carlisle successes on the field eventually faded away. But the 19th century warrior image that was so associated with the team most certainly did not. You're probably aware of the controversy swirling around today's Washington Redskins. Well, team owner, Dan Snyder, has defended the continued use of the name by saying that was coined by a Carlisle football alum,

a guy named Lone Star Deats. Here's Snyder on ESPN's Outside the Lines. Coach Deats was Native American. He named the team. The historical facts are the historical facts. It's not clear that that was the case. Scholars have suggested that Deats faked a native identity for himself in order to take advantage of various opportunities for Indians at the time. But Adam says that by invoking Lone Star Deats to defend the name, Dan Snyder is playing on the same romanticized notions that fans and sportswriters held in the heyday of the Carlisle football team. He's tapping in, I think, into the sportswriters' desire or tendency to sort of want to replay Indians of another age, which is in contradiction to what Carlisle was trying to do. David Adams is a professor emeritus at Cleveland State University, an author of Education for Extinction, American Indians

and the boarding school experience, 1875 through 1928. This time for a short break when we get back, we're going to talk about how English colonists used Native Americans to market the new world. You're listening to Backstoy. We'll be back in a minute. We're back with Backstoy. I'm Brian Ballot. And I'm Peter Ronoff. We're talking about the changing depictions of American Indians by non-Indians. We're going to turn the clock back now to when those depictions began. After Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas, Europeans were abuzz about his discovery and about the indigenous people who lived there. It didn't take long for the newcomers' accounts of these mysterious inhabitants to make their way back to Europe. There would have been some just peaceful, descriptive ones.

This is what Indian people look like. This is what they were. This is historian Joyce Chaplin. She says there was another strain of images as well. There were also a lot of alarming woodcuts and other illustrations that depicted Indians as cannibals with butchered human bodies hanging in the background. And the idea that American Indians were cannibals, all of them indiscriminately remains a very powerful and lasting prejudice based on those early images. These outlandish illustrations came mostly from the Spanish, the first colonizers. The earliest English illustrations of the New World came later, most notably from an English colonist named John White. White was a member of a small, privately funded expedition that first explored Roanoke Island and what is now in North Carolina, back in 1585. Sir Walter Raleigh, who was bankrolling this whole thing, commissioned White to document the lives of the local tribes who lived there.

I asked Chaplin, who was written about White's work, to describe some of these watercolors. He does sort of long shot images of Indian towns as if he were doing an aerial view almost. And then he does close-ups of people engaged in certain activities or even just portraits, somebody standing there, and they're everyday clothing, or maybe with some special implements, like a bow and arrow for hunting. When the images were last on a big display at the British Museum a couple of years ago, the curators at the museum worked out reconstructions of what the pigments would have looked like originally. So these people that, you know, I've looked at as a scholar, years and years and years, who kind of look blank suddenly pop. They're looking right back at me. And that really underscored the way in which White was being very careful to depict people possibly even as individuals. So anybody who had the opportunity to look at these images

would almost feel as if he or she were walking through the town and encountering what John White encountered. That seems very clearly to be his intention. You are there. I was there. I could see what these people look like. And here they are. I will introduce them to you. Right. So this isn't a depiction, a hostile depiction of savage people who need to be removed. It's a much more benign view. Yes, there's an image of one of the towns that shows the people gathered. They're dancing. More to the point they're growing corn. So the whole sense is this is great. Look how prosperous these people are. These are very peaceful images in sharp contrast to those that had been done of cannibals in the new world whether they existed or not. But what always strikes me about the images is how White organizes and displays Indians

as if they're performing to an audience. And so immediately in the pitch that he gives in presenting these images, you have room for suspicion could it really have been this nice? Why are all the Native people being depicted smiling? And looking welcoming and holding food? You think that might not have been accurate, Joyce, is that what you're saying? Oh, I agree. Probably people smile some of the time and help food. But it really looks like it's emphasizing all the positive attributes. So Joyce, you've given us the picture and that is it's a land of peace and plenty. At least that's what White wants people to think. What motivates him to create these images? There's no image of conflict. What's going on? Obviously this is a set of images intended to look appealing that this is a place where the English will be welcome and we'll find plenty to eat, a very helpful population.

Also, because this is colonization done on a small scale, done on the cheap and not a lot of money is put into this. So really, the organizers of the Rhonoch colony need to recruit. Settlers, they need to recruit investors. They have to make the colony look good, look inviting. Does that lead to an idea that maybe White had this in mind in the kind of imagery he created that is? So was this propaganda? It was propaganda, absolutely. The settlement, if we were going to continue at Rhonoch, would depend on Settlers signing up, investors putting up the money. There were other economic options for investors at this point in time so a pitch would have to be made. Why do this? What do you get out of this? I mean, there were really pretty serious questions about why it would be worth anyone's while. So images of a new world that seems productive, that has enough food,

that has people who have access to copper, for instance, and possibly other metals. That would have been what investors would have wanted to have seen. This is a part of the world that seems very bountiful, where the English with metal agricultural tools could probably do even better, with healthy populations indicating that other populations could move in and do just fine. Nevertheless, there would also be a sense that there's room for work. The metal tools would make a difference. These are people who should be Christianized. There are things that the English could accomplish by moving into this part of the world, not just that they would manage to survive or thrive, but they would fulfill various nationally defined missions to spread Protestantism, to claim territory for England. So the images have that complexity built into them, that they seem very welcoming and non-judgmental about the Native people.

On the other hand, there's a message about the room for colonization, that these people and their homeland imply. So, Joyce, the challenge in a way for us is to take these benign, generous images that seem to be ethnographically accurate and look forward to the history of European Native American and counters across North America, throughout the Americas, and things look darker and different as we move on. How do we make that connection? Is there something about these benign images that serve perhaps less than benign purposes? It's hard to say what white's own motivations were, but certainly in the way he made it seem that this was a land with plenty of room for English people, that set up an expectation that plenty of English people ought to show up. And that's what happened, that a lot of English people showed up, they wanted land.

They assumed, like white did, that there was plenty of room for them, that America would just keep producing a lot of food, and English population could flourish on a much larger scale than Native American populations did, and really, that whole idea that there was plenty of space for Europeans means that this is a fantasy about removing Native populations from that landscape as if there isn't a real connection between them and the land. Joyce Chaplin is a historian at Harvard. Her research on John White's paintings of Peerus in a new world, England's first view of America, will post some of these early images on our website, extrairadiot.org. Some of the most iconic images of Native Americans

come to us in the form, not of paintings, but of photographs. Perhaps you've seen some of the photos created by the ethnologist Edward S. Curtis. In 1907, Curtis published a giant 20-volume set called the North American Indian. In one striking image, we see a Navajo family on horseback, in single file, they're riding away, you might even say disappearing into the wilderness. And while some of Curtis's work paints Indians in a heroic, as well as tragic light, there are many who have criticized them as exploitative. Subjects had no say in how the images would be used. And some say Native peoples were portrayed as an undifferentiated mass, a backwards race, primitive, defeated in war, and destined to fade from history. Martha Sandwice is a historian who has written about early photographs of American Indians. And she tells a more complicated story,

one that takes us all the way back to the very first photos of Native people produced in the 1840s. These were daguerreotypes. The first ever photographic technology and a wonder of the day, a single portrait could take hours to produce and yielded a single image on a silver coated plate that could not be copied. They demanded the subject's active participation. And largely because of that, says Sandwice, those pictures told a different story than the later images did. You see people at a Cherokee political convention in 1843, inviting a photographer to make their pictures. You see a missionary in Great Britain in 1845, positing to have his photograph made to further his fundraising efforts. Or you can look at a daguerreotype studio in St. Louis in 1847 and see the great chief Kiyokook being photographed along with his family, which suggests that Kiyokook, like anybody else,

wanted a family portrait to take home. And he is in St. Louis, probably to negotiate tribal business with the resident Indian agent who lives there in that frontier city. So he's wearing a spectacular bear claw necklace. He has silver rings in his ear. He's wearing a huge silver piece metal that he's gotten from the federal government. And he's holding a silver-tipped cane, which is also a symbol of his status within his tribe. Yeah, and he would accentuate his, what we would call, otherness, his difference because it's going to work to his advantage. Exactly. And let's face it, he's got a lot of bling on. The bear claw necklace, the silver piece metal. I think Kiyokook is calculating how best to make an impression on the photographer and all the people who will see this picture. He's a person to reckon with. Well, looking forward, Marty, what happened? If image-making, image-taking in the first period, it does seem to be a negotiated activity.

And it's not imposing a stereotypical image. It's not something it's taken from Indians. It's a product of collaboration. What happens is it just technological that photography with negatives. We have replicable images and they circulate. What's happening with photography? I think technology really changes everything. When glass negatives become popular in the late 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, suddenly photographers can make a theoretically infinite number of paper prints from their glass negative. Then they can make money by selling many copies of their portraits of Indians. Yeah, so the sitter doesn't control the image anymore or at least once the negative exists, it's out of the sitter's control. Exactly. So the photographer instead of pleasing the sitter is anticipating, how can I please, oh, those hundreds or thousands of people out there who might want to buy this photograph?

And so what happens with those images? Do they become stereotypical, less flattering? How's the imagery change? Well, a couple of things happen once you can make these multiple copies of paper prints. They're on paper. They're mounted on cardboard mounts. And in the vast majority of cases, they're sent out into the world with words attached. To tell you how to understand the photograph that you're looking at. Right. These pictures are deployed for a variety of purposes, first to make money, but also to serve the purposes of the government, serve the purposes of white society. Describe some of those uses in the way, in effect, these pictures are reframed, repackaged, and tell a different story. Well, one of the largest producers of photographic portraits of Native Americans during the 19th century is really the federal government. The federal government is sponsoring expeditions that go west, and the federal government is interested in recording the faces of mostly men and sometimes women

who come to Washington as part of diplomatic missions. And in 1877, the federal government gathers together many hundreds of these pictures into a catalog. Every textual description of a person has a number. And you could go to the federal government and order picture number of 483. And when they sent you picture number 483, it would have a copy of the very caption from that catalog cut out and glued to the back. So when you acquired the photograph, you would flip it over and you would learn how you were supposed to understand it and interpret it. And sometimes the captions for these photographs change. There's one fantastic photograph in the catalog of a Sue Indian named Little Crow. And when the photograph was first made of him in the 1850s, he was a good Indian. And he had promised to have his haircut and become civilized.

That's what an older caption tells us. But later, Little Crow leads a battle against the whites in the so-called Minnesota massacre of 1862 and his caption in the catalog changes. And he becomes a parable for the treacherous Indian and for the idea that you really can't trust them. Native Americans wouldn't be too keen on this. What is the reaction to the extent you can surmise or what evidence do you have for how Indians feel about the history of this imagery, of pictures of them? You know, it's really risky to generalize about how Indian peoples responded to photographic technology. Some tribes welcomed it. Other tribes associating camera technology with other kinds of technology that had been hurtful to their tribes, guns, canons. We're much more reluctant to collaborate with photographers. But I think what many people are coming to understand now is that the meanings that were attached to photographs

in the 19th century, those words that were scrolled on the back that told you Uncle Joe was a good Indian or Uncle Jack was a bad Indian. You know what? Those aren't the only stories we can attach to these photographs. Photographs don't have a single fixed meaning. Right. So Uncle Joe may have become generic Indian as his image was circulated. But it is possible and it has happened that he can be reinvented, re-contextualized, re-appropriated, taken back by his descendants. Exactly. And the Yankton Lakota tribe during the 1980s did a project just like this. They got together a number of those Indian portraits that had been published in the government catalog of 1877. And they reeled those photographs back in and families attached their own stories to those photographs and they published their own catalog. They know who was a good hunter and who was a good dad and who fought the whites and who refused to sign the treaty. Those stories have been handed down

and now those stories are being re-attached to a picture. And I think that's a tremendous project. And it suggests that photographs that people may have discounted for well over a century now can live again in powerful ways within Native communities. Martha Sandwase is a historian at Princeton University. You can see examples of some of the early daguerreotype images she talked about in her book, print the legend photography in the American West. It's time for another break. But stick around, because when we return the president of the United States breaks ground for, wait for it, the biggest cigar store Indian ever. You're listening to backstory. We'll be back in a minute.

This is backstory. I'm Peter Arunov. And I'm Brian Bella. We're talking today about some of the ways American Indians have been depicted over the course of American history. So far, we've covered representations that you can see. But what about images of Indians that come from what we hear? One of our producers, Kelly Jones, spoke with an anthropologist who has studied speech patterns of Indians in popular culture and Kelly brought back this report. If I asked you to play Indian, what's the first thing you would do? That's what anthropology professor Barbara Meek asks her undergrads at the beginning of the semester. Their responses might sound familiar. You know, you get the obvious responses of the how white man and the raising of your hand and the dropping of your voice.

Meek's students are reenacting what they've seen and heard in movies and on TV. And Meek is super curious about what they hear when pop culture Indians speak. One of my overall interest in all of this is trying to understand the kind of social work that language does, especially when we're not paying attention to it. And so part of my work is figuring out what exactly is it that marks that speech as Indian-like. Meek calls Indian-like speech Hollywood-Engine English. It has different grammatical rules and features, but no basis in any actual Native American practice or speech pattern. It's totally made up. Other pop culture stereotypes index different images. Hollywood has never been shy about portraying Greeks as crazy or Mexicans as lazy. But the image that's crafted by Hollywood-Engine English is the image of the disappearing Indian. Here's how it works.

Rule number one, it has to sound foreign. We hear that in the how greeting. Like this one, from the chief in Disney's 1953 Peter Pan. Oh. Okay, so the immediate interpretation is that this is someone who is from somewhere else. Along with the how, Hollywood-Engines also invent words, ditch verb tenses, and say me instead of I to refer to themselves, all in order to sound more foreign. Like in this Bugs Bunny episode from 1960. Bus! Bus! Where are you going, Bus? Oh boy, me wouldn't like to be me tonight. So in that case, you hear the use of um, which is really pervasive across linguistic performances. And it's not really derived from any actual linguistic practice in my life. Rule number two is, Hollywood-Engine English has to be slow and plotting in comparison to the more fluent speech of the other characters.

Take this clip from a 1988 episode of MacGyver. Hello. My name is Standing Wolf. Interflats is a place of power. If wires go up, they will harm the spirits of the mountain. But Standing Wolf, I respect your beliefs. You can contrast to the other characters who are speaking quickly and more fluently in the American Indian characters. Our portrayed is having more difficulty in expressing themselves. Rule number three, Hollywood-Engine English must be sprinkled with references to nature. Here's an Indian in an episode of Quantum Leap from 1990. My breath is a hawk. Oh, it's light. It flies where it wants. Or again, the chief from Peter Pan. Oh, many moons, red man, fight pill, face lost boys. So another one here is the four many moons, right? Because American Indians characters,

or at least in the imagination, count time using celestial bodies rather than clocks or watches or something. And again, it positions the American Indian character in a less civilized, more primitive slot. And finally, rule number four. The truest Hollywood engine is a stoic one who is all but silent. Either a narrator or other character can speak for them as is the case in many John Wayne movies, or they can mutter monosilabically like Shep Proudfoot in Fargo, which came out in 1996. So do you remember getting a call Wednesday night? No. You do reside there at 1425 Fremont Terrace. Yep. Anyone else residing there? No. Well, Mr. Proudfoot, this call came in past three. Lest you think that Hollywood engine English is part of a vanishing era, here's a clip from Parks and Rec, a show that's still on the air at the time of this broadcast. In the scene, the character Ken Hotate,

tribal elder of the Wamapoke Indians, is performing a ritual to lift a fake Indian curse from the town, a curse that he fakes threatened to put there. At this point, we get subtitles that read, I am not saying anything. No one can understand me anyway. In case he didn't catch that, it was a slow and low. Okay, so this isn't Hollywood engine English. It's Hollywood engine gibberish. We can laugh along with Ken, as he pulls one over on the citizens of Pawnee. But I think that Ken Hotate is an Indian character that proves the rule. Real Indian practice remains hidden behind an imaginary style of speaking that has nothing to do with actual Native American languages. Because when he's not trying to fake a real Indian language, you can hear the low and disfluent Hollywood engine influence in that character's English.

There are two things I know about white people. They love Matchbox 20, and they are terrified of curses. You'd think we would have come a long way from the how of the Indian chief in Peter Pan in 1953. But Hollywood engine English is not a vanishing practice. That's Kelly Jones, one of our producers. We also heard from Barbara Meek, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan. In February 1913, just over 100 years ago, President William Howard Taft came to Staten Island for a groundbreaking ceremony. Congress had set aside a piece of federal land on a cliff top there for a new monument. It would be known as the National American Indian Memorial. It was really going to be a spectacular construction. This is Frederick Hoxie, a historian at the University of Illinois. This monument, he explains,

was going to consist of an enormous bronze statue of an Indian warrior, replete with feather headdress, a bone arrow dangling in one hand, and the other hand, outstretched in a sign of peace. The 160-foot statue would sit atop a seven-story pedestal with a museum at its base, all told the monument would tower 900 feet above the water, making it higher than the statue of Liberty. The idea was to symbolize the free gift of a continent to the newcomers from Europe, and it was supposed to symbolize this transition from the old savage ways of life to the new modern America. The memorial was the brainchild of Rodman Wanamaker, son of the Philadelphia department store founder. He had an active interest in American Indians, or at least in the idea of them. Like many of his time, he was convinced that Indians were going extinct, hence his proposal for a memorial.

Here's how it was described in the official program, handed out at the groundbreaking ceremony. A lonely lofty figure, where the sea will forever moan a dirge for a vanished race, where sun and stars, and wind and thunder, the gods and his great-world cathedral, may utter the speech of his soul, but now to fall upon unheeding ears of bronze. Posterity will applaud the honor we do ourselves, and gathering up the life story of this virile and picturesque race, while yet the rays of the setting sun fall upon their departing footprints. Now, if you go to our website, you can see some photos of this dedication ceremony, which not accidentally took place on Washington's birthday, and you'll see that there were all sorts of prominent dignitaries there, including a few dozen Indian chiefs. Turns out they were representing tribes from all over the country. And so I had to ask Fred Hoxie, 32 Indians from around the country,

why would they participate in this bizarre event? Well, that's a great question. They came to be visible. They came to be to receive the invisibility. And, you know, the bar was pretty low for American Indians to have an impact on the American public at this time. This is a time when Americans believed that Indians were savage people who could not survive in the modern world. So, first of all, just to be there, to be present, to be a part of the ceremony, was something that was at least symbol that they hadn't gone away. So, this is a bit of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, this is a memorial to the vanished Indian, and then the Indians show up. Right. And what the other thing is that I have tracked many of the delegations who came, and it's interesting that many of the people who did come were actually political leaders in their community who used the opportunity of being present in New York City, of being in the presence of well-the-president of the United States and Congressman and other people to say. And by the way, we'd like to have a talk with you

about the leasing of our lands and about the fact that you're sending our children away to school, and we're doing this. So, sort of like one of those G20 summits, where everybody poses for a picture, and then in the hallways they grab each other by the elbow. And so, these were very savvy political leaders, and they were struggling to find a way to have a voice, to have an impact on the society around them, and this ceremony was an opportunity to do that. The ceremony concluded with a flag raising, and then with all the Indians who were there, signing a document called Declaration of Allegiance to the United States. Over the next few months, Wanamaker had that same document taken to 66 Indian reservations all over the country. The person leading that expedition had to explain to many of the Indians signing it, that it wasn't bestowing citizenship on them, but rather giving them the right to honor their country. If you have ever been to New York Harbor,

you know there is no humongous American Indian there. Ground was broken for the monument, but organizers weren't able to raise the funds to actually build it. And with the advent of World War I public support for the project quickly, well, it vanished. As for the Indians represented at that bizarre event, and not only did they decided they not vanish, Hoxys says they emerged from the 19 teens with a more prominent voice than they had ever had before. During World War I, American Indians served in the Army and in the Navy even though they weren't citizens, they won lots of accolades for their service, but they also began to pick up on the rhetoric once America entered World War I, the rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson about self-determination of nations and about people being able to pick their own leaders. And that language resonated with American Indian leaders of the time, some of whom had been at that ceremony and others in their circles who said, well gee, captive nations, that sounds pretty familiar to us.

Self-determination, that's a great idea. How about if we have a little of that here? We begin to advocate for citizenship, and as citizenship, not just to blend in with everyone else, but citizenship to give them the ability to fight publicly for their interest, to testify in court, to act in all the ways that a citizen should in a democracy. And one of the reasons we have courts and citizens exercise their rights and courts is to protect their property. So the irony of a great memorial to the free gift of the land is that it might be a pointed departure or energizing moment for reclaiming that ownership of the land. Absolutely, and there's another thread that begins to surface right at this same time of Indians using the United States Court of Claims and other courts to enforce treaty agreements that had been made in the 19th century. Many times treaties with had provisions that had long been forgotten about hunting and fishing rights or about property rights, boundaries, land use, and so on.

And Indians in the early 20th century began going to court to try to have those rights enforced. And there were victories and defeats, but what really drew people into this effort was the fact that they could actually have, literally have a day in court. They could bring their cases forward. And again, be heard and be seen as modern participants in American society. That's Frederick Hoxie, a historian at the University of Illinois. We'll post some drawings of the proposed monument as well as some newspaper accounts of the groundbreaking at backstoryradio.org. Our final story for the hour picks up where Fred Hoxie left off with one of the court battles he talked about. It involved the Wallapai tribe of Northwestern Arizona, who in the years between the two world wars,

went head-to-head with the mighty Santa Fe Pacific Railroad. Because the Santa Fe's tracks ran through the desert, the railroad was desperate to control any and all water sources along their lawn. They claimed rights to a spring that would later become part of the Wallapai reservation, and they had the Hootspa to charge the Wallapai for access to that water. For their part, the Wallapai argued that they had been using the spring long before any settlers, not to mention railroads, came along, and so the land should belong to them. That claim invoked a legal principle dating back to the 1800s, but it had since fallen out of practice with reservations and shifts in Indian policy. It was known as Aboriginal Title. Anyone who claimed it needed only to point to where they were living at the time. Historian Christian McMillan has written about this case. He told me that popular images of Western Indians as somehow outside of standard conceptions of property rights

was central to the Santa Fe Railroad's case. So there are two things that they base their claim on. One, a broad sense amongst Americans at the time that Indians, especially like the Wallapai, who are generally considered nomadic, in a really pejorative sense of that word, couldn't possibly actually have any claimable rights with a specific piece of land because they just flitted around the landscape. So that's one sort of broad idea that many possess. The law really is based on that at the time. But then some Indians can't really own stuff. Not all Indians. I mean, as you know, depending on where we're talking about the country and what time of American history. But at this moment with this tribe. And yeah, who lived in this particular way, who were not farming massive amounts of land. They didn't build buildings that I know, et cetera. They are considered to be the lowest of the low

when it comes to any kind of claimable property rights. But the Santa Fe also knew they had to have actual, some actual legal basis for claiming this land. And they claimed that they had bought this land from two settlers towards the end of the 19th century before the railroad reached this land. And part of the dispute is over whether or not they bought this tract of land before the reservation came into being as a legal place from the executive order. So the Santa Fe was there before the Indians. That's their claim. And what's really fascinating about this is that as the case progressed, they started collecting depositions. And the two men whom they claimed to have bought the land from, both disavowed that claim and said, no, we could have never sold this land to the railroad because it was always Wallapai land. Well, this isn't just about land and water and the lots. It's about some pretty impressive human beings, as I understand it.

I want you to tell me about one of them, this Indian activist named Fred Mahone. What's the deal with him? Sure. Fred Mahone was born towards the end of the 19th century, went to the on-reservation school until he left for Shalako Indian school in the Midwest. And then as did about 90% of the young men in the Indian boarding schools, Shalako, among them, shipped off to France to fight in the American expositionary forest during World War I. When he came back to the United States after the war, he went to Southern California to look for work and somehow made contact with what was called the Mission Indian Federation. A really frankly radical Indian separatist group who wanted total sovereignty over their own affairs. And Mahone became enamored of this message and really taken by other Indians in great numbers, frankly,

standing up for what he believed to be their essential rights, which was their right to decide for themselves how to run their lives and at base to claim their land and to have their land be theirs and be in their control. And he latches on to the Peach Springs controversy because it's still going on in the early 1920s. Well, it sounds like we need an actual gluer here. Right, Mahone was not an attorney, if I'm correct. But this guy Felix Kohn, who worked for the Interior Department, was an attorney. Tell me a little bit about Kohn and his conceptions of the law. Kohn was a brilliant lawyer in many, many respects. Kohn picked up this case in the late 1930s after the Department of Interior and the Justice Department lawyers had gotten a hold of the case and said there was no case. They looked at all the depositions that had been collected. They looked at the evidence

and their claim was that the Walla Pi had no property right claim to this land. And this went on for 15 years before Kohn got a hold of it. And they were operating with the same imagery of the Walla Pi, they're kind of feckless, mobile, not really developing that. Right. Kohn really picked up where Mahone left off. It was Mahone's great insight and other Walla Pi's to document their land use on the Walla Pi reservation. He interviewed Walla Pi elders. He took photographs of grave sites, photographs of farms. He interviewed a dozen white settlers from the 19th century who were still alive in order to document Walla Pi land use. He understood this was the key to the case. Kohn, because of his role in the federal government and his expertise in federal Indian law, began to see that the evidence that someone like Mahone had collected could be used to revive these older ideas

of Indian title that had not been applied in the 20th century. What began to happen by the end of the 1930s is that other tribes, similarly situated to the Walla Pi, were also beginning to bring their cases through the courts. By 1940 or so, there were about 100 cases making their way through the court of claims and the appellate courts. So the decision comes down when? December, early December, 1941. I think three days after Pearl Harbor. And the essential ruling is that if an Indian tribe can prove that they've lived on a piece of land and used it since what the court called time immemorial, then they have an Aboriginal claim, Aboriginal title claim to that land. So what did that decision do for the broader image of Indians? And frankly, they're right to use the land in any way they wanted to. The most tangible way it changed in the images of the Indian in Mahone

was allow Indians to claim historical ties to land and begin to erase this idea that Indians disappeared from the landscape to erase this idea that Indians like the Walla Pi have no discernible property rights and Indian history, which up till that point had no professional basis. There was no scholarship on Indian history for the most part. Anthropology and Indians had had a long relationship. A difficult one. Long and difficult relationship focused on other things. And some anthropologists famously thought that Indians had no history that they lived in the present moment and what they were doing in the 1920s and 1930s was what they called salvage anthropology, trying to create texts that would represent Aboriginal worlds that were quickly, rapidly disappearing and that history didn't exist.

And what Mahone did and then what Cohen solidified, along with the help of many others, of course, was to say that, no, no, no, no. Indians have an actual material history in a place that needs to be legally recognized. And the only way to prove that is through historical research. But no one was really doing that until this case made it an imperative. Christian McMillan is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and the author of Making Indian Law, the Wauwapai Land Case and the birth of ethno-history. That's going to do it for us today, but we hope we can continue the conversation online, visit us at BexdoryRadio.org and visit us at BexdoryRadio.org and visit us at BexdoryRadio.org and visit us at BexdoryRadio.org and let us know what impact images of American Indians have made into your life. And while you're there,

take a moment to help us shape our next few episodes. Currently in the works are shows about presidential overreach, the history of shopping, and American fantasies about the future. We'd love to hear your questions and stories. You can leave a comment or send an email to Bexdory at Virginia.edu. We're also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, at BexdoryRadio. Whatever you do, don't be a stranger. Where the hell are you? Where the hell are you? Where the hell are you? Where the hell are you? Where the hell are you? Today's episode of Backstory was produced by Tony Field, Nina Ernest, Andrew Parsons, Kelly Jones, Emily Gattick, and Robert Armongal. Jamal Milner is our engineer. We had helped from Coley, L. High, special thanks this week, to the Walla Pie Tribal Council and Cultural Center, and to Francie Deep. Backstory's executive producer is Andrew Windham.

Major support for Backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional funding is provided by Weinstein Properties, by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment, and by History Channel. History made every day. Brian Ballot is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Peter Owneth is professor of history in Meredith at UVA, and senior research fellow at Monichello. Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond. Backstory was created by Andrew Windham, for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Backstory is distributed by PRX,

the public radio exchange.