Indian Rights Today Rest on Work of Ancestors

This Indian Country

American Indian Activists and the Place They Made

by Frederick E Hoxie

Penguin Press; 2012; 467 pages

Hardcover $32.95

Paperback $20.00

Ebook $16.99

ISBN 978-1-59420-365-7

Reviewed by Helen Brandt

An immediate problem in 1800 for people from England, Spain and France was what to do about the people already living on the North American continent. The preferred solution was to erase them from the map and official life of the United States. Hoxie tells the stories of individual Indian leaders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who resisted this solution.

The prevailing attitude towards Indians, as inferior and incompetent people requiring protection from the government as one would require for children, continued through the 19th and into the 20th century. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, describing Indians in 1846, referred to “this unfortunate race.” When appealing U.S. versus Thurston County in the early 20th century, the judges stated that federal supervision of citizen Indians was justified because these individuals “are still members of their tribes and of an inferior and dependent race.”

Readers are introduced first to James McDonald, a Choctaw lawyer who represented the tribe in negotiations with the federal government in the early 1800s. Settlers coming to Mississippi wanted the Choctaw people moved to Arkansas so the settlers could use the land. The Choctaws were engaged in profitable plantation agriculture, cattle ranching and trade, and many were not interested in moving.

Subsequent chapters tell of other Indian leaders who negotiated with the federal authorities to retain tribal lands and resist termination. Hoxie explains how Indians today have been able to assert their treaty rights and have them enforced by courts. Their predecessors laid the precedents that forced the United States to recognize their legal rights.

One chapter describes Sarah Winnemucca of eastern Oregon’s Paiute tribe who, through her lectures and writing in the late 1800s, cut through the United States’ official story-telling to recount the violence and injustices perpetrated on tribes by the federal government. Another chapter recounts the efforts of Vine Deloria, Jr., Sioux, who briefly taught at Western Washington State College (WWU) and later became executive director of the National Congress of American Indians.

After reading this book, if you visit the Southeast and Midwest today, you will realize that many of the towns have Indian names. The words are reminders of the people living there before the colonial invasion.

I lived in Tennessee for years and knew the story of the removal of the Cherokee, but never realized how articulately the nineteenth and twentieth century Indian leaders had argued with the United States government for the right to retain their ancestral lands and assert their rights as citizens.

The book is available at the Bellingham Public Library under the number: 323.1197 HOXIE 2012.