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Chapter Four addresses colonizing governmental discourses surrounding the Dawes Act of 1887 and the identity constructions that arose as the nation edged ever closer to removed Native communities in the West. The chapter, particularly, argues that the U.S. government transformed the paternal relationship it employed in the 1830s to exclude Natives into a rhetorical strategy of assimilation. In the process, American Indians were constituted as dependent and yet civilized enough for agricultural production as a key contribution to the U.S. nation-state. This illustrated a commodification of Native communities through republicanism. And, the government constructed itself as a republican father that would train American Indians for possible citizenship through the allotment policy’s insistence on yeoman farming. The late nineteenth century promises of citizenship pointed to the possibility that American Indians could exist as equals within the civis. However, the colonizing Dawes Act continued to distance American Indians from the U.S. nation. This conflation of assimilation and segregation underscored the identity duality of U.S. nationalism. But, the possibility that citizenship was feasible acted as a decolonial rupture that American Indians worked through to petition for both U.S. citizenship and separate sovereignty.

The Dawes Act and allotment brought an end to the Creek Nation. Although both Creeks and black Indians struggled to hold onto their land, those with lighter skin were relatively better off. The oil boom in Tulsa proved particularly harmful to Indians.

This chapter focuses on the impact of legislative efforts to protect the landed estate of Indians. Members of Congress trying to protect the remaining landed estate of Indians followed a twisted path, replete with compromises and maneuverings that added great complexity and ambiguity to the administration of Indian affairs. This was especially true for the Five Civilized Tribes whose success in mirroring the ways of the Euro-Americans proved to be a legal liability in the post-allotment era.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief background on the discovery of oil at the Cushing field in Oklahoma in 1912, which eventually supplied 17 percent of all oil marketed in the United States and by 1917 accounted for 3 percent of total world production. A profile of Jackson Barnett is then presented, a middle-aged and illiterate Creek Indian who experienced a major windfall after several wells were drilled in his property. The power struggle among many parties seeking to control his estate is discussed, which illuminates the broader principles of law that gave authority to certain individuals and governmental agencies to manage Indian property.

This introduction appraises the processes underlying the historical encounter between immigrants and Indians in the early twentieth century. It brings into the same frame two dominant processes in U.S. history: the unceasing migration of people to North America, and the protracted dispossession of indigenous peoples who inhabited the continent. Although this historical encounter at Spirit Lake took place in a small corner of North Dakota, it encapsulates the story of conquest and white settlement and the less publicized but equally important story of the dispossession and survival of Native Americans. Here we confront the human face of expropriation: the land takers and the dispossessed. Further, the introduction probes the consequences of offering land to peasants from abroad in order to recruit laborers for the U.S.’s mission of expansion and development. Decades of living side by side created multiple and contradictory layers of conflict, adaptation, resistance, and mutuality within the social relationships on this land.

This chapter maps sympathy’s place in the emplotment of what became known as the “New Southwest” after the U.S.–Mexican War. The chapter reads sympathy in the work of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, who opposed U.S. settlers plotting out the American West. In Life Among the Piutes, Hopkins countered the proposals that would eventually become the Dawes Act of 1887, which prescribed allotment (parceling land for tribesmembers’ individual ownership) and severalty (stripping Native Americans of tribal citizenship). She guides Anglo readers in understanding “love thy neighbor as thyself” as a principle best expressed from far away. After Gwin’s Land Law of 1851, de Burton lost a fortune defending her family’s rancho against U.S. squatters. In The Squatter and the Don, she inverts the stock character of the “sad” Mexicano to associate U.S. Americans with tears and grief through the figures of the white railroad baron, corrupt lawyer, and settler citizen.

Chapter 5 explores what happened to the story of the Spanish colony at Ajacán when it was unsuccessfully suppressed during the era of U.S. expansionism. The chapter focuses on Robert Greenhow, a translator working for the U.S. State Department in the 1840s, and the steps he took to suppress the documentation of Ajacán in the writings of the eighteenth-century historian, Andrés González de Barcia, thereby protecting “First Discovery” for Virginia. Greenhow’s career – which includes his duplicitous use of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Journal of Julius Rodman – brings to the foreground the geopolitical stakes of the story of Don Luis precisely when U.S.indigenous and international relations dramatically converged with the U.S. Supreme Court case of Johnson v. M’Intosh. Don Luis’s reappearance in two later texts – William Cullen Bryant’s A Popular History of the Unites States and Alice Fletcher’s Indian Education and Civilization – recasts the Ajacán narrative as Anglo-America’s primal counterfactual fantasy: the origination of a Spanish-American United States. The chapter concludes by exploring the work of two Omaha translators, Susette La Flesche Tibbles and her half-brother, Francis La Flesche, who witnessed the massive expropriation of indigenous lands before and after the passage of the Dawes Act.

Building on Robert Frazer’s framework for understanding forts of the West, this chapter organizes the frontier complex into five eras. The era of Indian removal (1804–1848) to Indian Territory cleared the path for white settlement in the East while driving a westward movement of white settlers. The restraint era (1848–1887) witnessed the cattle trails, cowboys, wagon trains, pioneers, Indian wars, and transcontinental railroad, out of which the mythic frontier was created. The reservation era (1887–1934) extends from the Dawes Severalty Act to the Indian Reorganization Act and represents the pacification of Indians and the firm establishment of whiteness in the West. With the advent of affordable cars and paved roads, the recreation era (1920–1980) saw a burst of frontier tourism reinforced by Wild West Hollywood imagery. Attendance at museums and historic sites has been in decline in the redoubling era (1980-present). Neoliberalism led to globalization and deindustrialization along with the destabilization of middle-class family incomes that has resulted in less discretionary income for family vacations. Combined with the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and new social media, traditional historic sites and museums are now faced with stiff competition for tourists who were once guaranteed in the recreation era of the frontier complex.

For decades, researchers have investigated the impact of market economies on indigenous peoples' lifeways and natural resources. This chapter reveals how incorporation of Navajo pastoralists into the American wool and livestock markets via the trading-post system initiated a turning point in Diné history. The passage of the Dawes Act in 1887, triggered the loss of over 80 million acres of tribal lands and ultimately impoverished thousands of Native Americans. That same year, revisions proposed to the wool tariff initiated a change in federal policy that ultimately held profound consequences for Navajo woolgrowers and weavers. Although their reservation was periodically enlarged to accommodate the need for increased grazing lands, Navajos' livelihood was significantly compromised. As livestock owners and weavers, Navajo women were doubly disadvantaged by changes in the domestic wool tariff coupled with patriarchal assumptions that obliterated their contributions to subsidizing the reservation economy from 1880 to World War II.