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This chapter focuses on Collier and the US Indian Service (IS). Collier brought applied anthology into the Indian Service so as to develop culturally appropriate policies—an innovation he claimed was inspired by what he saw in Mexico. Collier drew on examples of indirect colonial rule, including Spanish colonialism in New Spain, to further a scientific democratic governance of cultural and racial differences. Collier and others sought to promote and use democratic forms of Native leadership. During and after the Second World War, Collier, along with Laura Thompson and other academics, extended what they had learned regarding the management of ethnic difference to the Japanese-American internment camp at Poston, Arizona, which was run by the Indian Service, and, later, to U.S. “dependencies” abroad and “minorities” at home. This chapter charts the shift toward a more universalizing view of modernization and its application to diverse groups.

If the Prologue presents the specific action that altered the state of reservation resource development, this first chapter explains how we got there. Opening with the federal government’s warm embrace of the first energy proposals to the Northern Cheyenne tribe in the 1960s, the chapter describes the legal regime that placed federal, not tribal, officials in charge of reservation development. Tracking the ideological underpinnings of these laws back to the 1930s, it shows that while John Collier’s Indian New Deal ended the worst of federal Indian policies – such as allotment and forced assimilation – paternalistic assumptions of Indian inferiority remained in federal law. Further, the chapter demonstrates how laws governing reservation development were patterned off a dysfunctional legal regime used for leasing public minerals, which allowed energy companies to acquire vast amounts of resources on the cheap. Little of this, of course, was known to Cheyenne leaders in the 1960s, who collaborated with federal officials to secure the largest and most lucrative energy contracts possible.

The Introduction lays out the book’s central claim that, in the 1970s, energy tribes expanded their capacity to govern reservation resources and thus secured a belated recognition of their legal authority to develop these assets. After first describing the antiquated legal structure that prevented tribes from controlling reservation development, the introduction highlights the transformative role the Northern Cheyenne played in halting mining projects threatening its community. This tribe also spearheaded a national movement to prepare similarly situated tribes to control energy development and to demand changes in federal law that recognized tribal sovereignty over reservation resources. The Introduction situates this story of expanding tribal sovereignty within American Indian historiography on the Indian self-determination policy, but shows how it provides a surprisingly missing explanation for how tribes reclaimed control over their resources. In addition, this work contributes to the literature in energy and environmental history by demonstrating how local actions to shape development emanated out to affect global resource flows and the national legal structures governing those resources.

This chapter discusses John Collier's photographs of New Mexico, their captions, his correspondence, and “Portrait of America.” It shows how his photographs exemplify the modifications carried out by the changing mission of the Historical Section to the place of religion within the FSA/OWI file. Before the United States joined the Allied forces in World War II, photographers used religious activities as evidence of the culture of the poor. Their photographs illustrated the physical beauty of rural church life and stressed elements of American religion often overlooked by writers and even the participants themselves. In other cases, pictures of religious behaviors were used to demonstrate the need for social reform while at the same time marginalizing the charitable activities of faith communities. Before Pearl Harbor, photographers' commitments to the New Deal and their attraction to vernacular forms of art shaped how they understood religious behavior.

Chapter 4 argues that the continuing legacy of allotment shapes the conditions of native political representation under the Indian Reorganization Act (1934), which ostensibly sought to replace the allotment program with a sustained commitment to promoting native “community.” The kinds of native collectivity produced by reorganization implicitly depend on the heteronormative dynamics of allotment—particularly the self-evidence of the nuclear-family form and of a stable distinction between public and private spheres. Looking at significant policy statements about the Indian Reorganization Act before and after its passage, the chapter illustrates how the conjugally centered privatization performed by allotment helps structure and provide an ordering limit for what can count as legitimate native governance, using the Pine Ridge reservation as an example. Counterposing the notion of “domestic relations” institutionalized under reorganization to Ella Deloria’s representation of “kinship” in Speaking of Indians (1944) and Waterlily (completed in the late 1940s, published in 1988), it shows how she locates forms of identification and interdependence that cannot be registered in an allotment imaginary and, therefore, exposes the series of assumptions about home and family that continue to undergird U.S. Indian policy in the 1930s and 1940s.

Histories of peyotism in the United States tend to treat it as deeply rooted and universally embraced in indigenous communities. This chapter reminds us that this was not always the case. During its period of rapid growth, from around 1910 to 1940, peyotism was an evangelical religion in most Native American communities and was met with a great deal of resistance. The peyotists were often young men with ties outside of the community, and their practices challenged traditional hierarchies, traditional practices, and older power-brokers in their communities. In some cases, those who opposed peyotism in Native American communities adopted the same language as the missionaries and the Indian Agents in decrying the spread of peyotism, and in at least one case, (on the Navajo reservation in 1940), this prompted the tribal government to ban peyote on the reservation. The ban passed even with the opposition of the U.S. government, which by 1940 supported the rights of peyotists to practice their religion.

This chapter shows how the contradictions and frustrations surrounding veterans came to a head with the onset of the “Indian New Deal” initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt's Indian commissioner, John Collier. As Collier pushed his agenda of reform and return to communal landholding on Indian reservations, patriotism became the privileged weapon of an active minority of veterans spearheading resistance to the New Deal. Moreover, World War II proved a very favorable moment to realize a rhetorical and organizational connection that linked patriotism, the conservative defense of Indians' civic rights, and the rising tide of termination. At the end of the 1940s, the World War I generation reached the peak of its influence in Indian country and demonstrated the complexity of Indian patriotism. A new generation of Indian soldiers was soon to take their place. They would turn ceremonies popularized with World War I into a new, modern Indian tradition.

This chapter details the establishment of the Institute of Ethnic Affairs. In January 1945, John Collier resigned from the Department of the Interior where he had served for twelve years as Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs—longer than any Indian commissioner before or since. Together with his wife, anthropologist Laura Thompson, Collier founded the Institute of Ethnic Affairs. According to its prospectus, the Institute would be a nonprofit organization whose purpose was “to search for solutions to problems within and between white and colored races, cultural minority groups, and dependent peoples at home and abroad.” The Ethnic Institute would be interdisciplinary, educational in nature, and would recommend administrative changes requiring governmental action.

Chapter seven details the adoption of the superintendent’s constitution, the various groups vying for power at the time, and the community’s reaction and decision on the Indian Reorganization Act. By the early 1930’s the people of Turtle Mountain had been pursuing a claim against the federal government for decades. At the end of the Allotment Era, the federal government presented the community with a constitution that functioned less a governing document and more a tool to perpetuate control over tribal governance through the federal government. While many in the community recognized the deficiencies in the proposed constitution they nonetheless were led to believe that the constitution was a mandatory step toward a claim. Choosing the claim more than the constitution itself, Turtle Mountain ratified the proposed document. When the Indian Reorganization Act presented an alternative, the people of Turtle Mountain rejected it in fear of the consequences for the claim.

This chapter presents the author's account of writing an article for the Institute of Ethnic Affairs' monthly News Letter, explaining the difference between a “strategic” and a “nonstrategic” trusteeship and why the latter was better for the islands formerly mandated to Japan. She says that the writing assignment may have been the hardest she was ever given. It also describes John Collier's angry reaction to President Truman's announcement in November 1946 that the United States was prepared to place all of Micronesia except Guam under the Security Council. This was to become the only “strategic trusteeship” in the world.

This chapter traces the rediscovery of the medieval mystery plays which had been suppressed at the Reformation. The texts were painstakingly recovered, edited, and published in the first half of the nineteenth century, by medieval scholars but also by radicals like William Hone who were keen to emphasize the political value of expanding the literary canon. At the start of the nineteenth century, then, vernacular devotional drama was largely unknown; by the 1850s, the genre had been accorded a place in an evolutionary design that privileged the achievements of Shakespeare, and by the early twentieth century, performance was finally countenanced, albeit under the watchful eye of the Lord Chamberlain. This is a narrative of recuperation but also of misunderstanding, as the mystery plays were also positioned as comic burlesque and farce in constructions of the literary canon which stressed the aesthetic and religious superiority of the Protestant present.

Powwow history continues in this chapter, picking up from the early colonial dance societies and moving to discussion of the performance genres of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As part of its effort to destroy Indian culture, the U.S. government prohibited Native dance during these decades. Indian dancers resisted repression and preserved their cultural traditions covertly. They also participated in ceremonials, world’s fairs, and wild west shows. This chapter examines intertribal and transcultural venues where body actions and performance practices were learned by and shared among Native Americans. Axtmann also identifies sites where Native Americans and other indigenous peoples were “exhibited” and discusses the distinctions between Native and non-Native notions of power. When the colonial period transitioned to the postcolonial, and John Collier became Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1934, Indian dance was once again permitted. Powwows as we know them today began to emerge during the 1930s and 1940s.

Chastened by how close a national ban of peyote came to passing in early 1918, the following October a group of Native American peyotists gathered in El Reno, Oklahoma, in order to found the Native American Church. This chapter explores this remarkable moment of political activism, along with the histories of peyotism in the United States that led to this initiative. The deep history of peyotism north of the border remains somewhat unclear, though we can be certain that the individuals who came together in 1918 to found a church that could, in turn, enjoy constitutional protections were participants in practices that had consolidated in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Their efforts to create an institutionalized church that would be legible to the U.S. government did not immediately bear fruit, as anti-peyotists dominated the Bureau of Indians Affairs (BIA) through the 1920s, though these efforts did begin to see significant success after John Collier became chief of the BIA in 1933.

This chapter focuses on three mentors that influenced Ray Bradbury as a writer: Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, and Leigh Brackett. Bradbury was in the early stages of a process of literary education that began roughly from 1934 and lasted until 1953. During the early 1940s, his own maturing reading interests were enriched from time to time by friends like Henry Kuttner, who introduced him to the fiction of writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Eudora Welty, Charles Jackson, William Faulkner, Thorne Smith, and John Collier. This chapter examines how Brackett and Hamilton broadened Bradbury's reading and writing horizons throughout the early 1940s, citing in particular Brackett's influence on Bradbury's science fiction and Hamilton's introduction of Bradbury to authors such as Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, and Emily Dickinson. The chapter also considers Bradbury's fascination with Williamson's fantasy and horror tales, including the werewolf novel, Darker than You Think.