Indigenous assimilation and absorption in the United States and Australia

Pacific Historical Review

Volumn 75, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 563-585

  Ellinghaus, Katherine ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ACCULTURATION; IMMIGRANT POPULATION; INDIGENOUS POPULATION;

AUSTRALASIA; AUSTRALIA; NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES;

EID: 33751316998     PISSN: 00308684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/phr.2006.75.4.563     Document Type: Article

References (132)

1. Cong. Rec., 54 Cong., 1 sess. (1897), 1993.
2. Patrick Wolfe, "Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race," American Historical Review, 106 (2001), from www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/106.3/ah000866.html; quotation on p. 10.
3. The Bringing Them Home report estimates that between one in three and one in ten Aboriginal children were removed from their families between 1910 and 1970. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Sydney, 1997), 37. At the policy's height in the United States, in 1900, 21,568 Native American children were enrolled in boarding schools, a number estimated to be about one-third of the targeted age group.
4. David Wallace Adams, Ed0ucation for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience (Lawrence, Kans., 1995), 58
5. Ward Churchill, "The Crucible of American Indian Identity," in Duane Champagne, ed., Contemporary Native American Cultural Issues (Walnut Creek, Calif., 1999), 52.
6. Victoria Haskins and Margaret D. Jacobs, "Stolen Generations and Vanishing Indians: The Removal of Indigenous Children as a Weapon of War in the United States and Australia," in James Marten, ed., Children and War: A Historical Anthology (New York, 2002), 227-241.
7. See also Margaret D. Jacobs, "Maternal Colonialism: White Women and Indigenous Child Removal in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940," Western Historical Quarterly, 36 (2005), 453-476.
8. The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission used the following definition of genocide, coined by the United Nations Convention Against Genocide in 1948: "Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, any national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as: A) killing members of the group; b) causing serious bodily harm to members of the group; c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." Quoted in Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home, 270-271.
9. See Quinton Beresford and Paul Omaji, Our State of Mind: Racial Planning and the Stolen Generations (Fremantle, W.A., 1998)
10. Peter Read, A Rape of the Soul So Profound: The Return of the Stolen Generations (Sydney, 1999)
11. and Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800-2000 (Fremantle, W.A., 2000).
12. See, for example, Robert Benson, ed., Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (Tucson, 2001)
13. Genevieve Bell, "Telling Stories Out of School: Remembering the Carlisle Indian School, 1879-1918" (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1998)
14. Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1998)
15. Mary Lou Hultgren and Paulette Fairbanks Molin, To Lead and to Serve: American Indian Education at Hampton Institute, 1878-1923 (Virginia Beach, Va., 1989)
16. Devon Mihesuah, Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, 1851-1909 (Urbana, Ill., 1993)
17. K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called it Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln, Nebr., 1994)
18. Scott Riney, The Rapid City Indian School, 1898-1933 (Norman, Okla., 1999)
19. and Robert A. Trennert, Jr., The Phoenix Indian School: Forced Assimilation in Arizona, 1891-1935 (Norman, Okla., 1988).
20. "Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs," 35 Cong., 1 sess., S.exdoc 11 (1857), 311.
21. Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 (New York, 1995), 189-210.
22. Adams, Education for Extinction, 63.
23. See, for example, Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference, 1889 (Lake Mohonk, N.Y., 1890), 18-22,
24. and Jorge Noriega, "American Indian Education in the United States: Indoctrination for Subordination to Colonialism," in M. Annette Jaimes, ed., The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance (Boston, 1992), 380.
25. For more information on what happened to "returned students," see Adams, Education for Extinction, esp. 273-306
26. and Wilbert H. Ahern, "An Experiment Aborted: Returned Indian Students in the Indian School Service, 1881-1908," Ethnohistory, 44 (1997), 263-304.
27. For examples of Native American students who received higher education, see Peter Iverson, Carlos Montezuma and the Changing World of American Indians (Albuquerque, 1982)
28. Raymond Wilson, Ohiyesa: Charles Eastman, Santee Sioux (Urbana, Ill., 1983)
29. and Benson Tong and Dennis Hastings, Susan La Flesche Picotte, M.D.: Omaha Indian Leader and Reformer (Norman, Okla., 1999).
30. A. P. Elkin, "Native Education, with Special Reference to the Australian Aborigines," Oceania, 7 (1937), 489.
31. J. J. Fletcher, Clean, Clad, and Courteous: A History of Aboriginal Education in New South Wales (Marrickville, N.S.W., 1989).
32. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home, 170-171.
33. In the United States, see, for example, Benson, ed., Children of the Dragonfly, and Emily Benedek, Beyond the Four Corners of the World: A Navajo Woman's Journey (New York, 1995).
34. In Australia, see Coral Edwards and Peter Read, The Lost Children: Thirteen Australians Taken From Their Aboriginal Families Tell of the Struggle to Find Their Natural Parents (Sydney, 1989)
35. and Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home, which has a wealth of oral testimony.
36. Adams, Education for Extinction, 275.
37. Ibid., 273-306.
38. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home, 154-156, 236-240.
39. Ibid., 155, 232.
40. Read, A Rape of the Soul So Profound, 64-65.
41. See, for example, the excerpt from Margaret Tucker's autobiography quoted in Robert Manne, The Way We Live Now: Controversies of the Nineties (Melbourne, 1998), 17-21.
42. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home, also contains many heart-rending examples of this occurring.
43. See the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home, 25-150, for descriptions of the legislation in each state relevant to child removal.
44. An 1892 New York Times editorial, for example, talked about various tribes from Arizona meeting together to protest against their children being taken east to boarding school. According to the editorial, they even considered resorting to arms or running away to the mountains. José Barreiro, "First Words: When Education Became Ethnocide," Native Americas: Hemispheric Journal of Indigenous Issues, 17 (2000), 2.
45. Victoria Haskins and Margaret Jacobs describe Hopi children being escorted at gunpoint away from their parents and to school in 1906. Haskins and Jacobs, "Stolen Generations," 227-228.
46. Ward Churchill has claimed that in 1891 and again in 1893 Congress authorized the use of police, troops, and other forcible means to compel the transfer of children from reservations to boarding schools and to keep them there once they had arrived. Churchill, "The Crucible of American Indian Identity," 51.
47. Felix Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law (Washington, D.C., 1945), 79.
48. "Controlling Indian Allottees in Respect to Education of Their Children and Use of Intoxicating Liquors," 60 Cong., 1 sess., H.doc 790 (March 16, 1908)
49. "Memorial Protesting Against Legislation Authorizing Issuance of Fee-Simple Patents for Indian Allotments, etc.," in ibid., S.doc. 448 (April 22, 1908).
50. Adams, Education for Extinction, 239-270.
51. Coral Edwards, "Introduction," in Edwards and Read, The Lost Children, xiv.
52. See also Andrew Armitage, Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (Vancouver, B.C., 1995), 204-210.
53. Read, A Rape of the Soul So Profound, 78.
54. For a comprehensive discussion of child removal policies in Australia, see Haebich, Broken Circles.
55. Following Australian historian Russell McGregor, I use the term "biological absorption" to refer to efforts to control miscegenation in order to "breed out" a certain racial or ethnic identity. Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880-1939 (Carlton, Vic., 1997), 53. Biological absorption was closely linked to eugenics, a philosophy that aspired to control the genetic quality of the white population by preventing people judged "inferior" from having children and that generated much enthusiasm in both Australia and the United States in the interwar years. Australian scholars have, however, warned against conflating the two. For eugenicists, they point out, any tainting of the white race was seen as a threat - positing that a non-white race be genetically "absorbed," therefore, was related thinking, but certainly not pure eugenics.
56. See Stephen Garton, "Writing Eugenics: A History of Classifying Practices,"
57. and Russell McGregor, "'Breed Out the Colour': Reproductive Management for White Australia," in Martin Crotty, John Germov, and Grant Rodwell, eds., "A Race for a Place": Eugenics, Darwinism and Social Thought and Practice in Australia [Proceedings of the History and Sociology of Eugenics Conference, University of Newcastle, 2000], 9-18, 61-70.
58. Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Carlton South, Vic., 2002), 216-243
59. Beresford and Omaji, Our State of Mind
60. McGregor, Imagined Destinies, chap. 4
61. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London, 1999), 175-176
62. Manne, The Way We Live Now, 15-41.
63. Australia lacked federal control of indigenous affairs and the influential and well-organized humanitarian reform movement of the United States, and it was not until 1937 that the federal Minister for Home and Territories gathered together officials and administrators to discuss a national policy. Policies aimed at teaching Aborigines to become "civilized" were discussed but were overshadowed by anxieties about the threat posed to the white population by the growing Aboriginal population in the Northern Territory and Western Australia. The conference resolved that "the destiny of the natives of aboriginal origin ... lies in the ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth." Commonwealth of Australia, Aboriginal Welfare: Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities (Canberra, 1937), 21.
64. Cecil Cook to Administrator of the Northern Territory, June 27, 1933, 1940/1/408, "Marriage of white men to half-caste women," A659, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.
65. The Victorian Aborigines Protection Act of 1886 defined "half-caste" as all persons, "whatever of mixed aboriginal blood," but allowed some people of mixed descent to be defined as Aborigines: Those under age fourteen and over age thirty-four who lived with people of full descent, women of mixed descent who were married to men of full descent, and people who had been granted a license from the board. Those designated "half-caste" were allowed government rations for only another three years, clothing for another five, and blankets for another seven. The governor was also empowered to regulate where "half-castes" and their children could reside, giving him the ability to carry out the policy of removing all people of mixed descent from the stations and eventually from their entitlement to government support. "An Act to Amend an Act entitled 'An Act to Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria'" (Dec. 10, 1886).
66. Victoria Haskins, "'A Better Chance?' - Sexual Abuse and the Apprenticeship of Aboriginal Girls Under the NSW Aborigines Protection Board," Aboriginal History, 28 (2004), 33-58.
67. C. M. H. Clark, A History of Australia (6 vols., Carlton, Vic., 1981), 5: 200.
68. Andrew Markus, Australian Race Relations, 1788-1993 (St. Leonards, N.S.W., 1994), 110-154.
69. Only policymakers in Queensland appeared squeamish about the absorptionist project and tried to prevent racial mixing and to ensure the "purity" of the white race. For more information, see Katherine Ellinghaus, "Absorbing the Aboriginal Problem: Controlling Marriage in Australia in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century," Aboriginal History, 27 (2003), 185-209.
70. There were no treaties equivalent to those signed between Native Americans and white Americans in the United States; instead, the doctrine of terra nullius (which presumed that the land was empty) left Aboriginal people little legal status under the law, and certainly much less of a basis from which to claim sovereignty than the Native Americans' admittedly limited position as "domestic, dependent nations."
71. "Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs," 53 Cong., 2 sess., H.exdoc. 1 (1893), 377.
72. "Fiftieth Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners," included as part of "Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs," 66 Cong., 2 sess., H.doc 409 (1919), 218.
73. See, for example, "Rights of Children of Indian Women and U.S. Citizens Married Since August 9, 1888," included as part of "Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs," 53 Cong., 3 sess., H.exdoc 1 (1894), 65-66
74. "Correspondence on Sioux Mixed Bloods," 53 Cong., 2 sess., S.exdoc. 59 (1894)
75. "Report by Mr. Allen from the Committee on Indian Affairs," 52 Cong., 1 sess., S.rp 969 (May 18, 1896), which noted that the "term 'Indian' does not seem at all times to have been accurately defined in our legislative history" and attempted to use legal decisions concerning African American identity as precedents
76. and "Mixed Blood Indians," 54 Cong., 1 sess., H.rp 2276 (1896).
77. Elwell S. Otis, The Indian Question (New York, 1878), 281-283.
78. Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference, 1889, 117-118
79. and Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Lake Mohonk Conference, 1886 (Philadelphia, 1887), 43-44.
80. Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference, 1885 (Philadelphia, 1886), 27-28.
81. Various authors, Captain Pratt and His Work for Indian Education (Philadelphia, 1886), part 2, p. 7.
82. Fayette A. McKenzie, "The Assimilation of the American Indian," American Journal of Sociology, 19 (1914), 766.
83. "Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs," 56 Cong., 2 sess., H.doc 4 (1900), 49.
84. Lyman Abbott to Richard Henry Pratt, June 30, 1904, folder 4, box 1, Richard Henry Pratt Papers, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. (hereafter Pratt Papers).
85. Francis E. Leupp, The Indian and His Problem (New York, 1910), 343.
86. C. C. Painter, A Visit to the Mission Indians of Southern California, and Other Western Tribes (Philadelphia, 1886), 5
87. Indian Rights Association Papers, 1864-1973 (Glen Rock, N.J., 1975).
88. Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference, 10.
89. Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Lawrence, Kans., 1982)
90. and David D. Smits, "'Squaw Men,' 'Half-Breeds,' and Amalgamators: Late Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Attitudes Toward Indian-White Race-Mixing," American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 15 (1991), 29-61.
91. Hoxie, A Final Promise, 143-145.
92. "Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs," 60 Cong., 1 sess., H.doc 5 (1907), 21.
93. Proceedings of the Second Annual Lake Mohonk Conference, 1884 (Philadelphia, 1884), 21. Emphasis in original.
94. Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J., 2001).
95. "Annual Report of Commissioner of Indian Affairs," 44 Cong., 2 sess., H.exdoc 1 (1876), 379.
96. "Civilizing the Indian, before Protestant Ministers, 1891," folder 649, box 19, Pratt Papers.
97. See Peter Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law - An American History (New York, 2002)
98. Peggy Pascoe, "Race, Gender, and Intercultural Relations: The Case of Interracial Marriage," Frontiers, 22 (1991), 5-18
99. and Pascoe, "Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of 'Race' in Twentieth-Century America," Journal of American History, 83 (1996), 44-69.
100. Australian scholar Patrick Wolfe has argued that a reason for these different racial codings can be found in the different roles that white people envisioned for these groups in their settler societies. While African Americans had been brought the United States as a labor force, Native Americans' only commodity was land. This could be taken away all the more easily if indigenous identity was slowly disappearing through interracial sexual relationships. Consequently, a "one-drop" rule was applied to the larger, more threatening African American population. Wolfe, "Land, Labor, and Difference."
101. Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference, 9. Emphasis in original.
102. Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference, 1890 (Lake Mohonk, N.Y., 1890), 84-85.
103. Wolfe, "Land, Labor, and Difference," 30.
104. Report of Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis E. Leupp, Sept. 30, 1905, quoted in Wilcomb E. Washburn, ed., The American Indian and the United States: A Documentary History (2 vols., New York, 1973), 2: 738-739.
105. David Hollinger, "Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States," American Historical Review, 2003), 1363-1390.
106. See, among others, Devon A. Mihesuah, "American Indian Identities: Issues Individual Choice and Development," in Champagne, ed., Contemporary Native American Cultural Issues, 13-38
107. M. Annette Jaimes, "Federal Indian Identification Policy: A Usurpation of Indigenous Sovereignty in North America," in Jaimes, ed., The State Native America, 123-138
108. Arnold Krupat, Red Matters: Native American Studies (Philadelphia, 2002)
109. and Pauline Turner Strong and Barrick Van Winkle, "'Indian Blood': Reflections on the Reckoning and Refiguring of Native North American Identity," Cultural Anthropology, 11 (1996), 547-576.
110. Eva Marie Garroutte, "The Racial Formation of American Indians: Negotiating Legitimate Identities within Tribal and Federal Law," American Indian Quarterly, 25 2001), 225.
111. See also Churchill, "The Crucible of American Indian Identity"
112. Jaimes, "Federal Indian Identification Policy"
113. and Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, 1987), 338.
114. For a critique of Jaimes, see John P. LaVelle, "The General Allotment Act 'Eligibility' Hoax: Distortions of Law, Policy, and History in Derogation of Indian Tribes," Wicazo Sa Review, 14 (1999), 251-302.
115. Barreiro, "First Words," 2. Jorge Noriega uses the United Nations definition of 1948 to argue in favor of genocide in Noriega, "American Indian Education in the United States," 381. Laurence French does not hesitate to defi ne "forced assimilation" as "cultural genocide" and calls child removal "one of the most devastating and surreptitious methods of cultural genocide" in Laurence A. French, The Winds of Injustice: American Indians and the U.S. Government (New York, 1994), 113
116. Richard Drinnon concurred with John Collier's assessment of the termination policies of the 1950s as a form of "social genocide" because of child removal and drew on the United Nations definition to argue that "[e]very strand of [this] policy had been designed hasten the end forbidden by the Genocide Convention - namely, to destroy them as 'racial ... group, as such.' " Richard Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism (Berkeley, 1987), 243.
117. Other scholars have implied that assimilation was genocidal without actually using the word itself. Carter Revard has recently argued that the settler populations in North, Central, and South America "have worked, and still are trying by all possible means, to exterminate the native populations in these parts of the earth, whether by simple killing or by complex conversion." Carter Revard, "Preface," in Benson, ed., Children of the Dragonfl y, x.
118. David Wallace Adams described the American Indian boarding school system as the white man's conclusion that "the only way to save Indians was to destroy them, that the last great Indian war should be waged against children." Adams, Education for Extinction, 337.
119. In their comparative study, Jacobs and Haskins have argued that in the United States child removal was used as a means of control, while in Australia it was a means of both control and eradication. They base this conclusion on the different ways which governments and reformers explicitly justified child removal policies. Haskins and Jacobs, "Stolen Generations," 233.
120. Examples include Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco, 1997)
121. Michael Freeman, "Puritans and Pequots: The Question of Genocide," New England Quarterly, 68 (1995), 278-293
122. and Jaimes, "Federal Indian Identification Policy." In studies of the "American Holocaust," for example, Russell Thornton used the words "warfare" and "genocide" almost interchangeably, admitting that "the distinction between war and genocide is often not well defined," while David Stannard has pointed mainly to the importance of acknowledging outright violence against Native men, women, and children as genocidal. Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman, Okla., 1987), 49
123. David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (New York, 1992), xii, 118.
124. Ward Churchill dedicated one long footnote to the ways in which assimilation was genocidal in his 500-page study of Native American genocide. Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, 366-367n.
125. Stuart Bradfield, "'From Empires to Genocide Chic': Coming to Terms with the Stolen Generations in Australia," in Colin Tatz, ed., Genocide Perspectives II: Essays on Holocaust and Genocide (Sydney, 2003), 261.
126. Les Murray's poem "Roman Numerals" was printed in the Sydney Morning Herald on November 27, 1999, p. 46.
127. The reaction of conservatives to Bringing Them Home is detailed in Robert Manne, In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right (Melbourne, 2001).
128. See, in particular, A. Dirk Moses, "An Antipodean Genocide? The Origins of the Genocidal Moment in the Colonization of Australia," Journal of Genocide Research, 2 (2000), 89-106
129. Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain: The Question of Genocide in Australia's History (Ringwood, Vic., 2001)
130. Alison Palmer, Colonial Genocide (Bathurst, N.S.W., 2000)
131. and various authors, "'Genocide?' Australian Aboriginal History in International Perspective," special section of Aboriginal History, 25 (2001).
132. James A. Clifton, "Alternative Identities and Cultural Frontiers," in James A. Clifton, ed., Being and Becoming Indian: Biographical Studies of North American Frontiers (Chicago, 1989), 6.