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1 AGRICULTURE, CIVILIZATION, AND

AMERICAN INDIAN POLICY

A consistent theme in United States Indian policy has been the attempt to civilize and assimilate Native Americans along agrarian lines. The federal government, religious organizations, and interested "friends of the Indians" saw settled western-style agriculture as the most appropri- ate means of making the Indian over again in their own image. They be- lieved that the only way to save Indians from certain extinction, to incorporate them, to ensure their self-sufficiency and right to the land was to transform them into individualistic yeoman farmers and farm families, the backbone of American democracy. This belief, based in American agrarian idealism and the social-scientific view of unilinear social evolution, persisted into the twentieth century, influencing each major policy trend. Yet the success of agrarian-based policy directives rarely matched the desires or rhetoric of policy makers who refused to consider seriously the land and peoples they were so confident they could remake.

The Idea

In the history of Western Civilization, ancient Greeks and Romans were among the first to idealize agriculture as a productive pursuit and life- style. Aristotle, Xenophon, Socrates, Plato, and Hesiod sang the praises of the husbandman. Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Pliny, and Cato praised the agrarian tradition and sturdy yeoman farmer. They deemed agriculture "the mother of all arts," and "the only employment essential to man's needs and happiness." This tradition became part of Renaissance litera-

Lewis, David Rich. Neither Wolf Nor Dog : American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change, Oxford University Press, 1994. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/miami/detail.action?docID=272374. Created from miami on 2017-08-10 18:48:37.

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ture, which borrowed much of its philosophy from the classics. It rein- forced teachings from the Bible demonstrating divine approbation for the farmer. Agricultural panegyrics persisted in eighteenth-century Eu- ropean romantic thought and literature as elite landholders, recognizing their position as genteel agriculturalists, played up the importance, dig- nity, and virtues of country life in an increasingly commercial age.1

European economists and political theorists praised agriculture as well. The French "Physiocrats" argued that agriculture embodied natu- ral law, constituted the source of all wealth for nations, and should therefore dictate the sociopolitical order. In 1758, Swiss jurist Emme- rich de Vattel praised agriculture for its social and economic value. "Of all the arts," he wrote, "tillage, or agriculture, is doubtless the most useful and necessary, as being the source whence the nation derives its subsistence. . . . [I]t forms the surest resource and the most solid fund of riches and commerce, for a nation that enjoys a happy climate." No- where was that physical and intellectual climate more "happy" than in the predominantly agricultural society of colonial North America.2

In revolutionary America, the independent yeoman farmer and landowner became symbols of egalitarian American democracy, blessed by God and a "virgin" American environment. "We are a people of cultivators," wrote Hector St. John de Crevecceur, the independent farmer's most vocal advocate, " . . . the most perfect society now existing in the world." John Taylor, president of the Agricultural Society of Vir- ginia, described the agricultural state as a paradise chosen by the "divine intelligence," who would ultimately judge those seeking to enter heaven by their "agricultural virtues." Agricultural clubs flourished in the early nineteenth century, spreading the gospel of agrarianism through metaphors of fertility, growth, increase, and Christian civili- zation, "all centering about the heroic figure of the idealized frontier farmer armed with that supreme agrarian weapon, the sacred plow."3

Among American Enlightenment thinkers and agrarian spokesmen, Thomas Jefferson voiced the moral virtues of small freeholding farmers in language at once classical and mythopoeic. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson wrote, "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." In letters to John Jay and James Madison, he called farmers "the most valuable citizens . . . tied to their country, and wedded to its liberty and inter- ests, by the most lasting bonds." Jefferson viewed the self-sufficient farm and farm family as an idealized model for a open and democratic American society, expanding in a seemingly uninhabited and limitless environment.4

The Theory

In a development paralleling this rising agrarian idealism, European "social science" theorists confronted the differences between their so-

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Agriculture, Civilization, and American Indian Policy 9

ciety and those of Africa and the New World. They sought to explain the disparity in terms of preexisting paradigms—biblical creationism, de- clension, and the Great Chain of Being. By the mid-eighteenth century, these scholars developed models of "natural law" that explained social diversity without sacrificing European cultural hegemony. Most models stressed the relationship between subsistence systems and social development, that over time society naturally progressed through three or four distinct and consecutive stages, each corresponding roughly to a different subsistence mode—hunting (savage), herding (barbarian), agri- culture, and commerce. Agriculture usually marked the beginning of true "civilization," with commerce distinguishing European civilization from others. Euro-Americans accepted this progressive development model as representing natural law and used it to define not only differen- tial social development, but natural rights to and the proper use of land.5

This stage theory of progressive development from savage to bar- barian to civilized society found fertile ground in the American atmos- phere of agrarian idealism and revolutionary egalitarianism. It offered American leaders a powerful intellectual tool in the debate over Indian policy. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and Albert Gallatin placed American Indians in this teleological hierarchy and canonized the belief that they must advance toward civilization through these stages or become extinct. Lewis Cass and William Clark, superintendents of Indian affairs on the western frontiers of an expanding United States, echoed this developmental framework in their reports and writings, as did Thomas McKenney, the first commissioner of Indian affairs and architect of early American Indian policy.6

From the 1830s on, government officials, missionaries, and reform- ers emphasized the possibility of Indian development and assimilation— "through the stages of the hunter, the herdsman, the agriculturalist, and finally reaching those of commerce, mechanics, and the higher arts"—as part of "Nature's laws." Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, long associated with Indian affairs in the Old Northwest, concluded, "Civilization . . . cannot permanently exist without the cultivation of the soil. It seems to have been the fundamental principle on which the species were origi- nally created, that they should derive their sustenance and means of perpetuation from this industrial labor." The popular pervasiveness of this progressive theory is apparent in the seal designed for the Territory of Wisconsin in 1838, which contained the Latin motto Civilitas Succes- sitt Barbarum surrounding an appropriate agrarian backdrop.7

Between 1850 and the 1870s, the stage theory of human develop- ment merged easily with a growing body of evolutionary thought in the biological and social sciences. Lewis Henry Morgan, working in the same intellectual milieu as Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, and Edward Tylor, proposed a familiar yet elaborate evolutionary paradigm of universal cultural stages. All societies, he argued, followed the same evolutionary path—savagism to barbarism to civilization—differentiated by "ethnical" breaks. According to Morgan, "the successive arts of sub-

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sistence [hunting, pasturage, and agriculture] . . . afford the most satis- factory bases for these divisions." Applying this theory to the problem of civilizing American Indians in 1878, Morgan stressed that Indians would have to develop slowly through pastoralism to agriculture on their way to civilization and assimilation—that societies were unable to jump such "ethnical periods" of subsistence development without grave consequences. Morgan's evolutionary paradigm influenced a generation of policy makers and scholars, for he put into print, in systematic social science terms, a blueprint for Indian policy.8

The Reality

The application of this stage theory and common portrayal of Indians as "savages" in the process of development required white society to ignore the realities of native subsistence systems. To justify Indian dis- possession from the land, Euro-Americans denigrated indigenous agri- cultural systems and set their own systems of cultivation as the standard for judgement.

Evidence suggests that Indian cultivation in the New World dates to 7000 B.C. Domesticated crops appeared in the Southwest by 2000 B.C in the Mississippi drainage and Southeast between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 700, in the Plains Woodlands between 250 B.C. and A.D. 1000, in the Great Basin by A.D. 400, and in the Northeast by A.D. 700. Settled or shifting cultivation was a well established part of native subsistence and ceremonial systems prior to white contact. Nearly 50 percent of native groups cultivated domesticants at contact, producing 25 to 75 percent of their total subsistence needs. Peoples living in the Connecticut River valley of Massachusetts described six of the thirteen phases of their lunar calendar in terms of horticultural product schedules, and esti- mates for the area show that corn alone provided 50 to 60 percent of subsistence.1'

Generally, native groups practiced a shifting cultivation with various levels of sedentism. Individuals, families, or clans held usufruct rights to certain cleared plots within a communally controlled band or tribal ter- ritory. In the Northeast and Southeast, Indian males participated in clearing fields by girdling trees and burning heavy ground cover, leaving women to plant and cultivate the gardens until harvest. Likewise, in the riverine Plains environments women tended garden plots around semi- sedentary villages, while in the Southwest men carried on the extensive irrigated, flood-plain, and dry farming operations from their pueblos or seasonal camps. Most groups intercropped their plants in mounded, un- tilled fields. They applied little additional fertilizer, extending the natu- ral fertility of the soil by burning, periodic fallowing, and the symbiotic relations of plant intercropping. Digging sticks, antler rakes, and wood, shell, or scapula hoes were the primary tools of cultivation. Native peoples cared for at least eighty-six cultigens in North America, in-

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Agriculture, Civilization, and American Indian Policy 11

eluding corn, beans and peas, tobacco, squash and gourds, melons, sunflowers, Jerusalem artichokes, flax, hemp, and cotton. When added to a long list of specifically gathered cultivars—roots, greens, berries, seeds, and herbs—their horticultural produce was substantial.10

Early European explorers duly noted the extensive fields and grain reserves of eastern Indian farmers, and early colonists in Virginia and New England appropriated Indian crops, fields, and methods to their advantage and salvation. Prior to the total disruption of native subsis- tence systems through loss of land, infectious disease, and war, Native Americans enjoyed a much more dependable subsistence from the American environment than did Euro-American settlers. Nevertheless, Euro-American settlers chose to ignore the gulf between the reality of Indian farming and their own conceptions of Indians as wandering "sav- ages" suffering the hardships and periodic starvation of hunters. They continued to believe in the superiority of their own subsistence strategy which was agrarian, sedentary, and intensive, relying upon domesticated animals for protein, fertilizer, and power. They looked down on native systems, which were seasonally variable and diverse, which included non-domesticants, and balanced labor with leisure, accumulation with subsistence. From their perspective, native agriculture did not conform to civilized standards, for Indians raised only a limited number of plants in poorly cultivated, intercropped fields, cared for by women."

In the Euro-American view, this division of labor firmly discredited Indian cultivation. Women were to occupy themselves with the domestic arts of homemaking while men tended the fields. Whites viewed hunting as inimical to a stable family life and freely condemned it as a uncivilized occupation that contributed to male idleness and female slavery. Even with his studied understanding of Indian societies and subsistence sys- tems, Albert Gallatin disparaged this arrangement: " . . . that the labor necessary to support a man's family is, on the part of the man, a moral duty, and that to impose on woman that portion, which can be properly performed only by man, is a deviation from the laws of nature."12

This denigration of Indian agricultural accomplishments provided added justification for the confiscation of native lands. Both biblical and European legal traditions spoke to the natural and proper use of land. John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, argued that by ignoring God's dictum to "improve the land," Indians left the coun- try a virtual vacuum domicilium, a wilderness, open to those who would properly possess and settle it. Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel con- curred that it was "the law of nature to cultivate the land," so that civi- lized European nations might legally appropriate a just amount of territory from those "who, to avoid labour, choose to live only by hunt- ing, and their flocks."13

Colonial powers came to rely on these justifications when purchase or conquest of land through "just war" failed. In calling for Indian re- moval from Pennsylvania in 1792, Hugh Henry Brackenridge argued

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that they did not cultivate the soil, and "I pay little regard, therefore, to any right which is not founded in agricultural occupancy." Alexis De Tocqueville supported the colonist's claim to the land, for "it is by agriculture that man wins the soil, and the first inhabitants of North America lived by hunting." In justifying Indian removal, Lewis Cass, governor of Michigan and Secretary of War under Andrew Jackson, simply summarized agrarian and natural-rights philosophy.14

In the final analysis, Euro-Americans believed that when civil and savage society met, natural law required the savage to yield, accommo- date, take up farming, or face certain extinction. They used this doc- trine of proper land use throughout the nineteenth century as both a weapon against and a plan for American Indians. Once ensconced in the American tradition, prophets of Manifest Destiny utilized it against the British in Oregon Territory, against Mexico and the Philippines, until eventually American capitalists turned it on end to argue the dis- possession of increasingly "marginal" agriculturalists.15

The Policy

In America, equating "civilization" with agriculture and viewing Indians as "savages" in the human hierarchy effectively spelled out the relation- ship between whites and Indians. It justified the dispossession of Indi- ans from land and provided a framework for their eventual civilization or a rationale for their extinction. It required their involvement with the soil in a direct and settled subsistence system, the acquisition of domes- tic arts, and their conversion to Christianity. From rude attempts by missionaries in colonial America to more concerted efforts by church and state in the nineteenth century, Euro-Americans attempted to force a settled agrarian subsistence system on Native Americans. These ef- forts culminated in the creation of the Office of Indian Affairs, in the appointment of Indian agents, agency farmers, field matrons, and manual labor instructors, and ultimately in the policy of allotment.

In colonial America, Euro-Americans did little directly to convert Indians to an agricultural existence. While John Eliot made some at- tempt to settle Indians in "praying towns" where they might learn the "civilized arts," most early missionaries worried about the salvation of Indian souls rather than lives. Others experimented with educational approaches linking Christianity and agrarian civilization. Most promi- nent was Eleazer Wheelock, who established Moor's Charity School in Connecticut, and later Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, to train Indian missionaries and instruct them in the agricultural and the do- mestic arts. British colonial officials, however, felt that Indians were more valuable as actors in the fur trade and intercolonial struggles and discouraged such settlement. Sir William Johnson, superintendent of Indian affairs in the northern department (1755-74), consistently op- posed plans by religious societies to establish schools or Indian farming

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Agriculture, Civilization, and American Indian Policy 13

communities. He feared losing the fur trade and believed Indians could be Christianized without altering their subsistence economy.16

While following many of the practical and diplomatic aspects of British Indian policy, leaders of the newly independent American government argued that instead of lavish gifts in the British style, "tools of husbandry" be distributed to tribes "who may be disposed to live by agriculture." George Washington and his secretary of war, Henry Knox, carried out this policy first with the Seneca, convincing Cornplanter to have agents teach his nation to farm so they might keep their land.17

Beginning with the Creeks in 1790, the government put into formal treaty its commitment to encourage a settled agrarian lifestyle by prom- ising to provide domestic animals, agricultural implements, and in- structors. The Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1793 affirmed this resolve by allowing the appointment of "temporary" agents to regulate trade and encourage "the Arts of husbandry and domestic manu- factures, as means of producing, and diffusing the blessings attached to a well regulated civil Society." Agents like Benjamin Hawkins became unflagging advocates of this approach, which he believed would make Creeks "useful to themselves and to mankind; happy in their condition, and independent of the world." While not always happy with the rate of change, he firmly believed in the ultimate direction.18

During the next eighty years of formal treaty making, federal negotiators received explicit instructions to attach articles devised to introduce Indians to private property and a settled agrarian lifestyle. Negotiators promised eastern groups seed and domestic animals, tools of husbandry, and "suitable persons ... to teach them to make fences, cultivate the earth, and such of the domestic arts as are adapted to their situation." Removal treaties included provisions for relocation on "good tillable land" and aid in breaking and fencing those lands. Negotiators encouraged tribes to take their cash annuities in agricultural implements and made indefinite agreements with western tribes that when they "eventually" settled down they would receive agricultural instructors. Even the peace medals distributed at these negotiations symbolized the government's commitment to agrarian civilization with their images of Indians trading tomahawks for plows, tepees for cabins."

Thomas Jefferson expanded the government's campaign for Indian civilization. Reassured by moderate successes in the program, Jefferson signed the second Indian Trade and Intercourse Act (1802), which pro- vided fifteen thousand dollars per annum for materials and instruction. Jefferson liberally endorsed the agrarian lifestyle he believed would pro- vide Indians a more bountiful and stable subsistence, and, at the same time, free up land desired by white settlers. He called for the expansion of trading houses to encourage Indian sedentism and agriculture, to foster acquisitiveness and debt, and to tie them to an American market economy. Through this double-edged agrarian and trade policy he be- lieved a "coincidence of interests" could be reached between Indians

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who desired goods and had a "surplus" of land, and whites who desired land and had a surplus of goods.20

In his second inaugural message, Jefferson summarized his Indian policy, noting that

humanity enjoins us to teach them agriculture and the domestic arts; to encourage them to that industry which alone can enable them to maintain their place in existence, and to prepare them in time for that state of society, which, to bodily comforts, adds the improvement of the mind and morals. We have therefore liberally furnished them with the implements of husbandry and household use; we have placed among them instructors in the arts of first necessity; and they are cov- ered with the aegis of the law against aggressors from among our- selves.21

Jefferson expected his "instructors in the arts of first necessity"—his agents and farmers—to facilitate the eventual merger of Indians into white society, but he remained painfully aware of the slow progress and the potential realities of removal or extinction.

Thomas L. McKenney, superintendent of Indian trade (1816-22) and the first commissioner of Indian affairs (1824-30), carried on the agrarian bent of Jefferson's policy. In 1818, Congress formalized the po- sition of Indian agent, and McKenney ordered agents to spread the "gospel of agriculture and domestic arts" by cultivating garden plots at their factories. "This is the way," wrote McKenney, "you will most ef- fectively promote the great object of the Govt. towards these unenlight- ened people." The House Committee on Indian Affairs concurred:

Put into the hands of their children the primer and the hoe, and they will naturally, in time, take hold of the plough; and, as their minds become enlightened and expand, the Bible will be their book, and they will grow up in habits of morality and industry, leave the chase to those whose minds are less cultivated, and become useful members of society.

In 1819, Congress passed a Indian civilization act that provided an annual fund of ten thousand dollars, "to employ capable persons of good moral character, to instruct them in the mode of agriculture suited to their situation; and for teaching their children in reading, writing, and arithmetic."22

Long before this act, Christian missionaries had maintained a number of Indian schools and model farms, but this new source of funding and a corresponding wave of religious revivalism stimulated an explosion of missionary activity. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the Society of Friends, the Society for Propagating the Gospel, the Catholic, Moravian, Baptist, Methodist, and Episcopal churches, all took advantage of federal funds and established mission stations or manual labor schools with "pattern" farms staffed by white farmers and domestic instructors.23 Indian boys received instruction in

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Agriculture, Civilization, and American Indian Policy 15

farming and the mechanical arts, while girls received a full domestic education. Books, such as The Osage First Book compiled by the Ameri- can Board, contained basic literacy lessons with sentences stressing the importance of farming, proper female roles, uses of tools, the im- portance of cabins, private property, and the general benefits of civili- zation. Americus L. Hay, a Methodist missionary, recalled, "In school and in field, as well as in kitchen, our aim was to teach the Indians to live like white people." By 1848, the Indian Bureau outlined its own educational program stressing agriculture for boys and "housewifery" for girls attending some 110 boarding and manual labor schools.24

Despite the rhetorical emphasis on agrarian civilization, federal Indian policy was implicitly one of removal and the extinguishment of Indian land rights. In the 1820s and 1830s, officials formulating re- moval spoke in terms of the inevitable displacement of "savages" by ad- vanced agrarian societies yet stressed their commitment to assisting tribes in new homelands, "happily adapted" to agriculture.25 Rationales for removing successful agricultural tribes like the Cherokees were twisted and full of self-interest. The Georgia Assembly went so far as to argue that Cherokees "had no right to alter their condition and become husbandmen" after they had concluded treaties reserving their right to use the land as hunters. In practice, removal placed Indians in alien en- vironments and disrupted established social and subsistence systems, forcing some tribes to rely solely on the hunt until materials arrived for clearing and fencing new fields. The haphazard direction of removal, the marginal lands assigned to Indians, and even the rational choice of tracts suited to hunting by groups resisting forced subsistence change made the rhetoric of removal ring hollow.26

Removal and the continued westward expansion of white settlement necessitated the creation of a system of discrete reservations to serve as the locus for directed culture change. In 1850, Indian Commissioner Luke Lea outlined the basic reservation policy in which each tribe would receive "a country adapted to agriculture" for a permanent home. Restricted there until deemed "civilized," Indians would be forced by necessity to take up farming as traditional subsistence re- sources disappeared. Agency farmers, blacksmiths, mechanics, and teachers would assist them in this transition to a settled agrarian life- style. For an annual salary of about six hundred dollars, agency farmers were to care for agency livestock, distribute seed and equipment, and open a "model" or "pattern" farm. There they would show their charges how to farm, supply the agency with food, and, it was hoped, induce Indians to open their own farms.27

As the number of reservations and the size of the Indian bureau- cracy increased in the 1860s, so did charges of corruption, fraud, and mismanagement. After studying the-problems and balancing the goal of "changing the wild hunter into a cultivator of the soil . . . the savage into a civilized man," the Senate's Doolittle Committee recommended in

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1867 the appointment of missionary agents of "good character" to lead the civilization program. Responding to that report and the appeals of Christian reformers, President Ulysses S. Grant invited religious groups to nominate their own members as agents and agency personnel.28

The Grant Peace Policy emphasized Christian civilization and as- similation over military force and extinction while addressing criticisms of graft and corruption in the Indian Service. It also served, as Interior Secretary Carl Schurz stated, "To set the Indians to work as agricultur- alists or herders, thus to break up their habits of savage life and make them self-supporting." Christian reformers stressed that missionaries be "practical business men who can instruct them how to live by the cultiva- tion of the soil, and the teachings of God's Word," but in practice mis- sionary agents did not always live up to such expectations. The continued difficulties of attracting and keeping qualified people, incom- petence, and outright corruption plagued churchmen's efforts and good intentions. As missionaries they worked for Indian salvation but meas- ured their success or failure against Indian progress toward agrarian civilization.25

Despite a doubling in the number of agency farmers between 1869 and 1881, and some evidence of an increase in Indian participation, the advancements of Indians toward "civilization" did not meet the ethno- centric expectations of most reformers. Indians lacked adequate agri- cultural implements, seed, and instruction or resisted farming altogether. The curtailment of rations and cash annuities along with other measures designed to coerce Indians to farm did not seem to be working. Re- formers looked for new ways to force Indians to take up the plow.30

Allotment, Farmers, and Instruction

Over the years a general attitude developed within the Indian Bureau that "the common field is the seat of barbarism; the separate farm the door to civilization." Recognizing the benefits of individual property ownership and having experimented with voluntary allotment on several reservations, federal officials moved toward breaking up the collectivism of reservation life.31

Fundamentally, allotment was an agrarian policy for imparting civi- lization, carried out with horse-plow agriculture in mind. It accommo- dated philanthropic desires to transform Indians into independent yeomen farmers in the best Jeffersonian tradition and served the narrow self-interest of those desiring additional land for white settlement. Re- formers, including Massachusetts Senator Henry L. Dawes, believed that giving each Indian a separate plot of land would break up commu- nal farming practices, secure Indians' individual titles to land, encour- age industry, hard work, and thrift, halt nomadism, instill a sense of property and pride, end Indian dependency, and ultimately promote civilization and assimilation. On 8 February 1887 the Dawes General

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Allotment Act became law—fulfilling, ironically enough, the nation's commitment to the agrarian myth as it moved into an urban-industrial age where farmers were forced to take collective action to address politi- cal and economic inequality and the environmental realities of farming small homesteads.32

Between 1887 and the 1920s, agricultural instruction took on a new purpose as government officials and reformers reconsidered their assumptions about the nature of social development and Indian assimi- lation. America was increasingly urban and industrial, no longer a nation of simple yeoman farmers. The persistent heterogeneity of immi- grant identity and the failure of one hundred years of civilization programs to eradicate Indian cultures flew in the face of the American "melting pot" ideal. As Indians ceased being "romantic" figures and became farmers, the public lost interest in them. Policy rhetoric strayed from the long-held goal of assimilating Indians into mainstream Ameri- can society toward a less optimistic program of merely incorporating them on the margins—of encouraging local agrarian self-sufficiency, then withdrawing federal assistance, leaving Indian families to cope on marginal lands with little access to national markets or society.33

Intent on the success of allotment and the ultimate end of Indian dependency, the government appropriated funds to hire more and better-trained agency farmers and farmer's assistants "to superintend and direct farming among such Indians as are making effort for self- support." Between 1881 and 1905 the number of agencies reporting farmers topped 80 percent and the total number of farmers more than doubled. The Indian Bureau directed farmers to demonstrate practical techniques on the agency farm. Following allotment, these were to be phased out and demonstrations carried out on individual allotments by farmers living in "district stations." "District" farmers were to be local administrators, keeping records and enforcing agency rules in addition to caring for agency equipment and encouraging Indians to farm and accumulate productive livestock. Farmers received technical assistance from other government agencies, including the bureaus of Reclamation, Plant Industry, Animal Industry, and Entomology, and the Agricultural Extension Service. Commissioner Thomas J. Morgan made it clear that "the employment by the government of white farmers is a temporary expedient," and that Indian peoples must learn to work their own al- lotments, but agency farms and farmers remained important resources into the 1930s.34

While the government emphasized agricultural training for Indian males, it did not neglect the other half of the farm family equation. Field matrons were the white farmers' female counterparts, instructing Indian women in all aspects of domestic arts and home economics in order to provide a stable home for their model agrarian families. Their broadly defined duties included teaching food storage and other home manufactures, sewing, cooking, cleaning, keeping domestic livestock

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and a kitchen garden, and encouraging industry, Christianity, and a civilized appearance.35 On the allotted reservations, farmers and ma- trons organized agricultural fairs to stimulate production and healthy competition among the Indians, interest their non-farming tribesmen, and disseminate information. They followed up by organizing agri- cultural associations or homemaking clubs, creating a mutual support group for their "progressive" Indian farm families.36

The emphasis on agricultural instruction and self-sufficiency spilled over into the curriculum of government Indian schools. Indian Bureau officials stressed practical, manual labor education, with just enough of the "3 R's" for basic literacy. "I much prefer to know that he can plow, sow, and harvest," wrote Secretary of the Interior Henry Teller in 1884, "than to know that he has made great attainments in a literary way." Following the lead set by Hampton and Carlisle, later Indian schools maintained fields, shops, and domestic quarters where male and female students labored at least half of each day under the direction of "indus- trial teachers." This, educators believed, would contribute to the self- sufficiency of the school and teach Indians skills appropriate to life on an allotment.37

What book learning Indian children received reinforced the agrarian and domestic bent of their practical training. During the early twentieth century, government publications, course study guides, and directives for Indian schoolteachers stressed the domestic and agricultural lessons Indians should learn in school. Textbooks contained practical math ap- plications for farm and household, readings extolling agrarian values, and written and oral presentations on industrial themes. Commence- ment addresses by visiting dignitaries and graduating students stressed the benefits of agricultural education and labor. Indian school periodi- cals were full of stories about "successful" Indian farmers and home- makers—role models for students returning to wrest a living from allotted reservations.38

The increased number of agency farmers, field matrons, and teach- ers, and the emphasis on agrarian civilization, did not magically trans- form Indian peoples or solve the real problems of allotted reservations. Complaints about the uneven quality and work of Indian Bureau em- ployees (particularly farmers) continued, despite stricter hiring stan- dards and work rules.39 The emphasis on field agriculture worked against other economic possibilities and environmental realities. The Indian Bureau hesitated to promote livestock ranching over farming on western reservations because of the emphasis on individual allotment and fear that herding reinforced nomadic tendencies.40 On the other hand, the bureau did approve less restrictive leasing and land patenting policies, "sink or swim" measures intended to end Indian dependency and satisfy the land hunger of western interests.41 Despite the recogni- tion that most reservation lands west of the hundredth meridian were too arid for unirrigated farming, the bureau continued to pursue its

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agrarian goals. Extensive irrigation projects, built in the early twentieth century with Indian monies, generally came too late to save Indian farmers and ended up benefiting neighboring whites who bought up or leased allotments along the ditches.12

As the hollow promises and unpleasant realities of allotment became increasingly apparent, the Indian Bureau created a pageant to mask the increasing dependency and marginalization of Indian people. The cere- mony commemorated the final act of allotment, in which individuals re- ceived full title to their land and became citizens, symbolizing their progress from Indian savagery to agrarian civilization. In 1916 at Santee Agency, each Sioux male receiving a patent to his allotment emerged from a tent, shot a last arrow into the air to symbolize the end of his "Indian" life, and took hold of a plow to symbolize his new life. The agent administered a solemn oath of citizenship and gave each man a flag, a badge, and a purse to signify his new status. Women took a special oath as homemaker and received a flag, badge, workbag, and purse." In this final act, government officials and reformers created a tableau of policy success quite at variance with the larger reality of allotment.

By 1930, it became clear that allotment and, by extension, the agrarian program for Indian civilization, had failed in its promise of in- corporating Indians or turning them into self-sufficient yeoman farmers. The 1928 Meriam Report blasted allotment and detailed desperate res- ervation conditions. Investigators enumerated the weaknesses of the agricultural program—inadequate equipment and instructions, environ- mental limitations, market isolation, and native resistance. Despite this the report concluded that agriculture remained "the chief economic possibility for the great majority of Indians," although the effort should be directed away from competitive market agriculture to the develop- ment of self-sufficient family farms.44

The Meriam Report's recommendation came as small farmers, both Indian and non-Indian, began suffering the effects of a deepening eco- nomic and environmental nightmare. Commissioner John Collier and the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 put an end to allotment as de- pression put a virtual end to Indian farming. Under Collier, the Indian Bureau recognized the national trend away from small family farms to larger corporate operations and retreated from attempts to transform Indians into self-sufficient or even individual market farmers. Collier's bureau encouraged corporate tribal farming and ranching operations by supporting the reacquisition and consolidation of tribal lands and ar- ranging reimbursable loans and stock programs, but few of these proved as successful over time as did other tribal economic ventures. Environ- mental limitations, the lack of capital, technical knowledge, and mar- kets, the advantages of leasing, and Indian disillusionment with farming hindered such operations.45

Indian participation in and Indian Bureau emphasis on agriculture faded during the 1940s and 1950s as attention shifted to livestock

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ranching. But slowly, both farming and ranching were replaced by Bureau and tribal schemes for wage work, resource development, re- location, and termination. Tribal trust land status and complicated heirship cases further limited Indian operations. By the 1960s Indian Bureau programs discounted agriculture as a viable source for reser- vation economic development. Recent intertribal attempts to reinvigo- rate Indian agricultural activities have emerged, but their proposals have been blocked by the Indian Bureau's concern for individual over tribal land rights. While many Indian people continue to live in rural areas and spend part of their time working land or livestock, few make a living at it. Today, land leasing, water sales, and resource mining turn more profit for tribal peoples than eking out an existence as the idealized yeomen farmers and farm families of a bygone era and policy vision.46

Conclusion

The blanket application of this agrarian program with little regard to cultural and environmental variations between tribes and reservations proved the greatest weakness of American Indian policy. With their ethnocentric values and "good intentions," Anglo reformers and offi- cials attempted to assimilate Indians and, failing that, reduced them to the lowest Euro-American denominator, the poor farmer. They rarely questioned why Indians should abandon their own customs to adopt those of their white adversaries. They were too busy trying to instill notions of private property and awaken accumulative desires—"to get the Indian out of the blanket and into trousers—and trousers with a pocket in them, and with a pocket that aches to befitted with dollarsl"41 Re- formers believed that Indians' landed inheritance naturally suited them to farm, even when their remaining lands dictated a marginal farming economy on the periphery of American society. Overlooking the fact that even non-Indian farmers were struggling to make a living in sub- humid areas, they forged ahead, secure in their agrarian idealism and faith in progressive social development.

The agrarian bent of American Indian policy did not continue on faith and theory alone, but in part because government officials and re- formers could point to a number of notable "success stories." Prior to allotment, certain Native American leaders and groups requested agri- cultural implements and training in response to the collapse of all or part of their older subsistence strategies. Traditional agrarian peoples provided the most visible examples of adaptation and success. Officials believed that allotment simply reinforced this trend. Yet studies indicate that following allotment, Indian farming actually declined—that by the early twentieth century the breakup of tribal farming projects, restric- tions on property rights and access to credit, and inducements to lease and sell lands ultimately discouraged Indian farming.48

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While true, this assessment provides only a partial explanation for the problems of Indian farming in the twentieth century. Like all gener- alizations about the nature of government programs and Indian agricul- ture, it tends to conceal the complexity and diversity of the experience. It quantifies success and failure in terms of Euro-American values. It tells us more about American society than native societies. What needs to be addressed just as seriously is the response of Native Americans as rational actors, living in known environments, with their own scales of value and their own cultural reactions to farming and directed changes entailed in American Indian policy.

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