The 1914 Meeting of the Society of American Indians at UW–Madison
THE DISADVANTAGES FACED BY AMERICAN INDIANS LIVING on reservations in the early twentieth century are by now commonly known: physical health, diets, and housing were poor; education was inferior; and many tribal members lived in poverty. Under the Dawes Act, tribes continued to lose valuable land as the result of an allotment policy that divided collectively held tribal estates into parcels held by individuals. Though that same policy made those who were allotted land US citizens, most Indian people continued to live as wards of the government. Federal agents with little knowledge of Indian people governed tribal communities autocratically, with inadequate understanding of tribal sovereignty, history, or culture.
It wasn’t until 1911, when the Society of American Indians (SAI) held its first meeting at Ohio State University, that Indians organized to advocate for themselves. According to historian Chadwick Allen, the SAI was “the first American Indian rights organization conceived, developed, and run by Native People themselves.” Previous organizations, including the Women’s National Indian Association, the Indian Rights Association, and the Lake Mohonk Conference, were made up almost entirely of non-Indians. The SAI—national, secular, pan-tribal, and Progressive—was composed of members of the first generation of well-educated, professional, middle-class American Indian men and women. Together, these “Red Progressives” sought to use their education and status to improve the conditions of American Indian people in the areas of health, education, and civil rights, largely by lobbying Congress on behalf of all Indian people, and, to a lesser extent, by intervening at the tribal or local level.
In recent years as a strong tribal sovereignty movement has reemerged, the SAI has been criticized for its perceived commitment to the assimilation of American Indian people. In fact, during its twelve years of existence, SAI members embraced a measured cultural pluralism and self-determination to different degrees. Some, like Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai-Apache), were influenced by the ideology of Richard Henry Pratt, founder of Carlisle Indian Industrial School: “To civilize an Indian, put him in civilization and keep him there.” Montezuma, who had been raised outside of tribal life since age four, believed in “public education and instant assimilation” and, like many in the SAI, was opposed to the work of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and to reservation life in general. Others, like Laura Cornelius Kellogg, a Wisconsin Oneida educator and activist, sought to develop the reservations as industrial communes with a degree of separation from the dominant society. Gertrude Bonnin, a Sioux, took this further with the belief that the SAI should make an effort to aid Indians living on reservations: “It is our first duty, to make an effort toward uplift work among our reservation Indians, ourselves; and in our own way.”
Despite individual members’ concern for the plight of reservation Indians, the SAI thought more in terms of race than in terms of tribal affiliation. As historian Jeffrey R. Hanson points out, they “embraced several key components of late-nineteenth century evolutionism.” SAI members believed the “Indian race” could be uplifted through education and opportunity, but that the reservation policy and Indian people’s status as wards of the government were holding them back from full participation in American life. Among their goals, they hoped to “promote and cooperate with all efforts looking to the advancement of the Indian…To develop according to the natural laws of social evolution;…To present in a just light a true history of the race;…To promote citizenship among Indians and to obtain the
