90 Second Narratives
Season 7: “Community”
Episode 4: “Native Americans in Anti-Colonial Networks”
Sky Michael Johnston:
Hello and welcome to 90 Second Narratives. I am Sky Michael Johnston, the host and creator of 90 Second Narratives. I am pleased to introduce today’s storyteller, Dr. Justin Gage, a Visiting Researcher at the University of Helsinki and Instructor at the University of Arkansas. Here he is with his story, “Native Americans in Anti-Colonial Networks.”
Justin Gage:
By the late 1870s, after years of resistance, most western Native Americans had been forced onto reservations, those ever-shrinking pieces of land created by the United States government to contain and separate Natives.
For the US government in the nineteenth century, the solution to their so-called Indian Problem depended on geographic isolation – keeping Native Americans in a space where they could be set distant and controlled and perhaps assimilated.
Despite the colonial control and confinement, western Native Americans remained mobile in the late nineteenth century. Their tenacious mobility, defined not only as the freedom of geographic movement but also the ability to share ideas and information widely, allowed western Native Americans to create vast networks of communication that traversed the boundaries of the US government’s reservations. These intertribal networks were threaded together in the 1870s and 1880s by intertribal visiting and letter writing.
Native Americans disseminated important information and ideas on a continental scale, often in opposition to US colonialism, including religious knowledge and practices like the Ghost Dance.
Unfortunately, the U.S. government tried to suppress intertribal communication. Because of the anti-colonial notions that were spread along Native networks, US officials were afraid of its impact on their efforts of assimilation. But Natives did not allow themselves to be kept prisoners on reservations. They thought that they would have the freedom of movement and they expected US government agents to give it to them. When that freedom was threatened, Natives struggled to keep it.
If the definition of a community is a group that interacts and shares ideas and ways of life, then western Native Americans were building an intertribal community in these early reservation years. They were and still are an extraordinarily diverse community made up of hundreds of nations, but all were facing a common, unyielding challenge, hoping for a similar outcome.
Because of the rise of communication among tribal nations, Native Americans could discuss the circumstances that tied them to one another. Meaningful ideas could be transmitted to every reservation in the West because a community actively spread those ideas. Even in the face of colonialism.
Sky Michael Johnston:
You can learn much more about this important history in Dr. Gage’s new book, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance, published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2020. Additionally, Dr. Gage has shared a wealth of historical resources on the website, NativeAmericanNetworks.com, and you can click on that link in the episode description.
Thank you for listening today. Please join me again next week as Season 7 continues with the theme “Community,” and another “little story with BIG historical significance.”