The New Native Reconstruction, OAH 2022

Bibliography Citation: Speaker last name, First name. “The New Native Reconstruction.” Transcript of roundtable delivered at the Organization of American Historians, April 1, 2022. https://www.nativereconstruction.com/events/oah2022

Footnote Citation: Speaker first name last name, “The New Native Reconstruction,” transcript of roundtable delivered at the Organization of American Historians, April 1, 2022, https://www.nativereconstruction.com/events/oah2022

Introductions

A. Roberts (Chair): Welcome!… We’re going to start by introducing ourselves with the basics. Who we are, where we are, and then also starting with the question: based on your research and expertise, what modalities are particularly important tools or means for enacting Reconstruction in Indian country?

So I will start. I’m Alaina Roberts. I’m an assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, and I would say I study Reconstruction through the lens of settler colonialism. So my first book, I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (Penn Press, 2021), really explores the lives and experiences of the Black and mixed-race people owned as slaves by the Five Tribes—Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole, and Choctaw Nations. As a result of American coercion, these women and men were freed, enfranchised, and provided with land allotments. I argue that the United States forced these changes in Indian Territory, modern-day Oklahoma, to bring this western space into alignment with the changes that it had decided to make after the [Civil] war regarding people of African descent. So things like freedom and then arguments over land allotment, which of course were unsuccessful [in the South]. But also to ultimately prepare this land to be absorbed into the United States, to really try to disregard tribal sovereignty, complete with railroads, private land ownership, and White and Black American settlers. And so it’s really the idea that settler expansion and settler colonialism is necessary to look at in this period of time, as in really every single time period, to really get into the actions and experiences of Native nations and people.

T. Allread: Hi, everyone. I’m Tanner Allread. I’m a fourth-year J.D./Ph.D. in History student at Stanford. I would say the modality for me is looking at Reconstruction through law. So most of my research is in an earlier period; I mostly study Removal also with the Five Tribes and think about the ways in which the tribes changed their governmental structures and asserted their sovereignty through written constitutions and law and how that impacts how federal and state governments think about their own sovereignty and ideas of tribal sovereignty. But I think that also really carries over into the Reconstruction period, thinking about how the contours of federal and tribal sovereignty are being reworked in the wake of the Civil War, especially in the instances of the Five Tribes with these treaties, the 1866 treaties, that bring them back into allegiance with the United States after they aligned with the Confederacy during the Civil War, or factions of the Tribes aligned with the Confederacy. 

And then also thinking about how [federal officials are] using treaties and law to impose different conceptions of tribal membership on the tribes, such as accepting freedmen as citizens or accepting certain tribal members such as Kansas and Delaware Indians into the Five Tribes. And also thinking about the ways that the federal government then switches from treaties to legislation in order to govern Indian Affairs. So the federal government, rather than really enacting federal Indian policy through treaties with individual tribes, is now thinking about the ways in which they’re going to do this broadly through things such as the Dawes Act. And then there’s also recognizing what the Supreme Court is also doing and the ways in which they are going to justify the ways that the federal government is now treating the tribes as wards or dependents rather than as sovereign nations. So law was a major way in which Reconstruction was enacted upon tribal nations in the late nineteenth century.

A. Stern: I’m Alex Stern. I’m an ACLS postdoc at City College, part of the CUNY system. My work focuses on the growth of federal power, particularly in Indian Territory but more broadly through the nexus and lens of Indian policy. How Indian policy has, in fact, long been a growth medium for federal supremacy and how, after the Civil War, this led to the enactment of Reconstruction policies in the West, particularly in Indian Territory, that the federal government could never do in the South. So, related to Dr. Roberts’ work, land redistribution through allotment is one of the key ways in which we see the different abilities of the federal government to act depending on the space they’re in. In Indian Territory and in western spaces that are territorialized (not yet states), you see a different kind of Reconstruction process as compared to the South, but the political ideologies and the political projects are still very much one and the same. And this is a commitment to, I’d say, a larger national reform project built around free labor, private property ownership, homogenous citizenship, and the supremacy of federal power. So I’m interested in the relationship between the Five Tribes and the U.S. government and how their struggles over sovereignty affect the powers of those nations to enact their will over their people and territory.

N. Martin: Hi. I’m Nicole Martin. I’m currently a fellow with the National Park Service in a position studying women’s history in the Pacific West region. And the modality I’ve been most interested in is the American home and the role that Reconstruction in Indian Country has played in creating a uniform standard American home. So I’m coming at it from a little bit of a different angle because I think a lot of the studies that have come out of Elliott West’s Greater Reconstruction have really focused on legal and racial frameworks. And what I’ve been particularly interested in is examining those cultural processes, the shared culture that made Reconstruction possible, and I look at the way this creation of a standard American home was key to the process… that the home is the cultural ground upon which Reconstruction happens. 

The way this relates to Indian country is really important because an underemphasized factor in the creation of the American home has been the conquest of the American West. You don’t get an American home without the West and without the presence of Native peoples. The creation of the American home is always set against the supposed savagery and the lack of homes of Native people in nineteenth-century discourse. What is interesting, in opposition, especially in the antebellum period, there are still just two kinds of American homes: one supported by free labor and one supported by slave labor. So this is why I see the Civil War as a major turning point that finally gives the federal government the power to make the free labor home THE American home. Reconstruction is this powerful moment for this more inclusive vision of citizenship, but if we follow the home into the American West [in this period], it really becomes a much more coercive weapon of U.S. imperialism. 

This is especially true when we look at the way the home is instituted in Indian country. So I look a lot at allotment, how the Indian Problem is dealt with by trying institute the home there, how proof of being American becomes wrapped up in [people’s] ability to make and possess homes, and the greatest threat to the American nation becomes whether [people] are undermining and threatening White American homes.

K. Waite: Hi, everybody. I’m Kevin Waite. I teach U.S. history at Durham University in the U.K… So my first book, West of Slavery (UNC Press, 2021), came out last spring, and it’s really an examination of the long reach of the Slave South in the Far West and the curious afterlife of slavery in the West. I’ll confine my comments to the Southwest and really the homelands of the Apache and Navajo nations. 

My study really begins in the 1850s when White Americans were increasingly moving into the Southwest and taking stock of this vast landscape of unfree labor. When Whigs and anti-slavery Republicans moved into the region and saw these types of unfreedom – Native captive slavery, debt peonage, forced wardship of Indian minors – they considered it, more or less, the bastard offspring of the South’s slave chattel regime. But when White Southerners moved into the region and encountered these slaves and servants in the Southwest, they were frankly delighted because, to them, this confirmed their bedrock principle that race-based systems were powerful and adaptable to a whole number of geographies and contexts. So White Southerners, whenever the issue of unfreedom in the Southwest came before Congress, presented a united front and defeated these measures again and again in the late 1840s and 1850s. By their logic, slavery wasn’t just a peculiar system or institution of the slave South alone but was really, in a lot of ways, a transcontinental regime. 

So then flash forward to the Reconstruction era, as we know four million formerly enslaved African Americans are free, and the federal government suddenly has the power with the Thirteenth Amendment, theoretically has the power, to abolish systems of unfreedom in the American West as well. But this Reconstruction project, this emancipationist project for the Far West fails. After the Civil War, unfree Navajo labor can be found in an estimated 10% of all New Mexican households. Federal officials at the time estimated that there were about 3,000 Navajo slaves out of a total population of about 87,000 within the Territory of New Mexico. Now Republican officials did have some success in liberating some enslaved Native Americans; they freed about 300 of them in 1865 alone. The Indian agent for the region actually argued that there should be a special Freedmen’s Bureau for emancipating Native Americans in the Southwest. 

That failed like so many other Republican emancipation projects in the region, and it failed largely because the slaveholders of the Southwest were able to muster a fairly convincing counterargument. They really built this counterargument by pulling a page from the playbook of the planter class. They used this eerily familiar paternalistic language that enslaved Native laborers were being “redeemed” and that these “heathens” were being brought into the Christian household. And they also marshaled a states’ rights argument or at least a territorial rights argument to say that this emancipationist project in New Mexico was a violation of their local sovereignty, mainly it was a violation of the Master and Servant Act of 1851. So, by and large, New Mexican slaveholders escaped this federal project, and actually enslaved Native laborers can be found circulating throughout the Southwest into the twentieth century. This Republican Reconstruction project really hit a wall of noncompliance in the far Southwest.

Original Entry Point in Greater Reconstruction

A. Roberts (Chair): Well, thank you everyone. So now that we know a little bit about your work, I’m interested to know how you came to it because there are so many different ways the work that we do can be put into silos: Native American history, African American history, legal history, the history of race. And I think the reason that the idea of Greater Reconstruction that Elliott West coined is so attractive to many people is that it brings all these ideas together. So I wanted to know what brought you to this idea and showed you that this is the kind of framework that worked to allow you to tell your narratives. That could be a primary source, a secondary source, a book, an article…

A. Stern: I’ll start, if I may. So part of the reason I have really clung to this idea of Reconstruction in Indian Country—an idea which is still contested or debated, which is in part what makes it interesting—is that the primary sources really led me there in the first place. My initial research was actually on the Dakota War of 1862. And in working in the archive in Minnesota, I discovered a story of many potentialities, things that don’t happen but that people believed might happen. So in that particular moment, President Lincoln believes, in the fall of 1862, there might be a Confederate plot at work. The Union knows about the treaties the Confederacy signs with the Five Tribes in Indian Territory, which the Union army had immediately abandoned in 1861. And then, combined with this new Indian “rebellion” in Minnesota, [Union officials] begin to think there is a concerted plan to open a new western front to the Civil War.

So this ends up not being true. There is no plot; it’s just rumors circulating in Minnesota. But Lincoln still isn’t sure, and that’s is what forces him to divert U.S. troops and supplies to Minnesota to quell the war, or rebellion as they see it. He also commits himself, although he doesn’t end up realizing the project, to reforming the Indian system as his next major political project after the war. Because he sees the way that corruption in the Indian system creates a kind of national security issue for the Union’s aims during the war, but also in the post-war period. Coupled with that context, Elliot West’s Greater Reconstruction framework makes a lot of sense. 

And again, in the archive reading sources, so many late nineteenth-century writings by leaders of the Five Tribes communicate a view similar to elite White Southerners that really surprised me. At first, I had to double-check to see who was talking. So I’ll give you a quick quote from Pleasant Porter [the last elected Principal Chief of the Creek Nation, 1899-1907]. “We are from the deep south originally, and we inherit the southern liking for the democratic party. The republican party has been responsible for the division of our land and the destruction of our government. We’re not friendly and won’t be charitable.” And so, I think these sources draw substantive connections between Reconstructions in the South and West and show the role of the Reconstruction experience in developing unexpected political affinities between different groups of people up into even the early twentieth century.

K. Waite: I’ll follow. What really drew me westward and clinched this linkage between South and West in the Reconstruction era was just reading the writing of California lawmakers in the late 1860s. So I always assign for my students the inaugural address of Governor Henry Huntly Haight from California, which is explicitly a Reconstruction document. California had its own pressing issues in 1867 that you might think a governor would want to address, but he devotes almost the entire inaugural address to Reconstruction and how the federal measure to reconstruct the South and bring meaningful freedom to African Americans in the South would have ripple effects and come West, and would have, in his opinion, really nasty ripple effects in California. So he’s primarily concerned with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and what that would mean for non-White people in California. He’s very concerned about citizenship rights being extended to Chinese immigrants, African Americans, and Native Americans. And he was deathly afraid of enfranchisement being granted to those same groups. And he rode, his Democratic Party rode, this stunning electoral comeback during this era primarily on an anti-Reconstruction, anti-enfranchisement, states’ rights campaign.

N. Martin: So the way I came to [Greater Reconstruction] through the lens of the home was, like many in this room probably, I read Amy Dru Stanley’s famous book and was really taken with this argument that at the heart of the age of emancipation is this fight over the marriage contract, what is going to be a proper American home, and gender relations. But I really wanted to know what happens when you follow that story West. 

And I also found that a lot of the figures I was following in the sources were doing the same thing. I would find these letters of people working for the Freedmen’s Bureau who then pack up and move and work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and are working to institute in both places what they imagine is a proper home. They’re trying to teach people this proper American home. This is very much, to me, Reconstruction happening on two different grounds. And, of course, the fascinating thing is looking at the, and I think Alex brought this up, failures and differences between what is able to be done in the West versus in the South, where the federal government does not succeed in taking land and redistributing it but very much does so in the West in the name of the home. 

One of the characters/historical figures I follow the most is Alice Fletcher, the first allotment agent for the federal government. She’s working and lives with Native peoples on the Omaha reservation, and she comes away from that experience saying we have to institute the American home. Allotment itself is not enough; just dividing land itself is not enough. It has to be taught in the home. And she talks about how at the Hampton Institute, they celebrate the Dawes Act as the Indians’ own Emancipation Act. So the figures themselves were making these connections between policies in the South and West. They’re drawing those connections themselves. So, to me, you cannot talk about these two stories separately, and when we put them together, it will help explain what we have come to see as the failures of Radical Reconstruction.

T. Allread: I think for me, definitely like Alex, looking at Indian Territory was my introduction to thinking about Reconstruction in the West. I’m also from Oklahoma, so I’ve known this history from a young age of Indian Territory being involved in the Civil War and especially as a Choctaw citizen as well. I am a descendant of a tribe that aligned with the Confederacy. So there are already those connections personally. But thinking academically and research-wise, the source that really spoke to the connections between Native affairs and history and Reconstruction for me is the 1866 treaty between the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations and the federal government. Because there’s so much that not only speaks to these longstanding tensions in Indian affairs but also really connects how conceptions of Reconstruction that were being worked out in the South were then going to be applied in Indian Territory and broadened out afterward to the farther western tribes. 

For example, and this is definitely a shoutout for Dr. Robert’s book if you haven’t read it, a huge part of that treaty is ensuring that the enslaved people of the Choctaw and Chickasaws are freed and then incorporated into the nations and granted citizenship. So I think it’s really important to see those parallels with southern Reconstruction there. And then how they even go beyond southern Reconstruction. When we think of this idea of forty acres and a mule that was popularized around Sherman’s March to the Sea, this is actually happening in Indian Territory because the treaties themselves are saying freedpeople are entitled to settle on lands within those nations and to be undisturbed. So I think that really shows these parallels. 

And then I think also there’s a lot of parallels related to how these tribes are being reincorporated into allegiance with the United States; they’re required to give amnesty to anyone who opposed the Union at all or even opposed the nations themselves because they were loyal to the Union. There’s also recognizing the past obligations of treaties that were seen as voided once the Five Tribes aligned with the Confederacy that are then reinstated, so… they’re being reinstated into this long history of obligations and treaties between the United States and the nations… They want to recognize tribal sovereignty as the federal government long has, but they’re also thinking about Indian Territory itself and territorialization under federal policy. So, in this treaty, they’re saying that the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations will agree to have federal courts placed in Indian Territory, and the jurisdiction of those courts will be respected. And so they’re really negotiating this line between tribal sovereignty and what they’ll allow the nations to continue to exercise but then moving forward how the federal government wants to cabin that in some ways, thinking about the future settlement of Indian Territory or future incorporation of the nations within the United States itself.

Teaching

A. Roberts (Chair): As someone who teaches both Black and Native American history, all these comments really spoke to me but especially Nicole’s and Tanner’s, because I feel like I’m always trying to show my students how White Americans are constantly thinking about Black Americans and Native Americans together, even though a lot of the historical narratives that we learn complete separate these peoples as if they don’t have any sort of interaction. So… if we gave people here something to take away to teach to show this connection to their students, what would you give them? [Tanner’s] given us the Treaties of 1866, I think those are great; you can find them online even to show there is another emancipation project, there is another Reconstruction project very clearly spelled out. Nicole?

N. Martin: So when I have taught it, students often come in with narratives and, as they’re learning, they’re trying to fit that new information into those narratives. And then you throw something like some Native peoples fought for the Confederacy, and their minds just explode; it totally throws everything out of balance. So it’s those kinds of questions I try to make them think about or bring to the table. Another one I will often do is have them think about emancipation and then turn around [and ask] how does the Dawes Act, how does Chinese Exclusion happen only a couple decades later by the same Republicans? So making those linkages and showing how this is part of the same world view by putting those pieces of legislation together and using a lot of great secondary sources that will help explain it. The point isn’t just to be like, “Look, here’s this positive narrative you had, and now I’m just tearing it apart.” But to get them to think about the real complexities there so that we can to better understand this history. And that doesn’t mean to take away from that moment of emancipation and that radical promise but to show that it was always side-by-side with these imperial adventures in the West. Just literally putting those moments side-by-side is really helpful [in teaching]. You can do the same thing with battles in the Civil War when you look at the many massacres of Native peoples happening in the West. So that kind of thinking is what I try to encourage.

A. Roberts (Chair): Well, I don’t know; politicians say we like telling students the horrible things. [group laughter] Kevin, I know you’re completely in a different context with what your students know about U.S. history. Do they have the same kinds of ideas?

K. Waite: That’s a good question. Like Nicole, I love turning students’ preconceptions of American history on their heads and watching their eyes widen in wonder as you tell them about this history that just doesn’t make it into mainstream American narratives. So a secondary source that I love teaching is Elliott West’s “Reconstructing Race.” And my British students, in particular, really get into this because I think for them, and for a lot of American students as well, the American West is a land of gunslingers, saloons with swinging doors, and railroad towns. It’s not the multiethnic West, and it doesn’t belong in the Civil War and Reconstruction narratives. 

It does make our job as teachers and historians harder because the narratives don’t fit together easily, and I’d be curious to hear how you guys manage to teach this subject. But because the narratives don’t fit together easily and because [students] walk into the classroom with these preconceived notions of what the American West is, they really dive into the unit on Greater Reconstruction, in particular, I think.

A. Roberts (Chair): Well, Alex, you’ve written about the idea of lawlessness in the West. So how do you deal with that in the classroom?

A. Stern: I have the pleasure of teaching as part of the CUNY system, which has an incredibly diverse student body; many are the first generation to grow up in the United States. So the range of what they think Reconstruction is is really broad. And I myself am a southerner who is teaching in the Northeast and who trained in the West, so I have a little bit of a personal connection to the ways in which geography and our teachers shape what we think of history. I mean, I did learn the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression, although that was a 75-year-old chemistry sub telling us stories of his grandfather as part of the twenty-third battalion of Alabama sharpshooters. 

But more generally, I think students do pick up on that tension because they have different pieces and have heard different stories, like whether Reconstruction was a success or failure and why. So one of the things I like to do when I begin the unit is unpack what it is we mean by “Reconstruction.” And we start with the students sharing what they think that definition is, then we look at the textbook reading. I also love to assign Elliott West’s “Reconstructing Race,” which is the shorter piece, compared to his book The Last Indian War, which also has the Greater Reconstruction argument. Then we talk about what’s important: is it a geographical space, is it a time period? I’ve already said I think of Reconstruction as a set of political priorities. So we weigh those different definitions against each other. The reason I like this activity is: (1) I get a sense of what I’m dealing with in the room, but also (2) it allows us to explore some historiography and talk about that concept which I think is appropriate in an undergraduate class. I teach many non-history majors, but they’re ready for it. And so, it’s useful on a lot of different pedagogical levels. 

But because I have the privilege to teach Civil War and Reconstruction, the way I conceptualize teaching the Civil War also primes them for a broader, national view of Reconstruction. Having had the benefit of having known Kevin for a while, I bring in the southwestern element of the Civil War. I love to teach the Arizona Declaration of Secession; just a fascinating document because what they’re angry about is very different—they’re especially upset about mail and the lack of reliable mail delivery, which reflects their own geographical concerns—but the solution they identify is aligned with the Confederacy’s states’ rights project. So by broadening out the Civil War narrative, the different tendrils into the Southwest and Indian country, and teaching that as part and parcel of the same conflicts over power: who will control the future of labor and the United States, and which American sovereignties will win out. The Confederacy is an American sovereignty experiment; Indigenous nations are much older, but they are also American sovereignties. So, by having a more capacious Civil War set up, I think that naturally leads to broader conversations about what Reconstruction might look like. 

The West is so important in the lead-up to the Civil War, right? The conflict over the growth of slavery is about western territory. So the fact that it would fade out in the postwar period, if you think about it long enough, is actually confusing. Because we spend time on the West leading up, students naturally want to know where’s the West in Reconstruction, which really helps in unifying what is really, as Dr. Martin has highlighted, a very complicated series of relationships and processes.

Periodization

A. Roberts (Chair): So we’ve talked a little bit about broadening the idea of Reconstruction for students. In a more academic sense, [how do] you think about the periodization? What is that for you all, and what factors influence that time period?

T. Allread: I think this is always a hard question: the periodization. And I know the Greater Reconstruction concept causes people some discomfort, extending from about 1845 until 1877. They think that’s too long. I think, specifically focusing on Native Reconstruction, 1865 as a starting point along with the traditional notion of Reconstruction makes sense to me. Coming at it from the perspective of Indian Territory, the war also ends in 1865, even though the last Confederate general [Stand Waite] who surrenders does so in June, so after Appomattox, but this is still happening in the same year. And then, with Reconstruction, the government is thinking about how to manage emancipation in Indian Territory and then also how to incorporate these tribes back into the orbit of the United States, which happens along the same timeline as Reconstruction in the South. 

The harder point for me is where Reconstruction ends. From a legal standpoint, I want to go beyond 1877 and think one point could be 1886, thinking about U.S. v. Kagama, a Supreme Court case in which the Court declares that the United States government has federal plenary power over Indian tribes. And so, even though this has long roots in American colonialism, this is the most explicit statement in which the Supreme Court is recognizing the United States is a territorial sovereign, its affirmed that through the Civil War, its brought back in the southern states that tried to rebel, its asserted its power over all of these tribes in the West. So now since we have this conception of territorial jurisdiction, the U.S. can then proclaim that the people who are not citizens, the aliens like Native people and also immigrants, Chinese people, and the people of the territories later on, the U.S. has this federal plenary power over them. So I think it’s this powerful moment in which the federal government is asserting that they’ve brought everyone in under federal power in some way, even if tribal peoples are not citizens yet. 

If we want to go just a little farther, there could be an argument made for 1903 as well, in thinking about the Lone Wolf case, in which the Supreme Court not only affirms federal plenary power but basically says Congress can do whatever it wants with treaties with tribes. So, even though treaty-making ends in the second half of the nineteenth century, the federal government is still adhering to those treaties and trying to execute Indian policy, except now the Supreme Court has basically given a blank check to Congress as long as they can say something clearly about abrogating those treaties then it doesn’t matter what those treaties initially said. Congress can do whatever it wants. So it’s also this moment in which the federal government is announcing that it has complete and total control over Indian peoples. Even if there’s some recognized sovereignty, in other ways, they have decided it doesn’t really matter in the end because Congress can basically do whatever it wants, and [Native peoples] have become a part of the United States, even if they’re not citizens still by 1903.

A. Stern: I’ll tag on since Tanner and I, and Dr. Roberts as well, work in a similar geography: Indian Territory. So, I think the answer to the periodization question about Native Reconstruction is always going to be contextual. It depends. It depends on the Native nation you’re looking at. So that means the answer will change, and to me that’s a good thing. Historians, we like context, right? We contextualize things; that’s one of our powers. So, to my mind, saying even the periodization depends on context is a strong historical answer.

More specifically, in Indian Territory, you have a long Reconstruction period. I’m going to go a little further than Tanner and say 1907—statehood—because the organization of Indian Territory into a formally organized territory and then into statehood is, in fact, one of the core goals of the 1866 treaties, federal officials want to prepare that pathway.

A. Roberts (Chair): Obviously, I agree with that.

A. Stern: Yes! In your book, you use the same periodization. But this is an unusual, longer case. Indian Territory is often an exceptional case in part because the Five Tribes own their land fee simple, which is unusual in Indian country, and they have these robust governments that contest Reconstruction for a long period in support of their own sovereignty. So, it’s a longer stretch. But depending on where you’d look, I think the 1880s are the most common ending point. Again, it will depend on the Native nation you’re working on. And I think the diversity of endpoints is going to be a strength.

But, also like Tanner, I agree the end of the Civil War marks a substantive change in Indian Country. Unlike the broader mid-nineteenth century Greater Reconstruction idea, which highlights the continuities of the late antebellum period into Reconstruction.

N. Martin: Let me just jump on that because I like the 1840s starting point because it recognizes the West was so crucial before the Civil War. Again, I’m looking through the lens of the home, and I do see these questions that the Mexican American War brings up, questions about who belongs and how these different parts of the country are going to fit together, beginning much earlier than 1865. But I also agree the Civil War is such a major turning point. You don’t have an American home until the Confederacy is defeated. And I love your answer Alex, about the different contexts, so of course the periodization is going to change. 

I tend to take a broader view of Greater Reconstruction because I look at the three major “problem groups” of the period, which are Chinese immigrants, Native peoples, and Mormons. [For an endpoint,] I tend to look at 1890 because by then, you have the Dawes Act, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the Mormon Church capitulating on polygamy. If we were to go with Elliott West’s original, he picks 1877 because he says it’s the end of significant Indian resistance. This longer periodization—to 1890—allows us to look at, what I would say is, significant Indian resistance that continues past 1877, with 1890 taking us to Wounded Knee. This is the periodization I’m partial to. But Alex is completely right; it’s always going to be changing depending on the group that you’re looking at and focusing on.

K. Waite: I almost hesitate to add anything to that since those responses were so thorough and good. I also hesitate because Alaina’s book does such a good job of scrambling the traditional period markers of the Civil War era. If I can just make an argument about where we may want to end Reconstruction with the view from California… I realize I’m sort of taking on the role of the California chauvinist, but I’ll embrace it. 

I think you can make a strong case for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. I bring up the issue of Chinese immigration in part because those issues were often melded with white working-class fears over Native American and African American enfranchisement. And Stacey Smith makes this argument particularly well in her book… that Chinese Exclusion is, in a lot of ways, the legacy of the Thirteenth Amendment. It’s a perversion of the Thirteenth Amendment, but it belongs to that history because Republicans in California use the Thirteenth Amendment to argue that Chinese workers coming into the state were unfree; they’re coolies. And in order to uphold slave emancipation in the United States, you have to prevent these unfree workers from coming in to the US. So they seize the moral high ground, but they take a position that is actually pretty compatible with segregationist Democratic positions that had reigned in the 1860s and 1870s. So, actually, the traditional party lines get a little bit muddied or even inverted in California. But because they are drawing on the legacy of the Civil War and the legacy of slave emancipation, I think there is good reason to bring in Chinese American history into the conversation as well.

Native Perspectives & Sovereignty

A. Roberts (Chair): Well, on that note, I think it’s really helpful and important that you’ve brought in that Chinese American history into this conversation, so I wanted to kind of get a little more from Tanner and Alex on what it means to actually look at Native Americans and tribal sovereignty within this period and how it changes the way we think about the federal government and its relationship to people of color, especially going away from the focus just on African Americans.

A. Stern: I’ll speak a bit broadly first. One of the strengths that all these answers highlight is the interrelationship between Reconstruction geographies and the people affected by Reconstruction. Sally Barringer Gordon wrote about the Mormon problem after 1865 and called the anti-polygamy fight a “second Reconstruction.” I think there are third and fourth Reconstructions; there are many Reconstructions. Elliott West gets us to Reconstruction as a national project, but I also think it’s a multi-national project, recognizing these sovereignty questions and contests, but also Indigenous nations are, in fact, nations, and these aren’t just internal domestic squabbles. I think they’re more than that. So when we open up to a more international view… I’ll say also in the Civil War context, the Confederacy wants international support. They look to Europe, but they can’t quite get an official endorsement, but they can get it from Indigenous nations, and that support is really important. That’s part of what made Lincoln nervous in 1862. So, I think there is a more international dimension to Reconstruction too. But that helps us widen our gaze and see the connections between different groups and the scales of power relations at play.

But Indian Territory is always such a fascinating case, which is why I think three out of five on this panel have been looking there. Indian Territory offers this opportunity, as we’ve all been talking about, for the federal government to do Reconstruction in a way that was just never politically tenable in the South. 

Almost all of us here have talked about allotment. It’s a land redistribution scheme, in a way. But what I found really interesting in my archival research, reading Henry Dawes’ papers, was his commitment to Reconstruction values which he pursued through Indian policy. He doesn’t think very charitably of Indigenous sovereignties, or nations, or people really; he sees allotment as a political opportunity to recapture the moral high ground for the Republicans that they have lost through the failures of Reconstruction in the 1870s. Through allotment, and by adding citizenship to the allotment equation—Native peoples will agree to and receive allotments and then receive U.S. citizenship—he sees a way to recapture the political goodwill and moral cause of emancipation. 

In particular, he’s very invested in thinking about the freedpeople in Indian Territory and ensuring they are included on the tribal roll and in allotment. He writes to the Dawes Commissioners and to other congressmen about the essential nature of evaluating the tribal roles to figure out who has been recognized, who has been written out. It is, for him, tied to the failures of Reconstruction in the South. So, those relationships are very robust and show the ways in which American history is often a White-Black story, but many different groups have been living in the same places and have historical relationships with each other. Allotment, especially in Indian Territory, helps us see those relationships [between Native Americans, White Americans, and Black Americans] and the ways in which federal intervention during Reconstruction can empower some people and disempower others at the exact same time, and that does not mean they are different policies. But who those policies are for… that’s what shapes those outcomes.

T. Allread: I definitely agree with a lot of what Alex said. I think in comparing the experiences of Native people and freed Black people in the South, citizenship and assimilations are very important themes to think about and the parallels between the two. Not only through land ownership and allotment but also on the legal side of things.

In the South, there’s the Freedmen’s Bureau, and I’m thinking about Dylan Penningroth’s work on how Freedmen’s Bureau agents and courts are trying to impose a legal system and incorporate Black people and their ideas about property, family, kindship into this American legal system. Even though they subvert that in some way, as Dylan Penningroth points out, it’s a way in which the federal government is thinking about how to assimilate freedpeople into this American type of law. And I think that’s very similar, not only in Indian Territory but the West more broadly, especially if we’re moving into the 1880s, to the ways in which the federal government is setting up Courts of Indian Offenses, through which they’re giving more power to Indian agents to be the arbiters of justice on these reservations, and their ways of setting up what is called the Indian police. So it’s very similar, those parallels between the ways that federal officials are acting in the South to bring freedpeople into the United States and into notions of citizenship and the ways they’re preparing Native peoples for that step too, especially with allotment as the method to prepare people legally, culturally, and socially for American citizenship.

Two other quick points. Something that makes it a little different though is, as Alex was pointing out, the way in which you get Native peoples to become citizens or assimilate into the United States, you first have to break down tribal sovereignty itself. That’s the major obstacle that’s standing in the way for federal power to achieve its hegemony in Indian country. So during Reconstruction, there are a lot of different moments we can point to in which the federal government is trying to break down that sovereignty. For example, in 1871, Congress passes a rider on an appropriations bill saying that they will no longer be making treaties with Indian tribes. So even though how that actually plays out on the ground is contested and a little ambiguous, I think it’s a statement that the federal government no longer wants to recognize tribal sovereignty in ensuring that Congress has as much power as possible in Indian affairs. There’s actually some work that points to that rider having roots in Reconstruction politics because of the conflict between Andrew Johnson and Congress over Reconstruction, with Congress wanting to take more power over appropriations, including in Indian affairs. Congress is also expressing its power through Radical Reconstruction at this time, so that context also extends into Indian affairs as the House of Representatives ensures it would have some say. Now tribes are going to be governed by legislation rather than treaties.

And the last thing to point out—something that is very parallel even though how it works in the South and the West is very different for Black and Native peoples—is the prioritization of White land ownership or conceptions of White land ownership. The federal government does not want to give freedpeople land in the South because that would be taking land away from southern plantation owners and people who own that land. In the West, the federal government wants to divide up land through allotment because then that allows for any surplus land to be auctioned off to White people, which is what allows those land runs to occur. Also, when Native peoples are given title to that land, it then can easily be transferred between them and White people, as we see happen throughout the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Future Directions in the Field

A. Roberts (Chair): Those are some really great points, especially in bringing together citizenship and assimilation. As Reconstruction ends, whenever you decide Reconstruction ends, that impetus to allow and help Black people with citizenship then moves to Native Americans getting citizenship, whether or not they want it, and the negative effects of that.

Okay, so the question you always have to ask at the end of these panels: where is the field going, even though I think you all are the future of the field and you all are doing such interesting things in your work. What else is out there? What did you uncover in your work that you think still needs to be written about?

K. Waite: The big so what question. It seems, from a certain perspective, that the historians of Greater Reconstruction and the historians of Reconstruction are going in separate directions. They belong to different historical trajectories and are asking somewhat different historical questions. But actually, I think there is a compelling reason to ask historians to bring these two concepts together and to understand what those capacious framings, like Greater Reconstruction, tell us about the more traditional narrative of Reconstruction. 

Kate Masur and Greg Downs in their book The World the Civil War Made do a particularly nice job, I think, of framing the big picture question but also bringing the discussion back to Reconstruction. In a lot of ways, what the view from the West gives us is an understanding of the fragility of the federal project of Reconstruction. I mean, in some ways, the surprising thing about this era is not that Reconstruction fails either in 1876 or whatever end date you want to pick for it, but that it survives for as long as it did, given the pressures on it, not just from the former Confederate states but across the American West. I had a terrible line in my book, and my editor is sitting in this room, so I’m loath to bring it up. The Yankee Leviathan was a fish out of water in the arid borderlands of the Southwest. The strength of the federal government, which is apparent in Georgia in 1876, is pretty flimsy when you get out to New Mexico in 1878.

N. Martin: I want to start by talking a little bit about some of the criticism Greater Reconstruction has received since Kevin you talked about how Greater Reconstruction and traditional Reconstruction are seemingly going in different directions. I think some of the criticism we need to pay attention to is that this term is now getting so capacious. What is the analytical usefulness if we’re throwing everything under this larger Reconstruction umbrella? 

And I think Elliott West had a great response to this, which was what we have to do is hold in one hand the federal government’s… Washington’s determination to see all these groups as the same—to try to put everyone into one box, to make everyone fit into a [homogenous citizenry and] American home—while recognizing the widely varied realities. On the Greater Reconstruction side, we’ve gotten really good at making those connections and telling that ideological, dominant narrative. But where the work is left is getting at that much more messy, contested reality, and I think all these panelists are doing that. But that’s definitely where we need to focus our attention and energy and then, from there, offer a new synthesis that is maybe not so neat.

From my own personal focus as a historian, I’d like to see more cultural work around Reconstruction, but also women’s history in particular. I’d love to see more studies on how Indigenous women or other women from these so-called “problem groups” are responding to Reconstruction policy, such as the implementation of the American home. What is the gender story that’s coming out of this larger Greater Reconstruction story? I think there’s been some work done on that, but there could be more.

A. Stern: I’ll start with a very, very brief personal anecdote. When I was taking U.S. History in late middle school and high school, I always loved the war units because they had this really clear chronology and significance. You know, the Civil War and WWII also have a clear moral valence as well… And my least favorite unit was Reconstruction because it was so complicated, there were so many historical actors, and it was hard to take that all information in and understand what it meant. Now, having read more and thought about it longer, I think Reconstruction is so interesting because of those complications and the ways in which it is messy. Which I think, for a long time, has been pointed to to say there is no bigger national project at work here. But I think, in that messiness, we will find many, many projects. And we are, in fact, I hope, at the beginning of a proliferation of projects that look for and find these Reconstruction connections in many, many places. 

I recently read an article on H-Net that suggested that these Greater Reconstruction arguments were senior scholar arguments or projects because you had to make your bones first because you pursued this contested argument, I guess. It’s a good article, but I disagree with that point. I think the myriad of possible projects here is one of the exciting elements and why I’m so grateful to all these people up here with me for making this panel possible to signal to others the fruitfulness of this field and the variety of potential projects, not just in Indian country, but in a broader sense of figuring out who is important and matters in the history of Reconstruction or at least has something to say. 

Eric Foner puts it best. We return to the questions of Reconstruction, again and again, because they are the essential questions: citizenship, rights, democracy. These things mattered in the past; they matter now. And so, figuring out that history is not just important historical work but important work in a democracy that is struggling with those exact same questions.

T. Allread: I really liked Kevin’s point about how Greater Reconstruction and southern Reconstruction are almost diverging in some ways. I see so much value in Greater Reconstruction, and in talking about Native Reconstruction, just because we’re trying to bring the West into the larger story of the United States. So much focus still on the Civil War and Reconstruction is what’s happening in the East, east of the Mississippi. It’s great that we have all this scholarship coming out that is trying to bring these fields into conversation with one another.

Drilling down to some specifics on things I think would be really interesting to explore further… actually looking at how Indigenous peoples themselves are dealing with these federal policies. Something I’m really interested in is how tribal governments and peoples are exercising their sovereignty through law, especially in how that impacts federal law and policy. I don’t think tribal law has gotten its due in the late nineteenth century. Sidney Harring has this great book, Crow Dog’s Case, which gets at some of this, but it hasn’t really been done in a Reconstruction framework, so I think that would be really interesting. I’m also a big fan of Joseph Genetin-Pilawa’s book, Crooked Paths to Allotment, showing how Indigenous peoples like Eli Parker are actually influencing federal policy from the top. I’m not sure if he would go along with our Greater Reconstruction or Native Reconstruction framework or not, but I think bringing that story into it and also looking at what’s happening on the ground. How are Indigenous people also influencing policy within Indian country itself and not just from Washington? And then I think, I brought this up earlier, the plenary power doctrine has its roots in Reconstruction, and I’d be interested in people drawing connections there. I really like Greg Downs’ book After Appomattox, which looks at military power and how much the federal government is trying to do through military rule. I think there may be something there in thinking about how military rule in the South and then in the West then leads to this really encompassing idea of plenary power that then gets extended to Native peoples, immigrants, Chinese immigrants especially. And so I think there’s some work that can be done there in thinking about these legal doctrines beyond just the Reconstruction amendments and how they may have their roots in some Reconstruction ideals or policies too.

Overall, I’m very excited for everything that people on this panel are doing and outside of this panel to really highlight Native Reconstruction and Greater Reconstruction. Can’t wait to see where it goes from here.

A. Roberts (Chair): Well, any grad students here? Great dissertation topic ideas. Thank you all so much. Thank you!

Q&A

A. Roberts (Chair): So, we have time to discuss. Perhaps some of the ideas we have discussed have stirred some opinions, some thoughts, whether in agreement or not…

Audience Member: I’m way outside my fields of expertise here, but I’m curious whether there’s any crossover in conversation in your work, both with studies of Protestant missions—which includes missions to the Freedmen and the Indian schools—and, crucially, with the same kinds of cultural and racial stuff going on in American empire: Alaska, Hawaii, and then the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico… we’re still seeing those issues. I’ve done a little work on the United Fruit Company in Cuba, and it’s the same civilizing mission in 1900 in Cuba. So, I just wondered if there was a conversation with the folks working on American Empire in the same period?

N. Martin: Definitely, in women’s history, gender history fields, there’s a lot of crossover. For example, I’ve looked a lot at the Women’s National Indian Association, which is this organization in which white women pride themselves on being a missionary organization, though they are just looking at what they say is only an American problem. Unlike other missionary organizations, they’re going to focus on the [civilization] problem in U.S. territory. Of course, they’re using all the same language as a lot of overseas missionary organizations. [So they go] into reservations and try to build homes. They actually start a home loan building association where they raise money because they’re so convinced the answer is just “we need to build homes on these reservations.” So, in short, yes, there’s quite a bit of crossover, especially if you’re looking at the work, the space White women are carving out to gain power against “racial others.” Very much so.

K. Waite: That’s such a big, important question. I guess it’s no coincidence that the age of emancipation is also the age of empire, even though it may seem ironic at first, in that slave emancipation and Native removal and these infringements on Native sovereignty are flipsides of the same coin. That’s where I think Greater Reconstruction is so helpful because it encourages us to think of this era as a grand struggle over power and the attempt by the federal government to impose its sovereignty over a whole bunch of rebellious polities: the Confederate rebellion in the South, numerous Native rebellions in the West, and a number of separatist movements in the far West. Why is why I think then Hawaii can be brought into this Greater Reconstruction framework rather easily. I’d be curious to hear what Elliot West has to say about that. But Hawaii, in a lot of ways, is just the far, far West. So, the processes that are occurring in places like California are about to occur in Hawaii as well.

A. Stern: Yes, I think the transcontinental possibilities of Greater Reconstruction…will continue to push the geography. Greater Reconstruction is really continental right now. But you’re entirely right; the ideology of these nineteenth-century actors was not. They have grand [expansionist] plans, as Kevin’s book clearly shows, starting in the antebellum period, and it makes sense they continue into the Reconstruction period as well. So, I think you’ve highlighted a key growth area.

A. Roberts: For the Five Tribes, missionaries and religious people who come into the nations are, of course, [using Christianity as] an early way of trying to civilize these people. Religion is, of course, an important way they want to change societies, kindship networks, the entire way Native people relate to each other, which at first is not accepted by a lot of the people that I study, especially in the Chickasaw Nation. [They] are expelling these people, partly because they don’t like the religious aspect, but also because a lot of these missionaries are abolitionists. And so, a lot of the slaveholders, who are the important, influential people, are pushing these people out or having constant arguments with them over their vision for their nations and what civilization looks like. For some people, that is Christian religion; for some people, that’s not. For some people, it’s slavery; for some people, it’s not.

Audience Member: Thank you for such an interesting panel. I wanted to touch on something that Tanner said. So I teach in First Nations and Native American and Indigenous Studies, and I think one of the priorities, when we teach in that field, is getting at Indigenous perspectives of these histories. I have Indigenous students in my classroom, so thinking about how is it I talk about this history that is sensitive to what they’ve experienced or the history that they know. And so, I’m curious as to how you engage with Indigenous perspectives around this history, as some of it can be very tense. And also, I noticed a lot of this is focused on Indian Territory, but I’m wondering, for other tribal nations outside of that area, how do you speak about this history?

T. Allread: That’s a great question. My first point is that just by highlighting Indigenous perspectives is really important because, too often, the story of Reconstruction and the history of the West is told as what the federal government is doing to Native peoples and not so much how Native peoples are responding to it. And I also think that it’s really important to highlight that Native peoples are thinking about these things and have opinions on them. Indian Territory is a unique case because there are so many western-educated Native people who write so many letters and speeches, and there’s so much to draw from. I think in the farther West, there are maybe fewer sources written specifically by Native people, but I still think you can still access so many of those through federal agents’ reports and letters. They’re reproducing what Native peoples think about these things and the actions they’re taking to either conform to or oppose what the federal government is doing. So finding more creative ways is a part of the toolbox of a Native historian in accessing these opinions and perspectives because they’re definitely there; it just takes a little bit more work to actually access those.

A. Stern Just in support of that answer, I’ve really moved away from assigning monographs. I’ll do maybe one scholarly article I can give to my students as a PDF, but then mostly they’re reading primary source packets I’m putting together. I really like driving them to the primary sources: (1) because it gives them access to diverse voices and a richer story fromthe historical sources, but also (2) in many cases, when we’re teaching history, we’re not just teaching content, we’re also teaching skillsets. So those primary source packets give us an opportunity to work on…critical thinking and critical reading skills, which, of course, benefit them in any profession they would choose to go into. I give them the big picture view, that Greater Reconstruction view, but our discussion is really going to be about how that works on the ground. Let’s see what the Indian agent in Montana Territory is reporting back; let’s read Pleasant Porter’s papers. 

Of course, putting these packets together is a lot of work on the teaching end, such that it may take a few years to build those things, but the investment does really pay off and lets students have access to Native voices and to what it is historians do: we go to the archives and read people’s papers.

A. Roberts: One of the things I do because, in almost every single class, I always have to get in Native American slave ownership, which can be kind of difficult to talk about. First, I have to get my students to understand all these horrible things that Native people have endured; then, I’m going to tell them that they owned slaves and also themselves were oppressors. So I do the same thing that I do in my work, my writing, when I’m teaching, which is use myself. This is my family’s story; I’m talking about something that is difficult for me to get my head around sometimes; here’s how I came to it; here’s how I think you should understand it: as two groups of people who are trying to survive, making decisions, some of those decisions we may look at as morally wrong, here are why we think that they made, and how they themselves said they made these decisions.

T. Allread: One other thing. I think it’s also really important for us as teachers to resituate things geographically too. So often, it’s so easy to tell the story of U.S. history from East to West. I know Daniel Richter’s book is a little earlier, but his idea of facing East from Indian country is very important to try to integrate into classes. Because we’re trying to think, what if we started from the perspectives of Indigenous peoples and how are they experiencing these things that are coming to them rather than following Americans as they encounter Indigenous peoples and figure out what they’re going to do with them moving farther West. So even just switching that perspective geographically does a lot to honor Indigenous people’s experiences and of their perceptions history, which are very different from what we normally do in following American historiography. 

N. Martin: And just to follow really quick, on that note, because that’s such a good point. A source I love to use that does exactly that, which maybe you already use, is Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Paiutes. The first book published by a Native American woman. She does this amazing job of completely turning on its head the narratives coming out of Washington and completely reverses what is happening. Instead of Native peoples attacking White settler homes, it’s the opposite. She brings in sexual exploitation and all these topics that you’re like, “Wow, someone was really talking about this in the late nineteenth century.” It’s such a powerful source that centers from the West looking East.

Audience Member: Thank you so much for a really illuminating and exciting panel and set of ideas. One of the ideological things going on in this period is a belief among policymakers that Native peoples are vanishing. And I wondered if you’re seeing policies that are shaped by that assumption or also… any moments where you see the realization that that’s not happening, and changes to policy on the basis of the assumption that we’re not dealing with people who are vanishing but in fact people who are enduring or surviving. So I wondered whether that spoke to any of your research or the policies you’re looking at?

A. Stern: I think many scholars have pointed out that allotment is built on the logic of the vanishing Indian. Because as you divide land over generations, these allotments get smaller and smaller, and you end up with a tiny fraction of land. I see that a lot in the work I do around allotment policy. 

But even with the Five Tribes’ recent reinstatement of their reservations [the purposes of criminal jurisdiction] in Oklahoma—this is the McGirt decision—one of the questions that has lingered for me in my own work is why, with the Curtis Act (1898), which sets out to abolish tribal governments, Congress ends up not revoking the Five Tribes’ reservations. The Supreme Court was correct in their reading of the history in McGirt because Congress never abrogated the reservations. And I think the fact Congress did not, even though they could, may speak to their assumptions about what’s happening to Native people [who they think are vanishing]. And because they didn’t, we’ve seen a modern resurgence of sovereignty back into tribal governments today, although the state of Oklahoma continues to try and contest the McGirt decision.

K. Waite: I really like that question, and I’ll answer it with another question. If Native people are really vanishing in the American West, then what explains this white supremacist Democratic working-class backlash? Because voters in places like Oregon and California built this Democratic comeback on a widespread fear that non-White people were going to topple this carefully-constructed racial hierarchy, which white voters had done such work to sit atop of. Yet it was a precarious thing. And so, again, Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, African Americans all get lumped in together as the great non-White threat; whether these people presented any threat to white voters’ hegemony in the far West is a different question. The fact that the threat was felt sort of undermines the entire claim of a vanishing race.

Audience Member: I’m not sure I know where this question is going, but I’m wondering about New Mexico because it’s maybe another one of these problematic cases that we don’t normally think of in the context of Reconstruction. [It has] a “problematic” population, in part because it’s Catholic, in part race-wise. But New Mexico hits the threshold for organization as a state in 1848, when it enters the United States, and it held back from statehood for 64 years in the context of some serious debates about citizenship. There’s a set of discussions I confess I don’t understand, a distinction lost to us today, about the different rights of state and federal citizenship and their division. So, I guess it comes down to a question about is there something being worked out here about state and federal citizenship because Alex, you talked about statehood in Indian Territory, so this might be another one of those cases where that comes up?

A. Stern: Yes, Steve Hahn, in an article he published in 2013, “Slave Emancipation, Indian Peoples, and the Projects of a New American Nation-State,”—this was in the Journal of the Civil War Era—writes about territorialization. It’s very strange. The eastern states move very quickly, and then these far western states get held for decades in this territorial process. [Hahn argues] Reconstruction in the West is very much built on the supremacy of federal power through the territorialization process. And, in fact, most of the other scholars of Native Reconstruction I find are frequently working on the territorialization process and this movement to statehood within Montana Territory, Indian Territory. I don’t know anyone working on New Mexico specifically. But I think that territorialization, because it… allows for stronger federal oversight and influence, is very much connected to the longevity of Reconstruction in the West.

K. Waite: The very dense and unreadable source that I always assign my students to tease out this distinction between local and national citizenship is the Cruikshank decision of 1876, because the Court’s decision rests heavily on this distinction: when state citizenship exists and when national citizenship exists. I wish I had a better answer to your questions about New Mexico. I think Howard Lamar’s The Far Southwest still is a really, really useful source. But, I’ll end my comments there before I say something that I can’t sustain.

Audience Member: I have a bit of a provocative question… Get ready! [group laughter] Do you ever see yourselves and the work you do unintentionally empowering Lost Cause narratives? And let me explain what I mean by this. In so far that you believe that Civil War was fought over the question narrowly about the abolition of racial slavery and Reconstruction was a period devoted towards ending slavery and bringing freedom to Black people, I think the reason why the traditional historiography works is because that’s so clean. You have this overarching paradigm of slavery and its death and the resurrection of freedom as the narrative. But, do you ever see yourself, in your teaching or people you encounter on Twitter, in making Reconstruction more capacious and saying it was more about wider questions of citizenship and sovereignty… you have people who believe in the Lost Cause say, “Aha! There you go! So maybe they weren’t fighting for slavery after all. The federal government wanted to push its vision of citizenship on all these non-white people too, and that’s really what the Civil War is about. I’m going to leave it there. But I want to preface all this by saying I am very partial to the Greater Reconstruction paradigm; I use it in my own teaching. But I’m just curious, is this a risk, or am I overthinking as historians tend to do sometimes?

N. Martin: The way I deal with it, you have to pick your thing and go in close. I keep talking about the home, but that’s what I study. If I start by looking at the way that the home relates to slavery, that part of what makes a slave a slave is that they’re denied the right to the home—those are the arguments at the time—they’re denied some form of humanity, then very much the Civil War is being fought about slavery… You look at that moment, and then you follow it and look at how it is then employed in the West or other places, and I think then you can see the perversion of that ideal [in Reconstruction]. That is at least one way I try to do it… I think it’s about getting into that specificity as much as possible; that helps take away from this Lost Cause narrative.

K. Waite: I’m really glad you asked a provocative question. I don’t think you’re overthinking it. If by promoting a Lost Cause message in our teaching about Greater Reconstruction, you mean that we’re muddying the waters and that we’re questioning the virtue of the Union war effort, the answer is absolutely yes. I often come back to Lincoln’s “Last Best Hope” speech, which I think explains a lot about how the war is carried out, not just against the Confederate South but in the West as well. Lincoln and others in the U.S. government firmly believed that the United States was this precious republican experiment and a beacon to the rest of the world, and that any threat to that beacon would have to be dealt with in a very aggressive and violent manner. As Alex was talking about with the so-called Sioux Uprising, I think it explains why the retribution was so swift, and I think it does help us understand how a war waged against slaveholders in the South so easily bled into a war against Native people and Native sovereignty in the West.

N. Martin: On that note, Moon-Ho Jung’s book, Coolies and Cane, does that same great work. With Chinese immigrants, the threat Americans believe they pose, they believe slavery is back. The fear is slavery in the Union, and that has to be eradicated, so that also helps us make sense of how Chinese Exclusion and emancipation happen at the same time.

A. Roberts: Kind of related, I would just say, in short, the question of slavery is at least two questions: one is about labor, what sort of labor system are we going to have, and second is about racial difference, is there really a difference between White people and Black people. But really, Greater Reconstruction is about those two questions as they apply to all non-White people and even other White people. So I think in that way, it’s still looking at the same issue that happens to not be fully resolved by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.

T. Allread: So much of Greater Reconstruction is about emancipation. As Kevin points out in his book and Stacey in her book on California, it’s also working out, now that we have these [Reconstruction] amendments and have abolished slavery in the South, how do we then extend that emancipation to peoples in the far West in coercive forms of labor. And that extends to Native people, especially in California in thinking about forced apprenticeship and debt peonage in New Mexico and the Southwest. So, I think the emancipation theme is still central to Greater Reconstruction, even if a lot of us focus on the concepts and themes that come out of Reconstruction in the South that we then apply to the West. 

A. Stern: I’ll just say a bit more broadly, we’re in some ways lucky because the possible problem you raise is a bit more obvious. I do lose sleep over it, but I also know I need to stress-test my arguments… and address possible misconceptions. And I think that’s actually a practice we might all think about because our work does get taken up. Historians don’t control what happens once the text is in print. But we can be explicit in saying here’s what we’re arguing, and here are the limits. In this particular moment, history is very political. It’s a universal problem we all face but can, in our writing, try to address. Because especially in Native history, you do not want to do more damage. So talking to more people, workshopping… you can find these problem areas and nip them in the bud.