SHA 2024

Remembered and Forgotten:

American Indian Collective Remembrances of the American Civil War & Reconstruction

SHA 2024, Kansas City

Abstract: 

Bridging a divide between North and South, East and West, “Greater Reconstruction” scholarship challenges how historians periodize, map, and understand Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. Even more recently, historians have incorporated collective remembrances of the American Civil War and Reconstruction into the discussion, but all too often these stories have focused on non-Native efforts to shape Civil War memories. In their remembrances, non-Native Union and Confederate veterans and their families reframed the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction, tying southern Reconstruction and westward expansion together to defend settler colonialism. In the process, they wedded together two of the most pivotal events in U.S. history, but their accounts rarely incorporated Indigenous voices. Inspired by Kevin Bruyneel’s work in Settler Memory, this roundtable proposes to reframe the discussion by flipping the perspective to analyze collective remembrances of the Civil War and Reconstruction from Indian Country. What did historical remembrances of the Civil War and Reconstruction look like from Indian Country? Who framed it and how? In other instances, why did Indigenous people favor forgetting over remembering. What do these instances tell us about the intersectional relationship between memory, race, and power in the American West and South? Together, our panelists will tease apart the significance of the Civil War and Reconstruction’s presence and absence in American Indian collective remembrances of the era and in the process, offer insights into memory scholarship’s methodologies.

Lindsey R. Peterson, Digital Humanities Librarian, University of South Dakota

 Assimilation and Civil War Memory

During the 1880s–1890s, thousands of non-Native Union veterans and their families west of the Mississippi River commemorated the American Civil War as members of veteran and auxiliary associations like the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). Their collective remembrances celebrated Union veterans for preserving the Union, securing emancipation, and settling the West, and in the process, they wielded them to bolster the colonization of American Indians.

Conversely, some American Indian tribes rejected non-Native styles and methods of war commemorations, despite significant pressure to adopt these memory-making rituals. Others turned to the GAR and women’s auxiliary associations to resist colonization, but little is known about Native membership in these organizations. What did Native GAR membership mean to those who joined? How did American Indians navigate western Civil War commemorations like Memorial Day and monument erections? And what do these competing western memories reveal about memory, race relations, and the Civil War?

Alaina E. Roberts, Associate Professor of History, University of Pittsburgh

 The Forgotten Civil War?

The American Civil War ushered in an era of destruction for Native American nations in Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma): the 14-odd battles fought in the region decimated homes and crops, the end of African chattel slavery forced a restructuring of wealthy Indian leaders’ lifestyles, and the treaties that ended the war irreversibly altered practices of land ownership and tribal sovereignty.

So, you would think that the American Civil War would be an important milestone with significant coverage in tribal museums and cultural center. But you would be wrong. Why is this conflict something a number of Choctaw and pan-tribal museums/cultural centers have deigned to include when providing an overview of their history? And what does this tell us about race and memory in Indian Country?

Malinda Maynor Lowery, Cahoon Family Professor of American History, Emory University

 Controlling the Narrative: Lumbee Memories of the Civil War and Reconstruction

The Confederacy’s commitment to slavery and the Union’s commitment to expansion are different versions of the same story of colonialism and imperialism. In one of the areas of the South that was truly divided between Confederate and Union, Lumbee Indians in southeastern North Carolina took advantage of the discord among their neighbors to continue their own resistance to colonialism. This resistance expressed itself in the Lowrie War, a Lumbee-led multi-racial rebellion against local white authority between 1865 and 1872.

Remembrance of the Civil War and Reconstruction in the Lumbee community entailed a disavowal of the extent to which tribal members affiliated with the Confederacy. At the same time, Lumbees privileged memories of those who participated in the Lowrie War. This paper argues that Lumbees engaged in their own form of reconciliation, aligned in some ways with the efforts of southern Democrats and Republicans, in an outdoor drama that was commissioned and produced by Lumbees in the 1970s. The outdoor drama also positions the Lowrie War as a form of resistance to colonialism and a refusal to bend to either Democrat or Republican political agendas. At the same time, the drama emphasized the failures and triumphs of men on both sides while largely relegating the role of women, who were in fact central to the Lowrie Gang’s success during the rebellion, to the margins.

Alexandra E. Stern, Assistant Professor of History, The City College of New York (CUNY)

 Sequoyah Statehood & the Legacy of Reconstruction in Indian Territory

“The republican party has been responsible for the division of our land and the destruction of our government,” wrote Pleasant Porter, Principal Chief of the Creek Nation, in 1906. “We’re not friendly and won’t be charitable.” In the midst of attempting to secure a Native state in eastern Indian Territory, Porter directly connected the dual statehood movement to the legacy—and the scars—of Reconstruction within the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Nations.

Denied separate statehood by the Republican Senate and President that same year, many influential members of the Five Tribes saw their forced future as part of Oklahoma as one last punishment orchestrated by the party of Reconstruction. Highlighting one side of the Indigenous experience and memory of Reconstruction in Indian Territory, the Sequoyah movement, this presentation argues, showcases the unexpected political allegiances and contradictory legacy of Reconstruction at the border of the American South & West.