Question

“All Indian peoples in the years after the Civil War saw their sovereignty erode. . . .

“Reformers regarded Indian nations as legal fictions which the federal government should no longer recognize. . . . [Civilian and military leaders] disdained Indian sovereignty. . . . Reformers pushed the federal government toward direct supervision of the lives of individual Indians. . . .

“The reform policy had three basic components. The first was the suppression of Indian norms of family life, community organization, and religion. . . . Reformers tried to educate Indian children in order to instill mainstream American Protestant values in place of tribal values. Finally, reformers sought a policy of land allotment that would break up communal landholding patterns and create private ownership. In the end, Indians would be Christian farmers living in nuclear families on their own land. The remaining lands could then be opened to white farmers. . . .

“The strength of Indian communities during this period declined while the power of the federal bureaucracy that supervised them increased.”

Richard White, historian, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West, published in 1991

“As reformers and federal officials alike recognized, the key to ‘assimilation’ was ‘detribalization,’ and the key to ‘detribalization’ was eradication of the land base and communal practices that sustained tribal culture. . . .

“Congress enacted the General Allotment Act (also known as the Dawes Severalty Act) in 1887. . . . The act authorized the president to survey reservation lands, have them divided up into allotments of up to 160 acres, and make them available to Indians family heads. . . . Reservation land that was not subject to allotment . . . would be made available for purchase and white settlement. . . .

“. . . While effectively placing all Native Americans under the jurisdiction [control] of the federal government (as opposed to their own tribal laws and institutions), . . . those who remained on the shrinking reservations and maintained their tribal connections . . . continued to be excluded from the ‘equal protection of the laws.’ . . .

“. . .Try as the federal government might to penalize reservation Indians through isolation and dependency, the reservation could in fact become a site of cultural and economic creativity—and of resistance to the projects of the state. Indians regularly traversed reservation boundaries, often in defiance of government regulations and [travel] pass requirements, to visit one another and to exchange labor and goods, extending lines of communication and interethnic relations . . . . In doing so, they deepened their own tribal attachments while developing a sense of pan-tribal Indianness.”

Steven Hahn, historian, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910, published in 2016
The claims made by White and Hahn about United States policies toward American Indians in the late nineteenth century are similar in that they both support which of the following arguments?


The federal government sought to grant members of American Indian tribes United States citizenship.


a

The United States Congress saw treaties as the best way to promote American Indian economic development.


b

Federal officials desired to encourage the adoption of White American lifestyles by American Indians.


c

The United States wanted to force American Indians to provide labor for agriculture and mining.

Answer 1

C

Both excerpts describe policies—tribal suppression, children’s education in Protestant values, and allotment under the Dawes Act—intended to break up communal life and make Indians into independent, Christian, private‑landholding farmers (i.e., adopt White American lifestyles).