Prairie Imperialists - Katharine Bjork America in the Nineteenth Century

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      Just as it had in federal relations with Indians, a commitment to mediated and circumscribed sovereignty also went along with colonial assessments of the backwardness and the lack of capacity for self-government of the peoples of America’s new possessions after the war with Spain. At the same time, Indian Country has also always referred to the places, and to the people acting in them, where the expansive sovereignty claims of the United States have been challenged and checked. In other words, limits on effective sovereignty in Indian Country cut both ways. The United States acted to curtail self-determination by natives, but just as the Lakota and Apaches had, Cubans, Filipinos, and other colonized peoples contested and evaded many of the forms of control the United States sought to impose on them.

      Between its use by the British Crown as a way of designating Indian territories west of the Appalachian Divide that should remain beyond the reach of land-hungry American colonists to its invocation by soldiers in twenty-first-century wars of counterinsurgency, the concept of Indian Country has undergone changes both in meaning and in the contexts in which it is used. However, the original sense of being considered a place “apart from the lands of the whites,” has endured, even as the practical meaning of Indian autonomy within those lands continued to be subject to constraints imposed by the United States.31 In the 1830s, the limits on Native sovereignty were elaborated in several consequential Supreme Court cases. In 1831 the Supreme Court found that, in spite of their recognition in treaties with the United States, Indians were not “foreign nations” but “domestic dependent nations,” subject to the authority of the United States. In outlining a “protected nation status” for Indian tribes, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote: “[Indians] occupy a territory to which we assert a title independent of their will…. Meanwhile they are in a state of pupilage. Their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian.”32 The status of the Cherokee Nation, whose appeal of the Indian Removal Act led to Justice Marshall’s decision, became a precedent for the relationship of the United States to its insular territories and their inhabitants that was taken up by the court in the early years of the century.33 Like the Cherokee Nation, Cuba was recognized by the United States as a nation able to conduct its own affairs while simultaneously remaining under the “pupilage” of the United States. Cuba was recognized as a foreign country and yet remained “subject to control and even legislation from the United States.”34 Passed by Congress in 1901, the Platt Amendment placed limits on the sovereignty of the new government of independent Cuba even before it was formed. The amendment prohibited Cuba from entering into treaties with a “foreign power or powers,” placed limits on the new nation’s ability to contract a public debt, and obliged Cuba to provide the United States with a permanent naval station at Guantánamo Bay. Finally, the measure included a provision establishing the right of the United States to intervene for the “maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual liberty.”35 When the U.S. Military Government withdrew from the island in 1902, it left Cuba a protectorate. Puerto Rico, which the United States claimed outright, was defined as “a territory appurtenant and belonging to the United States, but not a part of the United States.”36 Cuba and Puerto Rico were recognized as separate nations, but were subject to the sovereignty of the United States in varying degrees.37 The Philippines, too, remained under American rule, direct or indirect, for more than three decades.

      Finally, no survey of the meanings of Indian Country is complete without noting that, for millions of Native Americans, the phrase connotes both home and homeland. Indian Country refers to geographical as well as cultural spaces within the United States that remain separate and distinct. Indian Country “may comprise ancestral territories and reservations, refer to sacred spaces, be framed by wins and losses in federal acknowledgement battles, and crosscut rural and urban environments,” according to anthropologist Stephen Silliman. “It is a metaphor for what it means … to be Native American in the contemporary United States.”38

      Although each of them emphasized a different aspect of its practice and lore, by the end of their time in Indian Country, Hugh Lenox Scott, John J. Pershing, and Robert Lee Bullard all expressed veneration for a combination of skills and traditions collectively referred to as “scouting.” Long a distinctive part of American frontier warfare, the use of scouts—both native and white—became central to the army’s prosecution of wars of Indian dispossession and pacification as the country expanded westward after the Civil War. Drawing on the role that the Indian scouts played in the West, in its next phase of imperial expansion, the U.S. Army looked for ways to organize native auxiliaries to support the occupation of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.

      The word scout comes from the Latin auscultare: to listen. In the military sense, scouting means reconnoitering, “searching out the land.”39 By the time Colonel Bullard’s white volunteer regiment in the Philippines adopted the name “Bullard’s American Indians,” however, the resonances of scouting far exceeded its narrow military definition. As Americans contemplated a diminishing frontier, the scout emerged as a nostalgic emblem of a heroic past. Bullard conveyed some of the mystique associated with the figure of the scout in an unpublished story he wrote about the Philippines: “No amount of learning or philosophy or civilization ever quite takes a man beyond a secret willingness, even longing to be trapper, ranger, hunter, woodcraftsman or fighter of savages or outlaws, all in one word, scout. In this the high and the low, civilized and savage, the general and the private soldier, differ not. Emperors and kings, princes, leaders, teachers, the greatest that the world has held, have aspired to the qualities, the name and reputation of scout.”40 In Bullard’s rhapsodic account, the appeal of scouting is primordial and universal; it is democratic in the sense that it has the power to overcome differences among men regardless of their station in life. Scouting, he suggests, transcends social class. All these attributes help explain the late nineteenth-century enthusiasm for forms of recreation and hobbyism loosely based on scouting and romanticized ideas of frontier manhood.

      The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time when the appeal and significance of scouting transcended its roots and function in military practice. As other historians have noted, it was no accident that the popularization of scouting in civil society occurred as the last Indian Wars were playing out in the American West and at the height of racialized colonial expansion by European powers in Africa and Asia. Such civilian and hobby scouting reflected ideals of manhood in an industrializing America as well as the politics of race and empire. The real key to the appeal of scouting, however, lay in its ability to furnish models for bridging that other gap alluded to in the story, the gap between civilized and savage, the very gap that preoccupied so many of the scientists, moralists, and colonial administrators of the day. In particular, organizations that emerged to promote Indian scouting for boys were interested in harnessing the inborn natural longing for the salutary primitive pursuits, identified by Bullard, to channel them for the good of the young scouts as well as in the service of empire. Less recognized is the way native scouting developed as an embodiment of colonial policy and racial relations within the military itself. Finally, army officers in command of Indian Scouts, including Hugh Lenox Scott, served as frontline ethnologists. In this way, military scouting reinforced and informed late nineteenth-century theories about the very nature of the categories civilization and savagery themselves.41

      In another sense, the logic of empire rendered all colonized people scouts. After the first American troops landed on Cuban shores in June 1898, U.S. General William Shafter offended some Cubans, who had been fighting for their independence from Spain for thirty years, by suggesting that their role should now be to serve as scouts for the newly arrived American troops, who were unfamiliar with the country and in need of orientation.42 In the context of their most recent experience of pacifying the West, the arrangement made sense to the Americans. According to this view, the role of the invading force was to take over command and apply superior force of arms to impose order. The expected role for the natives in this scenario was to provide local knowledge and act in a supporting role.

      As the theater of resistance to U.S. expansion shifted from the Great Plains and the desert Southwest to a new island empire in the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, the ethnographic knowledge and experience of dealing with primitives imputed to military men like

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