Prairie Imperialists
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The Spanish-American War marked the emergence of the United States as an imperial power. It was when the United States first landed troops overseas and established governments of occupation in the Philippines, Cuba, and other formerly Spanish colonies. But such actions to extend U.S. sovereignty abroad, argues Katharine Bjork, had a precedent in earlier relations with Native nations at home. In Prairie Imperialists , Bjork traces the arc of American expansion by showing how the Army's conquests of what its soldiers called «Indian Country» generated a repertoire of actions and understandings that structured encounters with the racial others of America's new island territories following the War of 1898. Prairie Imperialists follows the colonial careers of three Army officers from the domestic frontier to overseas posts in Cuba and the Philippines. The men profiled—Hugh Lenox Scott, Robert Lee Bullard, and John J. Pershing—internalized ways of behaving in Indian Country that shaped their approach to later colonial appointments abroad. Scott's ethnographic knowledge and experience with Native Americans were valorized as an asset for colonial service; Bullard and Pershing, who had commanded African American troops, were regarded as particularly suited for roles in the pacification and administration of colonial peoples overseas. After returning to the mainland, these three men played prominent roles in the «Punitive Expedition» President Woodrow Wilson sent across the southern border in 1916, during which Mexico figured as the next iteration of «Indian Country.» With rich biographical detail and ambitious historical scope, Prairie Imperialists makes fundamental connections between American colonialism and the racial dimensions of domestic political and social life—during peacetime and while at war. Ultimately, Bjork contends, the concept of «Indian Country» has served as the guiding force of American imperial expansion and nation building for the past two and a half centuries and endures to this day.
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Prairie Imperialists
Series editors: Brian DeLay, Steven Hahn, Amy Dru Stanley
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Following its victory over France in the Seven Years’ War, Britain’s Proclamation of 1763 articulated the concept of Lands and Territories beyond the reach of European settlement that were to be reserved “for the use of the said Indians.”27 This commitment to racial separatism was inscribed in the far-reaching Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts of the 1830s, in which the geographical limits of Indian Country were pushed further west and the content of native sovereignty was further circumscribed. Nineteenth-century Indian Country fulfilled the role envisioned on the early maps; it was the place to which America’s unwanted Indians could be removed.28 Federal legislation for Indian Country both recognized it as a place where Indian law and custom held sway, but also regarded the people living there as in need of civilizing. As William Unrau put it, “The Indian country of 1834 was as much a place for controlling human behavior and modifying culture as it was a physical space simply to be occupied by a displaced people in need of security and the means of survival.”29 Throughout the nineteenth century, a succession of Anglo-American institutions were put in charge of civilizing and pacifying—and expropriating—the native peoples of the continent: the Bureau of Indian Affairs, denominational churches, and the army. The Indian Bureau, as Brian DeLay has pointed out, was a colonial office focused on the domestic sphere long before the War Department created the Bureau of Insular Affairs to coordinate policy making for the new island possessions.30
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.
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