Reports of the American Indian family history project PDF
Preview Reports of the American Indian family history project
NUMBER 9 REPORTS OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN FAMILY HISTORY PROJECT PART ONE: INTRODUCTION Frederick E. Hoxie, Richard A. Sattler, and Nancy Shoemaker 1992 DfARCY McNICKLE CENTER FOR THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN THE NEWBERRY LIBRARY OCCASIONAL PAPER #9 REPORTS OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN FAMILY HISTORY PROJECT Frederick E. Hoxie Richard A. Sattler Nancy Shoemaker -- - PART ONE: INTRODUCTION The American Indian Family History Project has been supported in part by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the ~umanities ................. TABLE OF CONTENTS ................. . ......................... I Description of the Project 1 . .................................... A Introduction 1 . B Description of the Data: Censuses of American Indians 6 . ........... C Description of the Sample Communities 9 . ................. I1 Collecting and Processing the Data 31 . ........................... I11 Description of Variables 34 . IV The Individual Censuses: Profiles and Data Summaries 53 . ........................................... A 1885 53 . ........................................... B 1900 74 . ........................................... C 1910 115 . ........................................... D 1930 155 . .. V Conclusions and Description of Subsequent Reports 175 . ....................................... VI Bibliography 179 . .......................... VII Appendix: The Data Sets 184 Part One: DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT A. Introduction A generation ago, European scholars began to explore the family as an historical institution. Pioneering works such as Philippe Aries's Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of J'amilv L a an d Peter Laslettts The World We Have Jlost turned the attention of scholars away from kings and presidents and towards the history of everyday life. In the United States, rising interest in this history, and a renewed public debate over the state of the modern family has fueled a similar interest in social history and the role of domestic institutions in the national past. Herbert Gutman's landmark study, The Black Familv An Slaverv and Freedom. 1750-1820 epitomized this new scholarship. It is remarkable that despite the growth of scholarly interest in social and family history, no attention has been paid to the history of American Indian families. Despite a century of scholarship in cultural anthropology and dozens of museum collecting programs that have transported carloads of everyday material objects from Indian communities to display cases, there has been no academic interest in the structure and function of Indian families in the recent past. Kinship studies have proliferated, and a new literature on Native ~mericand emography has emerged, but until recently none of this has attempted to link Indian people to the larger history of the family in Europe and America. One example alone will buttress this last point: the ten-year cumulative index of th,e f published in 1987, does not contain a single entry on American Indians. Recently this situation has begun to change. In 1991, the Inaan Ouarterly published a special issue on Native American family history. It contained contributions by several authors covering a range of topics and tribal populations. Other articles have appeared in the last few years in Science Wtorv and the Jo~nalo f F w v m torv. The failure of researchers to examine the history of Indian families would seem in itself to justify an exploration of the subject, but in recent years another factor has emerged to amplify the attractiveness of the field. Throughout the twentieth century there has been a continuous increase in the size and assertiveness of America's Indian communities. From a lowpoint of 250,000 the national Native American population rose to nearly 350,000 in 1930 and then to more than 500,000 in 1960. In the last thirty years this figure has risen even more rapidly, to nearly 800,000 in 1970, 1.3 million in 1980 and nearly 2 million in 1990. These figures reflect both a strong demographic trend and a resurgence of cultural pride. They also indicate that ~ativeA mericans survived the forced assimilation of the early twentieth century with their identities and institutions intact. Explaining this phenomenon calls forth a variety of questions about Indian families. One asks, for example, "To what extent have families been altered by the pressures of modern life? Have some forms of family life been more llsuccessfulals~ bulwarks against outside interference? And how have older patterns been maintained in Indian family behaviors?Ig The most difficult period for Native Americans was the half- century from 1880 to 1930 when official federal policy stressed the necessity of Indian assimilation. During these years reservations were dismantled, tribal governments destroyed and local institutions abolished in an effort to, in the words of one reformer, l1kill the Indian and save the man." These fifty years were also characterized by a dramatic rise in the national population and economy. Even if the government had been neutral, there would have been dramatic changes in 1ndian communities caused by the growth of commercial agriculture, the emergence of modern transportation systems, and the transition of the united States to a multicultural, urban nation. Each of these trends would challenge a tribal world marked by self-sufficiency, face- to-face politics and reverence for tradition. The American Indian Family History Project is a response to the need for information regarding the history of Native American social life in the twentieth century. By compiling information about families and tracking the ways in which both the structure and behavior of those families changed through time, the project will provide scholars with a clearer picture of community life in an age of transition. The project is intended to stimulate new scholarship on the history of Indian families by tracing the outlines of this unstudied subject and suggesting ways in which it examined in the future. This examination, in turn, should help turn academic attention away from wooden categories of kinship and social structure and toward a more dynamic understanding of Indian life. Too often the scholarly literature on modem American Indian social life focuses on pathology: divorce, suicide, and alcoholism. This perspective is not only potentially skewed, but it emphasizes the differences between Native Americans and others. By gathering, organizing and analyzing a substantial body of data on Indian families, this project can shift the focus of scholarship to a universal institution and a more complex subject. The project will not only elevate a previously-ignored aspect of community life, but it will help teachers and students grasp the richness and the continuities imbedded in these indigenous American communities. The impetus for the American Indian Family History Project came from a research conference sponsored by the Newberry Library and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities in February, 1987. The conference brought together scholars from the fields of history, anthropology and sociology to examine new methods for studying the history of Native American communities. After two days of formal papers and discussions, the group recommended that a project be devised to use statistical methods in an effort to shed new light on recent Indian history. Specifically, the group recommended that the vast storehouse of censuses of American Indian tribes be studied in a pilot project. These censuses consist of tribal enumerations conducted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Census Bureau. The Indian Office began its data collection in 1832 and conducted annual censuses on all reservations beginning in about 1880. The Census Bureau carried out special enumerations in 1880, 1900 and 1910. These data made it possible to imagine a project that compared a variety of reservations settings over an extended period. Despite their many flaws, the census materials provided an opportunity to construct a fresh profile of Indian life during a period of dramatic cultural change. A proposal for to trace the history of American 1ndian family life from 1880 to 1930 through the collection and analysis of census data was submitted to the ~ationalE ndowment for the Humanities Division of Research Programs in late 1987 and was approved in the spring of 1988. Work began that fall and continued through the summer of 1992. This series of reports will bring the results of project research to a scholarly audience. - B. Description of the Data: Censuses of American Indians The American Indian Family History Project collected in machine-readable form census data for Indian communities in the period 1885-1930. Data was collected for the following communities: the Creek Indians in Oklahoma, White Earth Chippewas, the Crows in Montana, the Colvilles in Washington State, and the Hopis in Arizona. These data came from two different sources: Bureau of Indian Affairs censuses and federal censuses collected as part of the regular decennial enumeration. Bureau of Indian Affairs censuses: In 1885, the Bureau of Indian Affairs began requiring its Indian agents to submit annual censuses of the Indians within their jurisdiction. These documents are essentially enrollment lists which give names and other information for each-member of the tribe. Since these lists were enrollment lists and were not based on residence, they may exclude some people (intermarried whites and Indians from other tribes or bands, for instance) who lived with tribal members. Federal cansuses: Indians living on reservations were first enumerated in the U.S. federal census in 1890, but the manuscript forms for this census have not survived. The 1900 and 1910 federal censuses are available on microfilm and both used a special form to enumerate Indians living on reservations and in other Indian communities. Along with the questions on the regular census form, the Indian form asked supplemental questions such as tribe, father's tribe, mother's tribe, whether living in polygamy, and whether allotted. Anyone using these data should keep in mind that the populations in the two censuses are somewhat different. Indian Affairs listed tribal members; federal censuses listed people by residence. The federal censuses have considerable more detail than the Indian Affairs censuses, but are only available for 1900 and 1910. We collected data from the 1885 and 1930 Indian Affairs censuses so that we could look at change over time, There were, however, no BIA censuses for the Creeks. The following list describes what data sets are available for each of the five groups. Most data sets came from one of three National Archives microfilm collections: the 1900 Federal Census of Population (T623), the 1910 Federal Census of Population (T624), and Bureau of Indian ~ffairsC ensuses (M595). Because of the large size of the Creek population, we limited the 1910 data to two counties within the former boundaries of the Creek Nation.
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