AMERICAN MASTER NARRATIVES AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIAN CITIZENSHIP IN THE GILDED AGE AND PROGRESSIVE ERA

Abstract

AbstractAmerican Indian people fit poorly into the sweeping stories most commonly told about American history. Puritan-inspired stories of national origins and Turnerian frontier narratives cast Indians as outsiders whose role was to be dispossessed and then disappear. More recent counter-narratives of conquest and of redemptive struggles for citizenship allow Native actors important and autonomous roles, but are also premised on a teleology of assimilation and civil rights that flattens the complexity of Indian uses of U.S. citizenship rights. The history of the Society of American Indians, founded in 1911, shows how the paradox of Indian citizenship is central to stories about the broader sweep of U.S. historical practice.