Front Page | We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us

We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us

This is a companion website for the book by Justin Gage, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed between Us, winner of the Outstanding Western Book from the Center for the Study of the American West, the Beatrice Medicine Award from the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures, and the Smithsonian National Postal Museum Book Award.

In the 1860s and 1870s, after years of resistance, most western Native Americans were forced to settle onto ever-shrinking pieces of land created by the United States government to relocate, contain, and separate them. Native Americans were colonized peoples living on reservations, which, the US government hoped, would keep them away from each other and from the white populations coursing through the Plains. Despite this colonial control and confinement, Native Americans were able to remain mobile in the late nineteenth century. This tenacious mobility, defined not only as the freedom of geographic movement but also the ability to share ideas and information widely, allowed western Native Americans to create vast networks of communication that traversed the boundaries of the US government’s reservations. These intertribal networks, threaded together in the 1870s and 1880s by intertribal visiting and letter writing, facilitated the dissemination of important information and ideas to Natives on a continental scale, often in opposition to US colonialism, including religious knowledge and practices like the Ghost Dance.

Networks of Visitation

While Native peoples undoubtedly faced limitations on their movement and communication in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, they found ways to interact with those outside. Native Americans on reservations constantly submitted requests to visit foreign tribal nations on other western reservations. Native Americans made at least twelve hundred trips between western reservations, and probably many more, from 1880 to 1890. At least one-third of those trips, made by parties ranging in size from one to hundreds, were made without the permission of Indian agents and outside US government authority.

Networks of Correspondence

The written language, passed along in letters through the US Postal Service, also bridged the gaps among reservations during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, allowing men and women to communicate efficiently across the vast distances that separated them. With their own words, distant contacts could share news and express their thoughts and beliefs outside of colonial control, accelerating the development of larger intertribal communities. Natives used the US government’s suppressive education to communicate for their own purposes, to limit colonial control, direct their own lives, and expand their cultures.

DANGEROUS INFLUENCES

Native Americans had common concerns, and they shrewdly used the US government’s repressive education system and the mechanisms of American settler-colonialism, notably the railroads and the US Postal Service, to protect and expand elements of their ways of life. Unfortunately, US government officials believed that some of the ideas that spread through these intertribal networks might undo their efforts to control and assimilate Indians. Agents knew that tribes shared their experiences dealing with the federal government and the strategies they used to resist government control. Intertribal interaction often gave Natives advantageous knowledge as they negotiated government demands. Intertribal letters and visits were also used to collectively discuss and mobilize resistance against government policies, such as the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887, and to combat land cession. Moreover, intertribal communication spread and reinforced Indigenous concepts, especially religious ones, that were under attacked by the US government. Thus, communication was often an effort toward decolonization. Native Americans spread information that might limit colonial control.

“We should be permitted to make friendly visits among each other as the white people do. The president said he wanted us to be at peace with each other and to be friendly. We do not want the gates closed between us.” - Oglala Lakota leaders Red Cloud, Little Wound, and Young Man Afraid of His Horses to President Cleveland, 1888

Communicating the Ghost Dance

The intertribal networks of correspondence and off-reserve visitation that formed in the 1870s and 1880s facilitated the rapid dissemination of the Ghost Dance in 1889 and 1890. No other religious movement reached so many Native Americans in such a short amount of time. Information was sought, gathered, and relayed across a network that spanned the continent. Some Natives defended the movement, and others criticized it, but because of the well-established networks among tribes, a set of ideas originating in the mind of a Paiute in western Nevada named Wovoka (or Jack Wilson) became part of a continental, Native-controlled conversation (with believers from southern Arizona to Saskatchewan).

The Research

Maps

Take a closer look at the maps from the We Do Not Want the Gates Closed between Us.

Statistics

View the tables in We Do Not Want the Gates Closed between Us and some extras.