We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us

Dangerous Influences

Sequestered but still connected, Native Americans circulated information throughout the West, spurring on intertribal relationships old and new. Unfortunately, US officials believed that some of the ideas spread through those networks might weaken the reservation system. They were especially worried about two vital categories of knowledge spread via intertribal visiting.
First, visiting allowed tribal nations to share their experiences dealing with the US government and devise strategies to resist government control. These exchanges gave Natives advantageous knowledge as they negotiated US government demands, often frustrating US officials. The US government considered some ideas to be subversive and limited intertribal contact to prevent their spread.
Second, intertribal visiting spread and reinforced Indigenous religious ideas and practices, even as the US government was attacking those beliefs. For nineteenth-century Native Americans, intertribal dancing was more than a physical act. Networking tribes shared religious knowledge, their ever-evolving systems of ritual, and their interrelated constructs of the spiritual world. Indigenous forms of religion were seen to be backward, even barbarous, by most white Americans. Reservations were meant to Christianize the Indians, after all, so government officials also tried to limit visiting in order to put a stop to dancing.
1883-09-11
Anti-Colonial Knowledge
Native leaders across the West traveled off-reservation to meet foreign leaders in council, hoping to pool their knowledge, exchange strategies of resistance, and relate their experiences dealing with the US government. Visitors and hosts shared the forced subordination of colonialism, and they often considered ways to mobilize collectively to rebalance power on reservations. Cheyenne River Lakota leaders who hosted an intertribal council in 1883 believed that “the interests of the Indians . . . are identical” and that it was “proper” for leaders from different reservations “to meet and talk over matters in which they are all interested.” Intertribal meetings could cover a wide variety of common concerns, from the merits of boarding schools to a change of power in Washington, DC, or the intrusion of cattle operations. Leaders struggling to maintain some sense of sovereignty for their people sought information of political value. Intelligence acquired from foreigners could change the course of history for some tribes.
In 1888, Young Man Afraid of His Horses, the influential chief at Pine Ridge, wrote that he wanted to maintain connections with other tribes because those lines of communication were mutually beneficial. He argued with the US government that visiting with outside tribal nations was their right. He argued that in order to secure their future, Natives needed to visit one another to discuss matters that would affect all of them. He wanted to visit the Crows Reservation to discuss and “plan” the best strategies to maintain their lands as the “crowding” from whites became more severe. For Young Man Afraid of His Horses, restricting visiting in order to control the flow of information, whether it was anticolonial in nature or not, was unjust and disregarded his people’s sovereignty.
1889-01-26
The Office of Indian Affairs took steps to limit the spread of what it called “nonprogressive” or “demoralizing” thinking. In February 1889, for instance, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs told the agent at Pine Ridge that he wanted the “least possible intercourse” between Northern Cheyennes at Pine Ridge and Northern Cheyennes at the Tongue River Reservation. If the Pine Ridge Cheyennes were to visit Tongue River, the commissioner reasoned, they would also “in all probability exercise an extremely demoralizing, if not dangerous influence” upon the Tongue River Cheyennes. For the officials at Tongue River, things were going well; the Cheyennes were “progressing.” But there was worry that the constant interaction between the two reservations might bring nonprogressive, traditionalist viewpoints to Tongue River, which would interfere with farming or education.
Omaha or Grass Dance
Omaha Dance at the Pine Ridge Reservation, 1891
Intertribal Dancing
In the nineteenth century, dances, which were typically intertribal affairs, were significant cultural events where people gathered and exchanged both the material and the spiritual. Dances were expressions of religious meaning but also served social purposes. Religious practices like the Sun Dance or the Omaha Dance were acquired and adapted, and because of the expansion of intertribal communication during the reservation years, these ideas could be shared with distant groups. Dances remained a major motivation for visiting and were often held in order to strengthen intertribal bonds.
For federal policy makers, however, dancing only served to remind Indians of their prereservation lives. It was a practice of the past, a “demoralizing influence” that detoured the path of progress. For an agent at Devil’s Lake, visiting parties brought dances, and the dances brought out the “paint and feathers,” the bodily decorations of the uncivilized. Government officials, missionaries, and reformers included antidancing rhetoric in their civilizing campaigns because dances were the expression and promotion of so-called uncivilized, non-Christian ideas. Like the information spread by Indians in order to subvert colonial control, Indigenous religious concepts were also thought to be damaging to the US government’s efforts. There was little concern for the First Amendment rights of Native Americans because they were not US citizens, and policy makers limited Native dancing for the sake of white sensibility. It was not until 1978’s American Indian Religious Freedom Act that government interference with the exercise of Indigenous religious belief was deemed illegal by Congress. But back in 1883, commissioner of Indian affairs Hiram Price opined that there was “no good reason why an Indian should be permitted to indulge in practices which are alike repugnant to common decency and morality; and the preservation of good order on the reservations demands that some active measures should be taken to discourage and, if possible, put a stop to the demoralizing influence of heathenish rites.”
NorthernCheyenneOmahaDance
Northern Cheyenne Omaha Dance, 1891, with White Onlookers
Exchanging Religious Ideas
But because of their constant contact with foreign groups, tribes discovered and incorporated new religious ideas and dances throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Utes acquired the Sun Dance from their new allies in the Great Plains, the Omaha Dance and the Crow Dance spread to new tribes, and dancing persisted despite pressure from the US government. The diffusion of new religious knowledge and practices among Native groups in the 1880s and 1890s occurred because Native groups had an intertribal network of communication in place. Ideas considered subversive to government policies could be still shared among these increasingly connected communities.