From savage space to governable space: the extension of United States judicial sovereignty over Indian Country in the nineteenth century

Abstract

The ways in which Native American communities as well as American society at large are constituted today are in no small part the legacies of the Indian reform era, a period of time spanning the 1880s and 1890s during which the assimilation of Native people and their spaces into the American polity became an explicit project of US governance. This civilizing mission, however, was a double moment in American history, for not only was it intended to reconstitute ‘Indians’ as American citizens through the force of law - it also enabled a certain claim to innocence on the part of American society. In this paper, I explore ways in which the cant of conquest was transformed into the ‘gift’ of civilization through the arguments of reformers, including their appropriations of Native testimony. ‘Indians’ started to become ‘Native Americans’, citizens equal before (US) law in an ostensibly liberal polity, yet this assertion of Native equality was made on the terms of white reformers which erased colonialism from American political discourse.

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