6
Assimilation and Identity
The United States and Russia pursued different strategies during internal colonization to force the Sioux and the Kazakhs to abandon the nomadic life for a sedentary, agrarian one. Central to the various policies and programs advanced by the two countries was the belief that the Sioux and the Kazakhs could be civilized and, ultimately, assimilated and integrated into the broad American and Russian social, economic, political, and cultural milieu. The ideological differences did not completely mask the consequences; however, the differences influenced policy and altered the trajectory of internal colonization in the plains and the steppe. In particular, differences in technological advances (chiefly railroads and communication), missionary activities, the use of treaties (examined in previous chapters), and governance existed between internal colonization in the United States when compared to Russia.
The Railroad Difference
Historian J. Russell Smith observed, “Gunpowder and the railway reduced the grassland man to impotence.”1 As both the United States and Russia expanded railroad capacity throughout their empires, the tracks paved the way for deeper and more concentrated penetration into the colonized territories. The subject of railroad and empires has attracted significant popular and scholarly attention over the decades. Unquestionably, Russian imperial expansion began well before the process started in the United States, but the development of railroads occurred much earlier and more rapidly in the United States than in Russia.2 Historian Eric Hobsbawm called railroads a “revolutionary transformation” that “[t]ransformed the speed of movement . . . and introduced the notion of a gigantic, nation-wide, complex and exact interlocking routine symbolized by the railway timetable. It revealed the possibilities of technical progress as nothing else had done, because it was both more advanced than most other forms of technical activity and omnipresent.”3
In the United States, railroads were “quite consciously . . . agents of state,” and, as historian Richard White noted, “Just as Manifest Destiny made the expansion of the United States synonymous with the expansion of republican freedom, Christianity, and civilization itself, so the railroads made their expansion an expansion of civilization.”4 Railroads became the symbol of progress and civilization, and “technology, railways, the telegraph and weapons were used to control and order colonial societies.”5 An 1874 New York Times editorial enthusiastically insisted that railroads “pierced the jealously-guarded country of the red man; and in its wake will follow the turbulent and aggressive current which he has never been able to withstand.”6
By 1850 the United States had roughly three times more rail miles than Prussia—a leading European railway builder—a figure that swelled during the next decade.7 In 1869, after decades of sectional political debate, the transcontinental railroad connected the eastern United States to the West coast. According to James Belich, in “1875, the top five nations in terms of rail miles per capita were the United States (with 1,922 miles of rail per million people), New Zealand (1,350), Canada (1,159), Australia (998), and Britain (527). European Russian had 185 miles of rail per million people, Brazil 72, and India 34.”8 Only by the 1890s did railroads play a comparable role in Russia’s imperial expansion, similar to that which occurred in the United States. The Russian government, including the Imperial Geographical Society, considered the Trans-Siberian Railway that linked Moscow to the Pacific Ocean an agent of the state to bring “Christian love and enlightenment into dark Asia.”9 The Russians equated construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway to the American Union Pacific (1869) and the Canadian Pacific Railway (1885). American and Canadian railroads represented models to follow for Russia’s industrialization, territorial consolidation, and economic integration. Some Russians hoped to emulate the American example.10 The American transcontinental lines moved people and commerce, but those railroads also transported the military and, more importantly, pioneers, tourists, and entrepreneurs to the plains. Railways in Siberia and central Asia eased transportation for peasants, foreign visitors, government administrators, and soldiers to the Kazakh Steppe, Siberia, and the Russian Far East.
Railroad travel in both the United States and Russia encouraged pioneers and peasants to resettle in recently opened lands—particularly in the United States, where “the western railroads loosed a flood of stationery, postcards, calendars, timetables, guidebooks, and advertisements” on the public to promote rail travel and commerce.11 In the United States, railroads were often joint ventures between government and private interests. Russian railroads, however, were almost exclusively state enterprises. Nonetheless, by the 1890s, the Russian government recognized the necessity of promoting railroads among the peasant population in order to encourage migration and resettlement in the steppe and Siberia. According to historian Willard Sunderland, “as the scale of resettlement increased, state publishing houses (usually under the auspices of the Resettlement Administration or the Siberian Railway Committee) started churning out a wide array of settler-oriented materials, including settlement manuals on different settlement regions (putevoditeli), itineraries (marshruty), maps, and a variety of informational pamphlets.”12 A 1900 promotional Guide to the Great Siberian Railway, published by the Russian Ministry of Ways of Communication, claimed “emigration as a factor in Russian history had always tended to secure Russian dominion and Russian culture, and would serve as a stronghold of orthodoxy and Russian law” as the primary rationale to construct the Trans-Siberian Railway.13 In order to facilitate peasant resettlement, the Russian government reduced the cost of train travel so that a family of five could travel together for the price of a child’s third-class ticket.14
By 1904 the Trans-Siberian Railway linked Moscow to the Pacific Ocean, and within one year it connected the Kazakh Steppe, Turkestan, and Tashkent (via the Tashkent-Orenburg Railway) more fully into the Russian Empire.15 Railroads strengthened the American and Russian grasp on internally colonized lands; as a leading American railroad figure suggested, the “[r]ailroad line through Indian territory [is] a Fortress as well as a highway.”16 However, railroads defended the territorial gains made rather than introduced new ideas into the expansionist agenda. Railroads supplemented American internal colonization, but they also followed missionaries, settlers, miners, and others in concert with internal colonization. Railroads in the United States did not mark the path to internal colonization; they merely smoothed the way. In Russia, railroads created a new and easier path for peasants and opened different opportunities. In a sense, railroads in the western United States followed the flood of travelers and settlers; in the Kazakh Steppe, organized peasant resettlement accompanied the railroads. In both cases, railroads accelerated internal colonization, but they did not introduce it. This was most evident in the demographic changes in the plains and the steppe.
Population shifts in the United States and Russia compelled the American and Russian governments to establish frameworks to accommodate pioneers and peasants moving and settling on the plains and the steppe. American and Russian structures, resettlement, and reorganization clearly resembled colonies in other contexts. It was a particular type of sociopolitical organization and system of domination, which scholar Jürgen Osterhammel referred to as “border colonization.” Osterhammel argued that border colonization occurred when the expanding state’s recognized boundaries extended into and exceeded a contiguous wilderness area.17 In the American expansion, border colonization occurred at the same time, and in some cases before, the military conquest. For example, in the two decades before the 1862 Sioux rebellion in Minnesota, the neighboring territory of Wisconsin experienced a tenfold increase in Americans settling there, while in the 1850s, Minnesota expanded twenty-eightfold.18 Similar growth happened in the plains territories, Colorado, Montana Territory, the Dakotas, and Texas.
Russian peasant resettlement in the Kazakh Steppe was much slower, and peasants tended to settle close to the Irtysh Line or Russian fortifications. Peasant resettlement rarely exhibited border colonization. The Russian government tried to retain a firm grip on peasant movements, particular prior to the 1861 serf emancipation. Those peasants permitted to migrate tended to settle in northern steppe regions. In the southern steppe regions, peasants settled much more slowly. According to one Russian survey, peasants frequently settled as “villages” rather than on individual allotments, mimicking the pattern of life they left behind. After the serf emancipation, the Russian government attempted to manage peasant migration and demarcate specific lands available to resettlement in the steppe. Between 1874 and 1892, the number of settlements in the Syr Darya province almost tripled.19 Akmolinsk, opened longer to resettlement than any other Kazakh Steppe province, also experienced significant growth in the 1890s. The objective, as one source claimed, was to “drive the Kirgiz people out . . . to ensure the life and property of the Russian settlers and restrain the impertinent Kirgiz.”20 After completing the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1904, the Russian government lost control of the situation. Around Semipalatinsk, between 1907 and 1910, the number of resettled peasant families grew from 1,000 to 11,500.21 Indeed, between 1896 and 1916, more than 2 million Russian peasants settled in the steppe.22 These demographic changes, driven by comparable pioneer and peasant demands for land, were still somewhat different, particularly the role the railroads played facilitating the movement.
The Missionary Difference
One other difference between American and Russian internal colonization of the Sioux and the Kazakhs was the role played by missionaries. The internal colonization and ideological differences between the United States and Russia, as Roger L. Nichols observed, set the Americans “on a course using the church, the plow, and the school as the central means of incorporating tribal people into the general society.”23 In 1819 the US Congress appropriated ten thousand dollars for Indian affairs, ostensibly to save the Indian from extinction and to promote civilization among the various tribes in the East and throughout the Mississippi Valley regions.24 Civilizing and Christianizing Indians in the United States was long a practice among various Christian sects but declined in the first decades of independence.
Civilizing and Christianizing in the American case was an imperial ideology nonetheless, an ideology that emphasized assimilation and generally ignored native customs and beliefs during internal colonization. In the 1820s, several groups in the United States, including the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, dispatched missionaries to work among the various tribes, particularly in the West. From this point forward, civilization and Christianity were “inextricably mixed” in American internal colonization.25 The Russians followed a slightly different imperial ideology, more similar to British imperialism in India, in which the government focused on legal codes and civil institutions to orchestrate its internal colonization.26 As such, one Russian observer claimed that “Russian governance gave Central Asia the two most valuable gifts of civilization—security of life and security for property—two things that were not known there previously, and the absence of which made normal life there impossible.”27 The difference between American and Russian approaches to coupling the civilizing agenda with missionary efforts is not difficult to understand: the Kazakhs were Muslims.
Catherine the Great’s 1773 “Edict of Toleration of All Faiths,” which suspended nearly all Christian proselytizing among the empire’s Muslim populations, determined Russia’s policies throughout much of the nineteenth century. As such, the edict’s proponents expected to integrate Muslim subjects using less compulsory measures—such as forced conversions to Orthodoxy—because “to forbid, or not to allow them to profess different Modes of religion, would greatly endanger the Peace and Security of its Citizens.”28 Thus, for almost a century, the Russian government and the Orthodox Church ignored active missionary work among the Kazakh population.29 In the Kazakh Steppe, parish priests rather than missionaries operated the Orthodox missions. Those priests were often more busy with the job of ministering to Russian peasants in the towns and villages than bothering to convert Muslim Kazakhs to Christianity.30
Catherine’s edict did not completely discourage the Russian Orthodox Church from proselytizing among the Kazakhs, or even among pagan peoples in Siberia; rather, the government did not actively promote it.31 In fact, the Russian government and the Orthodox Church tolerated other non-Christian religions throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, including Judaism and Buddhism.32 Nineteenth-century Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin comparatively claimed that Russia chose not to disturb the “consciences of the vanquished” but determined to enlighten its non-Christians “in the Divine Faith simply by setting them a better example, without recourse to the violence and villainy to which other devotees of Christianity resorted in Europe and America.”33 Russia maintained a civilizing mission throughout much of the nineteenth century that was administrative and integrative rather than religious. The Russians often used the term grazhdanstvennost’ to describe the integration, but it is not a simple translation. It denotes a form of civil order and civil society—perhaps citizenship, but not assimilation.34
The Russian government discouraged missionary work among the Kazakhs because it held a very different perspective toward Islam.35 From the moment Europeans transplanted themselves in North America, converting the natives to Christianity was axiomatic. As Mark Cocker noted, possibly that first meeting in 1492 fundamentally altered Europeans’ intellectual conceptions of human history, as “half the world was obliged to embrace its other half in an instant revolution of the imagination.”36 Steven Conn argued that the very existence of Native Americans made Europeans ask some ‘basic” questions, such as “who and where” did these people come from? These questions vexed Americans as well and “lay at the heart of the way several intellectual genres” developed in the United States long into the nineteenth century.37
That is not to suggest that when Europeans arrived in the Americas that they were completely ignorant of other peoples—quite the contrary. Europeans knew about Asians, Africans, Muslims, and peoples living beyond (and within) Europe’s borders, but that did not prevent Europeans from asking fundamental questions about the world and where Indians fit within that worldview. Americans ultimately identified Indians as a different race, not an identity based solely upon a creed or geography. As such, American Christian missionaries actively worked to convert them throughout much of the nineteenth century. Moreover, many Christian missionaries in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere tended to respect the existence of Islam, although they considered it a flawed and ignorant creed; in the United States, missionaries regarded native religion as unrealistic and paganism. As the frontier moved west, missionary objectives remained the same; only the tactics changed.
The Russians, on the other hand, never troubled to answer such elementary questions. The people the Russians encountered in the Kazakh Steppe and Asia were a known people; they were, of course, misunderstood, stereotyped, and classified but were not a people that challenged the Russians’ fundamental biblical or classical understanding of the world and its history. The Russians typically grouped the new subjects as inozemtsy (of another land) and later categorized the Kazakhs as inorodtsy (“alien” or “of another people”). Both of these terms suggest the extra-territoriality of the annexed people, their non-Russian ethnicity. But in the nineteenth century, Kazakhs were also referred to as inoverets (of a different faith), bestowed by the conventions of the day as a religious marker to identify non-Russians (i.e., non-Orthodox). The terms had legal and informal connotations and usages; Kazakhs were “non-assimilable, radically different subjects of the tsarist realm,” and the term reflected the degree of civilized development.38 According to John W. Slocum, assimilation was deemed improbable for inorodtsy; they were people identified by distinct social, cultural, and religious characteristics “whose purportedly ‘low level of civilization’ placed them in need of a special relationship of trusteeship to the Russian state.”39 Kazakhs and others occupied a different social space in the empire because, as Aleksander Gradovskii noted in 1875, “the inorodtsy population . . . was always ready to rise up against the authority of the Muscovite government.”40 Thus, Russian government policy was designed to “neutralize that threat” in order to integrate rather than assimilate the Kazakhs.41
There were many nineteenth-century critics of Catherine’s policy—particularly among Russian officials working in the steppe regions—but the edict persisted roughly until the 1870s.42 Consequently, the Russian Orthodox Church did not concern itself with the Kazakhs’ civilization or their spiritual well-being; however, in the United States, Christianity and the civilizing mission went hand-in-hand throughout the nineteenth century. Among the Americans and other European imperial powers, according to Ryan Dunch, Christian missionaries “came to their fields convinced of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual superiority of what they thought of, not as their ‘culture,’ but as ‘Civilization.’ ”43
In 1824 the American Society for Promoting the Civilization and General Improvement of the Indian Tribes Within the United States published its first report, in which it insisted that the “work of civilizing the Indians, is a common obligation of the whole nation, and it is the duty of all to engage in it.”44 Americans also believed the mere proximity to American civilization and good Christian practices transformed Indians. As historian Robert F. Berkhofer Jr. noted, because for missionaries “the superiority of the American Way of Life appeared self-evident to them, they thought that Indians would see it in their immediate self-interest to adopt the habits and beliefs of the (good) White American after a brief demonstration.”45
Thus, American missionaries worked more overtly to introduce Indians to Christianity as part of the civilizing mission compared to their Russian counterparts in the Kazakh Steppe or among Muslims in central Asia. American missionaries believed that exposure to Christianity compelled Indians to abandon their heathen, pagan ways and become civilized agriculturists. Missionaries assumed success because such “work, doubtless, is that of raising half a million of fellow beings, inhabitants of our country, and original proprietors of its soil, from a state of ignorance, heathenism and wretchedness, to the possession of innumerable blessings, which result from Civilization and Christianity.”46 Stephen R. Riggs, nineteenth-century missionary to the Sioux, pronounced that “a civilization in which Christianity has no place cannot be other than a refined barbarism, and consequently . . . the gospel of Christ should be regarded as the great civilizer of nations.”47 Riggs’s views found echoes in most imperial, missionary environments, including the Great Britain House of Commons’s 1837 Select Committee on Aborigines, which asserted, “True civilization and Christianity are inseparable: the former had never been found, but as a fruit of the latter.”48 The Russian government did not share that philosophy through much of the nineteenth century. Interestingly, though, both the United States and Russia emphasized civilization and Christianity through education, with fascinating ideological parallels.
Internal Colonization, Education, and Unintended Consequences
The chief mechanism to emasculate indigenous cultures and affect internal colonization was education. Despite sharing seemingly comparable objectives, the subsequent consequences were not so very different. The United States designed Indian education to civilize and Christianize the native population; Russia designed education to make the natives instruments of the empire in order to teach the skills necessary to serve imperial needs as scribes, translators, and guides. Learning Russian was part of that objective, structured to integrate Kazakhs rather than assimilate them. Americans wanted the Indians to learn skills too, but chiefly to learn English, how to farm, learn a trade, develop a vocational skill, or learn to labor. By the mid-nineteenth century, Americans also inextricably coupled these ostensibly tangible goals to an overt but amorphous desire to civilize. The Russians, on the other hand, only linked education and civilization together by the late nineteenth century. Moreover, the American policies assumed a standardized, somewhat inflexible, universal approach to education. The Russians more quickly recognized that the cultural and linguistic differences among the empire’s many nationalities required a more malleable approach to education in the various regions.49
Even before independence, in 1775 the American Continental Congress appropriated five hundred dollars to educate “Indian youth at Dartmouth College.”50 In 1818 the American government determined to expand its support for Indian education. The US Congress expressed some admiration for what other European imperial powers accomplished in their efforts to educate natives and justified supporting missionary efforts among its own indigenous populations, noting,
Great exertions have of late years been made by individuals and missionary societies in Europe and America: schools have been established by those humane and benevolent societies in the Indies, amongst the Hindoos and Hottentots, and notwithstanding that superstition, bigotry, and ignorance have shrowded [sic] those people in darkness for ages, thousands of them have already yielded to instruction.
The government has no such difficulties to encounter: no bibles nor books to translate into foreign or other languages: only establish some English schools: the experiment may be tried at a very small expense. The committee believe that increasing the number of trading posts, and establishing schools on, or near our frontiers for the education of Indian children, would be attended with beneficial effects, both to the United States and the Indian tribes, and the best possible means of securing the friendship of those nations in amity with us, and in time to bring the hostile tribes to see that their true interest lies in peace and not in war.51
While the American government provided some limited support for children of eastern Indians to attend schools, the efforts to bring civilization to the Indians in these early years was sporadic and limited. Nonetheless, these labors foreshadowed attempts later in the nineteenth century to civilize the Sioux. Most schools in the 1820s and 1830s were small missionary institutions, often opened with the government’s blessing. In addition, most treaties signed between Americans and Indians included some provision for schools. Coupled with the goal of educating Indians was civilizing and Christianizing them; the federal government generally provided financial support and encouragement but was not yet giving material support, such as buildings or teachers. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was not yet in the education business on the reservations, but that changed after the Civil War.
In Russia, education initially played a more instrumentalist role and was used to integrate some natives into the government’s administrative structures and institutions rather than assimilate indigenous peoples.52 In 1847 the Russians opened the Omsk kadetskii korpus (Omsk Corps of Cadets), which graduated many Kazakhs, including Chokan Valikhanov, for duty in the army as translators, guides, and scribes. In addition, the Russians established many Russian-native schools (Russko-tuzemny shkoly), which taught Russian and Kazakh children; instruction was almost always in Russian, but these schools were not compulsory. In central Asia, however, the Russian-native schools competed with mektep (native schools with Tatar teachers, not Russians) for students, although attendance was generally small.53 Some Kazakh children attended mektep, but the curriculum in the mektep was generally Koranic recitation and catechism, calligraphy, and Islamic texts. By the 1850s, wealthy Kazakhs regularly enrolled their sons in Russian schools, with graduates often taking positions in the steppe bureaucracy as clerks and scribes. Despite Catherine the Great’s 1773 edict banning Orthodox proselytizing among Muslims, by the second half of the nineteenth century, the Russian educational agenda included efforts to convert Kazakhs to Russian Orthodoxy.
In the 1860s, Russian education of Kazakhs followed the so-called Il’minskii system, which emphasized the sciences, math, history, and geography but was taught in native vernaculars. Named for Nikolai Il’minskii, a professor of Turkic Languages at the Kazan Theological Academy and Kazan University, the goal was to limit the spread of Islam, particularly among Kazakhs (the Russians understood that Kazakhs were Muslim but believed its tenets were weakly possessed precisely because Kazakhs were nomads).54 Il’minskii believed native vernacular education better transmitted Russian civilization and Orthodoxy; Il’minski schools also taught Russian but as a subject, not the instructional language.
Il’minskii emphasized that native language education facilitated the transmission of Russian imperial ideas and ideology. Teaching in the vernacular reinforced loyalty to the empire and, ultimately, lead natives, including Kazakhs, to adopt Russian culture and habits.55 It was a tool to integrate and possibly convert Kazakhs and other national minorities to Orthodoxy.56 The Russian minister of education, D. A. Tolstoi, wrote to the tsar, “To enlighten the natives, to draw them closer to Russia and to the Russian spirit, constitutes in my opinion a goal of highest political importance.”57 This method differed little from American missionaries who opened schools among the Sioux and on reservations.
Stephen Riggs preached and taught using the Sioux vernacular; he compiled one of the first vocabularies, translated the Bible into Dakota, and spent some forty years among the Sioux as a missionary, educator, and ethnologist.58 Brothers Samuel and Gideon Pond joined Riggs in efforts to civilize, Christianize, and educate the Sioux. Like Riggs, they relied on the native language to conduct their work.59 After 1868 the government funded schools, regardless if they were on or off reservations or run by missionaries, but the office of the commissioner of Indian affairs reemphasized the prohibition against teaching in the vernacular.60
In Russia, similar debates raged. Il’minskii’s critics claimed that the 1864 statute on primary schools mandated instruction only in the Russian language, and they insisted that it accelerated Russification, the Russian version of assimilation: “assimilation of language assimilates also the nationality.”61 In the end, however, Il’minskii won the debate, and in 1870 education minister Tolstoi adopted measures for the education of natives, which required native teachers to be fluent in Russian or Russians who knew the native tongue.62 Similar to the work of Riggs and the Pond brothers with the Dakota, Kazakh dictionaries, grammar books, and educational material appeared in the Kazakh language, which in the 1860s did not have its own script. The Russians created one using a phonetic-based Cyrillic; however, later Kazakh intellectuals debated the use of Cyrillic or Arabic, with most choosing the modified Arabic script. But it is in education that the assimilation policies adopted by the Americans and the Russians diverge. The Russian government permitted Kazakhs to organize, open, and teach in their own schools; teach in the vernacular; and educate young Kazakhs in primary topics such as history, geography, mathematics, and the sciences. Kazakhs created the curriculum, recruited the students, and used education to try to protect and preserve Kazakh culture in the face of increased Russification.63
Thus, in the second half of the nineteenth century, in their own way, American and Russian compulsory education attempted to impose cultural conformity through education and Christianity. It was one thing to force sedentarization and the agrarian life through allotment but quite another to accelerate assimilation through education. In 1875 the commissioner of Indian affairs, John Q. Smith, conjoined education and civilization for all Indians because “they should be recognized and treated for what they are, an ignorant and helpless people, who have a large moral claim upon the United States.”64 Americans owed Indians, Smith insisted, “a debt which cannot be discharged by gifts of blankets and bacon, or any routine official care for their protection or relief.”65 These “trifles” meant nothing compared to the gift of “civilization—which every consideration of humanity requires that we should give them.”66
Figure 6.1. Ibrahim Altynsarin, center, and students (courtesy of Central State Archives, Republic of Kazakhstan, 2-27605).
American and Russian internal colonization clearly manifested over native language issues, but it was a more pernicious feature of American internal colonization than the Russian case. In fact, the US government clearly regarded the persistence of native tongues as one of the more powerful obstacles to assimilation. In 1877 Commissioner of Indian Affairs Ezra A. Hayt advised the government to establish a “rule making it compulsory upon all Indian children between the ages of six and fourteen years to attend schools, and requiring English alone to be spoken and taught therein.”67
In the United States, education was the blunt tool of assimilation. BIA administrators, teachers, and missionaries all played a prominent role; they imposed American culture, social norms, and civic behavior and strongly privileged English-language education over native languages, culture, and social customs. Schooling and education were not novel concepts for the Sioux. Missionaries had operated among them for several years, but in 1879 the American government funded the first off-reservation boarding school, started by Richard H. Pratt, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Only a handful had opened by the time of the Dawes Act, but the government, following the allotment principles established in the act, opened even more boarding schools, including Hampton Institute in Virginia and Haskell Institute in Kansas. By 1898 there were twenty-five such schools, with a couple more completed by 1909. The annual report from the commissioner of Indian affairs that year claimed that the “Indian Service is primarily educational . . . The first division of the Indian Office is therefore naturally called the Education Division.”68 Interestingly, these schools eventually employed a large number of native teachers—more than 20 percent of the total (549 from a force of 2,355).69
American education fundamentally rejected the concept of the native. The American government sought to destroy what made native languages, in particular, so inimical to American internal colonization ideology. In 1887 Commissioner of Indian Affairs J. D. C. Atkins reported that it was necessary to wean natives away from their mother tongues in order to instill English, claiming that if it was “good enough for a white man and a black man, [it] ought to be good enough for the red man.”70 To the critics of this policy who claimed “it was a cruel blow to the sacred rights of the Indians,” the commissioner rhetorically asked,
Is it cruelty to the Indian to force him to give up his scalping-knife and tomahawk? Is it cruelty to force him to abandon the vicious and barbarous sun dance, where he lacerates his flesh, and dances and tortures himself even unto death? Is it cruelty to the Indian to force him to have his daughters educated and married under the laws of the land, instead of selling them at a tender age for a stipulated price into concubinage to gratify the brutal lusts of ignorance and barbarism?71
As one BIA administrator explained it to Pine Ridge Reservation agent D. Gallagher, “The education of Indians in the vernacular is not only no use to them, but is detrimental to their education and civilization.”72 Many reformers objected to this provision, particularly because it seemed to prohibit the use of bibles published in native languages. In 1888 the commissioner of Indian affairs, John H. Oberly, a former superintendent of Indian schools and a committed Indian school reformer, clarified the policy.73 He wrote in the annual report that “it may be well to state that it is not the intention of the Indian Bureau to prohibit the reading of the Bible by any Indian in any language, or by anybody to any Indian in any language or in any Indian vernacular, anywhere, at any time.”74 The Russian debate about the use of the vernacular was not as heated, divisive, or invasive. The Russian government did not prevent Kazakhs from speaking the mother tongue; the government wanted, at a minimum, for Kazakhs to be bilingual, in order to serve the empire.75
As a consequence, Russian education policies in the steppe allowed Kazakhs to become active participants in education rather than simply recipients of the colonizers’ language and culture. Education in the Muslim world had a deep and rich tradition, but by the 1880s, many Kazakhs educated in Russian schools embraced a “new method” (jadid) to protect Kazakh culture by improving it. They wanted to control secular instruction, modeled on the Russian schools, but infuse it with cultural reform and literacy. From the Russian perspective—initially, at least—if these reforms created better translators, scribes, guides, and subjects, government officials did not object because the curriculum did not appear to conflict with Russian efforts to educate Kazakhs. The Kazakhs managed to adopt elements of Il’minskii’s system but resist, in particular, its Christianizing agenda. In a comparable context, some Sioux managed to perform what historian Thomas G. Andrews called a “tight rope” between accommodation and assimilation. Andrews examined the work of Clarence Three Stars, a Sioux teacher at the Pine Ridge day school, who believed that English language and literacy was the best mechanism to “recast” assimilation as a “tool of Oglala survival.”76 Literacy became the instrument of survival.
The American and Russian schools, however, graduated a generation of intellectuals who became spokesmen for the native culture—translators of Sioux and Kazakh culture to the colonizing power rather than mere representations of it. They could adopt all facets of the dominant society in dress, language, work, and carriage but could also defend the native culture and language. Americanization and Russification fostered a generation of Sioux and Kazakh intellectuals—men and women who could navigate more successfully between the two cultures than previous generations. They were, as Edward J. Lazzerini noted among other native colonized peoples, “partial insiders who knew how to turn the dominant discourse against itself,” subsequently adopting a variety of methods to protect the indigenous culture.77 They aspired to use the dominant culture to their advantage via education and economic advancement, to defend their own culture against the further intrusion of another. Sociologist Karl Mannheim wrote, “in every society there are those social groups whose special task it is to provide an interpretation of the world for that society.”78 But, equally important, Sioux and Kazakh intellectuals interpreted their respective culture for the colonizer more effectively; the colonizer was comfortable because the intellectuals also seemed to exemplify the positive civilizing policies implemented by allotment and education. These Sioux and Kazakh intellectuals epitomized civilization.
This unintended consequence of American and Russian education policies gave the Sioux and the Kazakhs an audience; literacy gave Sioux and Kazakh intellectuals access to an unfiltered, albeit English or Russian, voice. It was the language of the colonizer, but the playing field shifted. Literacy gave the Sioux and the Kazakhs power, some authority over their own history and culture, and allowed them to reach beyond the world of “the Indian problem” or the “nationalities question” to present a different perspective and even, to some extent, a different agenda. Attending schools designed to assimilate them changed the conversation, and Sioux and Kazakh intellectuals became active participants in that dialogue. Armed with the periodical press, they reflected the changes in their society by using methods that mimicked comparable situations in other colonized societies; they could reform their culture by “adjusting it to the requirements of progress while at the same time maintaining its distinctive identity.”79 Sioux and Kazakh intellectuals were able to reimagine their communities because, according to Benedict Anderson, “their vanguard role” derived from their multilingual literacy—or, rather, their literacy and multilingualism. Anderson argued that multilingualism gave native intellectuals valuable access to “modern Western culture in the broadest sense, and, in particular, to the models of nationalism, nation-ness, and nation-state produced elsewhere in the course of the nineteenth century.”80
In the United States, Sioux intellectuals such as Charles Eastman used the periodical press to defend and highlight the value of native languages, cultures, and traditions. In many Indian boarding schools, administrators and teachers allowed students to publish material that seemed to strengthen assimilationist policies, but students also used the new forums to defend and define their native identities. Among Kazakh intellectuals, such as Akhmet Baitursynov, there was a genealogic line between colonial education and the intellectuals’ capacity to turn the “dominant discourse against itself.” Eastman and Baitursynov became active leaders in the early twentieth-century sociopolitical movements the Society of American Indians (SAI) and Alash Orda (The Horde of Alash), which claimed to represent the interests of their people against the cultural, social, economic, and political internal colonization that enveloped the Sioux and the Kazakhs over the course of the nineteenth century.81 They wrote for American and Russian audiences, but they also successfully crossed the social and cultural divide to criticize government policies without threatening the social or political order. They were prolific writers; each advocated learning the colonizer’s language and insisted that education was critical for the survival of their people; but they also demanded that the governments desist with allotment and internal colonization.
Sioux and Kazakh intellectuals spawned a renaissance of Sioux and Kazakh literature in the early twentieth century, and they helped to influence renewed examinations of internal colonization and altered American and Russian policies. Allotment, in both the American and Russian cases, was simply the process to organize and stabilize land resettlement. In the American case, it is typically associated with the 1887 Dawes Act; however, in a sense, the Americans allotted land well before that legislation but called it something different, such as removal or reservations. By removing Indians to reservations, Americans were allotting land for one group of people to use and denying it to another. In the Russian case, allotment started the moment the tsar’s forces moved into the steppe and established the line of west–east forts manned by Cossack garrisons and Russian peasants. The Russians excluded Kazakhs from using those allotments to pasture their livestock and often denied them permission to migrate to the other side of the line. In other words, that policy effectively removed Kazakhs by forcing them to pasture their herds away from Russian military establishments and peasant settlements. The policy deprived them access to land they had claimed and enjoyed for generations. It was not, as in the American case, a literal and physical removal from one territory to another; but the result was the same.
Sioux and Kazakhs lived with what historian Beth LaDow called the “strange duality” in which the Sioux and other Indians were physically segregated from the dominant American society yet were expected to assimilate culturally.82 The Kazakhs lived with that same strange duality, categorized as inorodtsy—subjects without benefit—and expected to integrate and imitate Russian peasant sedentary agriculturalists. These two contradictory concepts, apparently sociopolitical handmaidens to civilization, permeated and influenced American and Russian alchemies of internal colonization.
A New Century, Different Solutions?
As the nineteenth century closed, the United States faced a crisis of identity, as did the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century. In the United States, many politicians, journalists, and others questioned if America was an empire comparable to Britain and France. The defeat of the Spanish in Cuba and the Philippines triggered an impassioned debate about the meaning and course of American expansion into these recently acquired overseas lands. For some Americans, however, this was not a new or necessary debate. Instead, the terms of the debate resonated clearly with the country’s earlier expansion across the continent. Writing in 1900, former journalist, soldier, and senator from Kansas, William A. Peffer, asked rhetorically, “Is our Philippine policy anti-American?” Not in essence, he claimed, because except for those few periods when the American army was engaged against Mexico, the Confederate states, or Spain, “the army was used almost entirely for the Indian service, and stationed in the Indian country along the frontier.”83 As such, he insisted, expansion and “Americanism . . . has consistently exhibited itself in the policy followed by this country . . . which are comparable to the Philippine situation at the present day. If it amounts to imperialism, then, indeed, are we a nation of imperialists without division.”84 America had overseas colonies; it had, or so it seemed, imperial ambitions. This argument was echoed decades later by Richard White, who noted, “Western expansion was about empire, as much as the American people and many historians would like to treat it as a purely domestic development. . . . [And] the creation of an overseas empire in 1898 was not ‘unthinking or accidental.’ It had precedents in continental expansion, which was just as conscious.”85 Contiguous expansion, for most Americans, was destiny and natural, but it was also imperial and colonization. Russia and its contemporaries, on the other hand, clearly considered it a continental empire, but no such debate occurred in the halls of government, among military men, or among Russian peasants migrating to the steppe. Russia was an empire, but the regime divested itself of overseas colonies in 1867 when it determined that Alaska was not worth the cost to maintain the overseas imperial grip. Russia’s identity crisis, however, was not the result of its continued imperial expansion but rather by its sudden termination.
Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1904–1905 exacerbated Russia’s internal economic and social fragility and sparked a revolution at home. It was a chastening defeat; an Asian power turned the tide against European economic and military hegemony. If that was not humbling enough, widespread peasant and labor unrest quickly spread and sailors in the Black Sea fleet rebelled, forcing the government to abandon many of its culturally and socially repressive, crucifying policies and return its colonial affairs to what one scholar called its “traditional pattern of flexible pragmatism.”86 The concessions wrested from Tsar Nicholas II resulted in unprecedented reforms. The tsar consented to parliamentary (Duma) elections, permitted political parties to organize, eased censorship, and granted freedoms of movement, the press, and assembly. Russia generally abandoned its policies of forced assimilation in order to pacify nationalist and anticolonial movements inspired by Japan’s example. One policy that the Russian government failed to reform was peasant resettlement in the steppe and Siberia. Finally unencumbered by official restrictions, peasant migration rapidly accelerated after 1905 and overwhelmed local officials. As with many other minority peoples in the Russian Empire, Kazakh intellectuals organized to petition the government for relief from the increased economic deterioration caused by peasants occupying land previously reserved for Kazakh nomads. Included in the petition was the demand that the government suspend all allotment and resettlement activities in the Kazakh Steppe.
In 1906 six Kazakhs, including Alikhan Bokeikhanov, were elected to serve in the First Duma; considered far too liberal for the conservative tsar, Nicholas II quickly dissolved it, and new elections were held. The tsar also managed to impose new legislation that greatly reduced national minority participation in all ensuing Duma elections. Nonetheless, Kazakhs, as was the case for many minorities in the empire, fully and actively participated for the first time in the empire’s political process. They were not alone. Kazakh intellectuals subsequently organized the Alash Orda, and in 1913 it started publishing a newspaper, Kazak. Edited by Akhmet Baitursynov, Kazak appeared regularly until 1918, when it succumbed to wartime shortages and the ravages of revolution and civil war. These men were not revolutionaries. In fact, during World War I, Alash Orda actively supported the Russian government’s efforts, but it vigorously debated what role Kazakhs ought to play and how the people could best contribute. That was all for naught, however, because in June 1916, the government announced plans to conscript Muslims to serve, which sparked widespread revolts throughout central Asia and the steppe regions.87 Alash proclaimed Kazakh independence from Russia in December 1917, but, caught between opposing Bolshevik Reds on the one side and Whites (anti-Bolsheviks) on the other, independence was short-lived. By 1923 the Bolshevik government reincorporated Kazakhs into the newly formed Soviet Union—a novel social, cultural, and political experiment that played out for the Kazakhs under Soviet rule, an examination of which is beyond the scope of this work.88
Figure 6.2. From left: Akhmet Baitursynov, Alikhan Bokeikhanov, and Mirzhakip Dulatov (courtesy of Central State Archives, Republic of Kazakhstan, 2-95119).
In the early twentieth century, despite debates about America’s overseas imperial ambitions, allotment continued uninterrupted on the majority of Indian reservations. In 1906 the federal government amended the Dawes Act with the Burke Act. The purpose of the Burke Act was to adjust the twenty-five-year trust period established for Indians granted citizenship and enfranchised. The government established Competency Commissions to evaluate so-called qualified Indians, thereby making Indians unrestricted landowners with the right to lease or sell land without government interference.89 The act merely accelerated allotment and Indian economic and social dislocation. By the 1910s, Sioux intellectuals such as Charles Eastman also participated in the modestly successful Society of American Indians. Formed in 1911, and similar to Alash Orda, the SAI advocated for increased work and education opportunities and debated the need for greater political, cultural, and economic sovereignty. In 1913 the SAI started to publish the Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians, which represented the principal organ to disseminate its agenda. The SAI held annual conferences and became the leading voice for reform in Indian affairs.
When the United States entered the First World War, many SAI leaders responded enthusiastically to the country’s military need in an essay. They instructed the journal’s readers that the United States “has upheld the principles of human liberty, political equality and universal justice and she has invited to her hospitable shores the millions of the world who needed a land of opportunity and has schooled them in those principles.” The essay concluded with the challenge, “Already we hear the tread of feet that once wore moccasins; already the red men are enlisting. Let this, then, be a personal question, ‘Have you done your share?’ ”90 The SAI was rarely in accord with the American government or the War Department, but on this occasion, the organization never wavered in its support. By the 1920s, the SAI splintered into factions, rent by internal rivalries, but its support for Indian enlistment, service, and domestic contributions (e.g., Liberty Loans and the Red Cross) positively influenced politicians and others to enact necessary reforms, including full citizenship for Indians in 1924.
Two years later, in 1926, Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work sanctioned an independent study to determine the effectiveness of American government policies on behalf of Indian since 1887 and the Dawes Act. The so-called Meriam Report signified the clearest statement of current economic, social, and cultural conditions for Indians, noting that Indians had not “adjusted to the economic and social system of the dominant white society.”91 As historian Margaret Szasz noted, “In the four decades since the passage of the Dawes Act, Indians had become more and more dependent on the Indian Bureau. Ironically, this was the very antithesis of the theoretical aim of Federal Indian Policy.”92
At the heart of the debates in the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1920s was the issue of self-determination. The concept of self-determination became current in the late eighteenth century, but US president Woodrow Wilson popularized the idea during the First World War. Vladimir Lenin also embraced the concept but for different reasons. Like Lenin, Wilson and his supporters held a liberal worldview in which self-determination represented self-government, nationality, and the nation-state.93 Neither Wilson nor Lenin defined self-determination within their own country’s boundaries as independence or decolonization. According to Rupert Emerson, the “intermingling” of minorities with the “dominant majority people” determined that “no form of self-determination, short of mass migration, can be invoked to satisfy such demands as the minority community may make for recognition of its separate identity and its human rights.”94 Lenin’s Soviet Union was the first to try self-determination, as understood then, in a multinational state.
Implementing the ill-defined self-determination program among the Kazakhs, however, was complex and burdened by lingering tensions between Russian settlers and Kazakh nomads. The Soviet Union’s self-determination policies promoted forms of nationhood (language, culture), created national territories, and established what historian Terry Martin called an “Affirmative Action Empire.”95 The Soviet government formed commissions to investigate Russian and Kazakh grievances and the Agricultural Commissariat ultimately concluded that protection for Russian agriculture, not “backward” Kazakh nomadism, was paramount. At the 1927 Communist Party Congress, Kazakh leaders claimed that the “Kazakh people interpret autonomy above all else as the right to decide independently questions of land.”96 Kazakh resistance to collectivization decimated livestock and resulted in a famine that claimed nearly 25 percent of the Kazakh population.97 The Soviets began the “socialist offensive,” ostensibly a class war against the “kulaks” (in the Kazakh case, wealthy nomads who possessed large herds). By 1931 Stalin proclaimed that the Soviet Union finally defeated “backwardness” and had become an industrialized, modern socialist society.98
In the United States, self-determination took a different path. Similar to Kazakh intellectuals’ complaints about Russification, American reformers and the leaders of the SAI demanded an end to the Dawes Act and the restoration of social, cultural, and economic sovereignty. The Meriam Report seemed to sanction the reform agenda. The assimilation policies, reformers claimed, did nothing to elevate Indians but further impoverished them. Reformers such as John Collier hoped to rebuild tribal structures severely fractured during allotment, restore tribal lands, reconstitute tribal self-governance, and preserve or resurrect indigenous culture and languages. In 1934 Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). Staunchly advocated by Collier, President Franklin Roosevelt’s newly appointed commissioner of Indian affairs, many American reformers considered this bill to be a vast improvement in Indian-American relations.
Also known as the Wheeler-Howard Act, its sponsor, Sen. Burton Wheeler of Montana, subsequently considered the bill a failure. He wrote in his autobiography, “I must confess that there is one bill I was not proud of having enacted . . . it was not a good bill.”99 Roosevelt, however, supported the bill because it granted to “Indian people” the opportunity to “take an active and responsible part in the solution to their own problems.”100 Upon its passage, a jubilant Collier wrote, “Whether that date [June 18, 1934—the date Roosevelt signed the law] shall be known hereafter as the Independence Day of Indian history will be determined by the Indians themselves.” But, he exclaimed, “The Allotment law—the agony and ruin of the Indians—has been repealed.”101 One supporter of the legislation, Elizabeth Green, compared the IRA with the “changes” evident for the “racial minorities once under the dominion of the Russian Tsars” and a “complete reorientation of Indian administrative policy” once thought “impossible.”102 She also claimed that the most “salient feature of the new legislation is its land policy. The immediate effect . . . was to halt permanently the policy . . . of individual allotment of the tribal lands, previously owned communally.”103
In the end, most scholars consider Collier’s reform efforts a failure. There are several reasons for this, but Collier himself cited the unwillingness of Congress to appropriate sufficient resources to carry out the program, a consistent complaint since the nineteenth century.104 In the end, the IRA did not implement self-determination or the full cultural revival Collier sought. In fact, in 1937 Senator Wheeler even introduced legislation to repeal it, though it remained in place until the 1950s.105 It failed for one simple reason: the American government, despite claims to the contrary, legislation, and well-intentioned proposals, was unable or unwilling to relinquish control of Indian affairs. By the late 1930s, the United States and Soviet Russia diverged significantly in their approach to self-determination. Both governments applied a form of “local federalism,” as suggested by Polish scholar Oskar Halecki, in which this form of self-determination “can give satisfaction to the claims of smaller groups or of factions of nationalities, without disorganizing the state to which they belong, by inconsiderate changes of frontier.”106 In a sense, one more reform equaled one more failure. Clearly, for both the Sioux and the Kazakhs, self-determination represented a more rhetorical rather than practical exercise.
US and Soviet government authorities continued to direct and intervene in Sioux and Kazakh political, social, and economic processes. According to anthropologist Thomas Biolsi, the “supervisory power could be invoked by the OIA [Office of Indian Affairs] (and occasionally was) to insure that council actions conformed to such standards as the tribal constitutions, OIA policy, and the democratic ideals of the OIA reformers.107 The Indian Office “engineered” political consent and cooperation from the Sioux (as well among other Indian tribes) in order to manage “tribal council operations . . . of self-government to the Sioux under the IRA.”108 In Kazakhstan, the Soviet federal system did not assume any devolution of centralized political power, but the policy prior to 1928 was to promote Kazakh national forms—specifically, language and culture. The policies that Collier instituted in the United States, albeit embryonic, were nonetheless self-determination. They shared with Soviet efforts the goal to dismantle forced assimilation or integration (Americanization or Russification) with policies designed to foster respect for and defense of indigenous culture, language, traditions, and arts. In the 1920s and 1930s, government officials in the United States and the Soviet Union deployed similar rhetoric to reform and restructure mechanisms to assimilate the indigenous populations; both governments had Sioux and Kazakh supporters in this effort. The governments allied with these reformers to attach greater emphasis to cultural self-determination of indigenous populations rather than political self-determination that superseded demands for political autonomy, even independence and absolute sovereignty.
Despite this invigorated political and social activism, neither the SAI nor Alash Orda fully affected the change they sought. The SAI was, according to historian Hazel W. Hertzberg, “a town meeting of educated English-speaking Indians rather than a representative confederation of tribes.”109 Sir Olaf Caroe dismissed Alash Orda as an organization that was “never much more than a committee which held congresses and issued manifestos.”110 These rather unsympathetic assessments ignored the cultural, social, literary, and political contributions made by the SAI and Alash. The SAI was the first Indian-led organization that demanded a “voice in federal Indian policy” and “respect for Indians as citizens.” It established the foundation for the “next wave of reform during the New Deal.”111 Alash Orda was comparable to the SAI. Alash was an unprecedented voice for Kazakh grievances, a voice that unraveled during the Russian Civil War. In the 1920s, Soviet policies briefly resurrected that Kazakh voice, but the Stalinist terror recklessly and violently silenced it during the chaotic 1930s. The SAI and Alash managed to give voice to those who had none to those willing to listen; the legacy was not just town meetings, conferences, or manifestos. The SAI and Alash managed to preserve and promote the culture, languages, and rich traditions previously deemed primitive and destined to perish with the “touch of civilization.”
Notes
1. J. Russell Smith, “Grassland and Farmland as Factors in the Cyclical Development of Eurasian History,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 33, no. 3 (September 1943): 160, emphasis in original.
2. See Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Richard Mowbray Haywood, The Beginnings of Railway Development in Russia in the Reign of Nicholas I, 1835–1842 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1969); Steven G. Marks, Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850–1917 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
3. Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution (New York: New Press, 1999), 88. Hobsbawm also writes that “the railways collectively constituted the most massive effort of public building as yet undertaken by man . . . Probably the only other by-product of modern technology, the net of telegraph-lines on their endless succession of wooden poles, about three or four times as great in length as the world’s railway system, was more universally known.” The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage, 1989), 27.
4. Richard White, “The American West and American Empire,” in Manifest Destinies and Indigenous Peoples, ed. David Maybury-Lewis, Theodore Macdonald, and Biorn Maybury-Lewis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 206–7.
5. Barbara Bush, Imperialism and Postcolonialism (Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2006), 84.
6. “Oklahama,” New York Times (May 19, 1874) editorial republished in Editorializing “The Indian Problem”: The “New York Times” on Native Americans, 1860–1900, ed. Robert Hays (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 330.
7. Steven W. Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Politics in America, 1840–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 34.
8. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 108.
9. K. N. Pos’et, “Prekrashchenie ssylki v Sibiri,” Russkaia starina, no. 99 (July 1899): 168.
10. See, for example, Stephen E. Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); William Carey McKee and Georgeen Klassen, Trail of Iron: The CPR and the Birth of the West, 1880–1930 (Vancouver: Glenbow-Alberta Institute, 1983); Pierre Berton, The Impossible Railway: The Building of the Canadian Pacific (New York: Knopf, 1972).
11. Alfred Runte, “Promoting the Golden West: Advertising and the Railroad,” California History 70, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 63. See also Earl S. Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (New York: Knopf, 1957).
12. Willard Sunderland, “Peasant Pioneering: Russian Peasant Settlers Describe Colonization and the Eastern Frontier, 1880s–1910s,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 897.
13. A. I. Dmitriev-Mámonov and A. F. Zdziárski, eds., Guide to the Great Siberian Railway (St. Petersburg: Ministry of Ways of Communication, 1900), 72.
14. George Demko, The Russian Colonization of Kazakhstan, 1896–1916 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 58–60. In 1900 one ruble was equal to approximately fifty cents.
15. See M. Kh. Asylbekov, “Nekotorye voprosy istorii stroitel’stva Orenburgsko-Tashkentskoi zheleznoi dorogi,” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoi SSR, seriia istorii, arkheologii i etnografii, no. 2 (1962): 44–61; Maurice, Dobb, Soviet Economic Development since 1917 (1948; New York: International Publishers, 1968), 35.
16. Grenville Dodge quoted in White, “American West and American Empire,” 206–7.
17. Jürgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1997), 4.
18. Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 230. In retaliation for the 1862 conflict, the government forced the Sioux to leave Minnesota. Sibley and his militia made certain to expel the Sioux. Sibley remained active throughout 1863 and did not disband his militia but increased its size and marched north to the Minnesota-Dakota Territory border. Several other skirmishes occurred—first at Big Mound and, later, near Dead Buffalo Lake. While these engagements were relatively minor affairs, they increased hostile tensions across the northern plains. The US War Department created the Department of the Northwest, under Maj. Gen. John Pope, to subdue the Sioux and force them to retreat westward into Dakota Territory. Another battle, near Killdeer Mountain in July 1863, revealed the government’s intent with this overwhelming military force. The goal was to inflict significant hardship on the Sioux by destroying their food, capturing other supplies, and forcing them, as one historian noted, to “submit to the largesse of the U.S. government.” See Bill Yenne, Indian Wars: The Campaign for the American West (Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2008), 103.
19. K. K. Palen, Pereselencheskoe delo v Turkestane (St. Petersburg: Senatskaia tipografia, 1910), 177–78.
20. TsGA RK, f. 15, o. 1, d. 331, l. 22–23.
21. Ibid., 17–18.
22. See Demko, Russian Colonization of Kazakhstan.
23. Roger L. Nichols, “The Canada-US Border and Indigenous Peoples in the Nineteenth Century,” American Review of Canadian Studies 40, no. 3 (September 2010): 421.
24. Quoted in Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1979), 149. See also Carol L. Higham, Noble, Wretched, and Redeemable: Protestant Missionaries to the Indians in Canada and the United States, 1820–1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000).
25. Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 1:145. See also Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 1787–1862 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965).
26. For an analysis of the creation of contemporaneous imperial ideologies, see Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). According to Kenneth Pomeranz, civilizing natives according to some concept of civilization has been around as long as there have been empires. He noted, “Some tried hard to ‘civilize’ their subjects. For instance, a civilizing agenda has been part of Chinese imperial statecraft for more than two thousand years.” “Empire and ‘Civilizing’ Missions, Past and Present,” Daedalus 134, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 35. As Barbara Bush noted, “French imperialism was ‘an affirmation of universalist republicanism’ and civilization, a mission to spread French language, culture, and ‘genius’ in order to achieve political and cultural assimilation of the colonized.” Imperialism and Postcolonialism, 24.
27. I. L’vov, “Zavoevanie Turkestana,” Russkii Vestnik, no. 7 (1868): 173.
28. W. F. Reddaway, ed., Documents of Catherine the Great: The Correspondence with Voltaire and the Instruction of 1767 in the English Text of 1768 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), 289, emphasis in original.
29. According to Frank T. McCarthy, it was only “during Peter’s time do we find mention of Orthodox priests travelling among the native peoples, attempting to convert them.” “The Kazan’ Missionary Congress,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 14 (July/September 1973): 311. Historian George V. Lantzeff interpreted the Russian civilizing mission differently, arguing, “Political leaders in Moscow realized that the compulsory introduction of Christianity might antagonize the natives. Consequently the government instructed its local officials and clergy never to use any coercion in converting the natives. Christianity had to prevail ‘through love and not through cruelty.’ Noninterference in matters of religion was pursued in spite of some advantages which might have been gained by the Christianization of natives. Baptized men, alienated from their kinsmen by the change of religion, might be enlisted to strengthen the Russian garrisons, while the baptized women could relieve the shortage of women in Siberia by providing wives for the Russian colonists.” “Beginnings of the Siberian Colonial Administration,” Pacific Historical Review 9, no. 1 (March 1940): 51.
30. Fanny E. Bryan, “Organization and Work of Missionaries in the Middle-Volga in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 6 (1995): 173–86.
31. According to Alan W. Fisher, “Rather than immediately Russifying the Muslims, Catherine wished only to bring them more completely under Russian administration, to regulate their leadership, and to insure the stability and passivity of this leadership.” “Enlightened Despotism and Islam Under Catherine II,” Slavic Review 27, no. 4 (December 1968): 552. According to Alexander Morrison, “The enlightened absolutist state under Catherine the Great espoused a policy of toleration of Islam, creating a muftiate and Muslim religious assembly at Ufa, and cooperating with the Tatar and Bashkir mullahs whom they considered to be a civilizing influence upon the Kazakh Inner Horde.” “Russian Rule in Turkestan and the Example of British India, c. 1860–1917,” Slavonic and East European Review 84, no. 4 (October 2006): 694–95.
32. Simply because the Russian government tolerated different religious faiths does not mean that discrimination evaporated. The government forced Jews into small enclaves and exiled Old Believers to Siberia. According to one foreign visitor, the Orthodox Church found other, more insidious, means to convert Kazakhs to Christianity: “The most ingenious methods are adopted to bring converts into the bosom of the Orthodox Church—for instance, when a Mussulman parent presents his child for registration under some Mussulman name, the officer, instead of registering the name given, substitutes for it some Christian name, and at a later period the father finds to his horror that his child is a member of the Orthodox Russian Church.” There is no way to know if this was a widespread practice or merely a rumor, but the author certainly was convinced it happened. See Charles Rudy, “Despotic Russia, Part II, Adventures in the Steppes of Russian Asia and the Frosty Caucasus,” Reformed Quarterly Review (July 1880): 353.
33. Karamzin quoted in Seymour Becker, “The Muslim East in Nineteenth-Century Russian Popular Historiography,” Central Asian Survey 5, nos. 3–4 (1986): 35.
34. For the meaning of grazhdanstvennost’ in the nineteenth century, see Vladimir Dal’, Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka v 4 tomakh (Moscow: Russkii iazyk, 1989), 1:390. See also Marcus Wheeler, Oxford Russian-English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972).
35. For an excellent analysis of late nineteenth-century Russian government efforts to manage the empire’s Muslim population, see Elena I. Campbell, The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).
36. Mark Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conquest of Indigenous Peoples (New York: Grove, 1998), 7.
37. Steven Conn, History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5.
38. John W. Slocum, “Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy? The Evolution of the Category of ‘Aliens’ in Imperial Russia,” Russian Review 57, no. 2 (April 1998): 175.
39. Ibid., 184.
40. Gradovskii quoted in Ibid., 185.
41. Ibid.
42. See, for example, Iuliia Aleksandrovna Lysenko, “Missionarskaia deiatel’nost’ Russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi v Kazakhstane (vtoraia polovine XIX-nachalo XX v.)” (PhD diss., Altai State University, Barnaul, 2011).
43. Ryan Dunch, “Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity,” History and Theory 41, no. 3 (October 2002): 310.
44. American Society for Promoting the Civilization and General Improvement of the Indian Tribes within the United States, First Annual Report of the American Society for Promoting the Civilization and General Improvement of the Indian Tribes in the United States. . . . (New Haven, CT: S. Converse, 1824), 15.
45. Berkhofer, White Man’s Indian, 150; C. L. Higham, “Saviors and Scientists: North American Protestant Missionaries and the Development of Anthropology,” Pacific Historical Review 72, no. 4 (November 2003): 535. Interestingly, this belief that more progressive, enlightened settlers can be used to raise up backward peoples is still used to justify internal colonization today. There is no evidence from other internally colonized societies that uplifting a backward people simply by proximity to the resettlement of advanced people in the midst of cultural, economically inferiors worked. Grant Evans identified this process in Vietnam, quoting from Vietnamese anthropologists, who observed that the government’s efforts to resettle Vietnamese peasants in the country’s central highlands would fill in the “time gap” because the “highland people who, it is believed, failed to evolve.” He quotes a Vietnamese government official who claimed, “People of a lower civilization follow those of a higher civilization.” “Internal Colonialism in the Central Highlands of Vietnam,” Sojourn: Social Issues in Southeast Asia 7, no. 2 (August 1992): 291.
46. First Annual Report, 16, emphasis in original.
47. Stephen R. Riggs, “Thoughts on Civilizing and Christianizing the Dakota Indians,” Independent (October 10, 1850).
48. Cited in Peter d’Errico, “Native Americans in America: A Theoretical and Historical Overview,” Wicazo Sa Review 14, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 19.
49. See, for example, E. K. Sysoeva, “Education Policy in Russia from the 1860s Through the 1890s,” Russian Education & Society 39 (1997): 62–76; Mariia Viktorovna Sturova, “Obrazovatel’naia sreda na territorii Akmolinskoi i Semipalatinskskoi oblastei (50–80-e gg. XIX v.),” Izvestiia Altaiskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta 2, no. 4 (80) (2013): 98–102; Vladimir Aleksandrovich Ermolov, “Osobennosti sistemy obrazovaniia v natsional’niykh shkolakh Rossiiskoi imperii: musul’manskie i evreiskie shkoly,” Obshchestvo. Sreda. Razvitie (Terra Humana) 4 (2009): 100–109.
50. Alice C. Fletcher, “Indian Education and Civilization,” in Bureau of Education, Special Report, 1888 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1888), 161.
51. Report of the Committee to which was referred so much of the President’s message, as relates to Indian affairs, accompanied with a bill for establishing trading houses with the Indian tribes. . . . , 15th Cong., 1st sess., House Document 59. Serial Set 7. (January 22, 1818), 3.
52. S. V. Gorbunova, “Zarozhdenie Russkogo obrazovaniia sredi Kazakhov: shkola pri Orenburgskoi pogranichnoi komissii,” in Kul’tura, Nauka, Obrazovanie: Problemy i Perspekivy, Materialy II vserossiiskoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii, g. Nizhnevartovsk, 8 Fevralia 2013 goda, Chast’ I, Istoriia idei i istoriia obshchestva problemy vseobshchei istorii, ed. A. V. Korichko (Nizhnevartovsk: Izdatel’stvo Nizhnevartovskogo gosudarstvenogo universiteta, 2013), 31–33.
53. Sturova, “Obrazovatel’naia sreda na territorii Akmolinskoi,” 98–102.
54. The best biographical examination of Il’minskii in English remains Isabelle Kreindler, “Educational Policies toward the Eastern Nationalities in Tsarist Russia: A Study of Il’minskii’s System” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1969).
55. See S. Chicherin, O iazykie prepodavaniia v shkolakh dlia vostochnykh inorodtsev (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia V. Ia. Mil’shteina, 1910); Wayne Dowler, “The Politics of Language in Non-Russian Elementary Schools in the Eastern Empire, 1865–1914,” Russian Review 54, no. 4 (October 1995): 516–38. A Kazakh educator, Ibrahim Altynsarin, became a leading proponent of the Il’minskii system in the steppe, and today many Kazakhs consider him one of the Kazakh nation’s first modern intellectuals. See Grigorii Grigor’evich Kosach, “Ibragim Altynsarin: chelovek v potoke vremeni,” Vestnik Evrazii 1–2 (1998): 110–31; Isabelle Kreindler, “Ibrahim Altynsarin, Nikolai Il’minskii and the Kazakh National Awakening,” Central Asian Survey 2, no. 3 (1983), 99–116; Gulnar Kendirbaeva, “ ‘We are Children of Alash . . .’ The Kazakh Intelligentsia at the Beginning of the 20th Century in Search of National Identity and Prospects of the Cultural Survival of the Kazakh People,” Central Asian Survey 18, no. 1 (March 1999): 5–36.
56. Mustafa Özgür Tuna, “Gaspirali v. Il’minskii: Two Identity Projects for the Muslims of the Russian Empire,” Nationalities Papers 30, no. 2 (2002): 265–89.
57. Tolstoi quoted in Kreindler, “Educational Policies,” 79.
58. See Franklin Edgerton, “Notes on Early American Work in Linguistics,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 87, no. 1 (July 1943): 31.
59. See Theodore C. Blegen, “The Pond Brothers,” Minnesota History 15 (September 1934): 273–81.
60. For more about education policies and practices in the United States, see, for example, Scott Riney, The Rapid City Indian School, 1898–1933 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999); Karl Markus Kreis, Lakotas, Black Robes, and Holy Women: German Reports from the Indian Missions in South Dakota, 1886–1900, trans. from German by Corinna Dally-Starna (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction; American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); Clyde Ellis, To Change Them Forever: Indian Education at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 1893–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996); Jacqueline Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); Hayes Peter Mauro, The Art of Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011); John Wunder, ed., Native American Cultural and Religious Freedoms (New York: Garland, 1999).
61. Quoted in Kreindler, “Educational Policies,”80.
62. The 1870 regulation appeared in Sbornik Postanovlenii Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia (St. Petersburg: Ministerstvo Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia, 1871), 4:1555–56.
63. For a contemporary overview of Russian policies, see S. V. Rozhdestvensii, ed., Istoricheskii obzor deiatel’nosti Ministerstva Narodnogo Proveshcheniia, 1802–1902 (St. Petersburg: Ministerstvo Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia, 1902).
64. US Department of the Interior, Office of Indian Affairs, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1875 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1875), 1:526 (hereafter Annual Report, year).
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.
67. Annual Report, 1877, 3.
68. Annual Report, 1909, 1–2. According to the report, there were 27 non-reservation boarding schools, 82 reservation boarding schools, 194 day schools, 43 mission boarding schools, 8 mission day schools, and 18 so-called contract schools. In addition, Indians attended nine public schools in the United States. According to Cathleen D. Cahill, the Catholic Church, “which had not played a role in Reconstruction education programs . . . [enjoyed] . . . extraordinary success in capturing federal money for Indian contract schools. In 1886, for example, it received more than half of all federal contract-school dollars, and by 1890 its share had risen to 63 percent.” Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 43.
69. Annual Report, 1909, 153.
70. Annual Report, 1887, 23.
71. Ibid., 23–24.
72. “Letter from Commissioner of Indian Affairs to Pine Ridge Agent Hugh D. Gallagher,” July 16, 1887, box 8, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Pine Ridge Agency, Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Record Group 75, National Archives and Records Administration at Kansas City.
73. For a brief biographical sketch, see Floyd O’Neil, “John H. Oberly, 1888–89,” in The Commissioners of Indian Affairs, 1824–1977, ed. Robert M. Kvasnicka and Herman J. Viola (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 189–91.
74. The report also included the numbers of employees at schools run by the Bureau, totaling 894 people, 137 being Indians. Of the 241 teachers, the report did not describe even one as a “teacher”; the majority of Indians were listed in menial jobs such as “Assistant matrons,” “Assistant seamstresses,” “Assistant cooks,” and “Assistant laundresses.” Annual Report, 1888, xvii.
75. See, for example, Wayne Dowler, Classroom and Empire: The Politics of Schooling Russia’s Eastern Nationalities, 1860–1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001).
76. Thomas G. Andrews, “Turning the Tables on Assimilation: Oglala Lakotas and the Pine Ridge Day Schools, 1889–1920s,” Western Historical Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 422–25.
77. Edward J. Lazzerini, “Defining the Orient: A Nineteenth Century of Russo-Tatar Polemic over Identity and Cultural Representation,” in Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917, ed. Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 40.
78. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction of the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936), 10.
79. Ayşe Kadioğlu, “The Paradox of Turkish Nationalism and the Construction of Official Identity,” Middle Eastern Studies 32, no. 2 (1996): 14.
80. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991): 116.
81. The Society of American Indians was a pan-Indian movement; it held annual conferences and published its own periodical. Alash Orda was the Kazakh faction that split from a broader Pan-Turkic, Muslim oriented sociopolitical movement that emerged shortly after the 1905 Russian Revolution. It too held numerous meetings, but, more importantly, it started publishing a newspaper—Kazak—also in 1913.
82. Beth LaDow, The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland (New York: Routledge, 2002), 181.
83. William A. Peffer, “Imperialism America’s Historic Policy,” North American Review 171 (August 1900): 256–57.
84. Ibid.
85. White, “American West and American Empire,” 218–19.
86. Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History, trans. Alfred Clayton (New York: Pearson Education, 2001), 334.
87. The best work in English about the revolt remains Edward Sokol, The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1954). Sokol, however, resorted to traditional interpretations of nomadic society by claiming that it was “understandable that when the nomads were directly affected, as in 1916, they reacted in a vigorous return to their ancestral tradition of violence and raiding warfare” (69) (emphasis added). See also TsGA RK, f. 554, o. 2, d. 225, l. 6. According to this archival source, the majority of Kazakhs who revolted were impoverished, whereas “those standing with the government are the privileged class, the rich.”
88. In 1924 the Soviet Union delimitated boundaries into ethno-national units, including the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (KazSSR). It also introduced a new nationalities policy, korenizatsiia (nativization), designed to give nationalities a greater voice in the various republics. Stalinism eviscerated this form of autonomy, which quickly evaporated in the 1930s. The government accused Bokeikhanov and Baitursynov of nationalism and executed them both. Rehabilitation came only in 1989. The political system remained in place until the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, and Kazakhstan became the independent Republic of Kazakhstan.
89. See, for example, Janet A. McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian, 1887–1934 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Russel Lawrence Barsh, “Progressive-Era Bureaucrats and the Unity of Twentieth-Century Indian Policy, American Indian Quarterly 15, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 1–17; Leonard A. Carlson, “Federal Policy and Indian Land: Economic Interests and the Sale of Indian Allotments, 1900–1934,” Agricultural History 57 (January 1983): 33–45.
90. “America Needs Men,” American Indian Magazine 5 (January–March 1917): 5, emphasis in original.
91. Lewis Meriam et al., The Problem of Indian Administration: Report of a Survey made at the request of Honorable Hubert Work, Secretary of the Interior, and Submitted to him, February 21, 1928 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1928), 3.
92. Margaret Szasz, “Indian Reform in a Decade of Prosperity,” Montana The Magazine of Western History 20, no. 1 (Winter 1970): 21.
93. Michla Pomerance, “The United States and Self Determination: Perspectives on the Wilsonian Conception,” American Journal of International Law 70, no. 1 (January 1976): 2.
94. Rupert Emerson, “Self-Determination,” American Journal of International Law 65, no. 3 (1971): 472.
95. See Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
96. S’ezdy sovetov RSFSR i avtonomnykh respublik RSFSR, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1959), 718.
97. For a memoir of this tragic time, see Mukhamet Shayakhmetov, The Silent Steppe: The Memoir of a Kazakh Nomad Under Stalin, trans. Jan Butler (New York: Overlook/Rookery, 2006).
98. Joseph Stalin, Sochineniia (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1946–1951), 13:306–9.
99. Burton K. Wheeler with Paul F. Healy, Yankee from the West: The Candid, Turbulent Life Story of the Yankee-Born U.S. Senator from Montana (New York: Doubleday, 1962), 314–15.
100. President Roosevelt’s letter to the bill’s sponsors in H.R. Rep. No. 1804, 73rd Cong., 2d sess., at 8 (1934).
101. Office of Indian Affairs, Indians at Work 1 (Washington, DC: Office of Indian Affairs, March 1, 1934), 1.
102. Elizabeth Green, “Indian Minorities Under the American New Deal,” Pacific Affairs 8, no. 4 (December 1935): 420.
103. Ibid., 424–25.
104. John Collier, From Every Zenith: A Memoir; and Some Essays on Life and Thought (Denver: Sage, 1963), 190–91; John Collier, Indians of the Americas: The Long Hope (New York: W. W. Norton, 1947), 169; D’Arcy McNickle and Harold E. Fey, Indians and Other Americans: Two Ways of Life Meet (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), 116–17.
105. For an excellent analysis of this period as it relates to the Sioux, see Akim D. Reinhardt, Ruling Pine Ridge: Oglala Lakota Politics from the IRA to Wounded Knee (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007). See esp. chaps. 2–4.
106. See Oskar Halecki, “The Problem of Self-Determination,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 87, no. 2 (August 1943): 194–98.
107. Thomas Biolsi, “The IRA and the Politics of Acculturation: The Sioux Case,” American Anthropologist 87, no. 3 (1985): 657.
108. Ibid., 658.
109. Hazel W. Hertzberg, The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1971), 96.
110. Olaf Caroe, Soviet Empire: The Turks of Central Asia and Stalinism (New York: St. Martin’s, 1967), 104.
111. Patricia Lee Furnish, “ ‘Aboriginally Yours’: The Society of American Indians and U.S. Citizenship” (PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 2005), 172.