SOURCE: McAllister, Edwin J. “‘Our Glory and Joy’: Stephen Riggs and the Politics of Nineteenth-Century American Missionary Ethnography Among the Sioux.” In Christian Encounters with the Other, edited by John C. Hawley, pp. 150-65. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, McAllister describes Riggs's ethnology in the context of contemporary thought about human civilization and racial difference. McAllister suggests that while Riggs's writing demonstrates a lack of modern respect for Native American tradition, it also reflects his belief that Native Americans were not biologically inferior to Whites and therefore incapable of “civilization.”]

Stephen Return Riggs (1812-83) was a Presbyterian missionary to the Dakota Sioux Indians from 1837 until his death. Like countless other American missionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Riggs took up the pen to describe for Christians at home the people among whom he lived and worked. The works of these missionaries were widely read, and in a culture that valued Christian piety and self-sacrifice, their words had tremendous authority. Consequently, their effect on American attitudes toward Native Americans and dark-skinned foreigners carried tremendous weight and performed a powerful type of cultural work.

Rigg's representations of the Dakota in many ways exemplify the agendas and assumptions of the “mainstream” American ethnography centralized in the Smithsonian during the middle and late nineteenth century. For example, the successful assimilation of Native Americans into patterns of settler culture and the destruction of Native American social institutions would be the aim of most ethnography produced during these years, and Riggs's is no exception. Yet it is also true that Riggs's Christian beliefs produce a significantly different sense of “otherness” in his ethnographic writing. The narrative of conversion that characterizes much missionary writing necessitates a construction of an easily bridgeable distance separating red man and white; a former state of savagery is contrasted with a present elevated moral and social state. Like most missionaries, Riggs produced representations of the Native Americans that focused on the saving power of the gospel to lift the red man from savagery to civilization, representations designed to show the “civilizing” power of conversion at work, not only in the lives of notable individuals, but also in the life of the Dakota community.

When Riggs first travelled to Minnesota in 1837 to work toward the evangelization of the Dakota Sioux Indians, he did so under the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, an ecumenical umbrella organization that from its inception in 1810 oversaw the distribution and work of American foreign missionaries. That Minnesota Indian territory would have been considered “foreign” in 1837 is perhaps not so surprising as it seems initially. Minnesota would be a territory rather than a state for twenty more years. More importantly, the Native Americans living in Minnesota Indian territory were far removed from centers of white population. Over the course of the next forty years as the American frontier was pushed more and more rapidly westward, Riggs would find himself less and less isolated from his countrymen. Finally, recognizing that the domestication of the West was to a large extent a fait accompli, the ABCFM would give up its jurisdiction over the Dakota mission, the last of its Native American enterprises, relegating control over them to domestic mission boards.

Governmental bureaucracy was also responsive to the shift in status of the “Indian problem” from a foreign to a domestic issue. In 1874, Major John Wesley Powell, a Civil War veteran, recognized authority on anthropology, and, four years later, the first head of the newly-formed Bureau of American Ethnology, warned the U.S. Congress that the disappearance of the American frontier was substantially narrowing the choices available for dealing with the Native Americans: “There is now no great uninhabited and unknown region to which the Indian can be sent. He is among us, and we must either protect him or destroy him” (quoted in Hinsley 145). Powell's recognition that the Native Americans were now “among us” found its bureaucratic corollary in the gradual shift in the administration of Indian affairs from the Department of War to the Department of the Interior. With the Native Americans now a domestic issue, public administrators found themselves forced to confront the “Indian problem” not as a military concern, but instead as an issue of domestic policy and control, of how to properly integrate the red man into civilization. The central question they faced was how to do so most quickly and efficiently.

It was quite explicitly out of the need for information on how to make decisions regarding the assimilation of Native Americans that the discipline of ethnology in America was born. In the Introductory section of the First Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Powell would, after noting the achievements of his newly formed bureau during the past year, observe that:

In pursuing these ethnographic investigations it has been the endeavor as far as possible to produce results that would be of practical value in the administration of Indian affairs, and for this purpose especial attention has been paid to vital statistics … the progress made by the Indians toward civilization, and the causes and remedies of the inevitable conflict that arises from the spread of civilization over a region previously inhabited by savages. I may be allowed to express hope that our labors in this direction will not be void of such useful results.

(xiv)

Certain assumptions are obvious in the passage: the inevitability of the conflict between savages and spreading civilization, the usefulness of ethnographic knowledge for assimilating Native Americans to civilization, that Native Americans could be civilized, and that such civilization represented not simply a difference, but a natural upward progression beyond their savage state.

In its study of this savage state, the Smithsonian, and later the Bureau of American Ethnology, relied for its ethnographic information on those who knew the Indians best: army officers and missionaries, men who had lived and worked among Native Americans over a span of years. It was enthusiastic amateurs like these who formed the core of the field workers for the newly emerging science of ethnology, collecting and recording information in the field, eventually using systematized forms produced by the central authorities in Washington (Hinsley 48). Riggs, who had little formal educational training other than his years in seminary, would be a model data collector for the budding new science and a significant contributor to the methodological standardization of linguistic information gathering. Riggs's first substantial publication was his tremendous Dakota dictionary and grammar, compiled after eighteen years of patient effort. He at first attempted to have the dictionary published by subscription, but the work was brought to the attention of Joseph Henry, the General Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (which would later oversee the Bureau of American Ethnology), who, after consulting with William W. Turner, the Smithsonian's most prominent philologist, decided to print the dictionary as one of the first of the Smithsonian's “Contributions to Knowledge” series in 1851. Riggs would proudly report that it had “obtained the commendation of literary men generally, and it was said that for no volume published by the Smithsonian Institution up to that time, was the demand so great” (Riggs 1880: 121). He would also call it “a missionary contribution to science” and perhaps “the means of perpetuating the remembrance of the Dakotas, beyond the time when, as a distinct people, they shall have disappeared from the continent” (Riggs 1869: 415).

For later generations of ethnologists, the idea of an untrained, and, worse, unscientific missionary producing ethnographic data might have been repugnant, but for Riggs and his contemporaries, the enthusiastic amateur as data-gatherer made perfect sense. Believing that the science of ethnology was following a natural upward course of development, most practitioners in the first half of the nineteenth century were prepared to admit that the discipline was in an early stage compared with more standardized and professionalized disciplines like natural history, an assumption that justified the numbers of amateurs involved in the collection of ethnographic data. Missionaries seemed in fact to be better positioned to collect this data than almost anyone else. W. W. Turner, the man who recommended Riggs's dictionary to Joseph Henry, felt that the missionaries were the only group of men “qualified by education and sustained by motives of benevolence” to spend the necessary years studying the “mental idiosyncracies of our red brethren” (quoted in Hinsley 50).

The discipline was professionalized very quickly by its association with the Smithsonian. By 1869, Joseph Henry would be ready to claim that ethnology had “passed from the period of pure speculation … into that of the active collection of materials preparatory to the next—that of deduction and generalizations” (quoted in Hinsley 35). Riggs would, in fact, help to produce the methodology that later came to characterize professionalized ethnology; his article entitled “Illustration of the Method of Recording Indian Languages” would be published in the B.A.E.'s first Annual Report in 1879. Riggs's first formal ethnography of the Dakota Sioux, entitled “Dakota Texts, Grammar, and Ethnography,” would be published posthumously by the B.A.E. in 1893.¹

If Riggs's ethnographic work exemplifies the tendency toward increasing methodological rigor and professionalism in nineteenth century American ethnology, there are other components of Riggs's ethnographic program that place him in a less exemplary, more ambiguous relationship to the established mainstreams of ethnographic thought, components related directly to assumptions and agendas of his evangelical Christianity. Mainstream ethnology in America was to a certain extent molded by pietist Christian assumptions, particularly the assumption of the unity of man. Joseph Henry's distaste for the work of physical anthropologists like Samuel G. Morton (whose Crania Americana and Crania Aegyptica purported to show that the races had been separate since their origins and that nonwhite races lacked the brain size to participate in civilization) was a sentiment he shared with most nineteenth century American Christians.² As a consequence, such work had no place at the Smithsonian or later in the B.A.E. Riggs's representations of the Dakota Sioux without question exemplify the participation of ethnology in the mainstream attempt to assimilate the Native Americans to the “civilization” of nineteenth century bourgeois America. But it is also true that Riggs's representations of Native Americans are significantly different, that the narratives of conversion in much missionary ethnography implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) resist certain pessimistic assumptions coded into much late nineteenth century developmental ethnology about the possibility for assimilating Native Americans.

Developmental ethnology of the sort practiced by B.A.E. ethnologists generally located the central “difference” between civilized and savage man as a question of temporal disjunction, mapping “civilization” along a single horizontal axis and assuming that all societies progressed along the same pathway. Nineteenth century American ethnologists did not think of human societies as part of a broad spectrum of different cultures. Most did not imagine “cultures” as plural at all. The opening sentence of E. B. Tylor's germinal Primitive Culture (1871) exemplifies the common sense that culture was a singular phenomenon: “Culture or Civilization, taken in its ethnographic sense,” Tylor writes, “is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Thus, the term “culture” was normative rather than descriptive (Sattlemeyer 107). Native American and other primitive “tribes” or “nations” or “races” were part of the same creation as white men but had developed more slowly. Both travelled along the same upward path that terminated in the culture of the ethnographer. Given enough time, savage nations would end up in the same place.

If the monogenist assumptions behind developmental ethnography worked against “scientific” justifications for the destruction or enslavement of dark-skinned peoples produced by physical anthropologists, it could also be very easily used as its own justification for institutionalizing grotesque inequalities between “savages” and their civilized brethren. Savages who had not developed the capacity for higher forms of government on their own clearly could not be expected to participate fully in the “civilized” decision-making process, even in decisions regarding their own welfare. For instance, James Mill, John Stuart Mill's father, in his History of British India (1817), argued that the Hindus were only “half-civilized.” As such, despotism was the only mode of government appropriate to their “level of civilization,” and the best form of that they could hope for was the “enlightened despotism” of British rule. Only for the enlightened European were the radical politics of utilitarianism appropriate (Stocking 32-33). The same thinking lay behind the paternalistic policies of Congress and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, for example the decision in 1871 to stop treaty making with the Indians, after some three hundred seventy treaties, and the later decision to privatize Indian land holdings with the 1887 Dawes Act (Feit 112).

Developmental ethnologists, even those most optimistic about the eventuality of Native American participation in American culture, suggested that the process could be a lengthy one. Assimilation depended on programs of uplift and education that might take many generations to effect. Even if the natives' natural progress toward civilization could be hastened by the benevolent intervention of more civilized people, it was only natural to assume that several generations at the very least would have to pass before Native Americans could fully participate as citizens in civilized American life. Given the widespread belief among Americans (and the official policy of the B.A.E.) that conflict would inevitably arise “from the spread of civilization over a region previously inhabited by savages,” such assumptions had dangerous implications, dooming the savage to extinction regardless of the good intentions of his civilized white brothers.

Riggs and other missionary ethnographers had good cause to reject temporal disjunction as the grounding point of difference between savage and civilized man; while the missionaries were at the time a driving force behind efforts at education and “uplift” for the red men, their principal reason for being among the Native Americans was the salvation of souls, an operation that for them had far greater implications for the project of assimilation than it had for those who assumed that Christianity was merely one element in the panoply of civilized institutions. For most missionaries in the nineteenth century, true civilization and Christianity were synonymous. Christianity was not just one element of civilized life; it was the very rock on which civilization was grounded, and those who did not embrace it would never be civilized. Stephen Riggs insisted on the temporal priority of salvation before civilization. Adopting the rhetoric of progress and advancement for his cause, he would proclaim that the idea “that uncivilized heathen nations should first be civilized, and then Christianized, is a sentiment of the past. Now it is coming more and more to be acknowledged that the Bible is the great civilizer of the nations” (Riggs 1869: 386). Like savage peoples, ethnographic knowledge was itself developing toward a more perfect grasp of the real grounding point of difference between civilized and savage nations: “But what makes us to differ from them? Chiefly we are indebted to the Bible for our superior intelligence and more civilized habits” (1869: 338). Riggs would demonstrate the truth of this maxim in his representations both of individuals and of the Dakota people generally, choosing as his codes for denoting the assimilation of them into a civilized state certain outward manifestations of nineteenth century respectability: adoption of agriculture and a sedentary mode of life in a house, cutting off long hair, and wearing white men's clothes. Again and again, Riggs shows that the Dakota who accept the gospel also accept the necessity it entails of becoming civilized—in other words, of behaving like white nineteenth century middle-class Americans.

Rigg's accounts of the behavior of his early converts work to confirm his insistence on the temporal priority of salvation to civilization, and the natural emergence of one from the other. He tells the story of Simon Ana-wang-mani in both Mary and I, a book produced for a general public audience, and more fully in Dakota Ethnography, but in each case the message is the same: conversion will make of the savages good, domestic, hard-working, lower middle-class Americans. Simon was the first full-blooded Dakota male to “come out on the side of the new religion” (1880: 65) and is the first Dakota mentioned by name in any of Riggs's work.³

Pre-salvation Simon is a Dakota warrior “known for recklessness. … There was in him a strong will, which sometimes showed itself in the form of stubbornness. His eye, even in a later day, showed that there had been evil, hatred, and maliciousness there. He was a thorough Indian” (1893: 219). Simon's first acts as a convert are to officially marry his wife and to take to himself an English name. Simon puts on white men's clothes, cuts his hair, and plants a garden by the mission fields, inspiring Riggs to remark: “By dressing like a white man and going to work, he showed his faith by his works. … He built for himself a cabin, and fenced a field and planted it. For this his wife's friends opposed and persecuted him” (1893: 221). Ridiculed in his own village, Simon goes to another Dakota village, where he is briefly honored, but having no Christian company, falls prey to the evils of alcohol. Tempted with fire water, “He fell! … He put off his white man's clothes and for some time was an Indian again.” However, Simon eventually comes to his senses, and so “in 1854 he returned to the dress and customs of the white men and to his profession of love to Jesus Christ. Since that time he has witnessed a good confession before many witnesses as a ruling elder and class leader, and recently as a licensed preacher” (1893: 222-23). Riggs clearly makes no distinction between Christian belief and nineteenth century middle class American social practices, and the latter serve as a certain signifier of the former. It is clearly Simon's conversion to and practice of Christianity that civilize him and not the amount of education he has. If the durability of that civilizing power is in doubt, it is so only briefly, and then only because Simon has so little Christian company.

The pattern repeats itself as the Riggs find more converts, underlining the inevitability of post-salvation assimilation to civilized behavior, which includes the rejection of uncivilized company of the sort that caused Simon's temporary fall: “We began to have more young men in the church, and they began to separate themselves more and more from the village, and to build cabins and make fields for themselves. Thus the religion of Christ worked to disintegrate heathenism” (1880: 114). Here Christian conversion is directly equated with a very specific set of social practices and, importantly, it happens quickly. If certain developmental ethnographers like James Mill theorized that vast amounts of time would be necessary to “civilize” the natives, Riggs would work explicitly against such an assumption by showing the speedy conversion of the Indians to social practices considered universally to denote civilized behavior by most nineteenth century Americans.

In his accounts of the formation of the Hazelwood Republic, Riggs quite explicitly makes a case for the ability of the Christianized Dakotas as a body to participate immediately not only in a broadly defined range of “civilized” practices, but in a very specifically American range of practices as well. If Native Americans could participate in agriculture, sedentary home-building, and church life, Riggs also shows that they are ready to take on the political responsibilities necessary to participate as citizens in the public life of the U.S. In the late 1850s, having a number of Dakota converts, Riggs and his fellow missionaries determine to establish a “settlement of the civilized and Christianized Dakotas” (1880: 131) apart from the Dakotas living on the agency. “We had now such a respectable community of young men, who had cut off their hair and exchanged the dress of the Dakotas for that of the white man, and whose wants were now very different from the annuity Dakotas generally, that we took measures to organize them into a separate band, which we called the Hazelwood Republic” (1880: 133). This group organizes themselves democratically, signing a constitution, electing a president, and voting on important matters of state.

In a sketch that Riggs says will illustrate both “the Dakota beliefs in regard to diseases, and the common way of treating them, as well as the progress of thought, and changes of practice, consequent upon the introduction of Christianity,” we see the citizens of Hazelwood at work in a dispute over the “rightness” of treating the sick using traditional shamanistic practices, A Christianized native is upbraided by his fellow converts for calling in a traditional medicine man to treat his dying wife. Unsure of how to respond to this reversion to uncivilized practice, the Dakotas ask Riggs for his guidance, but he refuses, instead instructing them to call together an assembly of elders. The elders “were told that the Gospel of Christ molded the customs and habits of every people by whom it was received. There might be some wrong things in a national custom which could be eliminated, and the custom substantially retained. Or the custom might be so radically absurd and wrong, that it could not be redeemed. In that case, Christianity required its abandonment” (1869: 216). The members of the Hazelwood Republic, after discussing the matter fully, vote overwhelmingly to give up traditional practices for treating the sick. Clearly, this group of native Americans is ready to take on the challenge of civilized, Christian democracy. Riggs even attempts to have the senior members of the Hazelwood Republic made citizens of the state, but they are refused on the grounds that their English is not good enough for them to understand the law.

Perhaps the central incident in Riggs's missionary life was the 1862 Dakota uprising. The uprising seems to have been caused by several factors. A loosely related group of Dakotas had killed forty white settlers earlier in the year at Spirit Lake, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs insisted that the agency Indians themselves undertake a punitive expedition against them. In addition, the BIA decided in 1862 that rather than giving cash annuities to agency Indians, they would pay the equivalent in goods. However, neither the cash or the annuities were on hand at the agreed time and the several of the Dakotas, near to starving, broke into the government warehouse and took flour. Subsequent misunderstandings finally culminated in a pitched battle that lasted several weeks and caused many deaths among whites and Native Americans alike. A group of four hundred Dakota males were captured. After a series of quick trials in which the burden of proof was placed on the accused, over three hundred of these were sentenced to death. Most of the sentences were later commuted, but thirty eight accused by white eyewitnesses of murder were hung together in front of the other Dakotas.

To give Riggs his due, he seems to have recognized that the discontent of the Dakotas had a certain legitimacy. He includes in his autobiography an excerpt from a newspaper article written by his daughter Martha for the Cincinnati Christian Herald recounting the uprising which blames most of the trouble on the behavior of whites:

The Indians have not been without excuse for their evil deeds. Our own people have given them intoxicating drinks, taught them to swear, violated the rights of womanhood among them, robbed them of their dues, and insulted them! What more would be necessary to cause one nation to rise against another? What more, I ask? And yet there are many who curse this people, and cry, “Exterminate the fiends.” Dare we, as a nation, thus bring a curse upon ourselves and on future generations?

(quoted in 1880: 178)

In Tah-Koo Wah-Kan; or, the Gospel Among the Dakotas (1869), Riggs would provide a similar list of causes behind the 1862 uprising (and in much the same order) but would, however, conclude by tracing the source of the conflict to the inevitability of conflict between heathen savages and civilized Christians: “And last, but not least, among the causes which produced the Sioux outbreak must be mentioned the antagonism of heathenism to Christianity and Civilization” (1869: 331-32). One is reminded of John Wesley Powell's remark (quoted earlier) regarding “the inevitable conflict that arises from the spread of civilization over a region previously inhabited by savages.” Riggs adds Christianity to the equation, but the justification for the assimilationist agenda is obviously the same for professional ethnographers or for missionaries: we can only save the Indians by destroying their institutions (which will otherwise inevitably cause conflict with spreading civilization) and by assimilating them to our patterns of acceptable behavior. Riggs goes on to quote approvingly Mr. Pond (a fellow missionary), who conflates assimilation, salvation, providence, and manifest destiny: “‘They [the Dakotas] hoped to be able to roll back the providential wheel of Almighty God’” (1869: 331).

Riggs also uses his depictions of the 1862 uprising to strengthen his claim that salvation must come before civilization. The Dakotas have all been exposed to education and encouraged to take up the plow and put on white men's clothing, yet it is only the church members who do not participate in the violence—more, they protect the white settlers. Again, from Martha Riggs's newspaper account: “It must be remembered that the church members, as a whole, have had no hand in it. One, John Otherday, guided a party of sixty-two across the prairies. Two others … have recently brought into Fort Ridgly three captive women and eleven children” (1880: 178). Translators from the Hazelwood Republic are used by the army to ransom white captives. Clearly, only those Indians who have been converted to Christianity can truly be relied on to behave in acceptable ways; the rest will continue in savagery.

Riggs's providential vision of salvation and civilization moving in lockstep westward across the frontier is realized in the mass conversion of the captive Dakota men, who make their decision regarding conversion based on their rational assessment of the outcome of the uprising.

In one aspect, the question was “Shall the Indian or the white man rule?” But in another and more important one it was, “Shall the Kingdom of Christ be set up among the Dakotas, or shall the worship of stones be continued?” So especially thought those three hundred and thirty prisoners, who were wearing chains on their ankles in Mankato in the winter of 1862-63, and they regarded the question as having been settled by the events of the last few months. The power of the white men had prevailed; and the religion of the Great Spirit, or the white man's god, was to be supreme.

(1869: 341-42)

Riggs insists that the 1862 conflict is only secondarily of civilization versus savagery. The primary relevance of the event for Riggs and for his Dakota charges is the triumph of Christianity over heathenism, the deep truth made plain by the military victory of the whites. “Their own gods had failed them signally, as was manifest in their present condition” (1880: 187). Not surprisingly, these converts, like all Riggs's converts before them, begin displaying the behaviors associated with civilization. If their current situation makes agriculture and home-building impossible and the wearing of white man's clothes unavoidable, there are still behaviors within their control that they can choose to adapt or reject. Riggs shows the miraculous birth of interest in education among the Dakotas: “The prisoners asked for books. … From this time on the prison became a school. … They were all exceedingly anxious to learn. And the more their minds were turned toward God and His word, the more interested they became in learning to read and write” (1880: 187).

In the years following the uprising, the Dakotas, converted and unconverted, are moved to the Crow Creek reservation. Upon their arrival, the Hazelwood Republic converts are dismayed by the decision of the US Bureau of Indian Affairs to allow the unconverted Dakotas to keep their old system of tribal government on the reservation, having reasoned that as they had been electing their church officers, so they would elect the necessary civil officers. In other words, the converts are ready to continue the democratic practices they established earlier in the Hazelwood Republic, but are prevented from doing so by the decision of the BIA that recognizes the pre-conversion heathen power and social structures of Dakota society.

Riggs represents the reservation system as the land base on which traditional communal economic and governance practices, practices he has already associated with savagery, can be continued. Riggs's opinions here are much the same as those of the scientific establishment in America. Major Powell of the B.A.E would use a similar argument only a few years later to support the passage of the General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act, which provided for the allotment of reservation lands into individual holdings. Appealing directly to Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society, which argued that the recognition of private property rights was one of the necessary sequential steps on the march toward civilization, Lewis urged passage of the act, claiming it would aid in the transformation of “communalistic” Indians into “individualistic” Americans (Feit 112-13). Clearly, though, for Morgan and Powell, the institutionalization of private property among Native Americans is only one of a series of perhaps very slow steps toward civilization. For Riggs, it is all that remains necessary to make citizens of the Dakotas.

Arriving at Crow Creek, the Hazelwood Republicans, who had come to associate owning their own land and houses, working their own farms, and electing their own leaders as not only civilized, but Christian behaviors, find that they “must be Indian or starve!” One of the converts remarks sadly that “I could not bear to have my children grow up nothing but Indians” (1880: 238-39). Riggs's converted Dakotas themselves voice these arguments against communal tribal structures and land holdings, pointing to the reestablished Hazelwood Republic as the model for Dakota behavior. Riggs has one Dakota argue:

If when we are hungry we cry out to our Great Father, “give us food,” or when we are cold we say, “Send us clothes,” we become as little children—we are not men. Here at this place we see that each man takes care of himself; he has a farm and a house, and some cows and a few chickens. We go into their houses and we see tables and chairs, and when they eat they spread a cloth over the table, as do white people, and there are curtains to the windows, and we see the women dressed like white women—here we find men.

(1880: 282-83)

The Dakota move out of savagery to civilization is part of a natural progression like growing up. Clinging to traditional institutions would be as shameful as keeping the toys of childhood after becoming an adult. Riggs suggests that the assimilation of the Native Americans, the making of them into something other than mere “Indians,” will be retarded by allowing them to keep any of their old institutions or by setting up paternalistic economic structures to care for them until they develop into civilized beings.

A stern believer in the Protestant work ethic, Riggs's rejection of an annuity system based on government handouts must be seen in light of his insistence on the ability of Native Americans to fend for themselves in the face of encroaching white settlements, an argument predicated entirely on his belief in a quickly bridgeable gap between savages and civilized men. Riggs was not arguing that the Native Americans should be ignored, rather that they should be (and could be) assimilated as quickly as possible into the social, governmental, and property structures of white nineteenth century America. “The men who would have their hair cut, and put on pantaloons, should have their fields plowed and houses built for them; and they would be furnished with work, cattle, wagons, etc” (1869: 397); “But give them a chance,” Riggs wrote, “and hold out proper inducements to them. Make it possible for them to become men … not by feeding and clothing them, except for the present necessity, but by showing them that work is honorable … and that the law of labor is one from which no people are exempt” (1869: 400).

Riggs is no multiculturalist hero. He was working very consciously and unapologetically toward the eradication of Native American customs, beliefs, and institutions of every sort. In doing so Riggs did not imagine that he was assimilating them into a different culture, but rather that he was assisting them to take their rightful place within culture itself, and not as developmental inferiors but as full participants. Seen in the context of the pervasive mindset that figured culture as a single ladder upon which the nations of man were placed at higher or lower positions, Riggs's assimilationist program emerges, lamentably short-sighted by our current standards, but relatively enlightened for its own time: “The Indian tribes of our continent may become extinct as such; but if this extinction is brought about by introducing them to civilization and Christianity and merging them into our own great nation, which is receiving accretions from all others, who will deplore the result? Rather let us labor for it, realizing that if by our efforts they cease to be Indians and become fellow citizens it will be our glory and joy” (1893: 167). In calling for the cultural assimilation of Native Americans, and insisting upon the easy possibility of that assimilation, Riggs was responding to an alternative even less attractive by contemporary standards: Extermination at its worst, or a paternalistic refusal to treat the Native Americans as developmental equals at best.

Notes

1. I have some doubt as to whether Riggs intended to publish a formal ethnology at all. He was producing a “letter” for the B.A.E to be entitled “Unwritten Laws,” which his son Thomas had published when it was found among Riggs's papers after his death. In a letter to J. C. Pilling (then chief of the B.A.E) dated April 20, 1881, Stephen Riggs wrote of his planned article: “This letter, I think, will cover Ethnology. But I do not profess to be skilled in Ethnology as a science, and shall be glad of any suggestions from Maj. Powell and yourself.” (quoted in Riggs 1893). The letter is interesting in that it clearly shows that Riggs was aware of the inappropriacy of his producing a formal ethnography, suggesting that the discipline had become professionalized enough by the 1890s to make even one of its pioneer amateurs feel unqualified.

2. William Stanton's The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America 1815-59 is a fascinating introduction to “physical anthropology,” branch of ethnology that argued that different races were actually separate species. Popular in the pre-Civil war south, scientists like Samuel George Morton would employ the numerical precision emerging in other scientific disciplines to “prove” the natural and unchangeable intellectual inferiority of other races, particularly through craniometric measurements. Morton's Crania Americana, published in 1839, used graphic tables to show that whites had, on the average, a substantially larger craniometric volume—in other words, bigger brains. According to Hinsley, Joseph Henry apparently felt some discomfort with physical anthropology, not only because he felt that it was politically unwise to encourage highly controversial research at a time when he was attempting to construct an “objective” scientific community, but also because he thought it was damaging to Christian piety. For whatever reason, it had no place at the Smithsonian or the Bureau of American Ethnology, and consequently was largely left out during the construction of respectable ethnology. (It is worth noting, though, that Henry's refusal to allow physical anthropologists to lecture under the auspices of the Smithsonian was a discourtesy he also extended to abolitionists, so perhaps political expedients outweighed pietist in the decision.) Riggs clearly and specifically sets up his own work in opposition to it—on numerous occasions stating very explicitly that the Dakota are human beings just like us and subject to the same religious dispensation. However, I chose to leave it out of this chapter not only because it is a tremendous and complicated matter, but also because craniometry was not really a part of “mainstream” ethnology at the time that Riggs was writing.

3. This despite the fact that Riggs recounts having saved numbers of Dakota women and half-breeds long before Simon is converted. As far as I know, Riggs never mentions a Dakota woman by name anywhere in his work.

Works Cited

Bureau of American Ethnology. First Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1879-80, J. W. Powell, Director. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881.

Feit, Harvey. “The Construction of Algonquin Hunting Territories: Private Property as Moral Lesson, Policy Advocacy, and Ethnographic Error,” in Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge. Ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991.

Hinsley, Curtis M., Jr. Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology 1846-1910. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1981.

Riggs, Stephen R. A Dakota-English Dictionary (edited reprint of 1851 edition), James Owen Dorsey, ed. in Contributions to North American Ethnology, vol. 7. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1890.

———. Dakota Grammar, Texts, and Ethnography, ed. James Owen Dorsey. in Contributions to North American Ethnology, vol. 9. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893.

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