The early reservation years of the late nineteenth century comprise a period of intellectual mobility and activism for Native Americans. This article argues that the thousands of letters written by western Native Americans to non-Natives during this period were a consequential weapon against U.S. colonialism. By highlighting the history of Wolf Chief, a determined Hidatsa activist, this article reveals the many strategies of Native Americans who wrote to U.S. presidents, officials, newspapers, and others to decolonize their lives, seek justice, counteract colonial abuses, and preserve a sense of self-determination. U.S. policy makers hoped that a more literate Native population would be transformed, that educated Indians might understand the virtues of Americanization, and that literacy might quell opposition to U.S authority. Instead, Native Americans used the written word in the early reservation years to challenge a massive colonial apparatus in ways that scholars have not recognized. Wolf Chief’s advocacy from the Fort Berthold Reservation was rooted in the conviction that the Three Tribes deserved a meaningful role in shaping their own futures and protecting their autonomy. His wide-ranging correspondence emphasized the importance of including Native perspectives in the management of reservation affairs, as he believed that effective solutions required the active involvement of his people.

This essay will discuss the issue of Native American history and periodization where we are not allowed “premodern” histories. History prior to European contact is relegated to terms like “Pre-Columbian” and consigned to the domain of archeologists. As a reclamation of Native sovereign ancestral presence, I am interested in public humanities as an interdisciplinary way to push against the myths and stereotypes that both confine Indigenous people to static pasts, either displacing ancestors into settler national memory or oblivion. My goals in public humanities are to work toward reclamations of ancient pasts in the so-called Americas from the limited imaginations of settler skull- and arrowhead-collectors toward reasserting the ongoing lived relationships that Natives have with spaces condemned as ruins and materials as relics. I briefly mention my own work in digital curation, Red Coral Stories, to provide counternarratives from European conquest toward expanding Native American presence across space and time.

The late nineteenth-century policy of allotting tribal lands into individually owned tracts is appropriately interpreted as a destructive federal effort to expropriate Native land and eliminate tribal identities. The Ottawa Tribe in Indian Territory, however, had divergent objectives in supporting allotment. This article argues the Ottawa advocated for allotment and U.S. citizenship to escape intrusive federal control over their lands and resources. Although they embraced policies aimed at eliminating tribal existence, the Ottawa rejected the intentions behind those policies, and instead, they drew on long-established community attributes of mobility and interconnection with outsiders to resituate their nation within American society. By centering Ottawa perspectives, this article disrupts progressive narratives that denote the pursuit of U.S. citizenship as an effort to secure equal inclusion. It underscores U.S. citizenship and allotment as tools of settler colonial domination and demonstrates how the Ottawa subversively deployed U.S. citizenship and private property rights to combat colonial administration and maintain tribal sovereignty. Examining a policy often glossed over as invariably imposed on Native nations, this article underscores the necessity of analyzing Native community dynamics and political strategies to understand the implementation and impact of allotment.