Federal Indian policy deliberately dismantled communal landholding and gender roles

Evidence

The federal civilization plan was spare on specifics but transformative in practice. American officials intended to drive what the historians Theda Perdue and Michael Green have termed “comprehensive cultural change,” converting a communal lifestyle rooted in sustainable farming and hunting into an individualistic lifestyle punctuated by private property and male authority. The policy demanded that Native men give up the bow for the plow, and that Native women cease farming corn and turn their attention to the domestic work of spinning thread, weaving cloth, and other “properly” feminine activities. Native people were advised to adopt Christianity and begin producing “civilized crops” like cotton. And Native tribes, which held lands in common, were expected to embrace, as Henry Knox put it, “a love for exclusive property.” To aid in this reinvention of Indigenous society, the United States would provide tools, fund the establishment of Christian missions and schools, and commission blacksmiths. If Native people did not prove that they could rise above savagery and assimilate, Hawkins and others believed, they would be crowded out or killed. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 482

Categorization

• QUESTION: The threat behind the policy — assimilate or be killed — is worth chasing: was relocation/extermination a stated alternative or an implied one?
• XREF: Echoes the slavery-as-design thread in the book so far: both policies convert communal into individualistic property regimes under federal auspices. — connects to: Twentieth-century Swedish land reforms dismantled communal extraction commons. — Emil Sandström and Ann-Kristin Ekman and Karl-Johan Lindholm, Commoning in the periphery – The role…, 43; Tribes can exclude members on gendered marriage lines; Colonial taxation converted communal land into male-owned private property — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 394