A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate Indians, 1880-1920

Abstract

This is an important book. In the latter nineteenth century, diverse and influential elements in white America combined forces to settle the 'Indian question' through assimilation...The results were the essentially treaty-breaking Dawes Act of 1887, related legislation, and dubious court decisions. Schoolteachers and missionaries were dispatched to the reservations en masse. Eventual 'citizenship' without functional rights was given Native Americans; the Indians lost two-thirds of reservation land as it had existed before the assimilationist campaign...With insight and skill that go well beyond craft, Hoxie has admirably defined issues and motives, placed economic/political/social interaction into cogent perspective, brought numerous Anglo and Indian individuals and organizations to life, and set forth important lessons.-Choice. This significant study of Indian-white relations during a complex time in national politics deserves close attention.-American Indian Quarterly. Important and intellectually challenging ...This volume goes far to fill a large gap in the history of United States Indian policy.-Journal of American History. Frederick E.Hoxie is director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian at the Newberry Library. He coedited (with Joan Mark) E. Jane Gay's With the Nez Perces: Alice Fletcher in the Field, 1889-92 (Nebraska 1981).