Reconstruction in Indian Country: Ely Parker and the Contentious Peace Policy

The formative years of the U.S. government’s post-Civil-War Peace Policy governing Native Americans exist in the historical literature as a complex and paradoxical phenomenon fraught with internal contradictions. While there is little consensus among historians, this paper seeks to make sense of this mystifying moment. I argue that two distinct directions in Indian policy emerged in the Reconstruction period: one founded upon notions of compensatory legislation and another upon the ideals of dispossession and compulsory assimilation. Ultimately and unfortunately, the 1871 House Committee on Appropriations’ investigation into the Bureau of Indian Affairs revealed the latter to be most pervasive.

Ely S. Parker, a Seneca Sachem and the first Indian Commissioner of Bureau of Indian Affairs developed a reform agenda built upon the notion that the federal government had a responsibility to compensate indigenous peoples for an economic and political system of domination that had dispossessed them of land, resources, opportunities, and sovereignty. Many, like Parker, believed the post-war years signaled a moment of opportunity, when profound changes in the direction of Indian affairs seemed possible. Others seized this opportunity to shape Indian Country according their vision of a proper polity. William Welsh and the Board of Indian Commissioners, the most vocal and influential non-Native philanthropists interested in Indian Affairs, developed this alternate reform agenda characterized by a focus on coercive assimilation as its foundational component within the evolving federal schema of dispossession. Their driving philosophy asserted that Christian philanthropists of the United States understood the best interests of Indian people, better than Indian people themselves. This study reveals the power of unintended consequences in Indian policy reform, the pervasiveness of colonialist thought, and contextualizes Indian affairs within the larger reform spirit of the Reconstruction Era.