I am glad that Julie Reed turned her attention to the responses by Indigenous peoples to the 1871 Indian Appropriations Act (IAA), which formally abolished the practice of treaty-making with Native nations. Reed focused upon the Cherokees and, like Alaina Roberts, on affairs in the Indian Territory.

Initially the Cherokees saw little threat in the 1871 enactment. The Nation was engaged in its own process of reconstruction, repairing the grievous damage done during the Civil War. The Cherokees’ awareness of the threat posed by the IAA, however, grew over the decade that followed its enactment. Like Native nations elsewhere, the Cherokees faced an invasion of business interests that coveted the Nation’s land, and that colluded with federal officials to gain access to it. “The domino effect of the 1871 IAA,” Reed argues, enabled both “paternalistic reformers” and government officials “to assert themselves better suited to govern the individual lives of Native peoples as opposed to their Native nations, even as treaties explicitly guaranteed the Five Tribes those rights.”

The Cherokees were, as Reed and many other historians have pointed out, skilled and adept builders of institutions in the Indian Territory.Footnote ¹ They healed themselves after the trauma of their expulsion from the southern states. They reconstructed their nations after the Civil War. The institutions they constructed have always been challenged, scrutinized, and interfered with by federal officials. So if the IAA of 1871 was, as Reed argues, part of a domino effect, which domino was it? The first to fall, or one of many? Reed writes that “the net effect” of Congress’s decision to end treaty-making “was to usher in a legislative era that over time sought to erode and disregard the sovereign rights of all tribes, whether classified as civilized,” like the Cherokees and others in the Indian Territory, “or not,” and “with treaties in place or without.” To me, that language seems a bit imprecise. Federal assaults on Cherokee sovereignty began long before 1871, and the very recent Cherokee Tobacco case of 1870 had already taught Cherokees who needed convincing that they could not rely upon their treaties to protect them from the federal government.Footnote ²

Reed is right in that the 1871 IAA signaled “the federal government’s intent to act unilaterally toward tribes from that point forward.” Symptom rather than cause, the IAA did not erase Indigenous nationhood, regardless of Ely Parker’s assertions about tribal governments and their powers. Nor did it destroy the commitment of Native peoples to assert their sovereign rights even in the face of incredible odds against extraordinarily powerful and paternalistic forces. One more significant obstacle in a road filled with them, the IAA’s significance can be overstated when we focus more on the federal government than on Native peoples who made difficult decisions and devised strategies on how to accommodate themselves to or resist these policies, and navigate their way through the wreckage spawned by America’s colonial policies.