The absence of Indigenous historical perspectives creates a predicament in the historiography of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. For the first eight years of the Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, zero articles written about or by Native Americans can be found within its pages. By 2010, however, a roundtable of leading Gilded Age and Progressive Era scholars critically examined the reasons why “Native Americans often slipped out of national consciousness by the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.”Footnote ¹ By 2014, the journal offered a special issue on the importance of Indigenous histories during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a “period of tremendous violence perpetuated on Indigenous communities,” wrote the editors Boyd Cothran and C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa.Footnote ² It is the observation of Indigenous histories on the periphery of Gilded Age and Progressive Era that inspires a reevaluation of the historiographical contributions that highlight Indigenous survival through the onslaught of settler colonial violence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The purpose of this microsyllabus seeks to challenge these past historiographical mishaps by re-centering works that delve into the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives and experience of settler colonial violence during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Violence, both physical and structure, comes in varied forms: oppression, limiting people’s rights, their access to legal representation, their dehumanization through exclusion and segregation, as well as the production of memory. These forms of violence are consequences of settler colonialism, the living structure of erasure, removal, and eradication of Indigenous nations committed by a settler state.Footnote ³ Controversial historiographical debates over the use of terms like genocide and ethnic cleansing demonstrate the scale of physical violence deployed by the U.S. government or white settlements to replace Indigenous communities. Concurrently, policies and practices of structural violence worked together to further erase and remove Indigenous nations. The Gilded Age and Progressive Era offer a unique time frame to observe the evolution of violence and how it became embedded in the societal structure of the United States.

Contention over terminology, such as debates over genocide and ethnic cleansing, can replicate the violence that many Indigenous peoples continue to experience. Some historians agree that genocide can describe federal and settler-driven policies against Indigenous peoples; or, as Benjamin Madley argues, processes where “individuals kill, kidnap, and otherwise act to destroy a specific group.”Footnote ⁴ On the contrary, Gary Clayton Anderson argues against the use of genocide, but forwards the use of ethnic cleansing as the best approach to describing what happened to Indigenous communities by the hands of federal and settler culprits during the nineteenth century. “Ethnic cleansing,” writes Anderson, is a “term reflected of forced dislocation with the intent to take away lands of a particular ethnic, religious, or cultural group.”Footnote ⁵ The “crimes” against Indigenous peoples can in no way, shape, or form “hardly resemble ‘planned killing’ that went on for months and years” throughout Europe and Asia during the twentieth century. In response to these accusations, historians like Boyd Cothran, Margaret D. Jacobs, and Walter L. Hixson all critically engage Anderson’s prose to raise awareness to the words that historians choose to use and their impact on the people they research and encounter within their work. While Jacobs and Hixson argue that other terms—like settler colonialism and colonial genocide—should be used to clarify this degree of violence, Cothran contends that these events’ realities get lost in translation when scholars debate such terms.Footnote ⁶

Perhaps one of the most provocative forms of structural violence is in the production of history for scholarly and public consumption. During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in particular, white Americans used their versions of the past to control the treatment of Native Americans as the nation began ushering in new forms of control, surveillance, and exclusion. Boyd Cothran’s article, “Enduring Legacy,” reassesses redemptive violence and problematic recollections of violent encounters between Indigenous and white settlements. David Grua’s work, similarly, addresses the “race war” question that often pitted Indigenous groups at odds with “peaceful white settlers” that was “the final victory in the four-hundred-year struggle between civilization and savagery.”Footnote ⁷ Louis Warren’s work on Buffalo Bill and Native myth, as with Michelle Wick Paterson’s essay and Jean M. O’Brien and Lisa Blee’s work on the Massasoit monument, provide additional insight into how settler colonialism and the binary of race produce mythic stories of the past designed to control, demean, and exclude Indigenous peoples from the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Philip J. Deloria explains ways to break up master and conquest narratives that routinely attempt to leave Indigenous peoples out of American history.Footnote ⁸

The continuity of violence against Indigenous communities, especially as it transformed from military power to political and environmental violence during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, offers new opportunities to focus on Indigenous persistence and survival. Notable recent works like Nick Estes’s Our History Is the Future showcase the evolution and continuity of violence and settler colonialism in the twenty-first century, specifically how the conflicts of the past shaped contemporary problems in Indigenous communities. The Gilded Age and Progressive Era serve as a rest stop when traveling down the path of white colonial violence. Upon closer analysis, it also provides a place for us to critique that violence and better explore the foundations of the challenges that Indigenous nations face today.