To suppress dissent among Native peoples, the Canadian government amends the Indian Act (see entry for APRIL 12, 1876) to outlaw the unauthorized solicitation of funds for Native political organizations. The measure effectively destroys Natives’ efforts to band together to force the government to address their concerns, particularly their claims that land throughout Canada was seized from them illegally.
The Indian Shaker Church divides over a doctrine dispute.
The Indian Shaker Church (see entry for 1883) is mired in controversy when two groups of adherents emerge in the church—those who want to use the Bible in their services and those who do not. The dispute comes to a head when a former bishop of the anti-Bible faction refuses to step down after a pro-Bible believer is elected to the position.
The conflict is resolved by the superior court of Snohomish County, Washington, which formally divides the church. The anti-Bible faction continues to be called the Indian Shaker Church; the pro-Bible faction is thereafter known as the Indian Full Gospel Church.
Mourning Dove’s Cogewea: The Half-Blood i s published.
Writing under the pen name Mourning Dove, Colville-Okanagan writer Christine Quintasket
“Cogewea seated on the veranda was endeavoring to interest herself in a book____The
Scene opened [with] a halfblood ‘brave' is in love with a
White girl____He deems himself
Beneath her. . . . But to cap the absurdity of the story, he weds the white ‘princess' and slaves for her the rest of his life.
Cogewea leaned back in her chair with a sigh. ‘Bosh,' she mused half aloud. ‘Show me the Red “buck” who would slave for the most exclusive white “princess” that lives. Such hash may go with the white, but the Indian, both full bloods and the despised breeds, know differently.'”
—from Mourning Dove's Cogewea:The Half-Blood
Achieves popular and critical success with the publication of Cogewea: The Half-Blood, one of the first novels published by an American Indian woman. Written over a 10-year period while Quintasket was working as a migrant laborer, the book tells a melodramatic story of Cogewea, a young mixed-blood woman trying to find her place in Indian and white society. Before her death in 1936, the author will publish one more book, Coyote Stories (1933), a collection of traditional Indian tales, many featuring the trickster character Coyote.
Patterson v. Seneca Nation upholds the right of tribes to set their own rules of membership.
Among the Seneca, ancestry is traced matrilineally, or through the mother’s line. According to this tradition, the Seneca Nation does not extend tribal membership to children with Seneca fathers and white mothers. A Seneca man challenges the Seneca Nation’s membership criteria in Patterson v. Seneca Nation. The Supreme Court finds for the tribe, citing that because of its tribal sovereignty the “Seneca Nation retains for itself the power of determining who are Senecas.”
March 3
The Indian Oil Leasing Act is passed.
With the Indian Oil Leasing Act, Congress gives the secretary of the interior the ability to negotiate oil leases on behalf of Indian tribes. The legislation is supported by Indian groups, who want to ensure that tribes, and not the U. S. government, will receive oil royalties on their lands. Their right to this income was threatened after Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall tried to designate as public domain land all reservations formed by executive order (see entry for 1922). Although supported by Indian advocates, the act will work against the interests of many Indian tribes, as U. S. officials readily grant longterm leases that net these groups relatively little royalty income.
World History
