Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: This War is For a Whole Life [Culture of Resistance] Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 4 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-09-03 23:28:23 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 05:54:05 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 05:54:05

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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model of pan-Indian leadership that later generations admired and emulated. Chapter 4 digresses into a discussion of the Paiute Wars of the 1860s, but he rebuilds momentum for his thesis in Chapter 5, which deals with a power struggle at Morongo Reservation in the 1890s. William Pablo (Wanakik Cahuilla) is presented as a “traditional” chief: a defender of older political prerogatives and Indian resources against the growing intrusions of white settlers and the Indian Bureau. The book contains numerous photographs and references to Pablo, who utilized pan-Indian networks, because he is a pivotal “transitional” figure in Hanks' argument. Without providing evidence for this exaggerated claim, Hanks emphasizes the idea that Pablo galvanized “all groups of Native Americans in the region” (pp. 77-78; cf. pp. 105, 187). The following chapter, “The ‘Vanishing Policy,’” reviews the ‘Kill the Indian and Save the Man’ policies of the assimilation era (as famously advanced by reformer Henry Pratt); this is the context for understanding the extreme native responses of suicide and the rape/murder of Pechanga schoolteacher Mary Platt in 1908. The framing of such actions as acts of resistance is mirrored in the following chapter in Hanks' discussion of the leadership of Leonecio Lugo and the execution of agent William Stanley on the Cahuilla reservation in 1912; here the argument is more convincing. In the final two chapters, the book takes a close look at the Mission Indian Federation between 1919 and 1966. Coming full circle, the last chapter foregrounds Federation activists in the coastal and federally-unrecognized Juanefio and Gabrielefio tribes, insightfully documenting the kin networks that linked the Federationists in its last days. The book meanders somewhat in its last chapters, as Hanks endeavors to integrate major events and historical actors, both nationally and panregionally. The stories of the Federation’s white councilors—Jonathan Tibbet and Purl Willis—and Indian leaders Adam Castillo and Clarence Lobo (among many others) are interwoven with the national policy shifts of the Indian New Deal of the early 1930s and the Termination movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The structure nonetheless is sound. Hanks' examination in Chapters 8 of the Mission Indian Federation, particularly during the volatile formative period from 1919 to 1923, is one of the most searching to date. Heightened emotions and a cauldron of controversial discourses over Indian citizenship, bolshevism, assimilation, and allotment attended the birth of the pan-regional organization. Native people’s status as non-citizen wards particularly rankled Southern California Indians; Joe Pete, a founding Federation member, resisted the draft in World War I. When several Federation members were indicted for anti-American activities, the organization responded with flag-waving declarations of Americanism (p. 138). Hanks does not explain how consensus was hammered out, but three goals provided unity in the early years: opposition to “forced” allotment (as a vehicle for termination), the demand for full citizenship (fueled by resentment of unending federal paternalism without statutory authority), and the desire to “abolish the Bureau.” Together, these aims created a platform encapsulated under the Federation banner of “Human Rights and Home Rule.” The Society for the American Indian (SAI) influenced the Federation’s ideology and agenda from its founding, for Carlos Montezuma's call to “abolish the Bureau” resonated strongly among Southern California Indians who resented the Bureau of Indian Affair’s growing intrusion into Native politics and lifeways. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, the Federation rather effectively orchestrated strong opposition to the Bureau’s abuse of power. The 1930s was the finest hour for the Federation, the Cahuilla-centric