Julianne Newmark

Abstract for Book Manuscript:

TENTATIVE TITLE: "From Professional Presence to Political Power: The Activist Writings of Gertrude Bonnin, Charles Alexander Eastman, and Carlos Montezuma"

Julianne Newmark, Ph.D.

As well known Native leaders of the first decades of the twentieth century, Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa), Carlos Montezuma, and Charles Alexander Eastman negotiated the difficult landscape of federal Indian policy, at times appearing conciliatory and assimilationist and at others hostile to the kind of religio-governmental complex represented by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The texts produced by these activist writers during the volatile nativist climate of the Dawes era pose considerable challenges for current scholars. While many have attended to Gertrude Bonnin’s autobiographical texts as well as her essays and editorial work for the American Indian Magazine, few have investigated her carefully crafted communications with Native and non-Native people throughout the country in personal correspondence, in the newsletter of the National Council of American Indians, and in the testimony she delivered regularly before Congress. Carlos Montezuma’s multi-volume, self-produced newsletter Wassaja has been similarly overlooked. Charles Eastman’s numerous published works have been the focus of measured scholarly attention, however his emergence as a deft rhetorician whose goal was activist and retaliatory has not been suitably recognized and considered. This book-length project seeks to fill in some of these gaps by examining selections from these writer’s political oeuvres.

In the nineteen-teens and -twenties, many Native people sought the help of well known Native leaders like Bonnin, Montezuma, and Eastman, asking for their assistance with specific matters related to tribal land (including the issuance of patents-in-fee for individual allotments, the payment of royalties to tribes for resources drawn from their lands, the taxation of parcels of land, and negotiations with BIA agents regarding use or sale of land). In response to proposed policies and ongoing negotiations about physical parcels and expanses of Native land, Bonnin, Montezuma, and Eastman created textual objects as versions of place (not only, or primarily, in a geographic sense). These objects—in the form of pamphlets, newsletters, books, and transcripts of speeches in the Congressional Record—affected government policy, the decisions of individual tribal agents, and the futures of many individual Native people. These three leveraged the markers of Euro-American professionalism they had earned (in the form of medical and college degrees and, in Bonnin’s case, her husband’s tenure as a Captain in the World War) to create new versions of Native presence and permanence through their activist efforts.

Despite what many scholars read as the problematic or fraught acquisition of their Euro-American educations and professional credentials, Bonnin, Montezuma, and Eastman forthrightly and proudly availed themselves of the significant leverage such credentials afforded them, with Natives and non-Natives alike. This project’s argument is that insufficiently studied texts by Bonnin, Montezuma, and Eastman (about whom scholars are, in fact, increasingly writing) reveal their commitment to a powerful textual alchemy of profession, place, and presence, marshaled at once to create lasting political and social change.

This book manuscript delves further into the political writings of these three Native leaders than other studies have thus far. By examining the political writing of Bonnin, Montezuma, and Eastman together in a single study, this project offers a sustained and suggestive assessment of early-twentieth-century Native textual activism (with these three writers serving as provocative indicators of a larger trend). Because Raymond Wilson and Peter Iverson have published solid biographies of Eastman and Montezuma (respectively), this project does not repeat their biographical work. Rather, "From Professional Presence to Political Power" examines the writing itself, the influences upon it and purposes of it, and, of course, the lasting political changes that came as a result.