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"Neonativism and the Society of American Indians: Responses to Nativism in the Letters and Papers of Carlos Montezuma and Charles and Elaine Eastman" Abstract: Both deemed "successful" products of Dawes-Era boarding schools, Eastman and Montezuma increasingly felt that government paternalism, most significantly as practiced by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and its agents, was further imperiling Native peoples and would serve to limit their access to positions of equality and inclusion in broader American culture. Thus, through the SAI, Montezuma, in particular, railed against the BIA and envisioned a pan-Indian movement that would empower all Native Americans, enabling them to access the highest levels of education while acknowledging and enforcing the importance of certain tribally held beliefs. I aim in this project to build upon my work on Eastman and neonativism and to add to it discussions of Montezuma and the Society of American Indians. Through examining the Newberry Library's Ayers's Collections holdings, which include Elaine and Charles Eastman, Carlos Montezuma, and Society of American Indians papers, I offer in this paper an analysis of the ways in which these men, and the SAI as a group, functioned within (and reacted against) the nativist and BIA-dominated climate of the time. Charles Eastman, Montezuma, and the SAI created a vision of an alternate future for Native people that would defy the policies of cultural erasure and tribal dispossession rampant in the first three decades of the twentieth century.
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