In the 1860s and 1870s, the United States government forced most
western Native Americans to settle on reservations. These
ever-shrinking pieces of land were meant to relocate, contain, and
separate these Native peoples, isolating them from one another and
from the white populations coursing through the plains. We Do Not
Want the Gates Closed Between Us tells the story of how Native
Americans resisted this effort by building vast intertribal
networks of communication, threaded together by letter writing and
off-reservation visiting. Faced with the consequences of U.S.
colonialism-the constraints, population loss, and
destitution-Native Americans, far from passively accepting their
fate, mobilized to control their own sources of information, spread
and reinforce ideas, and collectively discuss and mount resistance
against onerous government policies. Justin Gage traces these
efforts, drawing on extensive new evidence, including more than one
hundred letters written by nineteenth-century Native Americans. His
work shows how Lakotas, Cheyennes, Utes, Shoshones, Kiowas, and
dozens of other western tribal nations shrewdly used the U.S.
government's repressive education system and mechanisms of American
settler colonialism, notably the railroads and the Postal Service,
to achieve their own ends. Thus Natives used literacy, a primary
tool of assimilation for U.S. policymakers, to decolonize their
lives much earlier than historians have noted. Whereas previous
histories have assumed that the Ghost Dance itself was responsible
for the creation of brand-new networks among western tribes, this
book suggests that the intertribal networks formed in the 1870s and
1880s actually facilitated the rapid dissemination of the Ghost
Dance in 1889 and 1890. Documenting the evolution and operation of
intertribal networking, Gage demonstrates its effectiveness-and
recognizes for the first time how, through Native activism,
long-distance, intercultural communication persisted in the
colonized American West.
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