An Introduction to America’s Music

206 PART 2 | FROM THE CIVIL WAR THROUGH WORLD WAR I

AMERICAN INDIAN MUSIC AND ITS COLLECTORS

The decades after the Civil War saw the population of the continent’s earliest res-

idents, American Indians, swiftly decline in the face of war, disease, and poverty.

But the same time period also saw the fi rst systematic efforts of both Indians and

non-Indians to preserve and understand their cultures, providing the fi rst large

body of detailed knowledge of traditional indigenous music.

AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURES SINCE 1830:

CRISIS AND RENEWAL

American Indian societies suffered many hardships following the fi rst contact

with Europeans: the disruption of their culture, survival in an alien society,

and struggles to adjust to minority status. So harsh was the Indians’ lot that as

the Civil War ended, many whites assumed that Indians were headed for extinc-

tion. Little more than 300,000 Indians were alive in 1865—a population merely

one-tenth the size of the estimated 3 million residents of North America before

European contact.

Much of that reduction was a direct result of U.S. policy. Beginning with the

passage in 1830 of the Indian Removal Act, the government forcibly moved about

60,000 Indians from their homes in the southeastern United States to Indian

Territory (present-day Oklahoma), an episode known as the Trail of Tears. But it

soon became clear that movement westward would not be a permanent solution

to the “Indian problem.” During the 1840s whites moved west along the Oregon

Trail, Mormons sought religious freedom in Utah, and prospectors fl ooded into

California following the discovery there of gold. W hen Indian tribes resisted

whites’ westward expansion, the U.S. A rmy was deployed to move them onto

reservations.

In the decades after the Civil War, Congress abandoned the practice of mak-

ing treaties with Indian nations, instead treating indigenous peoples as wards

of the state and legislating on their behalf. (The Fourteenth Amendment, which

in 1868 extended citizenship to former slaves, excluded most Indians.) New gov-

ernment policies were designed to deal with Indians on an individual or family

basis rather than negotiating with autonomous tribes. In 1878 the General Allot-

ment Act dissolved more than one hundred reservations by parceling out land

that had been communally owned to individual heads of families. The results

were disastrous for Indians, and by the 1890s they had lost 86 million acres of

their former lands.

Another part of the United States’ policy was the creation of boarding schools

for the education of American Indian children, beginning in 1878 with the

Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. The schools were approved by mission-

aries and social reformers who saw assimilation into the white mainstream as the

best hope for the dwindling Indian population. But boarding school practices

included transporting children far from their homes and families, forbidding

them to speak in their native languages, and indoctrinating them in the atti-

tude that their beliefs and traditions were inferior to Euro-American customs.

Graduates, often meeting resistance from white society and encountering diffi -

culties in rejoining their families, were caught between two worlds and at home

the Indian

Removal Act

the General

Allotment Act

Indian boarding

schools

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