Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

Spring 1984

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 2, Spring 1984, pp. 135.

Comments

Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

Early in 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant began his "Quaker Policy" by inviting the Society of Friends to take responsibility for the administration of Indian affairs in Nebraska, Kansas, and the Indian Territory. The Friends, by appointing superintendents, hiring all reservation employees, and operating mission schools, would replace a corrupt patronage system and at the same time help tribes accommodate to a new way of life. The federal government, for its part, would supply goods, money, and official endorsement. Clyde A. Milner investigates the results of this experiment on three small reservations in Nebraska.

Over the past twenty years historians Henry Fritz, Robert Mardock, and especially Francis Paul Prucha have placed the Quaker Policy, or Peace Policy, in the larger context of nineteenth century Indian affairs. These studies concentrated on the role of Congress and the Indian Office in Washington, D.C., and did not reveal how Grant's reform, which was expanded to include churches other than the Quakers, influenced the lives of missionaries and Indians in the West between 1869 and 1882. To learn this, one needs considerable detail about fourteen denominations working in ten geographic regions on more than seventy reservations. Few such tribal histories existed until recently. Milner now brings us one step closer to a complete picture with his account of the Oto, Pawnee, and Omaha Indians, and their Liberal Friends.

Few studies can match Milner's for skill in combining church history, ethnology, everyday 135 life at agencies, Indian and white religious beliefs, government policy, and statistical analysis. Few come close to Milner in capturing how the Quaker Policy must have seemed to missionaries delivering the services and to Indians receiving them. Milner contends that when idealistic, well-meaning eastern Quakers arrived in Nebraska to bring tribal people a superior way of life, the Friends ran directly into Indian and white resistance. They encountered factionalism and local politics, violence and bad faith. The Quakers learned that cultures change slowly and conservatively, and they discovered that friendly persuasion did not always work, even among other Friends. In short, the Quakers experienced some success, considerable failure, and occasional disaster. While providing much detail, Milner holds this story in the context of American westward expansion.

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