The Oldest American Aristocracy: An Exploration of Social Class and the History of the Society of American Indians

Abstract

In 1911, a group of highly educated, professional middle class Native Americans gathered in Columbus, Ohio to form the Society of American Indians (SAI). Over the eleven years of the existence of the SAI, the organization made efforts to lobby for expanded rights for Native Americans, most notably universal citizenship. The membership of the SAI had been drawn from a “talented tenth” formed at government boarding schools where Native students were to be assimilated into settler society; unlike the majority of students who went through these schools, they were not trained to do manual labor, but instead to focus on the academic strengths they had proven through their classwork. It is in these schools where the majority of SAI leaders and members learned the White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) middle class culture, the main culture of Progressive Era reformers who also worked to “Americanize” new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. This education provided the members of the SAI with high levels of exposure to WASP middle-class values, mores, expectations, and cultural capital that would profoundly affect how the members and leaders of the group viewed their role in the assimilation of Native Americans. The Society of American Indians fully embraced the WASP middle-class culture instilled in them during their time in the boarding school system, using the cultural capital gained in such institutions to work toward the end of the government wardship system levied upon Native people as part of the reservation system and to lobby for full US citizenship for all Native Americans. The

SAI’s embracing of WASP middle-class culture ultimately ended up creating a rift between some Native nations and SAI leaders, especially concerning the increasing use of peyote as a religious sacrament among members of Plains and Southwestern nations. It would be the internal rift created by this controversy, a clash of the middle-class disdain for the use of psychoactive substances and mainly impoverished Indigenous peoples far away from the cities on reservations, that would ultimately spell the demise of the Society of American Indians in late 1923.