The notion that Indians had conceded to European colonization so the newcomers could later form the United States had become a stock feature of White American public memory by the early twentieth century. It was the basis of the myth of the first Thanksgiving, in which friendly Indians take the Pilgrims into their care, seal the relationship with a feast, and then fade into the mist. In the Mid-Atlantic, the equivalent tale was of the Delaware Indians’ peacefully ceding their country to Pennsylvania’s Quaker founder, William Penn. In the South, it was the young Powhatan princess, Pocahontas, saving the Englishman John Smith from execution at the hands of her chieftain father and thereby allowing the colony of Virginia to continue. In the West, it was another Indian maiden, Sacajawea, guiding the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific to permit the United States to claim the continent from sea to shining sea. These stories were so foundational to White people’s sense of national history that they all appeared in the art of the United States Capitol rotunda. The point of the National American Indian Memorial was to introduce generations of new Americans, just as they were about to set foot in the country, to the legend of Indians peacefully conceding to colonialism. As Rodman Wanamaker explained to Taft, the great Indian statue would serve as a beacon “to all those coming to this land of liberty and freedom, recognizing also the welcome which the Red Man gave to the White Man when our forefathers first came to these shores.”
The problem, of course, was squaring this fairy tale with the colossal violence that had accompanied White expansion across America. The solution offered by American cultural productions, ranging from the scholarship of the historian Frederick Jackson Turner to scores of Hollywood films, was that the frontier struggle to tame the wilderness and the savages had transformed effete European settlers into intrepid, individualistic Americans. In other words, Indians, even in their resistance, had contributed to the greatness of White America. Part of Wanamaker’s urgency to expose recent immigrants to this creed was that few of them thought of themselves or others in the racial terms that Americans took for granted. To become true Americans, they needed to learn that they were White people; that Whites, by virtue of their superiority, now dominated the continent and its darker-hued populations, particularly Blacks; and that Indians had for the most part vanished as part of God’s will “in the name of progress,” as Wanamaker’s hero, Buffalo Bill, so often put it. The memorial’s groundbreaking dramatized these ideas just as assuredly as the structure was supposed to embody them. Held in drizzling rain on George Washington’s birthday, the event featured Taft, in the final days of his presidency, as the main guest of honor, joined by members of his cabinet, the governor of New York State, the mayor of New York City, military officers, and many other eminent invited guests. Several chiefs from Dixon’s Last Indian Council were there, too, along with some other Indians who had interruptedtribal business in Washington, D.C., to attend. Taft’s speech, given in full view of the Native guests, praised the monument as “perpetuating the memory of the succession from the red to the white race in the ownership of the Western Hemisphere.” It was “the story of the march of empire westward and the progress of Christian civilization.” Taft finished by digging up one scoop of dirt with a silver spade provided by Rodman Wanamaker, and then another with an ancient Indian stone axe previously excavated from the site. Next up was the Northern Cheyenne elder Wooden Leg, whose shovel was a buffalo thigh bone brought in from the Plains. The Indian delegates then sang a war song (which one, from which tribe, the accounts do not say), and signed or marked a pledge of allegiance to the United States to express their supposed agreement that “the Indian is fast losing his identity in the face of the great waves of Caucasian civilization, which are extending to the four winds of the country, and we want fuller knowledge, in order that we may take our places in the civilization which surrounds us.” Finally, the Indians hoisted Old Glory while a military band played a song specially composed by the Wanamaker stores’ musical director, Irvin Morgan. He titled it “The Indians’ Requiem,” a genre usually meant to be played at a Mass for the dead. Symbolically, Dixon and Wanamaker had roped the Indian delegates into performing at their own funeral.
The proceedings were also an opportunity for White people to congratulate themselves for their magnanimity in triumph. As the event’s printed program asked rhetorically, where else but America would such an edifice be built “by a civilized nation to a race of primitive people”? The victors’ nobility toward the vanquished might very well have been unprecedented. “So far as can be learned,” Dixon waxed, “never before in the history of mankind has a monument been erected to a race of people,” never mind a conquered one.
Indians at the groundbreaking showed no interest in ushering in their own demise or applauding White people for erecting an Indian statue as compensation for their destruction of so many actual Indians. Austin Red Hawk, an Oglala Lakota, delivered a speech about “my strong belief that we,” Indians, “were created by the Great Spirit to live in this country,” contrary to the ceremony’s insistence on their doom. White people had long argued that God destined them, as civilized Christians, to spread at the expense of Indian savages. Indians across the centuries had countered that the Creator had made Indians and Whites separately and put them each on their own continent to follow their distinctive ways of life. Therefore, Whites should return to Europe or, at the very least, leave Indians alone, and Indians should shun the White people’s culture as pollution. Red Hawk refrained from elaborating those points given the spirit of the occasion, but his Indian counterparts would have understood the reference. The Indian representatives also rejected White characterizations of them as primitive relics by spending the day after the proceedings in a tour of New York City, taking the subway to the American Museum of Natural History, the BronxZoo, Grand Central Terminal, and the Woolworth Building, and then a ferry to the Statue of Liberty. They even witnessed a firehouse drill. Everywhere they went, crowds followed, jostling to catch a look at “real Indians.” For Whites, one of the purposes of hosting such delegations was to overawe Indians with the scale, wealth, and power of American society, but sometimes the efforts backfired. In this case, one unidentified member of the Native troupe found it sad that such an obviously rich community had paved over so much green earth. The implication was that perhaps Whites stood to learn as much from Indians as Indians did from them.
Later that week, the Native delegates visited the Office of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., where they made it clear that they saw the groundbreaking as a diplomatic council rather than as the last rite for their race. The Crow chief, Plenty Coups, told Commissioner Frederick H. Abbott, in English, that he thought the event was meant to symbolize “it is friendship from now on.” The Brulé Lakota chief Hollow Horn Bear, a veteran of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, believed the point was to demonstrate that the “open road for happiness and prosperity among my people is to join hands with the white brother, and receive into our own lives the civilization and education that he offers and join with our white brothers in supporting the flag.” He conceded that this agenda was the only way forward given that “the white people” had “driven me into certain places, the reservations, small places where I am penned up.” The Blackfeet leader, Mountain Chief, who in 1871 had been the intended target of a massacre by American troops, hoped participation in the groundbreaking would serve “as our protection,” which the tribes expected but rarely received from the United States despite its treaty obligations. He also complained that there was too much turnover among reservation agents and in the federal Indian Office, which made it difficult to cultivate and sustain productive relationships. Clearly, none of these men thought their people were about to ride off into the sunset.
The sharpest criticism of the memorial came from the Society of American Indians (SAI), a recently founded organization of formally educated, professional Indians who largely favored dismantling the reservations and encouraging Indians to assimilate into White society while retaining pride in their Native heritage. They saw the memorial, and all the rhetoric of Indian primitiveness and imminent extinction surrounding it, as a rejection of their progressive examples, never mind of the history of the United States brutally subjugating Native people and forcing White civilization and Christianity on them. The Seneca anthropologist Arthur C. Parker wrote in the society’s journal that “the irony of building a gigantic statue to a race of men who have been so grossly injured by the evils of civilization cannot but be apparent to those who think even superficially.” To him, the whole exercise was “a flagrant insult.” The SAI’s Chauncey Yellow Robe, a Brulé educator, likewise denounced the memorial as a “degrading, demoralizing, and degenerating” romanticization of savagery, akin to stereotypes of Indians in the movies and Wild West shows. He took even greater offense at the depiction of Indians as a disappearing race when they were struggling and sometimes succeeding at recovering from the damage the United States had inflicted on them. “The Indian wants no such memorial monument,” proclaimed an indignant Yellow Robe, “for he is not yet dead.”
From The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States. Used with permission of Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © 2026 by David J. Silmerman.
