In this episode, we'll journey back to the late 1800s to explore how America's Indigenous population harnessed the power of education, specifically learning to read and write in English, as well as their utilization of the United States Postal Service. Here navigating us through this transformative period is Justin Gage, Author and Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Get ready for a thought-provoking and enlightening conversation!
This week on Mailin' It, we explore how the Postal Service became a conduit for America's Indigenous communities during a time of profound change. We’ll discuss some of the intricacies around Native Americans who found themselves on government-sponsored reservations, encouraged to embrace American culture and their ingenious utilization of the United States Postal Service. Guiding us through this conversation is Justin Gage, Author and Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Together, we'll explore how America's Indigenous population harnessed the power of education, specifically learning to read and write in English, as a means of empowerment. You don’t want to miss this enlightening conversation that uncovers the hidden layers of history.
Jonathan Castillo:
Hello, and welcome to Mailin’ It, the official podcast of the United States Postal Service. I'm Jonathan Castillo. As we do from time to time on the podcast, today, we're going to explore another instance of the Postal Service’s impact in US history. Back in the late 1800’s, life was changing dramatically for Native Americans who were being put on government-sponsored reservations and encouraged to adapt to US culture and customs. A big part of this effort was teaching Native Americans to read and write in English. In this episode, we're speaking with Justin Gage about how America's indigenous population made the most of this education and how they used the United States Postal Service to their advantage. Justin is assistant professor of history joining us remotely from campus at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He's also the author of the book, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us - Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance. Welcome to Mailin’ It, Justin.
Justin Gage:
Hey, thanks for having me. Really a pleasure to be here.
Jonathan Castillo:
I think the best place to start is to get an idea of what life was like for Native Americans back in the 1880s and 1890s when the Ghost Dance Movement gained popularity. So what was the Ghost dance, and how did US westward expansion affect the Native Americans who had been living on those lands?
Justin Gage:
Yeah, that's a really good question. And a complicated one. The ghost dance itself was a movement, a movement that involved dozens and dozens of different tribal nations in the West. And at the time, the 1880s, 1890s, native Americans were colonized people living on reservations. Most all Western Native Americans had been forced onto these places. Some of these places were close to their homelands. Others were, were many hundreds of miles away from their homelands. But yet they were confined there. They were told to be there. And reservations were created to keep Native Americans away from white people. Also created to keep Native Americans away from each other, from other tribes. The Ghost Dance movement was able to spread from reservation to reservation because of networks communication that had been established in the years before. The Ghost Dance began in 1889.
And so whenever native Americans were placed on reservations in the 1870s, largely some of them before these Western Native Americans, they were able to maintain their networks inter tribally, despite being oftentimes hundreds and thousands of miles away from each other. And so they were colonized people, and reservation systems were was created under a system of colonization. Native Americans weren't there by choice and on reservations. The US government was trying to assimilate them, was trying to change them, was trying to take away their traditional languages, their traditional customs. They're trying to educate them in a so-called Americanized educational system. And the English language was, you know, really, the foundation of Indian education, assimilation, the thinking was, is that there was this, the English was superior to native languages. They actually believed racially English was superior.
And that if Native Americans could begin to speak English and read and write English, that they could become better. They could become better despite their, you know, at the time believed by many their racial inferiorities. And so the ghost dance was a belief among many. And this spread rapidly that perhaps their lives could become better, and perhaps the white people controlling them, the white people around them, perhaps they would go away, perhaps that the government could stop, you know, running their lives. And so in many ways, the Ghost Dance movement was an anti-colonial movement, a religious movement.
Jonathan Castillo:
Let me ask you this, Justin, you mentioned about… there was this thinking that a common language could potentially help erase the differences between the natives and the whites. Right? To me, and correct me if I'm wrong, of course, that sounds like it would be kind of, a new thing for Native American culture, right? The hundreds of different tribes using the same language, in this case English, right? That seems like a tough sell.
Justin Gage:
Sure. For the Eastern tribes contact with the English language becoming literate for Eastern tribes like the, you know, the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws many others, that was something old. But for Western tribes, those that were, had their homelands and what we think of as the West, you know, largely west of the Mississippi River, it was, there was in the 1840s, missionaries arriving fifties, 1860s, many, many more white Americans arriving and were missionaries. And then the government started to create schools on reservations. And the English accessibility to the English language was rising. And many Native Americans, especially leaders, thought, well, the English language is the language of our colonizer. It's the language of our enemy. It's the language of, the language on these laws and these treaties, the language on these agents telling us what to do, how they, they're communicating.
It's all in English. And so there was thought English, learning English, our children, learning English, would be beneficial. And so some parents, some leaders, you know, chose to ask for schools on their reservations. Some chose to send their children, to boarding schools. But many others, many, many others were coerced into sending children to school. Despite all this, of course, is that many Native Americans use this education, use the English language, and in some cases in missionary schools, some Native Americans were learning literacy in their own language, especially those like Dakotas or Lakotas Omahas, others. They were learning a written form of their language. They're using this. And as literacy rates grew, they're using this for their own benefit. And so, you know, it's hard to tell exactly how many Native Americans in the West were reading and writing by 1889 or so. But looking at the government numbers among western tribes, major western tribes, it's around 18% of the population. And that was a pretty big change because 10 years before, it was probably around 3% among those same people in those same tribes. So they're using this to take advantage of eventually, of course, the postal system, which is of course why we're here today. And every, in every reservation in a post office or at least mail delivery, some reservations had multiple post offices, and they use that to their advantage.
Jonathan Castillo:
I really like what you said about the younger generation kind latching onto the idea that being able to communicate in a singular language could potentially help their communication networks, intertribal relations and things of that nature. Let me ask you this, you mentioned at the end that's kind of where the Postal Service centered, right? And the mail. So at that time, how were Native Americans using the Postal Service?
Justin Gage:
In a lot of ways, and in a lot of ways that, of course, you would expect in a lot of ways that white people were using it. The difference was, of course, is that that Native Americans often experienced separation because of the colonization. Families were ripped apart because part of the tribe was forced to live on this reservation. The other part of the tribe was forced to live on that one. The kinship ties across, you know, the Great Plains were vast, and so people were separated and tribes were separated, tribes that had these long histories of friendship, of kinship, even of rivalry. And so native Americans, despite being separated on reservations, they could send these letters to their friends and family to other leaders. One important use early on was diplomacy. Tribes, we don't think about tribes often enough as nations.
They were, they are nations. And they had leadership, and they had economies, and they had cultures, societies, you know, hundreds of them. And they used letters to interact with each other diplomatically. Oftentimes in the 1880s, it was to make peace, to cool relations, to solidify relations. Even before reservations began popping up, native Americans visited post offices. They use post offices. Eventually on reservations, you see anecdotes of government agents, Indian agents who ran the reservations. They would write, on mail day, the post office is swamped with people wanting to send and receive letters. Illiterate Native Americans would ask people working in the store or the post office to translate, to write. You have agents who are saying most of the day is spent on mail day doing that.
You also have native Americans asking for more post offices. There were fewer post offices per square mile on reservations than anywhere else in the west. The government did not go outta their way to service Native American communities. And so, you have Indians writing to the government asking for more post offices, making it more accessible. You have agents writing on their behalf. You have Native Americans running, or at least trying to run their own post offices. There's a lot of examples of, of the desire to use the post among Native Americans in the 1880s, 1890s.
Jonathan Castillo:
So what I'm hearing is that even though it wasn't necessarily legally permitted for a Native American to serve as a postmaster at that time, it sounds like they really connected with their communities, like you said. So it was kind of like a beacon of, you know maybe sanctuary, hope within the reservation. Does that characterize it?
Justin Gage:
Yeah, I think they become hubs of communication. And, and they weren't just using it to communicate everyday news. Of course, they did that too. They were also communicating it in ways that went against what the government would hope they were using the, they were using the mail in ways that the white officials didn't expect, and in ways that they didn't want them to use them. So some of the mail was used to push back against government power, colonial power. Some of the mail was used to petition, petition for better conditions to make the public aware of abuses on reservations, to make the public aware of corruption to petition for laws to be passed or not be passed. And so they used the mail to receive all sorts of correspondence that would inform them on the happenings of the country, the happenings of the government, the happenings of Indian Affairs.
They would get newspapers in the mail. And so they consumed all these new sources of information, and by doing that, they're connecting themselves to white sources and to this national web of communication that was expanding across the continent in that era. And so, you know, it's very important that they stay connected to friends and families on other reservations, but they could do this. They could use letters to express their thoughts and belief outside of control of white Americans. And this communication, of course, is intertribal and accelerates the development of these larger intertribal communities across the west. And this, this really sets up the spread of movements like the Ghost Dance in 1889.
Jonathan Castillo:
Right. And that you led right into my next question, which is really, it seems like the Ghost Dance Movement was a really good example of how well Native Americans could leverage the Postal Service to organize and to try and hold on to their way of life and preserve their culture. Can you give us a little bit more detail about what the Ghost Dance Movement was and the role the Postal Service played in organizing it?
Justin Gage:
You could, you could say that the mail was very important in the success of the Ghost Dance. The 1890 Ghost Dance is the fastest spreading Native American religious movement that we know about. So the, the Ghost Dance Movement originated in really western Nevada from a single man named Wovoca - or Jack Wilson. Wovoca had this set of ideas, and he believed he received these ideas from God - or the creator - these ideas in a vision or set a set of visions. And these ideas, he began to, he believed he had to tell other Native Americans about, at first it was locally, then regionally, eventually it's a continental movement. And this native controlled conversation is spread in part through letters. And so the fastest way to get news of this from Nevada to the Dakotas, of course, was letter.
And so the ghost dance was a set of ideas that was largely ethical in its teachings. There was no, you know, ghost dance handbook. There was no, it was not doctrinal. So Wovoka’s teachings included things like, be a better person, work harder, don't be violent. Actually, he's taught people to send their kids to school, and also do this dance, do this dance in this way. And if you do it long enough that the world will change and this will usher in a revolution, a change in your lives, a change in our lives. And in many ways, the dance - like in other native dances - was an expression, actually dancing was an expression of Wovoka’s belief, one's reverence for the creator. Deeply personal, but done communally. You know, over time, this dance spread, in part because a lot of folks wanted to experience that.
And so it meant many different things to many different people. And it's really hard to explain what Ghost Dance was because of that. But a lot of folks who believed it many people thought would revolutionize the world, perhaps it would be this event, this, this culmination after dancing that would lead to the disappearance of white folks. And of course, the ghost dance was entirely peaceful. It was entirely nonviolent. But white people, you know, heard that, that Indians were dancing to get rid of us, and they were afraid of it. They're also afraid of the intertribal nature of it. Anytime tribes banded together, joined forces in the eyes of white folks, it spelled danger, of course. The ghost dance was entirely, entirely peaceful.
Jonathan Castillo:
How did the US government react when it found out that Native Americans were using our infrastructure to promote the ghost dance movement?
Justin Gage:
The Ghost Dance wasn't the only thing that was being spread, that white officials, US officials didn't want to be spread. That there were all sorts of things that were being spread through the mail that they thought might weaken their efforts, their reservation system. And so, you know, 1879, there are there are Omahas writing letters to Poncas. And the Poncas, according to their agent, were getting really upset about their situation in Indian territory. They had been removed Indian territory from their homelands, and the government thought the Omahas are the ones causing Poncas to be upset because of this correspondence. There's many, many examples of censorship of the government trying to stop mail being sent to certain people or certain times for certain reasons. And a lot of those were of course, regarding the ghost dance.
The school's most likely censored mail. the Carlisle Indian School superintendent, Richard Henry Pratt, was going through the mail probably at least, at least in many instances, the mail that students were receiving. And so the US government, when the Ghost Dance comes around, the Ghost Dance becomes a big deal in the American press. And government officials thought they needed to stop this. How do you stop it? Well, do you stop Native Americans from communicating with each other? You stop the spread of it. So you have this system of surveillance and spies, informants, you're trying to infiltrate native networks and censoring the mail is a part of that. You have government agent at the Kiowa Agency, the Kiowa Reservation, actually asking the government to ask the postmaster if he can peruse their mail to see if, if you take out the letters being written about the Messiah, in the West Wovoca, there's at least one instance at Standing Rock, where Native Americans Lakotas had to cross the Missouri River to mail a letter in the dead of night.
They had to cross the river at nighttime,
Jonathan Castillo:
Justin, let me ask you this. Do you think the Ghost Dance Movement's success encouraged other Native Americans to use the mail as a way to fight for their rights, possibly in other ways?
Justin Gage:
I think so. I think many knew that before the Ghost Dance. But you know, the Ghost Dance success certainly was an event that led more people to use the mail, or at least to rely upon it, perhaps. I think by the ghost dance, by 1889, most Native Americans, especially those who are literate, saw the mail as a very practical tool for communicating. And, you know, the average Native American, the average person on a reservation, they weren't part of the leadership. Perhaps they realized that letters gave them access to the people who were controlling their lives. It gave them access to people like the American President, and that way they could have some sense of control of their own lives. They didn't have to go through their Indian agents on the reservation. They could bypass this vast forest of colonial bureaucracy that was built around them. And so the ghost dance was this movement that depended in part on people's ability to use the mail to communicate over long distances.
Jonathan Castillo:
From what you've said about the Ghost Dance movement, it had a big impact on Native Americans in a lot of ways. What kind of influence would you say the movement had beyond the original call to action?
Justin Gage:
There was this big effort where Native Americans try to communicate to white Americans what this meant, and that they should have the religious freedom to perform the ghost dance, to believe these things. But for the most part, white people misunderstood it, but it inspired, I think, a lot of folks, native Americans to be more unified. Some Native Americans, many actually, they saw hope in the movement. They saw hope for change. They saw hope for a living, a life like they had in the past, even though the ghost dance wasn't necessarily an old time religion, it was very innovative religion a movement. And after the famous and horrible event at Wounded Knee, the Wounded Knee Massacre, which occurs in late 1890, and many people see the Ghost Dance ending with Wounded Knee, of course, that it happened. And reservations like on Lakota reservations, the Ghost Dance went more and more underground. But in other parts, especially Indian territory, the Ghost Dance actually peaks in 1891. And so Ghost Dancing is persisting, and it even persists into the 1900’s. It spreads as far as Canada along these intertribal connections.
Jonathan Castillo:
Incredible. Well, Justin, thank you so much for joining the podcast. You've given us so much insight on Native American culture during the 1800’s, during the 1900’s. It was truly an honor, sir.
Justin Gage:
Thank you. I'm honored as well. I had a fun time and I look forward to future episodes of Mailin’ It.
Jonathan Castillo:
Now we're ready for another “Did You Know,” our segment that reveals some lesser known facts about the Postal Service. These days it's hard to imagine walking more than a few blocks without coming across one of the Postal Service’s iconic blue mail collection boxes. In fact, there are nearly 140,000 blue collection boxes in use across the US. Did you know that Street Letter mailboxes as we know them today date back to the late 1850s when a Philadelphia merchant first patented a cast iron letter box designed to connect to city lampposts? Those cast iron boxes replaced an assortment of different types of collection boxes that the Postal Service had used over the years in select cities. Those first boxes had been placed inside shops and other small businesses, and were hard to find. Street mail collection box designs have evolved a lot over time. Before 1970, they were green, then red, then white, then green again, and finally beginning in 1955, red, white, and blue. There have been exceptions made from time to time. In March, 2007, the Postal Service unveiled a special mailbox designed to look like the droid from Star Wars, R2D2. More than 400 R2D2 mailboxes were placed in cities throughout the US in connection with the stamp issuance, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the movie.
These were regular mailboxes wrapped with a vinyl skin. And in 2013, the cartoon character, SpongeBob Squarepants, appeared on collection boxes in 13 cities. The boxes were a part of a letter writing campaign geared towards children in partnership with Nickelodeon.
And that wraps up today's enlightening conversation, exploring the Ghost Dance movement of the late 1880s and early 1890s, and its connection to mail. We gained new insight on the Postal Service’s role in helping Native American tribes organize the movement, exchange new ideas, connect across the entirety of the nation, and ultimately preserve their culture and legacy. A heartfelt thank you once again to our guest, Justin Gaga and to all our listeners. Thanks for tuning in. Until next time, that's all for this episode of Mailin’ It. Don't forget to subscribe to Mailin’ It wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you don't miss out on any new episodes. And follow along on Instagram @USPostalService, X - formerly known as Twitter @usps, and on Facebook.