Native American communities met the many challenges of the early twentieth century in ways that defy easy categories of “progressive” or “traditional.” Indian people used many different outlets, including cultural appeals to non-Indian audiences, to craft survival strategies. Natalie Curtis's The Indians' Book (1907), a collection of Native music, art, and folklore, became one of these outlets. Through an examination of the contributions made by two Native leaders, Lololomai (Hopi) and High Chief (Southern Cheyenne), this essay considers the ways in which local Native American leaders sought to shape popular representations of their tribes. Additionally, it explores how these leaders used Curtis's work to address local political and social issues in their communities. Their efforts to influence the themes of The Indians' Book represents an attempt to, as historian Frederick Hoxie terms it, “talk back to civilization.”

This paper explores the role of race in the construction of tribal rolls for the Choctaw Nation of Indian Territory under the Dawes Act. Examination of two examples, enrollment of Choctaws in Mississippi and arguments presented in the 1907 hearings before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs on the status of Choctaws of Indian and African American heritage, demonstrates that policymakers' primary concern in deciding the fate of mixedrace individuals was not the determination of Indian blood, so as to enroll them, but of African American blood, so as to exclude them. With this approach, members of the Dawes Commission used Indian policy to uphold the color line. The Choctaw Nation also drew sharp racial lines. Their concern, however, was not racial purity, but citizenship and tribal sovereignty. Attorneys for the mixed-blood claimants proffered a definition which they believed to be biological—they focused on their clients' percentage of Indian blood—while the Choctaw Nation's lawyers held to a political and legal definition embedded in notions of children's legitimacy, as granted through marriages sanctioned by the Choctaw state. Thus the same racial enrollment policy—exclusion of blacks—served two different functions in the implementation of allotment.

Congress founded the Agricultural Extension Service (AES) in the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 to disseminate agricultural research to individual farmers. In some states the AES also worked to encourage Native Americans to adopt sedentary intensive agriculture and all aspects of assimilation connected with that occupation. J. F. Wojta, AES administrator in Wisconsin from 1914 to 1940, took a deep interest in Indian farmers and used the power and resources of his office to instruct Native Americans. Ho-Chunks, Menominees, Ojibwes, and Oneidas in Wisconsin adopted or rejected these social, economic, and political assimilation efforts during the Progressive Era according to their own circumstances and goals. The experience of Wisconsin tribes with the state's agricultural extension programs illustrates different ways that Native peoples tried to benefit from modern government services while maintaining their own culture and kinship ties.

For years, scholars of Native American history have urged U. S. historians to integrate Indians into national narratives, explaining that Indians' experiences are central to the collective story rather than peripheral to it. They have achieved some successes in penetrating and reworking traditional European-American dominated accounts. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the field of colonial history. In fact, for several decades now colonialists have placed Native Americans at the center, seeing them as integral to imperial processes and as forces that simply can no longer be ignored. To omit them would be to leave out not only crucial participants but important themes. Native people occupied and owned the property European nations coveted. They consequently suffered great losses as imperialists bent on control of land, resources, cultures, and even souls applied their demographic and technological advantages. But conquest did not occur overnight. It took several centuries for Spain, France, the Netherlands, Russia, Great Britain, and eventually the United States to achieve continental and hemispheric dominance. Nor was it ever totally achieved. That 564 officially recognized tribes exist in the early 2000s in the United States demonstrates that complete conquest was never realized.

In February 1915, upon viewing The Birth of a Nation at a special White House screening, President Woodrow Wilson reportedly remarked, “It's like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” This line has appeared in numerous books and articles over the past seventy years. This article examines the history of this alleged quotation and the sources where it has appeared. The article weighs the evidence that Wilson effusively praised in these words one of the most racist major movies in American history.