on the cover / By Cathleen Cahill

Tales of Subversion

How Native peoples and some whites sabotaged federal efforts to kill a culture

(July 14, 2011)  The school buildings were falling apart. Old and heavily worn, first in military service for Fort Gaston and then as the campus for the Hoopa Valley Indian Boarding School, they required enormous upkeep. That burden fell on the shoulders of Sherman Norton, a Hupa man hired in 1912 as a carpenter for the federal Indian Service, the workforce of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Norton, a determined man, did the carpentry, but he also patched pipes, rewired the electricity, fixed the school’s laundry equipment, and maintained the 44 miles of telephone line strung out over the mountains that connected the Indian Agency with the rest of the world. For all of this, he received the “Indian” wage rate of $45 per month.

For six long years, from 1912 to 1918, Norton wrote to the commissioner of Indian affairs insisting that he be paid $60 per month, the salary that the previous white carpenter had received. The duties he was performing, Norton pointed out, went far beyond his job description. When the government refused him a better salary, Norton stopped doing tasks other than carpentry. This infuriated his supervisor, Superintendent Jesse B. Mortsolf, who labeled him a troublemaker and recommended that the Indian Office transfer him away from Hoopa Valley to another reservation. So Norton quit. He may have found some satisfaction when the Indian Office later had trouble finding someone else to do the job at his salary. Several years later, when Mortsolf transferred out of Hoopa Valley, Norton and his wife, Ella Jarnaghan Norton, began working for the Indian Service again. He became chief of the Indian police force at $720 per year - the same $60 a month he’d originally hoped to receive in 1912. She became the school’s laundress, at $760 per year.

Children and teachers in Hoopa Valley, date unknown. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE HUMBOLDT ROOM, HUMBOLDT STATE UNIVERSITY

GALLERY >

Sherman and Ella Norton lived at a time when the federal government was bent on destroying Indian tribes and Native cultures. White officials believed that if Indians did not give up all of their traditions, they were doomed to disappear. The solution, the government argued, was to “kill the Indian in him and save the man” by forcing Native people to abandon their cultures and conform to the white way of life. The federal government chose the Indian Service as its weapon of choice for this attack. The service targeted entire Native communities: It outlawed their religious ceremonies, forbade traditional hunting and fishing practices like the Hupas’ annual fish dam, and divided tribally held land into individual homesteads, selling off the remainder to the highest bidder. Perhaps most heartrending, it also rounded up Indian children and forcibly sent them to boarding schools to keep them away from their families and communities.

This raises the question: Why would the Nortons, or any Natives, want to work for a bureaucracy trying to annihilate their culture? What was the attraction of thisanti-Indian agency, and why was the pull so strong that in 1912, the year Sherman started as carpenter at Hoopa, almost 30 percent of the Indian Service’s 6,000 employees were Native?

The answers lie in letters and memoirs, in government reports and personnel files, in employee logs, diaries and a wealth of records that have begun to paint a new, revealing portrait of the whites and Natives who went to work for this Indian Service. The surprising answer, for many Native peoples, is that they worked for survival — and for subversion. They became adept at turning the government’s own tool against itself, working within the system to ease its harshest effects. As Indian Service employees, they were perfectly positioned to offer a sympathetic ear to a lonely schoolchild, explain complicated government regulations, advocate for friends and relatives who were being mistreated, and keep their families together. These were strategies used not just by the people in Hoopa Valley, but by many around the American West.

The story of their struggles to persevere, and the lasting impacts they made on some white employees, emerged from nearly a decade of research. Their stories are told more extensively in the new book, Federal Fathers & Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933. They’re summarized here because these stories - and the people who lived them — helped shape the future. The United States government spent long decades and hundreds of millions dollars trying to destroy Native nations and their cultures. In the end it did not succeed. It failed primarily because Indians resisted in many ways: everything from risking arrest for participating in religious ceremonies to continuing to cook their traditional foods for children and grandchildren. The Hupa, especially, resisted by refusing to leave their homeland. It is no accident that tribal member Byron Nelson Jr.’s history of Hoopa Valley is entitledOur Home Forever. In the face of massive and persistent federal efforts to annihilate Indian cultures, what might seem like small or scattered decisions by Native people should be recognized as significant acts of heroism.

Often, those heroics had the most everyday underpinnings. An Indian Service job was sometimes the best economic option for staying home, rooted in community.  Hoopa Valley, far from the cities on the Pacific coast, was typical of the harsh economic choices many Native people faced. Their old ways no longer could feed a family. In their valley, the Hupa peoples’ supply of traditional foods, especially salmon and acorns, had been drastically damaged by the Gold Rush, the salmon canneries at the mouth of the Klamath, and the chopping down of acorn-bearing oak trees. Some wage-paying jobs were available in the lumber camps or in the coastal towns, but that meant leaving Hoopa Valley, the center of the Hupa world. It was an arduous journey over narrow mountain paths on foot, in a bone-shaking wagon, or on the back of a horse or mule, with no options for frequent returns. Most jobs available to Indians would not have offered much time off to take the trip home.

At Hoopa, officials reported again and again that tribal members didn’t want to leave the valley — and many Hupa put in requests for jobs at the federal Indian school. Norton knew he could make a better living working off the reservation, but staying at home was more important. His letters to the commissioner of Indian affairs reveal that he was afraid that if he went away he would lose his rights as a tribal member, and his wife also refused to leave her home in the valley. By working for the government at Hoopa, they could stay and participate in the tribal ceremonial life. As an employee at the Indian School, Sherman was able to keep an eye on his children. Superintendent Mortsolf constantly complained that Norton was “interfering with the discipline” at the school and causing problems with other employees. Most likely Norton was simply objecting to the harsh treatment of his children. Morstolf also reported that Norton, along with John Carpenter, was serving as “a sort of lawyer and advisor among the Indians.” Because they worked for the Indian Office, they may have been in a good position to help their fellow tribal members navigate its bureaucracy.

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