After the Frontier: Separation and Absorption in US Indian Policy

This article seeks to chart the shifting post-frontier strategies whereby Indian societies were incorporated into US society. Recognised as techniques of settlement, US policies that have been viewed as discordant or antithetical emerge as complementary implementations of the settler colonial logic of elimination. The article discusses three of these strategies: Indian removal, general allotment, and blood quantum criteria, arguing that scholars who have viewed the surface differences between these strategies as signs of incompatibility have failed to acknowledge the overarching context of settler colonial invasion, a process that continues after the initial expropriations of Indian landowners. Geographical removal eliminated Indians quickly and effectively, but it was an inherently temporary solution. On the passing of the frontier, with no space left available for Indian removal, relations with Indians - the first arena of US foreign policy - became a depoliticised arm of domestic administration. Various techniques of Native assimilation, all of which had previously existed in undeveloped forms, came to dominate US Indian policy. The article considers two of these techniques, allotment and blood quanta, noting their continuity with earlier strategies for eliminating Indians.