COMANCHE SOCIETY AND THE RESERVATION

At first it was just a place where the American military might leave them alone where they could maintain trade relations with the Texans where they could rest for a while before going back out on raid in Texas. However, by the 1870s, more and more Anglos had moved into Texas, making raids problematic. The government had successfully suppressed the horse and cattle trade between the New Mexican traders and the Comanche. A major upsurge in Anglo bison hunting devastated the bison herds, effectively eliminating the Comanche’s primary means of sustenance and supplementary income. Things were changing for the People, but most of the Numunu, the Comanche, understood that very soon, they would have to change as well.[1]

In 1866, the US government carved 2,968,893 acres from the land ceded by the Choctaws and Chickasaws and used it as a reserve for the Comanche. The government promised semiannual annuity payments and biweekly rations distributed among the People,[2] and it was these promises that finally enticed the Comanche to settle on the reservation.[3] Once on the reservation, nearly all of the necessary resources for survival were under Anglo control, and the People had until 1901, when the reservation would be divided into allotments, to change their way of living from nomadic hunting to sedentary farming and ranching and their way of relating from communal to individualist.[4]

The Comanche economic adaptation to reservation life was less difficult than the necessary social adaptations. Although change was an aspect of Comanche ways of being, the struggle on the reservation was between the Anglo attempts to manipulate and force the assimilation of the People into Anglo ways and the Comanche determination to retain a sense of their own identity as a People.[5] This kind of social manipulation was not something the People had dealt with before.

Between 1875 and 1879, the People retained a sense of their former social structure. Gathered together as residential bands, they were led by one or two older men and grouped in nomadic camps that would travel the length of the reservation. In 1879, in an attempt to fragment the residential bands and further Comanche assimilation, the government changed the process of ration distribution. Whereas before, the rations were allotted to the head of the residential bands, now these rations would be distributed according to heads of families, which undermined the authority of the headmen of the residential bands. This process of “segregation” continued with the move of the government agency from Fort Sill to Anadarko. This move required a forty-mile trek for each family to obtain their biweekly rations, which was a journey made easier in small units rather than in large encampments. The authority of the residential headman was undermined even further with the Anglo agent choosing the head of each of each family unit. The agent would suggest to these men that they should take their family and establish a permanent home.[6]

            The band was the main method of social organization and the gradual fragmentation of Comanche bands into family units was one of the goals of the federal Indian policy. As fragmentation continued, the Comanche needed to find new ways of organizing and reinforcing their cohesiveness as a People. They also found themselves in virtually constant contact with the larger Anglo society. The traditional dances and ceremonies became occasions where Anglos could gawk at the People. The close proximity of outsiders and the boundaries of the reservation greatly restricted the traditional methods of gaining and maintaining spiritual power. These traditional practices slowly fell into disuse. It was under these conditions that peyote came in to wide usage. [7]

            Medicine people had used peyote for many years. It was thought to give a person access to spiritual power in a similar fashion as the vision quest or the sun dance. Peyote meetings were held at night, out of the view of anyone not participating or supporting the ritual. The use of peyote in this way also had the social benefit that it used the same symbolism and worldview as traditional ceremonies. In many ways, the wide spread embrace of peyote was the logical next step in the evolution of Comanche social and spiritual practices.[8]

            Spiritual power had always been a necessary aspect of Comanche leadership. The peyote meetings allowed spiritual power, and thus, social influence to be accumulated. Someone who had strong visions was believed to have reliable judgment. In the relaxed hours after the ceremony but before the sunrise, both politics and business could be conducted and influence established or maintained. By the 1890s, peyote use became so widespread that the local agent commented that only distance and the lack of transportation kept an Indian from attending the meetings.[9]

            In 1900 the Comanche began the process of choosing their allotments. They typically tried to choose locations close to a reliable water supply and friends and family. The allotment process also opened up reservation lands to Anglo homesteaders. After the initial choices of allotments the rest were disseminated through lottery. Those who ended up being a part of the lottery found themselves surrounded by the more than 30,000 Anglo homesteaders.[10]

                The government post allotment policies were designed to force assimilation on the Comanche to remold the People into the Anglo image to force a move from tribal identity to individualist identity.[11] These policies did not take into account the deep-seated prejudices the People had to contend with. The boarding school was one of the primary assimilation was forced on the Comanche. The boarding schools were essentially vocational schools that conformed to Anglo cultural norms. The boys were taught such things as shoe repair and blacksmithing, while the girls were taught sewing and cooking. It is ironic that, even for those who completed their education at the boarding school, most of them could not find work because they could not find Anglos who were willing to hire them. The boarding schools were also designed to force Indian children to use English as their primary language. They were forbidden to speak their native language on threat of corporal punishment.[12]

            Due to the post-allotment changes, a gap began to grow between Comanche interaction and relation with each other. Drums could no longer echo across enough distance to call the People to peyote meetings. They did not encounter each other on a daily basis, nor did they cross paths on the Plains. The People continued to gather in encampments throughout the next decades, but these gatherings were only twice a year, at Christmas and New Year and during the summer months. Complicating the situation further, over the next three decades, the majority of Comanche sold or lost their allotments and were essentially landless.[13]

            Factions had grown among the People on and around reservation lands. These factions were as much a product of the older, reservation generation as they were the Anglo policies. This older generation remembered the traditional dances and what they meant. They restricted access to full participation to a very limited number of young people. The same thing occurred with the peyote gatherings. A young person could not become a full member until their late 30s or 40s. This drove many of the young people to the Christian gatherings that could serve a similar social purpose. Even the encampments started to become segregated, with the traditionalists gathering out on the open land and the Christians gathering on church property.[14]

            By the 1930s the factions had grown even more segregated. Many of the old people had died before they could fully transmit the meanings of the traditional dances, the social dances, and the peyote rituals to the young people. The younger people who began to take over leadership roles were often raised in the boarding schools or as a Christian, or were simply ignorant of the traditional meanings of the practices. These new leaders created meaning where they could. Christian symbols became reinterpreted for use in the peyote meetings and were imposed on the dance gatherings. Even so, there grew division between those who were “peyote people” and others who were “powwow people.” The “church people” were those who fully embraced the Anglo version of Christianity in the region. They rejected both factions. This resulted in three basic public factions, or ways of being Comanche, in the region. These public factions, however, did not often extend into the People’s private lives. Family members and friends could be members of different factions. The public gathering were designed more to provide a social structure to post allotment life rather than exert an exclusive claim on tradition or Comanche identity.[15]

            As much as the reservation and allotments caused the People to find new ways to secure social and familial structure, World War II required even greater changes. New avenues for economic security were opened up after the War far away from the rural environment of the average Comanche. Transportation was easier to come by, and the jobs offered in the cities were much more lucrative than those available in Indian Country.[16]

            As families and friends scattered, the tight familial bonds started to loosen. For those who left the region, the focus of family obligations tightened to the nuclear family and close friends. The powwow slowly became the main activity used to secure the loose community of the People. As familial bonds have loosened such activities as “adoption” have evolved. Whereas in the past a close family friend and that friend’s family were simply accepted as family and treated as such, ritual has evolved to publicly declare these relationships, and etiquette has evolved for those who seek this recognition all of which is centered on intra-tribal and intertribal powwows.[17]

            The powwow also evolved after WWII. Prior to the war, a powwow was an occasional thing. Regularly scheduled powwows were held yearly, and once in a while, if a serviceman returned after WWI, his family would have a gathering to honor his return. As the number of Comanche servicemen increased during WWII so did the frequency of powwows. In many cases a powwow would be arranged to honor the “going-away” as well as the “coming-home” of a Comanche serviceman. Since there was almost always someone going-away or coming-home, powwows became a weekly occurrence. This practice also tied the powwow securely to the military or warrior societies, something that persists to this day.[18]

            Since many of the People had moved to areas too far away to focus on intra-tribal gatherings, the intertribal powwow came to take prominence. This also had the effect of further loosening the traditional kinship networks and transferred the obligations and privileges of such to new friendship networks. The earlier factions of pre-WWII are still present but in a much diluted form.[19]

            Accounts of Comanche history tend to stop around the beginning of the 20^th century. The People, however, did not stop living as Comanche. They have continued to live lives worthy of the acknowledgment of history, and they continued to develop new and innovative ways of maintaining their identity as Comanche, as Indians, and as Americans. The People did not stop simply because the form of their society changed. They evolved with and through those changes, and they continue today.

Bibliography

Foster, Morris W. Being Comanche: A Social History of an American Indian Community. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998.

Gwynne, S. C. Empire of the Summer Moon. New York: Scribner, 2011.

Wallace, Ernest and E. Adamson Hoebel. The Comanches Lords of the South Plains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986.

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[1] Morris W. Foster, Being Comanche (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1998) 75.

[2]  Ernest Wallace and E. Hoebel, The Comanches, Lords of the South Plains (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986) 311.

[3] Foster, Being Comanche, 75.

[4] Ibid, 80.

[5] Ibid, 86.

[6] Ibid, 87.

[7] Ibid, 92.

[8] Ibid, 93.

[9] Ibid, 94.

[10] Ibid, 101.

[11] S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon (New York, NY: Scribner)310.

[12] Foster, Being Comanche, 107.

[13] Ibid, 118.

[14] Ibid, 119.

[15] Ibid, 127.

[16] Ibid, 142.

[17] Ibid

[18] Ibid, 147.

[19] Ibid