On Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1882, former-Indian-superintendent-turned-reformer Colonel Alfred B. Meacham related a recent premonition of death to his friend Dr. Thomas A. Bland. Believing his earthly mission nearly fulfilled, Meacham implored Bland to continue publication of his monthly periodical devoted to Indian reform, The Council Fire. Two days later, Meacham died at his editorial table, and Bland became editor of the journal. Bland used The Council Five and the National Indian Defence Association, which he founded in 1885, as vehicles for his particular philosophy of Indian reform. Bland largely accepted the goal of Indian assimilation as outlined by humanitarian reformers of his generation. However, in his view, proponents of coercive allotment of reservation land had mistaken the end for the means. He insisted that successful assimilation demanded a gradual and voluntary conversion and not compulsion. Convinced that sudden change was detrimental, Bland began a crusade to protect tribal institutions and property rights. As a critic of forced assimilation, he clashed with reformers in the Women’s National Indian Association, the Indian Rights Association, the Board of Indian Commissioners, and the Lake Mohonk Conference of ”Friends of the Indians,” who campaigned vigorously to make severalty compulsory. Indeed, Bland’s outlook and struggle against rapid assimilation provides significant insight into a critical era of reform. Clearly, Bland was not a sentimental romantic who simply exalted the qualities of the “noble savage”; nor does the evidence suggest that he represented early notions of cultural pluralism or relativism. Yet his position as champion of Indian self-determination during this period was certainly unusual. He represented not only the most persistent but perhaps the only voice crying for retention of Indian rights against an onslaught of allotment advocates. This paper seeks to explicate Bland’s considerable efforts to block measures that forced rapid assimilation on the tribes.

Today we - America’s half million Indians - stand at a fork in the trail. The time has come for all of us to choose the way we will travel. In one direction is the downhill trail we have followed since our lands were invaded more than a century ago. This way, marked by the laws of an often-blind government, leads to ignorance, poverty, disease, and wasted resources. The new trail - the way of self help - leads toward a better life, toward adequate education, decent income, good health, and wise use of our precious natural wealth. -Clarence Wesley, former president of the NCAI, undated In November 1944, nearly eighty delegates from twenty-seven states, representing fifty tribes, met at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Denver, Colorado. Out of the Denver deliberations came the first successful national organization controlled by Indians, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI). Although it was established by Native Americans, the NCAI’s founders patterned it largely after the Indian reorganization constitutions and by-laws of the Indian New Deal. Many of the founders had gained important political experience from IRA tribal governments. Recent wartime experiences also led a new generation of Indian leaders to demand equal voting rights, adjudication of land claims, increased veterans’ benefits, and the full benefits of American citizenship.