Scales and Flowers: Immigration, Indigeneity, and the Dream of America

Lady Liberty and the Land Before Liberty

There was a time, when America used to love immigration stories. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many popular narratives centered on the "rags-to-riches" journey of immigrants, often framed through the lens of the “American Dream.” Writers like Horatio Alger (with his tales of young strivers) and journalists who chronicled Ellis Island arrivals helped fuel an image of the U.S. as a land of opportunity.

Hollywood, too, embraced immigration stories. Films like The Jazz Singer (1927) and later works in the mid-20th century dramatized the tension between old-world traditions and assimilation in America. Broadway musicals such as West Side Story or Fiddler on the Roof (when adapted in the U.S. context) tapped into immigrant themes of displacement, community, and cultural blending.

There were also cultural celebrations of immigrant heritage: Italian, Irish, Jewish, and later Mexican and Asian stories became part of the broader national narrative. These stories often highlighted struggle and sacrifice but ended with belonging or success, reinforcing the idea that America thrived because of immigrants.

Of course, this celebratory tone often coexisted with xenophobia and exclusionary policies (like the Chinese Exclusion Act, or the quotas of the 1920s). he “love” of immigration stories was selective, focusing on groups that were being more widely accepted at the time at the exclusion of others – chief among “those others” the native population of the continent.

Thus, John Gast’s American Progress (1872), where a pale woman in white drags a cord of light westward, while Native peoples scatter before her, seemingly stands in stark contrast Emma Lazarus’s The New Colossus at the foot of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Both the painting and the poem speak of destiny, of welcome but also exclusion. And together they pose the central contradiction of American identity: this is a nation built by immigrants, and a nation built on the erasure of the people who were already here.

That tension—between the immigrant myth and the Indigenous reality—still vibrates in the national bloodstream, in debates about multiculturalism, sovereignty, and justice. It also reverberates in literature: the novels, short stories, and essays that chronicle not just assimilation or exclusion, but survival.

The Melting Pot Burns

In 1908, Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot offered a vision of America as one giant crucible: all races and nationalities poured in, blended, and forged into “a new race of men.” Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur had sketched something similar back in 1782, marvelling that Europeans had left behind “ancient prejudices” to become “new men.” By the 20th century, this narrative hardened into policy and doctrinal mantra: one language, one culture, one America.

Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in his 1992 book The Disuniting of America, pleaded for a return to this “E pluribus unum” ideal. He argued that European immigrants once wanted nothing more than to shed their pasts, forget their traumas, and become American. The danger, he thought, was a “cult of ethnicity” pulling the republic apart.

But Schlesinger’s nostalgia rings hollow against history’s backdrop. For immigrants from Italy, Poland, and Russia at the turn of the 20th century, the “melting pot” often meant industrial exploitation, suspicion, and xenophobia. For Native Americans, it meant something darker still: assimilation was never a choice but a mandate, enforced by law, bayonet, and boarding school.

Land as Policy, Policy as Theft

By 1887, the Dawes Act parceled out tribal land into allotments, the supposed path to “civilizing” Native families. Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, made the logic plain: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” He used the sentence in an 1892 speech to describe the philosophy behind federal Indian boarding schools — that Native children should be stripped of their languages, religions, and cultural practices in order to be remade into “Americans.” It became the most infamous shorthand for the assimilationist project of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The reality, thus, was far from Jeffersonian yeoman dreams. The Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809 had imagined the republic’s strength resting on independent smallholders — virtuous “yeoman farmers” tilling their own soil. The Dawes Act imported this agrarian ideal into Indian policy, promising that allotting land to Native households would transform them into self-reliant citizens. But as Seneca scholar Robert B. Porter noted, most reservations were “unsuitable for farming and the allotments were too small to be economically viable.” Instead of Jefferson’s pastoral vision, Native families faced debt, foreclosure, and dispossession. Between 1887 and 1934, more than 90 million acres — two-thirds of Native land — passed into non-Indian hands.

Termination and relocation extended the assimilationist logic of earlier eras. Mid-20^th-century policies carried the long arc of dispossession forward under new legal and bureaucratic forms. In 1953, Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 108, declaring that dozens of Native nations should be “freed” from federal recognition and obligations. Over the next two decades, 109 tribes lost their federal status, their governments dissolved, and their treaty rights effectively nullified. This policy stripped Native communities of more than a million acres of trust land, transferring vast resources into non-Native hands.

At the same time, the Relocation Program—promoted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a gateway to economic opportunity—pushed thousands of Native people into cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, and Seattle. They were promised vocational training, jobs, and modern housing; what many found instead was poverty, discrimination, and isolation from their homelands and kinship networks.

Resistance: From Alcatraz to Idle No More

Out of this crucible, however, came resistance. The Red Power era of the 1960s and ’70s signaled a generational refusal to disappear. It ignited with the occupation of Alcatraz Island (1969–71), where Native activists reclaimed an abandoned federal prison in San Francisco Bay and declared it Indian land under treaty law. The world watched as banners draped over cell blocks proclaimed the endurance of Native sovereignty.

Just two years later, the standoff at Wounded Knee (1973) brought global attention to Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where Oglala Lakota traditionalists and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) confronted federal marshals in a 71-day siege. Founded in Minneapolis in 1968 by Clyde Bellecourt, Dennis Banks, and George Mitchell, AIM began as an urban patrol against police brutality, but it quickly evolved into the most nationally recognized Indigenous activist movement of the era.

AIM’s bold tactics—seizing the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C., occupying courthouses, and organizing cross-country “Trail of Broken Treaties” marches—drew attention to centuries of broken promises and ongoing violations of tribal sovereignty. If federal policy had sought to render Native people invisible, the Red Power movement made them impossible to ignore.

The movement was not only political but deeply personal. Many Native veterans, radicalized by their experiences in Vietnam, returned to find a new front of struggle at home. Bill Means, serving overseas, recalled discovering AIM from a bunker: “I saw my brother Russel’s picture… making a protest against Columbus. And so I thought to myself, ‘Wow, I’m really missing something here.’” For him, the war abroad sharpened the urgency of the battles being fought on Native land.

For AIM leaders themselves, activism was framed as a sacred duty. Dennis Banks later reflected: “Our elders and spiritual leaders said we had to help all who called, so that’s what we did.” In that spirit, AIM activists responded to calls from reservations and urban communities alike, whether confronting police violence, defending treaty rights, or occupying federal buildings. Their actions were fueled not just by political strategy but by a sense of spiritual responsibility, a mandate to protect and uplift Native nations.

In Canada, these stories reverberated decades later with #IdleNoMore. Sparked in 2012 by opposition to Bill C-45 and its gutting of environmental protections, the movement harnessed flash mobs, social media, and round dances to reassert First Nations sovereignty. It wasn’t just about pipelines or water rights—it was about re-centering Indigenous presence in a nation that still preferred to legislate it away.

And where AIM had carried the banner of resistance, Idle No More shifted the lexicon to resurgence. As one Indigenous thinker put it: “When resistance is defined solely as large-scale political mobilization, we miss much of what has kept our languages, cultures, and systems of governance alive.”

Literature as Counter-History

If politics was the battlefield, literature began writing a counter-history. In 1968, N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a landmark moment that announced what critics would call the Native American Renaissance. For the first time, mainstream literary institutions recognized a Native writer’s work not as ethnography or folklore, but as art of the highest order.

Other writers soon followed, reshaping how Native experience was told and who got to tell it. Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, and Louise Erdrich expanded the canon with novels that braided history, memory, and myth. Literary critic and writer Gerald Vizenor called these authors “postindian warriors,” wielding stories as their weapons in the fight against erasure. They reclaimed oral traditions and transformed them into modern forms of resistance.

Cherokee writer Thomas King distilled this ethos in a simple truth: “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” Storytelling became both shield and spear—a way to preserve identity, expose colonial violence, and imagine futures beyond assimilation.

Louise Erdrich’s short story “Scales” offers a devastating slice of this truth. Its protagonist, Gerry Nanapush, a Native man cycling in and out of prison, embodies the systemic injustices woven into the U.S. legal system. Courtrooms and jail cells become his second home, not because of guilt, but because the structures of justice are stacked against him. His unborn son, kicking like a restless prisoner in the womb, becomes a haunting metaphor for how generations are born into confinement before they even take their first breath.

The story’s very title signals its indictment: the scales of justice are not balanced. White witnesses are automatically granted credibility; Native defendants are treated as disposable. When Gerry is finally caught at Pine Ridge, Erdrich blurs the line between fiction and history. The narrative bleeds into the legacy of Leonard Peltier, the AIM activist convicted after a 1975 shootout at Pine Ridge, whose trial was marred by coerced testimony, withheld evidence, and international condemnation. Peltier remains imprisoned, a living reminder of how colonial justice continues to function as another form of termination.

Through this weaving of story and history, Erdrich shows how literature can bear witness where courts refuse to, transforming fiction into an act of resistance.

Tomson Highway’s short story “Hearts and Flowers” threads politics through art with devastating subtlety. Its protagonist, Daniel Daylight, a Cree boy confined in a Canadian residential school, discovers a rare moment of triumph when he wins a piano competition. The date is freighted with irony: 1960, the year First Nations people were granted the right to vote in Canada. For Daniel, victory at the keyboard is inseparable from the shifting, painful threshold of citizenship. To be recognized as human, he reasons, his people must first be recognized as voters.

The story exposes the paradox of art under colonial regimes. Music is not simply an escape from oppression but a fragile bridge across it—an expression of dignity in a system designed to erase it. The piano keys carry both the imposed weight of Western culture and the possibility of transforming that culture into a space where Native voices can be heard.

Highway shows how even beauty is entangled in politics. Daniel’s accomplishment is bittersweet: it does not undo the violence of residential schools, but it insists that Native children, long treated as wards and subjects, are also creators, performers, and citizens. Like Erdrich and Momaday, Highway reclaims art as a site of survival, showing how literature and music can wrest meaning from a world determined to deny it.

These aren’t just stories. They are reckonings with policies and prejudices that made Native life disposable, and with the creative stubbornness that said: not anymore.

Futures Beyond the Apocalypse

Indigenous literature today pushes past Renaissance into futurism. As scholar Dean Rader writes, “We are now post-Renaissance… we have passed the adolescence and moved well into adulthood.” From Eden Robinson’s Terminal Avenue to Richard Van Camp’s “On the Wings of This Prayer,” Native writers are remapping science fiction, horror, and dystopia as survival tales. Gerald Vizenor’s term “survivance”—an active sense of presence—morphs here into speculation: What comes after apocalypse, when apocalypse has already happened?

Eden Robinson’s techno-surrealist nightmares, Richard Van Camp’s zombie allegories: both grapple with “post-apocalypse stress syndrome,” the idea that balance (bimaadiziwin) is something always disrupted, always pursued. These stories insist that Native survival is not a relic of the past but a vision of the future.

Violence Against Women, Violence Against Memory

One of the most searing intersections of activism and culture today is the fight against violence toward Indigenous women and girls. Across Canada, the Native Women’s Association of Canada has documented hundreds of cases of the missing and murdered, each one a story of loss compounded by state indifference. The 2014 death of Tina Fontaine, a fifteen-year-old whose body was pulled from the Red River in Winnipeg, became a national flashpoint. Her murder, and the failure of institutions to protect her, galvanized calls for justice and ultimately helped force the creation of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). Yet at the time, then–Prime Minister Stephen Harper dismissed her death as merely “a crime, not a sociological phenomenon”—a refusal that underscored the structural denial at the heart of the crisis.

Artists have taken up the charge where politics faltered. Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers’s film A Red Girl’s Reasoning (2012) transforms grief and rage into metaphorical fury: its protagonist, an Indigenous woman failed by the courts, becomes a vigilante hunting down predators who target Native women. The film reimagines justice outside colonial systems, translating lived violence into cultural resistance. Alongside marches, vigils, and advocacy, such art insists that stories are not only memorials but weapons—ways of refusing erasure and demanding change.

Immigration, Assimilation, and the Myth of Forgetting

All of this circles back to Lazarus’s lamp at Liberty’s feet. Immigration narratives in America and Canada often rest on the promise of assimilation: leave your old world behind, become new. But Native narratives expose the lie: assimilation here was never voluntary, and forgetting was enforced at gunpoint.

Schlesinger worried that ethnic pride might fracture America. What he missed is that America was already fractured—by conquest, by policy, by a centuries-long refusal to see Indigenous peoples as fully human. If immigrants could be melted into one nation, Natives were supposed to be erased.

Yet both immigration and Native survival complicate the nationalist script. The so-called “cult of ethnicity” is, in reality, a chorus: voices demanding that America’s identity be plural, layered, diverse. As Thomas King reminds us, we are our stories—and the American story is incomplete without the ones that were nearly silenced.

Breaking the Cycle

The melting pot myth is cracked. The “new race of men” Crèvecoeur once praised cannot be born without reckoning with the diverse realities of the people living in America. Immigration today makes many Americans restless. Native Resistance in Literature holds up a mirror these restless people. Or as Vizenor said, these writers “encounter their enemies with the same courage in literature as their ancestors once evinced on horses.” The lamp of Liberty may welcome the tired and poor, but it shines brightest when it also illuminates those who never left.