In 1912, ethno-botanist Melvin Gilmore met with White Horse, an elderly member of Nebraska’s Omaha Nation. White Horse described the terrible transformation he had seen in his lifetime: “Now the face of all the land is changed and sad. The living creatures are gone. I see the land desolate, and I suffer unspeakable sadness.” This presentation draws on early twentieth-century research from ethnographers, geographers, and government officials, as well as contemporary oral history, to examine the interplay between Omaha and Euro-American understandings of lands and peoples in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first half of this presentation focuses on the indigenous perspective. The Omaha were not only hunters, but also industrious farmers of corn and vegetables, and their spiritual system understood the earth as a vibrant, living body. As the land filled with settler farmers, it seemed, paradoxically, to empty and wither. The second half of this presentation takes up Euro-American obsessions with productivity, which, conversely, understood Omaha lands as empty and unused until brought into a Euro-American style of agriculture. These competing cosmologies came into high relief with a 1910 government competency commission, which assessed each member of the Omaha Nation, including White Horse, to determine whether their lands should be held in trust; individuals’ competency was determined in large part by their commitment to sedentary farming. Shifting rubrics of ableism evaluated individuals and lands through Euro-American sciences of agricultural efficiency, leaving only the Omaha and their ethnographers to recognize the awful desolation settler-colonialism had engendered.
