Indian Congress

The Indian Congress occurred from August 4 to October 31, 1898 in Omaha, Nebraska, in conjunction with the Trans-Mississippi International Exposition. Occurring within a decade of the end of the Indian Wars, the Indian Congress was the largest gathering of American Indian tribes of its kind to that date. Over 500 members of 35 different tribes attended, including the Apache medicine man Geronimo, who was being held at Fort Sill as a United States prisoner of war.

Frank A. Rinehart's photographs of the Indian Congress participants are regarded as one of the best photographic documentations of American Indian leaders around the start of the 20th century.

Background

In a report on the Indian Congress published in the American Anthropologist in 1899, its chief ethnological consultant, James Mooney credited the realization of the project to "the grit and determination of the exposition managers, foremost among whom was Edward Rosewater, proprietor of the Omaha Bee. The successful outcome was due chiefly to his tireless activity and unfaltering courage. The ethnologic project was the child of his brain, and in spite of serious imperfections, the general result was such—particularly from the practical standpoint of the ticket seller—that we may expect to see ethnology a principal feature at future expositions so long as our aboriginal material holds out." After steady lobbying by Rosewater, an extremely influential Republican and a friend of President William McKinley, and other members of the organizing committee of the Trans-Mississippi International Exposition, in December 1897 a bill was introduced in the United States Congress that provided an appropriation of $100,000 to carry out an Indian Congress at the same time as the Expo. After it passed in the Senate, preparations for the Spanish–American War monopolized the United States House of Representatives, preventing a vote on the bill. In July 1898, $40,000 was made available for the event in the Indian Appropriations Act by the President. That was a month after the rest of the Expo opened.