Gender, Race, and Power in the Indian Reform Movement

Revisiting the History of the WNIA

Valerie Sherer Mathes

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780826361820
• eBook ISBN: 9780826361837
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Founded in the late nineteenth century, the Women's National Indian Association was one of several reform associations that worked to implement the government's assimilation policy directed at Native peoples. The women of the WNIA combined political action with efforts to improve health and home life and spread Christianity on often remote reservations. During its more than seventy-year history, the WNIA established over sixty missionary sites in which they provided Native peoples with home-building loans, founded schools, built missionary cottages and chapels, and worked toward the realization of reservation hospitals. Gender, Race, and Power in the Indian Reform Movement reveals the complicated intersections of gender, race, and identity at the heart of Indian reform. This collection of essays offers a new interpretation of the WNIA's founding, arguing that the WNIA provided opportunities for indigenous women, creates a new space in the public sphere for white women, and reveals the WNIA's role in broader national debates centered on Indian land rights and the political power of Christian reform.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword by Albert L. Hurtado
• Introduction. Still Working in the Field: The WNIA and Gender History by Jane Simonsen
• Chapter 1. From Indian Territory to Philadelphia: A Critical Reexamination of the Origins and Early History of the Women’s National Indian Association, 1877–1881 by John M. Rhea
• Chapter 2. Two Marys and a Martha: Three Massachusetts Women and Indian Reform in the 1880s by Curtis M. Hinsley
• Chapter 3. A Place at the Table: The Women’s National Indian Association in the Indian Reform Arena by Valerie Sherer Mathes
• Chapter 4. Her Soul Is Marching On: Helen Hunt Jackson’s Followers in the Indian Reform Movement by Phil Brigandi
• Chapter 5. In the Shadow of Ramona: Frances Campbell Sparhawk and the Fiction of Reform by David Wallace Adams
• Chapter 6. Mary Lucinda Bonney Rambaut: Educator and Indian Reformer by Valerie Sherer Mathes
• Chapter 7. C. E. Kelsey and California’s Landless Indians by Valerie Sherer Mathes
• Chapter 8. “Your Indian Friend”: Indigenous Women and Stragic Alliances with the WNIA by Jane Simonsen
• Conclusion. “Indians Can Be Educated”: The WNIA at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition by Lori Jacobson
• Appendix. WNIA Missionary Stations by Valerie Sherer Mathes
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index