Gender, Race, and Power in the Indian Reform Movement


Book Description

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.




The Quaker World


Book Description

The Quaker World is an outstanding, comprehensive and lively introduction to this complex Christian denomination. Exploring the global reach of the Quaker community, the book begins with a discussion of the living community, as it is now, in all its diversity and complexity. The book covers well-known areas of Quaker development, such as the formation of Liberal Quakerism in North America, alongside topics which have received much less scholarly attention in the past, such as the history of Quakers in Bolivia and the spread of Quakerism in Western Kenya. It includes over sixty chapters by a distinguished international and interdisciplinary team of contributors and is organised into three clear parts: Global Quakerism Spirituality Embodiment Within these sections, key themes are examined, including global Quaker activity, significant Quaker movements, biographies of key religious figures, important organisations, pacifism, politics, the abolition of slavery, education, industry, human rights, racism, refugees, gender, disability, sexuality and environmentalism. The Quaker World provides an authoritative and accessible source of information on all topics important to Quaker Studies. As such, it is essential reading for students studying world religions, Christianity and comparative religion, and it will also be of interest to those in related fields such as sociology, political science, anthropology and ethics.




Amelia Stone Quinton and the Women's National Indian Association


Book Description

This first full account of Amelia Stone Quinton (1833–1926) and the organization she cofounded, the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA), offers a nuanced insight into the intersection of gender, race, religion, and politics in our shared history. Author Valerie Sherer Mathes shows how Quinton, like Helen Hunt Jackson, was a true force for reform and progress who was nonetheless constrained by the assimilationist convictions of her time. The WNIA, which Quinton cofounded with Mary Lucinda Bonney in 1879, was organized expressly to press for a “more just, protective, and fostering Indian policy,” but also to promote the assimilation of the Indian through Christianization and “civilization.” Charismatic and indefatigable, Quinton garnered support for the WNIA’s work by creating strong working relationships with leaders of the main reform groups, successive commissioners of Indian affairs, secretaries of the interior, and prominent congressmen. The WNIA’s powerful network of friends formed a hybrid organization: religious in its missionary society origins but also political, using its powers to petition and actively address public opinion. Mathes follows the organization as it evolved from its initial focus on evangelizing Indian women—and promoting Victorian society’s ideals of “true womanhood”—through its return to its missionary roots, establishing over sixty missionary stations, supporting physicians and teachers, and building houses, chapels, schools, and hospitals. With reference to Quinton’s voluminous writings—including her letters, speeches, and newspaper articles—as well as to WNIA literature, Mathes draws a complex picture of an organization that at times ignored traditional Indian practices and denied individual agency, even as it provided dispossessed and impoverished people with health care and adequate housing. And at the center of this picture we find Quinton, a woman and reformer of her time.




Education for Extinction


Book Description

The last "Indian War" was fought against Native American children in the dormitories and classrooms of government boarding schools. Only by removing Indian children from their homes for extended periods of time, policymakers reasoned, could white "civilization" take root while childhood memories of "savagism" gradually faded to the point of extinction. In the words of one official: "Kill the Indian and save the man." This fully revised edition of Education for Extinction offers the only comprehensive account of this dispiriting effort, and incorporates the last twenty-five years of scholarship. Much more than a study of federal Indian policy, this book vividly details the day-to-day experiences of Indian youth living in a "total institution" designed to reconstruct them both psychologically and culturally. The assault on identity came in many forms: the shearing off of braids, the assignment of new names, uniformed drill routines, humiliating punishments, relentless attacks on native religious beliefs, patriotic indoctrinations, suppression of tribal languages, Victorian gender rituals, football contests, and industrial training. Especially poignant is Adams's description of the ways in which students resisted or accommodated themselves to forced assimilation. Many converted to varying degrees, but others plotted escapes, committed arson, and devised ingenious strategies of passive resistance. Adams also argues that many of those who seemingly cooperated with the system were more than passive players in this drama, that the response of accommodation was not synonymous with cultural surrender. This is especially apparent in his analysis of students who returned to the reservation. He reveals the various ways in which graduates struggled to make sense of their lives and selectively drew upon their school experience in negotiating personal and tribal survival in a world increasingly dominated by white men. The discussion comes full circle when Adams reviews the government's gradual retreat from the assimilationist vision. Partly because of persistent student resistance, but also partly because of a complex and sometimes contradictory set of progressive, humanitarian, and racist motivations, policymakers did eventually come to view boarding schools less enthusiastically. Based upon extensive use of government archives, Indian and teacher autobiographies, and school newspapers, Adams's moving account is essential reading for scholars and general readers alike interested in Western history, Native American studies, American race relations, education history, and multiculturalism.




Women and Gender in the American West


Book Description

The Joan Jensen-Darlis Miller Prize recognizes outstanding scholarship on gender and women's history in the West. The winning essays are collected here for the first time in one volume.




After One Hundred Winters


Book Description

A necessary reckoning with America’s troubled history of injustice to Indigenous people After One Hundred Winters confronts the harsh truth that the United States was founded on the violent dispossession of Indigenous people and asks what reconciliation might mean in light of this haunted history. In this timely and urgent book, settler historian Margaret Jacobs tells the stories of the individuals and communities who are working together to heal historical wounds—and reveals how much we have to gain by learning from our history instead of denying it. Jacobs traces the brutal legacy of systemic racial injustice to Indigenous people that has endured since the nation’s founding. Explaining how early attempts at reconciliation succeeded only in robbing tribal nations of their land and forcing their children into abusive boarding schools, she shows that true reconciliation must emerge through Indigenous leadership and sustained relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people that are rooted in specific places and histories. In the absence of an official apology and a federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ordinary people are creating a movement for transformative reconciliation that puts Indigenous land rights, sovereignty, and values at the forefront. With historical sensitivity and an eye to the future, Jacobs urges us to face our past and learn from it, and once we have done so, to redress past abuses. Drawing on dozens of interviews, After One Hundred Winters reveals how Indigenous people and settlers in America today, despite their troubled history, are finding unexpected gifts in reconciliation.




Women's Lives


Book Description

Women’s Lives integrates the most current research and social issues to explore the psychological diversity of girls and women varying in age, ethnicity, social class, nationality, immigrant experience, sexual orientation, gender identity, ableness and body size and shape. The text embeds a lifespan perspective within each topical chapter and has an intersectional approach that integrates women’s diverse identities. It includes rich coverage of women with disabilities and on middle-aged and older women throughout. Taking a deeper transnational focus, it also examines the impact of social, cultural, and economic factors in shaping women’s lives around the world. This edition explores the latest areas of research and tackles important contemporary topics such as: feminization of immigration media portrayals of LGBTQ individuals and immigrants regulating testosterone levels in women’s sports; disorders of sexual development; nonbinary identity the effects of social media on body image; sizeism new classification of sexual disorders menstrual equity and the "tampon tax" migrant women as transnational mothers academic environment for low-income, ethnic minority, and immigrant women effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on women’s employment and work-family balance the dilemma of unpredictable work hours healthcare barriers experienced by immigrant women and LGBTQ individuals #MeToo movement; vigilante gender violence the fourth wave of feminism the role of immigrant women and ethinc minority women in grassroots feminist activism men’s support of feminist issues and more Boasting a new full-color design and rich with pedagogy, the book includes several boxed elements in each chapter. "In The News" boxes present current news items designed to engage students in thinking critically about current gender-focused events and issues. The "What You Can Do" boxes give students examples of applied activities that they can engage in to promote a more egalitarian society. "Get Involved" boxes ask students to collect data and to critically think about the explanations and implications of the activity’s findings. "Learn About the Research" boxes expose students to a variety of research methods and highlight the importance of diversity in research samples by including studies of underrepresented groups. At the end of each chapter, "What Do You Think" questions foster skills in critical thinking, synthesis, and evaluation by asking the student to apply course material or personal experiences to provocative issues from the chapter. The "If You Want to Learn More" feature provides names of the most current books available on various topics that are discussed in the chapter. Combining up-to-date research with an approachable and engaging writing style, Women’s Lives is an invaluable resource for all students of gender from psychology, women’s studies, gender studies, sociology, and anthropology.




Gendered Paradoxes


Book Description

Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its “free market” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country’s poor, including women’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and “unfinished” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist “issue networks” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.







The Zuni Man-woman


Book Description

The life of We'wha (1849-96), the Zuni who was perhaps the most famous berdache (an individual who combined the work and traits of both men and women) in American Indian history.