University of New Mexico Press Gender, Race, and Power in the Indian Reform Movement: Revisiting the History of the WNIA

Product 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, argues 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. Review Especially important is the documentation of sociopolitical networks that extend from Indian Territory to California to Eastern and Midwestern urban centers of power. This book is also significant for how it situates Native women in the WNIA's activities, showing them to be activists rather than passive recipients of elite and middle-class American altruism. Recommended.--N. J. Parezo, ChoiceThe collection of chapters that makes up this important re-examination of the Women's National Indian Association (WNIA) offers a compelling and complex analysis of Indigenous and White women's activism.--Sarah Eppler Janda, Southwestern Historical QuarterlyGender, Race, and Power in the Indian Reform Movement presents an important new look at one of the most significant Indian reform organizations. Re-examining the WNIA's history, membership, and activities, contributors to this volume highlight the intersectionality of race, gender, and identity.--Lisa E. Emmerich, professor emerita of history, California State University, Chico This fine collection is the first to explore the activities of Indigenous women in the WNIA and to locate the organization in the broader gendered politics of Indian policy. It is a worthwhile contribution to both women's and policy history.--Katherine M. B. Osburn, author of Choctaw Resurgence in Mississippi: Race, Class, and Nation Building in the Jim Crow South, 1830-1977 About the Author Valerie Sherer Mathes is a professor emerita of history at City College of San Francisco. Her published books include The Women's National Indian Association: A History (UNM Press).