Amelia Stone Quinton and the Women’s National Indian Association: A Legacy of Indian Reform. By Valerie Sherer Mathes

Abstract

As Valerie Sherer Mathes points out in this scholarly biography, Amelia Stone Quinton (1833–1926) was the most prominent female leader within the Indian reform movement and yet she is not well known to women’s historians in part because this social movement has been cordoned off to the realm of Indian history, but also because the Women’s National Indian Association, which she cofounded with Mary Lucinda Bonney, embraced assimilationist doctrines (pp. 1–2). As Lori Jacobson explains in an excellent preface: “In Quinton’s view, the way to overcome hatred of Indians and inspire a sense of moral culpability in powerful white Americans was to transform native people, eliminating their cultural traditions and inculcating them with white, middle class, Protestant values” (p. vii). Thus, the WNIA was dedicated both to alleviating poverty and to preparing Indians for U.S. citizenship-- through the building of missions, churches, schools, hospitals and homes. To further both ends, Quinton advocated for the breaking up of reservations into smaller individual parcels—a policy that materialized with the passage of the General Allotment Act of 1887. By 1908, Quinton had established fifty-three mission stations and had organized numerous chapters across the country. Every year, Quinton travelled thousands of miles, gave hundreds of speeches, wrote dozens of articles, sent numerous petitions to Congress and raised substantial monies. Even after her retirement in 1909, Quinton remained the face of the WNIA, having created an organization that outlived her by twenty-five years when it disbanded in 1951.