Dispossession and the Model Cottage: Violent Homemaking and Disciplinary Debt in the Allotment Era

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This paper examines domestic space in relation to nineteenth-century US federal Indian policy. It presents a self-help homebuilding project funded by the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA), a philanthropic state proxy providing social programs for Native peoples. Administrators used the project to argue for the success of individual land tenure as an assimilative tool in the Dawes Act (1887), resulting in ninety million acres of Indigenous land loss. The monied women of the WNIA oversaw all aspects of construction and loanmaking, imposing new gender roles and norms of land use that strengthened racial hierarchies and gained them political capital. For Omaha participants in a pilot allotment program, home building provided some opportunities for economic self-determination even as, even as they rejected state control over their private lives and cultural expression. The model cottage is shown as indicative of the dispersed, tutelary governance that characterizes US settler colonialism in Indian Country.