JANE E. SIMONSEN. Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the West, 1860-1919. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 266. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.50

Abstract

In 1999, President Bill Clinton made a highly publicized stop at the home of Geraldine Blue Bird on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation. He discovered that Ms. Blue Bird was caring for twenty-eight adults and children in a four-room house with no plumbing. The visit triggered an outpouring of generosity (which included a new mobile home) and provided evidence that the “deliberate, arduous, and often self-conscious production of domesticity”—the subject of Jane E. Simonsen's book—is an enduring feature of relations between Native Americans and their dispossessors. The book contains six chapters that examine the cross-cultural “contact zone” created when domesticity—described here as “an imperial construct used by the white middle class to uphold its power in a diversifying and expansionist nation” (p. 3)—was imagined, imposed and resisted in Indian communities. Rather than track a single organization or institution, Simonsen traces the meaning of “domesticity” in Indian-white relations between the time in the Civil War era when writers and reformers imagined domestic reform as the key to integrating indigenous peoples into the nation and the second decade of the twentieth century, when a combination of white indifference, Native resistance, and social transformation had hardened racial and cultural hierarchies and Indian leaders like the artist Angel DeCora had emerged to complain that whites, “softened and perverted thro' artificial living,” could not appreciate the cultural achievements of indigenous peoples (p. 212).