National Indian Association Research Articles

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

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.

Gender, Race, and Power in the Indian Reform Movement: Revisiting the History of the WNIA ed. by Valerie Sherer Mathes

Reviewed by: Gender, Race, and Power in the Indian Reform Movement: Revisiting the History of the WNIA ed. by Valerie Sherer Mathes Jessica O’Rourke Gender, Race, and Power in the Indian Reform Movement: Revisiting the History of the WNIA. Edited by Valerie Sherer Mathes. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020. 284 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $65.00 cloth. Gender, Race, and Power in the Indian Reform Movement is a collection of nine essays aimed at evaluating the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA) through the broader lenses of intersectional gender, race, identity, and power. The WNIA has historically been criticized for being “too narrowly Christian and middle-class in its ambitions.” Mathes’s collection complicates this oversimplified criticism by acknowledging the “dedicated, practical, and hardworking citizens” within the WNIA who pushed for positive reforms in the late nineteenth century (xii–xiii). In addition to Mathes, Albert L. Hurtado, Jane Simonsen, John M. Rhea, Curtis M. Hinsley, Phil Brigandi, David Wallace Adams, and Lori Jacobson also contribute essays which examine the trends and examples of the WNIA’s history, including its key members and their personal contributions to the Indian reform movement and the role of the WNIA in the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. In one excerpt, Mathes also examines the relationship between the WNIA and Californian Indians in their joint endeavor to secure land sovereignty. This text utilizes power as a lens for evaluating gender history. Collectively, these authors argue that deeper understandings of the WNIA—as well as the field of gender studies—can be obtained through “reuniting the history of the WNIA and the individuals connected to it to broader themes of intersectionality, relational history, and intimacy” (20). This anthology also seeks to provide agency to Indigenous women by privileging their perspectives, which are often overshadowed by the Euro-American presence in the WNIA. Contributing authors also emphasize the agency demonstrated by women across the racial divide while still being subject to male-dominated reform movements. Mathes’s essay, titled “A Place at the Table: The Women’s National Indian Association in the Indian Reform Arena,” observes cross-gender interactions between WNIA women and their male counterparts who largely maintained control over the political sphere (98). Gender, Race, and Power in the Indian Reform Movement successfully contributes to scholarship that rejects traditional identity binaries and embraces the intersection of gender and race. This collection is an important read for audiences with a foundational knowledge of Indigenous history but will be especially helpful to readers seeking information on the gendered and racialized experience of Indigenous women during the late nineteenth century. It is an especially beneficial text for students and scholars alike looking to better understand the role of the WNIA in shaping Indigenous reforms. [End Page 358] Jessica O’Rourke Department of History Washington State University Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Charles C. Painter: The Life of an Indian Reform Advocate

An 1895 memorial by the Indian Rights Association (Ira) lauded Charles C. Painter for his Indian reform work, describing it as being “as valuable as [it] was inconspicuous,” notes Valerie Sherer Mathes (p. 225). In this “memoir of a career,” Painter is presented as an overlooked figure whose story pulls together multiple threads of late nineteenth-century Indian affairs (p. x). Painter engaged leading politicians and reform organizations and touched on significant topics, including treaty rights, land issues, and questions of assimilation and education. Accurately describing Painter as an “unapologetic assimilationist” who believed that American education and Christianity would solve the “Indian problem,” Mathes highlights Painter's contributions (ibid.). His “extensive field investigations and well-written reports” showcased his ability to communicate effectively with the many reform organizations of the time (p. 1). She credits Painter's “intuitive grasp of the broader picture” for his ascent to leadership roles in these organizations (p. 3). Painter's advocacy for Native American education led him to become the Ira's first paid employee in 1883. He skillfully worked with other Indian affairs groups, including the Women's National Indian Association, the Board of Indian Commissioners, and the Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indians. Mathes's careful study illuminates the differences between these groups' policies and approaches.

Review: The Women’s National Indian Association: A History edited by Valerie Sherer Mathes

Review: The Women’s National Indian Association: A History edited by Valerie Sherer Mathes

The Women’s National Indian Association: A History. Edited by Valerie Sherer Mathes.

The Women’s National Indian Association: A History . Edited by Valerie Sherer Mathes. Foreword by Margaret Connell Szasz. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015. x + 340 pp. Illustrations, table, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00.) In 1879 Mary Lucinda Bonney and Amelia Stone Quinton were dismayed by congressional debates on opening Indian Territory to white settlement (in what is now Oklahoma). The continued displacement of Indian people appalled the women, who described their condition as the nation’s “moral wrong” and a debilitating injustice. Their advocacy launched the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA), the first national organization devoted to Indian assimilation. Women with financial resources, access to influential men, and time for social reform filled the local chapters. These women considered themselves uniquely qualified for the task of solving the … becky.jager{at}wsu.edu

The Women's National Indian Association: A History

The Women's National Indian Association: A History

The Women’s National Indian Association: A History ed. by Valerie Sherer Mathes

Reviewed by: The Women’s National Indian Association: A History ed. by Valerie Sherer Mathes Mikaëla M. Adams The Women’s National Indian Association: A History. Edited by Valerie Sherer Mathes. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015. vii + 340 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth. The post–Civil War years marked a turning point in federal Indian policy. Whereas some Americans called for the annihilation of the country’s indigenous people, others wanted “to replace policies of removal, confinement, and extermination with homes, Christianity, and even citizenship” (2). Leading this reform impulse was a group of Protestant middle-class white women who created the Women’s National Indian Association (wnia). In Valerie Sherer Mathes’s edited volume, nine historians evaluate the mixed legacy of this organization. Although it provided certain women with an outlet for political participation, the wnia promoted a strident policy of assimilation—one that had devastating consequences for Native communities. Founded by Mary Lucinda Bonney and Amelia Stone Quinton in Philadelphia in 1879, the wnia started as a petition drive to pressure Congress to uphold Indian treaties. Auxiliary branches sprung up in the 1880s, although regional understandings of race and power (particularly in the South) limited the wnia’s work in certain areas. In 1882 the male-dominated Indian Rights Association took over the lobbying function of the wnia. To remain relevant, the women refocused on missionary work. Taking a “maternalist” approach, wnia members endeavored to spread “the values of white Christian society” by transforming Indian homes, families, and economies through projects such as the Home-Building and Loan Department and the field matron program (68). wnia members also participated in the annual Lake Mohonk conference on Indian reform and began publication of The Indian’s Friend in 1888. Although funding cuts and policy shifts eventually undercut the organization (it disbanded in 1951), in its heyday the wnia included ninety branch organizations in twenty-eight states and supported fifty-six mission stations on reservations. Through appealing to Victorian “domestic ideology that made women into the moral caretakers of the nation,” the wnia claimed authority to enact social change at a time when women lacked full rights in the United States (72). Yet even as these women enhanced their own political life, they treated Indians as “children” who needed to be taught to become “civilized” adults. Ultimately, the wnia [End Page 154] supported destructive legislation such as the 1887 Dawes Act and federal Indian boarding schools. According to contributor Lori Jacobson, wnia members “remained largely untouched by a sense of responsibility for their role in the violent cultural genocide enforced by an assimilationist agenda” (281). Instead, through what Jacobson calls the “erotics of reform,” they imagined Indians as willing participants and counted as a moral victory every conversion from “savage” to “civilized,” no matter “the personal and cultural traumas such conversions could enact” (281). As this volume shows, historians can no longer ignore the wnia since it offers one of the strongest examples of “women’s associational and maternalist political power in the nineteenth century” (212). Yet the volume also acknowledges its limitations. As Mathes points out, “one finds little Indian voice in the wnia literature, making it impossible to measure individual Indian’s responses to the efforts of these women reformers” (40). Future researchers, one hopes, will build upon this work to include indigenous perspectives. Mikaëla M. Adams Department of History University of Mississippi Copyright © 2016 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The Women’s National Indian Association: A History

The Women’s National Indian Association: A History

The Women's National Indian Association: a history

The Women's National Indian Association: a history

Valerie Sherer Mathes, editor.The Women’s National Indian Association: A History.

Journal Article Valerie Sherer Mathes, editor. The Women’s National Indian Association: A History. Get access Valerie Sherer Mathes, editor. The Women’s National Indian Association: A History. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015. Pp. x, 340. $45.00. The American Historical Review, Volume 120, Issue 4, October 2015, Page 1585, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.4.1585a Published: 09 October 2015

Helen Hunt Jackson, Amelia Stone Quinton, and the Mission Indians of California

Helen Hunt Jackson, the author of an 1883 government report and a book on the condition of California’s Mission Indians as well as the novel Ramona, came late to the cause of Indian reform. Others, including Amelia Stone Quinton, had earlier founded organizations such as the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA) to pressure Congress for reform and to engage directly in assisting Native American peoples. Correspondence between Jackson and Quinton illuminate their different methods of and proposals for Indian reform, yet it was Jackson’s published work, based on research and direct observation, that inspired many WNIA members.

Review: Divinely Guided: The California Work of the Women’s National Indian Association, by Valerie Sherer Mathes

Review: <i>Divinely Guided: The California Work of the Women’s National Indian Association</i>, by Valerie Sherer Mathes

Divinely Guided: The California Work of the Women's National Indian Association

Divinely Guided provides a useful overview of the Women's National Indian Association (wnia), an evangelical Christian organization founded in 1879 that sought assimilation of Native Americans to prevent their “extinction.” Valerie Sherer Mathes's goal is to bring the scholarly discourse on female reformers among the Indians, well known to ethnohistorians, into dialogue with a women's history that has neglected women's efforts in Indian work. Divinely Guided successfully locates women such as the wnia cofounder Amelia Stone Quinton and Annie Ellicott Kennedy Bidwell, vice president of the wnia in the West, in the historiography of women activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using personal papers, government documents, and wnia literature, Mathes reconstructs wnia assimilation efforts in northern and southern California. On reservations (Round Valley and Hoopa) and in missions these women were purveyors of a federal maternalism in which white women, acting in their roles as wife and mother, “uplifted” Indian women according to middle-class norms of civilization. As was true for the efforts of many other women reformers, these labors imparted organizing and lobbying skills, and brought these women into the political sphere, where they became influential in Indian policy. Mathes demonstrates that the wnia was as large and influential as the Women's Christian Temperance Union and deserves a monograph-length study. She contextualizes the wnia in the evangelical influences informing President Ulysses S. Grant's so-called peace policy, which allowed churches to administer Indian reservations beginning in 1872. As women were powerful in evangelical causes, this step opened the door for their Indian advocacy.

Divinely guided: the California work of the Women's National Indian Association

Founded in Philadelphia in 1879, the WNIA devoted seventy years to working among Native women. Bucking society s narrow sense of women s appropriate sphere, WNIA members across the U.S. built homes, missionary cottages, schools, and chapels, and sponsored teachers and physicians all with a strong dose of Christianity. Though goals of forced assimilation were as unrealistic as they were unsuccessful, WNIA s contributions to the welfare of Native women were hardly insignificant, especially in California. In the north, they worked at the Round Valley and Hoopa Reservations and realized their most unusual undertaking the funding of the Greenville Indian Industrial School. In the south they worked with the Native mission populations, where cultural similarities and greater proximity fostered unprecedented cooperation among WNIA workers. Amelia Stone Quinton, longtime WNIA president and editor of The Indian s Friend, provides a consistent narrative thread, as does Helen Hunt Jackson in the chapters on Southern California. Even after Jackson s death, her spiritual presence and the impact of her novel Ramona guided WNIA membership. Mathes s recovery of WNIA history, supported by a wealth of documentation, reveals much about an era s sense of sphere, service, and sisterhood.

Valerie Sherer Mathes. Divinely Guided: The California Work of the Women's National Indian Association. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2012. 392 pp. Paper $39.95.

Valerie Sherer Mathes. Divinely Guided: The California Work of the Women's National Indian Association. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2012. 392 pp. Paper $39.95.

'The better class' of Indians: social rank, imperial identity, and South Asians in Britain, 1858-1914

General Editor's introduction 1. Ranjitsinjhi's Britain Part I: Institutions 2. The India Office 3. The National Indian Association 4. London's inner-city missions to Indians Part II: Interactions 5. Imperial subjecthood and legal identity 6. Patterns of compassion: Aiding Indians in need 7. Scholarships and the civilising mission 8. Assimilation and ostracism in education 9. A hierarchical empire Bibliography Index

&lt;em&gt;‘The Better Class’ of Indians: Social Rank, Imperial Identity, and South Asians in Britain, 1858-1914&lt;/em&gt;, by A. Martin Wainwright

Reviewed by: 'The Better Class' of Indians: Social Rank, Imperial Identity, and South Asians in Britain, 1858–1914 Shompa Lahiri (bio) 'The Better Class' of Indians: Social Rank, Imperial Identity, and South Asians in Britain, 1858–1914, by A. Martin Wainwright; pp. xiii + 273. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008, £60.00, $84.95. 'The Better Class' of Indians draws upon two streams of scholarship: David Cannadine's emphasis on the importance of class over "race" as a prism through which British officials interpreted colonial subjects, and the small but growing collection of histories of Indo-British encounters in imperial Britain, developed by, among others, Antoinette Burton, Michael H. Fisher, Satadru Sen, and myself. A. Martin Wainwright's study focuses on how British civil servants, charities, educators, and missionaries sought to translate Indian social hierarchies into the British lexicon of class. Furthermore, according to Wainwright, elite Indian sojourners in Britain also exploited the language of class to claim high social rank in Victorian and Edwardian society. This book is thus concerned with official attitudes and policy towards loyal Indians, rather than the influential but disloyal Indian nationalists, who visited and studied in imperial Britain and went on to govern independent India and Pakistan. 'The Better Class' of Indians is split into two parts. Part 1 examines the background of British administrators and the government and government-sponsored institutions that dealt with the colonial Indian population in Britain. The first three chapters [End Page 751] are devoted to the India Office, the National Indian Association, and the London City Mission. Part 2 explores the "interactions" between a variety of British officials and Indians including Indian oculists, litigants, entertainers, and, most significantly, students. Each chapter treats a different aspect of the relation between social hierarchy and the treatment of Indians. Indians were accepted by British officials and "polite society" when they successfully adhered to a variety of criteria that could be translated into social rank or elite class status, including "wealth and what it could buy," education, professional status, property, and other gentlemanly traits, including suitable dress, prowess on the sports field, demeanour, lifestyle, and charitable giving (234). Above all, according to Wainwright, British officials were keen to attract loyal Indians to Britain. The subject of chapter 1, K. S. Ranjitsinjhi, "the cricketer prince," matched more of these criteria than most of his Indian compatriots in Britain, leading Wainwright to argue that Ranjitsinjhi's class status overcame barriers of "race." While most of the chapters show how Indian social rankings (including caste) translated into British equivalents, there is the occasional mismatch. For example, Indian oculists did not command the professional status and respect in Britain that they had in India. Instead, they were viewed as quacks by the medical profession and taken to court. The book is not just a study of comparable social hierarchies; it also considers the risks and possibilities of "translation," a highly productive concept that could have been fruitfully explored in greater depth and one instance in which the study could have benefited from a more interdisciplinary approach. Instead Wainwright provides a close and very detailed reading of archival sources that will appeal to some historians but shows limited engagement with wider related secondary literature. Wainwright's keen attempt to distinguish himself from previous scholarship is overstated at times. Nevertheless his focus on elite institutional responses, the uniqueness of Indo-British relations in the imperial metropolis in contrast to India, and the importance of the civilising mission in British official attitudes towards Indians in Britain do make departures from existing research. It would be very difficult to argue that class prejudice did not inform official British attitudes to Indians in Britain, as well as popular responses, given the class-conscious nature of Victorian and Edwardian society. However, this emphasis on class works best within the study when it intersects with other variables, in particular gender and "race." As Anne McClintock argues in Imperial Leather (1995), the "articulated categories" of race, class, and gender should be approached not in splendid isolation, but cross-referentially. Wainwright is on shakier ground when class alone is privileged, such as when he discusses how British officials' own class positions were enhanced...

BOOK REVIEW: Edited by David Finkelstein and Douglas M. Peers.NEGOTIATING INDIA IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEDIA. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.

Reviewed by: Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media Jeffrey L. Spear (bio) Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media, edited by David Finkelstein and Douglas M. Peers; pp. xi + 285. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, £55.00, $75.00. Like most scholarly anthologies, Negotiating India is an incomplete mosaic of individual studies with an introduction by the editors outlining a larger project, the representation of India in nineteenth-century media both in Britain and in India itself. Despite the title, [End Page 113] there are few references in the essays to any publications before 1850, and only Javed Majeed's study of two Urdu periodicals of the 1870s treats vernacular Indian publications. Majeed's essay generally supports the assumption that journalists addressing the Indian public in Urdu were nevertheless working within such Western categories as the narrative of progress and the immutability of caste even as they tried to resist or qualify them: "The concern with stereotypes has much to do with the typologies on which European notions of race rested...but it is also connected with the hierarchy of rank in India itself. All this is part of an attempt to defend Hindustanis against colonial strictures while redeploying a language of difference to shore up Hindustani society itself" (153). Studies of the ways Indians represented both the English and themselves in their own languages during the colonial period are crucial to discussions of the degree and kind of subaltern agency, so it is a shame that there could not be other English-language essays here dealing with the frames and terms of Indian discourse in, for example, Bengali or Tamil. The only journal discussed in Negotiating India devoted to representing Indian views to readers of English in both India and Britain is The Indian Magazine, the subject of Antoinette Burton's "Institutionalizing Imperial Reform." This magazine, which ran from 1870 to 1914, was the organ of the National Indian Association, which promoted educational and social reform in India. Burton is particularly skillful in weaving quick sketches of personalities into her account of the magazine and the Association, and of their impact on such major reform issues as child marriage and enforced widowhood. Two essays address the handling of specific topics in the Victorian popular press: A. Martin Wainwright examines coverage of the technology of the Raj in Victorian periodicals; Glenn R. Wilkinson analyzes the treatment in the "yellow press" of the 1897 Pathan uprising at Tirah in the Northwest Frontier. Following the lead of Robert H. MacDonald in The Language of Empire (1994), Wilkinson treats the frontier as an "imagined space," that allows contradictory perceptions of India and the Pathans to coexist. Seeming at once to be well-equipped, natural fighters and undisciplined, superstitious fanatics, the Pathans could be cast simultaneously as worthy opponents and as essentially inferior to the rationally organized and more technologically advanced British. The remaining essays by historians include accounts of race and caste in boys' papers; the army in India and the military press; and the representation of scientific and Indian traditional medicine in the medical press. There are three essays by literary scholars. John McBratney's essay on Rudyard Kipling's From Sea to Sea (1899), while not changing our understanding of Kipling's views, does have the virtue of paying detailed attention to his journalism, which is usually brushed aside in a rush to get at the early short fiction. Laura Peters on Charles Dickens and the Indian rebellion, and Hyungji Park on 1857 and the serialization of The Moonstone (1868), go over material that is well known to specialists in Victorian literature, but will prove helpful to readers from other fields. Some details in these essays may mislead readers without specialized knowledge. Wainwright, for example, refers to George Birdwood as "a former professor of botany at Bombay University and a well-known proponent of Indian culture" (196). While it is true that early in his career Birdwood held professorships in anatomy, physiology, botany, and material medica at the Grant Medical College, his lasting influence was not in science but as a champion of Indian arts and crafts. These he made sure were prominently displayed when, after returning to...

Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media (review)

Reviewed by: Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media Jeffrey L. Spear (bio) Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media, edited by David Finkelstein and Douglas M. Peers; pp. xi + 285. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, £55.00, $75.00. Like most scholarly anthologies, Negotiating India is an incomplete mosaic of individual studies with an introduction by the editors outlining a larger project, the representation of India in nineteenth-century media both in Britain and in India itself. Despite the title, [End Page 113] there are few references in the essays to any publications before 1850, and only Javed Majeed's study of two Urdu periodicals of the 1870s treats vernacular Indian publications. Majeed's essay generally supports the assumption that journalists addressing the Indian public in Urdu were nevertheless working within such Western categories as the narrative of progress and the immutability of caste even as they tried to resist or qualify them: "The concern with stereotypes has much to do with the typologies on which European notions of race rested...but it is also connected with the hierarchy of rank in India itself. All this is part of an attempt to defend Hindustanis against colonial strictures while redeploying a language of difference to shore up Hindustani society itself" (153). Studies of the ways Indians represented both the English and themselves in their own languages during the colonial period are crucial to discussions of the degree and kind of subaltern agency, so it is a shame that there could not be other English-language essays here dealing with the frames and terms of Indian discourse in, for example, Bengali or Tamil. The only journal discussed in Negotiating India devoted to representing Indian views to readers of English in both India and Britain is The Indian Magazine, the subject of Antoinette Burton's "Institutionalizing Imperial Reform." This magazine, which ran from 1870 to 1914, was the organ of the National Indian Association, which promoted educational and social reform in India. Burton is particularly skillful in weaving quick sketches of personalities into her account of the magazine and the Association, and of their impact on such major reform issues as child marriage and enforced widowhood. Two essays address the handling of specific topics in the Victorian popular press: A. Martin Wainwright examines coverage of the technology of the Raj in Victorian periodicals; Glenn R. Wilkinson analyzes the treatment in the "yellow press" of the 1897 Pathan uprising at Tirah in the Northwest Frontier. Following the lead of Robert H. MacDonald in The Language of Empire (1994), Wilkinson treats the frontier as an "imagined space," that allows contradictory perceptions of India and the Pathans to coexist. Seeming at once to be well-equipped, natural fighters and undisciplined, superstitious fanatics, the Pathans could be cast simultaneously as worthy opponents and as essentially inferior to the rationally organized and more technologically advanced British. The remaining essays by historians include accounts of race and caste in boys' papers; the army in India and the military press; and the representation of scientific and Indian traditional medicine in the medical press. There are three essays by literary scholars. John McBratney's essay on Rudyard Kipling's From Sea to Sea (1899), while not changing our understanding of Kipling's views, does have the virtue of paying detailed attention to his journalism, which is usually brushed aside in a rush to get at the early short fiction. Laura Peters on Charles Dickens and the Indian rebellion, and Hyungji Park on 1857 and the serialization of The Moonstone (1868), go over material that is well known to specialists in Victorian literature, but will prove helpful to readers from other fields. Some details in these essays may mislead readers without specialized knowledge. Wainwright, for example, refers to George Birdwood as "a former professor of botany at Bombay University and a well-known proponent of Indian culture" (196). While it is true that early in his career Birdwood held professorships in anatomy, physiology, botany, and material medica at the Grant Medical College, his lasting influence was not in science but as a champion of Indian arts and crafts. These he made sure were prominently displayed when, after returning to...

Dr. Thomas A. Bland, Critic of Forced Assimilation

On Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1882, former-Indian-superintendent-turned-reformer Colonel Alfred B. Meacham related a recent premonition of death to his friend Dr. Thomas A. Bland. Believing his earthly mission nearly fulfilled, Meacham implored Bland to continue publication of his monthly periodical devoted to Indian reform, The Council Fire. Two days later, Meacham died at his editorial table, and Bland became editor of the journal.’ Bland used The Council Five and the National Indian Defence Association, which he founded in 1885, as vehicles for his particular philosophy of Indian reform. Bland largely accepted the goal of Indian assimilation as outlined by humanitarian reformers of his generation. However, in his view, proponents of coercive allotment of reservation land had mistaken the end for the means. He insisted that successful assimilation demanded a gradual and voluntary conversion and not compulsion.2 Convinced that sudden change was detrimental, Bland began a crusade to protect tribal institutions and property rights. As a critic of forced assimilation, he clashed with reformers in the Women’s National Indian Association, the Indian Rights Association, the Board of Indian Commissioners, and the Lake Mohonk Conference of ”Friends of the Indians,” who campaigned vigorously to make severalty compulsory. Indeed, Bland’s outlook and struggle against rapid assimilation provides significant