“Shall the Indian remain Indian?”: Native Americans and the women\u27s club movement, 1899–1954

Several historians have ably researched the participation of whites and African Americans in the women\u27s club movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States. This dissertation adds the various ways Native Americans figured into this organizational phenomenon. The so-called Indian problem served as the impetus for white women\u27s organizational foray into Native American affairs, beginning with the Women\u27s National Indian Association in 1883. About forty years later, the General Federation of Women\u27s Clubs called on all of its affiliates to attend to the welfare of Indians. White women\u27s sincere but often-uninformed notions about tribal needs and interests guided their efforts—to mixed effect. The ways in which Native American women participated in their own clubs varied. Whites sometimes imposed clubs upon them, believing this structure would facilitate the training of traditional Indian women in mainstream ways of living. Indian women, generally those living on reservations, also formed their own organizations, often to raise money to provide financial support to local families in need. Assimilated Native American women, many of whom had experienced the white indoctrination of mission and government schools, created clubs for two primary—and seemingly contradictory—purposes: to promote their adopted ways of life to all Indians as well as to study and preserve selected aspects of native culture and history. The club movement for all populations of women involved considerations of identity, learning, service, and leadership. This dissertation explores the particular ways in which these themes revealed themselves in the organizational experiences of Native American women. The timeframe of this study is 1899, when one of the earliest all-Indian women\u27s clubs formed, to 1954, when Elizabeth Bender Cloud, the first Native American chair of the Indian Affairs division of the General Federation of Women\u27s Clubs, completed her service in this position