Off-reservation boarding schools form a notorious episode in the long history of child removal in the United States. This history roared back to life in the summer of 2018, when the Trump administration established child separation policies and built family detention camps on the US-Mexico border that have detained more than three hundred thousand children and separated over a thousand children from their refuge-seeking parents.5 Whether designed to intimidate and threaten refugee families, as Trump’s policies sought to do, or to dispossess tribes of their future by assimilating Native youth into capitalist civilization, as the boarding schools intended, separating children from their parents is widely recognized as a form of trauma and cultural warfare with repercussions that persist for generations.
But less well known is that removing Native children from their families, tribes, and territories simultaneously forms a significant episode in the history and counterhistory of white feminism. The machinery of civilization threatened to pulverize Native youth into mere remnants of the past—and white women would reap many of the profits.
In the fall of 1879, while three-year-old Zitkala-Ša was playing with friends in Yankton territory, Alice Cunningham Fletcher, a forty-one-year-old white woman in Brooklyn, found an unexpected new outlet for her feminism. She had been a leader of the burgeoning clubwomen scene in New York for a decade. Enthusiastic about her experience as a member of the first society for career women in the country, Sorosis, she helped expand it into a national organization called the Association for the Advancement of Women (AAW), for which she served as cofounder, secretary, and conference organizer. These clubs shattered decorum, bringing “talented, cultivated and beneficent women” together in public at halls and restaurants without the customary accompaniment of men. Through networking, charity, and educational lectures, clubwomen sought to advance their personal and professional status.6
Though many reformers joined Sorosis and AAW, the ultimate goal of these middle-class clubs was respectability, not politics—discussion of suffrage was prohibited. The clubwomen movement soon sprung up in cities across the country, comprising a third, genteel strain of white feminism developing in the wake of Seneca Falls. Its approach was distinct from the strident, political activism of Susan B. Anthony and especially Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who sought to transform laws and social mores. And it differed from the high-handed, emotion-driven patronage of Harriet Beecher Stowe and other sentimentalists who parlayed white women’s feelings into sources of authority. Clubwomen, by contrast, drew upon white women’s alleged moral authority to carve out a place for themselves in the country’s social and professional institutions. Their societies sought access, not civil rights or social transformation. Yet clubwomen’s motivations lay not only in self-interested desire to succeed as individuals. They had a collective goal, though a highly limited one: to promote the personal and career success of bourgeois white women. When asked to supply details of her biography for a volume on prominent American women, Fletcher refrained from touting her own accomplishments and replied, “Write me as one who loves her fellow-women.”7
That winter, Fletcher attended a lecture at Boston’s Faneuil Hall that expanded her life’s direction. Chief Standing Bear, a leader of the Ponca tribe, was touring the East Coast with the Omaha translator Susette “Bright Eyes” La Flesche and her brother Francis, aiming to gain support for the Poncas’ plight. Two years prior, the US government had unilaterally canceled the 1858 treaty that granted the Ponca rights to the northern Nebraska land with which they had lived in dynamic relation for millennia and remanded them south to Arkansas Indian Territory. Standing Bear was advocating for Ponca rights to live in Nebraska, but for much of the white audience, it was his humanity that was up for debate. Fletcher was struck by Susette La Flesche’s eloquence, grasping that “the door of language could be unlocked and intelligent relations made possible between the two races.”8
Within two years, studying—and reforming—Native women and families would become Alice Fletcher’s central objective in life. She devoted herself to anthropology, a rapidly developing science that approached the Indigenous as if they held the secrets to the primitive beginnings of humanity. To understand, and revise, “barbarous” traditions and worldviews, she spent months and seasons living among Native tribes in Nebraska, Oklahoma, Ohio, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Wisconsin, and South and North Dakota. Moved to genuine respect for some aspects of Native life and appalled by the treachery of white settlers who surrounded and stole Native lands, Fletcher was moved to join the cause of Indian reform. She became the most prominent white woman activist for Native rights of her era. Yet she positioned Native people as her charges and herself as the benevolent and powerful white mother. “The Indians cling to me like children,” she wrote to her mentor from the Nez Perce Reservation in northern Idaho, “and I must and will protect them.”9
Fletcher shared the civilizing impulse universal to white feminism of her era, though we might call the specific philosophy she and the other clubwomen in Indian reform developed “settler feminism.”10 Their method was severance: severing Indigenous children from their parents and tribes and severing communally held lands into individual property allotments, subjugating Native people to the patriarchal and monogamous norms of settler life. Meanwhile, the more Fletcher dispossessed Native women and tribes of their traditional social roles, the more she broke through norms herself and gained increased political and social power. She became the first woman to be appointed to a research position at Harvard, a full eighty-five years before the institution even admitted female undergraduates. Her prolific output made her the most respected and influential woman scientist of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Settler white feminists liberated themselves through assuming authority over the Indigenous. Yet it was far from the only kind of feminism in the West. Zitkala-Ša would become an artist and feminist activist who would unite tribes to push back against theft disguised as benevolence.
When the Civil War came to a close in 1865, the Indian Wars heated up. Across the West, Indigenous tribes fought US soldiers for the next two and a half decades for the right to live among their lands. The confederated Sioux tribes, led by Lakota warriors including Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, and Crazy Horse, executed the most successful resistance ever mounted by Indigenous groups in US history. In 1868, the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne became the first and only Natives to win a major war against the US government. The Bozeman War resulted in a treaty securing total control of their vast lands and hunting grounds that spread across the Dakotas and reached into present-day Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, and Colorado.11 The remarkably recent date of such a major Native victory testifies to the lasting power of the Sioux.
But US officials didn’t respect the treaty. When George Armstrong Custer’s thousand-person expedition illegally mining Sioux lands struck the gold they were determined to find in the Black Hills in 1874, the tribes’ fortunes changed drastically. Settlers prospecting for the valuable mineral, often guided by US troops, flooded the area. Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and other Lakota and Cheyenne leaders famously defeated Custer and his Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876, the year Zitkala-Ša was born just to the east among the Yankton Dakota. But the Sioux ultimately lost the Black Hills War and were forced to surrender to US forces by 1877. Sioux lands dwindled to just over 10 percent of their former size as the US Army seized control of everything but central South Dakota. Leaders including Red Cloud and Spotted Tail moved onto Rosebud, Standing Rock, Pine Ridge, and other Dakota reservations to the west and north of the Yanktons’, where they were subject to the whims of capricious agents who cut their food rations in half or let the beef, tobacco, and grain spoil entirely.12 Sitting Bull (Hunkpapa Lakota) had served the Black Hills War as a spiritual adviser after a vision that foresaw their triumph over Custer. Refusing to submit to US control when the war was lost, Sitting Bull and nearly two hundred family members and supporters fled north across the Canadi
an border to the hills of Saskatchewan to evade capture.
Yet after four years of resistance, the fifty-year-old Sitting Bull and his band of 168 people were forced to travel south and surrender to US forces. The buffalo herds that had sustained their people for millennia had all but disappeared, deliberately slaughtered by determined US and Canadian militaries and private citizens to starve the Plains tribes into death. Only ten to fifteen million buffalo remained in the Great Plains by 1865, down from a precontact population of up to sixty-five million. By the early 1880s, the military had reduced the buffalo population to only a few hundred survivors. Sitting Bull and his band were now held as prisoners of war at Fort Randall, South Dakota, a few miles across the Missouri River from the Yankton village where then five-year-old Zitkala-Ša roamed the hills. An officer counted each person every morning.13
In October 1881, two years after she had attended Standing Bear’s Boston lecture, Alice Fletcher sat somewhat awkwardly in a tight-waisted, full-skirted dress around a fire in Sitting Bull’s tent. Sitting Bull explained to Fletcher that desperate hunger had compelled him to surrender three months prior.
“The old life is gone,” Sitting Bull told Fletcher while Buffalo Chip (Omaha) interpreted. “The skill of the hunter is now of no use; nor is the valor of the warrior.”14 The young would have to turn to plowing the prairie and other ways of the settler in order to survive.
As Sitting Bull spoke, his younger wife entered the tipi and threw sticks on the fire before reclining in its glow. Adroitly leaning upon one elbow, she turned her eyes upon Fletcher, no doubt assessing this unusual newcomer. The budding anthropologist looked back, cataloging the woman’s bright eyes, good looks, and brass bracelets. Sitting Bull, too, gazed upon his wife, before once more addressing Fletcher.15
“You are a woman,” he began slowly. “Take pity on my women, for they have no future. The young men can be like the white men, till the soil, supply the food and clothing, they will take the work out of the hands of the women, and the women, to whom we have owed every thing in the past, will be stripped of all which gave them power and position among the people. Give a future to my women!”16
Fletcher found herself a guest of Sitting Bull’s because she had traveled west to study “the life of Indian women.”17 Earlier that year, Fletcher had approached Susette La Flesche, who arranged for Fletcher to camp with the Omaha in Nebraska for three weeks before traveling northward to the Sioux. To gain permission from the Bureau of Indian Affairs agents to enter the reservations, she secured research sponsorship from the Peabody Museum and the federal Bureau of Ethnology.
“I wish to get at Indian women’s life from the inside,” she had written to bureau director John Wesley Powell, “and as the segregation of the sexes is marked among barbarous people, I trust that being a woman I may be able to observe and record facts and conditions” inaccessible to male anthropologists.18 Now she was collecting prime data straight from one of the country’s most notorious Native rebels.
Anthropology, as it was understood in the nineteenth century, was the science that investigated the evolution of human society. Anthropologists approached the entire history of human culture as one linear process of development from savagery, to barbarism, to civilization. In this rigid model, only Europeans had arrived at civilized maturity. Racialized people were figured as specimens of arrested development, frozen in earlier life stages of humanity. People of African descent were imagined to be congealed in a savagery from which they would never progress. Natives were consigned to the stage of barbarism, an arrested stage in the evolution of humans; anthropologists approached them as lingering relics of the receding past, not as living members of the present in charge of their own future.
Alice Fletcher made several early innovations in anthropology’s methods and application. Her first contribution was to argue that Native societies, because they were the imagined origins of her own, thus held the clue to understanding the oppression of women in civilization. Fletcher would not only promote the further development of professional white women—she intended to pinpoint the origins of their troubles by investigating the Indigenous cultures of the West. This work “preserving the record” of the past, as she put it, would help white women seize a greater role in civilization’s boundless future.19
White feminism, in other words, had come to the sciences.
When she met Sitting Bull, Fletcher was beginning to undertake her first fieldwork. But she was encountering a surprising set of data. The scientific and reform opinion of Fletcher’s day was that barbarous groups were sex segregated, meaning that men and women lived largely separate existences characterized by drastic inequality in which men exploited women’s labor. Indian societies were imagined to be so far down the evolutionary scale of development that women were drudges, simply menial laborers abused by their idle husbands. Racist images of “squaws” portrayed with papooses strapped to their backs as they stooped over the fields abounded in the popular and scientific press. Sara Kinney, a leader of the Women’s National Indian Association (WNAI), a white feminist reform organization founded in 1879, articulated the received wisdom bluntly: “In the native order of society, the home, as we understand it, cannot exist.”20
Civilized societies, by contrast, were portrayed as having achieved the landmark state of binary sex specialization, a state of complementary opposites in mind, body, and emotion. Sex specialization meant that men managed the public sphere of business and politics and women presided angelically over the private realm of hearth and home, but they formed allegedly equal halves of a partnership. In this fantasy, civilized men freed middle-class white women from the need to labor, as child-rearing and managing the household were misapprehended as free gifts of the heart rather than efforts of the hand.
But Fletcher was realizing that Lakota and Omaha women had freedoms and responsibilities of which white women could only dream. “The Indian woman,” Fletcher concluded, “considers herself quite independent. She controls her labor, her possessions and follows her own inclinations if she has sufficient determination.” Contrary to accepted wisdom, the Native woman “is not necessarily the slave of the man.” Rather, her work stoking the fires; making the food, tents, and clothing; and raising corn, beans, and pumpkins meant that “she is the conserver of life,” a position that came with many privileges and was awarded due respect.21 Now, Sitting Bull was telling Fletcher directly: Lakota women had more freedom and power than the white women of the West. He was also, in her rendering, asking Fletcher for help.
For Fletcher and other white feminists, assistance meant taking guardianship over people of color. Fletcher felt that Indigenous people were not doomed to be forever suspended in the barbarian stage of development. They could be saved, trained into the habits of civilized sex specialization. “It is good to think of the so-called dependent races as children,” rather than through the lens of “savagery” or “barbarism,” she corrected in 1900.22 Natives were not frozen in prehistory, as her colleagues believed. They were in need of a mother—a white mother, who could raise the race into maturity.
Amelia Quinton, president of the Women’s National Indian Association, put it best. “The Indian Question must become more and more a woman question,” she instructed. “When all legal rights are assured, and all fair educational facilities provided, the women and children of the tribes will still be a sacred responsibility laid upon the white women of the land.”23
Despite Fletcher’s limited experience—visiting two tribes for six weeks total, while reliant on translators—she was now ready to call herself an expert in Native life writ large. And indeed, she had now acquired more firsthand experience with Indigenous tribes than had most other social scientists in the United States. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Fletcher pushed for assimilation with full knowledge of the loss of liberties Native women would experience. Men needed to labor in the fields while women took care of the home and children. In historian Louise Newman’s words, Fletcher and other w
hite women reformers believed that “Indian women were to be given the gift of patriarchy.”24 Her white feminist position explicitly and knowingly helped undermine Indigenous women’s traditional authority—while simultaneously taking inspiration from them to realize her own budding professional and political power.
Zitkala-Ša arrived at White’s Manual Labor Institute at nightfall in March 1884 after three days of hard travel. Already unnerved by the incessant gaping of strangers on the train, she now faced a new sensory onslaught: a whitewashed two-story building illuminated by blinding gaslight. The eight-year-old child hugged the wall for safety, but to her horror, “two warm hands grasped” her, and a “paleface” woman tossed her up and down in the air. Unable to communicate a word with any of the adults and unused to being “trifl[ed]” with as a “plaything,” Zitkala-Ša burst into tears, tears that eventually carried her into sleep that evening.25
The first days were full of surprises: learning how to sit in a chair; “eating by formula” after a series of confusing bells and prayers; being stripped of her new dress, belt, moccasins, and all other objects from home and assigned a “clinging” dress and stiff shoes in their place.26 Judéwin, whose limited knowledge of English nonetheless enabled her to understand adults who Zitkala-Ša felt were “deaf” to her concerns, caught wind of the afternoon plan to cut their hair. Zitkala-Ša was moved to rebellion. Hairstyle played a significant role in Dakota and Lakota culture, and short hair was the punishment for dishonored “cowards.”
“No, I will not submit! I will struggle first!” she cried to her friends.
The Trouble with White Women Page 11