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

by Mathes, Valerie Sherer

• ISBN13: 9780896727267
• ISBN10: 0896727262
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-01-06
• Publisher: Texas Tech Univ Pr

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Valerie Sherer Mathes teaches history at City College of San Francisco. She is also the author of Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy, coauthor (with Richard Lowitt) of The Standing Bear Controversy: Prelude to Indian Reform, and editor of The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	p. ix
Series Editor's Preface	p. xiii
Acknowledgments	p. xvii
Prologue	p. 3
Women's Early Indian Work	p. 11
"Women's Work for Women": Founding of the Women's National Indian Association	p. 24
The Women's National Indian Association Comes to Round Valley	p. 51
Northern California Members and Their Work at the Hoopa Reservation	p. 78
Greenville Indian Industrial School	p. 101
Women's National Indian Association Work Continues in the North	p. 127
The Indian Reform Work of Annie Ellicott Kennedy Bidwell	p. 153
The WNIA Carries on Helen Hunt Jackson's Legacy	p. 177
WNIA Missionary Work among the Cahuillas and at Martinez	p. 204
A Hospital at Warner Ranch	p. 231
Epilogue	p. 262
Abbreviations	p. 267
Notes	p. 269
Bibliography	p. 365
Index	p. 381
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