November is National Native American Heritage Month. In the history of the United States, those who were oppressed and subjugated often found themselves at the mercy of others who were equally as subjugated. In the American expansionist history, white women became a leading driver of cultural influence of Indigenous affairs. Here are three stories of how the image and power of the white woman influenced the history of Native American development.
It's a statue in Edmond, Oklahoma full of life -- a woman in late nineteenth-century garb leaps from a train's front grill (the "cow catcher") with a flag in her hand. The woman known as Nannita "Kentucky" Daisey -- she had taught school for brief time in Louisville -- became legendary during the land rush period of Oklahoma's history. However, contemporary accounts of her own and a colleague's recollection pointed toward her actually lowering from the first car, calmly staking her claim, and then running to catch up with the train. The state remembered it as Boomer Sooner --booms from the firing of guns and cannon as claims were made, and sooner folks who snuck secretly into the territory. Her admirers remembered the legend of Kentucky Daisey. She land rushed three times in the "Unassigned Lands," once hiding a group of other white women in a low ravine waiting for their chance to drive their stakes into the ground. But Kentucky Daisey's decades-old gendered stereotypes may seem at first blush unsurprising, yet the fact that it does so in the face of other decades-long efforts to make representations of the American West more multicultural in memory, including the 2007 push to create a statue of her in Edmond. Rather than focusing on the culling of Native American lands promised to them in perpetuity, the town decided to erect a statue of one of the thousands of bloodthirsty people who claimed land in the "rush." Edmond, Oklahoma citizens chose to elevate a woman who self admittedly didn't do the famous deed she was known for. The statue's erection exposes issues of gender and commemoration in the American West.
"I h
ave married a gentleman of Indian blood," writes one women in the Indian Service, and "I could help him." The political ramifications of the "Indian problem" in the post-Civil War West were great, but a proposition by those who governed brought a possible solution to their needs: white women and Native men could form domestic relationships. Much has been said of the white woman kidnapped and held in the Indigenous camp, but this proposal came from the newly emerged Indian Service: instead, remove the man from his homeland, educate him in white boarding schools, and allow him to form friendships, and eventually romances, with white women during their Indian Service work. Thousands of white women were intentionally hired and paired with adult Indigenous men returning from eastern boarding schools. Interracial relationships "advocated amalgamation by marriage as a necessary and desirable part of the assimilation process" as noted by Richard Henry Platt, one of the Indian education proponents. White women were historically seen as the moral centers of nineteenth century western civilization. By harnessing the power of white domesticity, the government saw a way to assimilate the men who had been fighting the manifest expansion into their territories.
In 1910, the wealthy Gulicks ran an advertisement for the characteristics they intended to create at their girls' summer camp in Lake Sebago, Maine: young white girls would experience the ideal out-of-doors Indian life, including jewelry making, storytelling, costuming, and learning myths and folklore. By the 1920s, the "maidens" of Camp Fire Girls represented the twentieth century's answer to a toothless Indian: no longer a threat in the west, the Indian lifestyle became the picturesque and idyllic way to intone young white girls to become docile, beautiful, and servile. Native women, as "mothers of the race," as seen by those who led the assimilation effort, served as the perfect role models for young women in another culture. Camp Fire girls recorded their summer camp memories in a scrapbook called the "Hiawatha meter," created pageants with Pocahontas as the first American woman, and provided maiden feasts, where they would prepare and serve a meal. They relinquished both markers for more masculine pursuits, such as the playing of lacrosse-style games that would have been common for native girls, and embraced white civilization's ideals, such as purity culture, as in rejecting fancy dress and keeping oneself as "pure as the mountain stream." In doing so, they co-opted the colonial view of Native domesticity, scrubbing it of its domestic power in favor of a light wholesome version of cultures which had been destroyed. By the 1930s, the Camp Fire Girls had also spread to the boarding schools that were further destroying culture, asking young Natives to bond with each other over a homogenized and bland representation of their peoples' history.