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Maternal Colonialism: White Women and Indigenous Child Removal in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940
MARGARET D. JACOBS
This study of white women's involvement in the removal of indigenous children in a comparative, international context offers an opportunity for recasting the history of women and gender in the American West as part of a larger story of gender and settler colonialism around the globe.
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BETWEEN 1898 AND 1910, when social reformer Estelle Reel worked as superintendent of Indian education for the Office of Indian Affairs, she often penned self-promoting articles in the third person that were later syndicated in newspapers across the country. In one such article, "Woman's Great Work for the Government," she claimed:
Miss Reel is popular with the Indians. She is known as the "Big White Squaw from Washington." So fond of her are some of the Indians that they are willing she should take their children away, and one Indian woman insisted that she should carry a pair of fat papooses to President Roosevelt. She doesn't have to bribe the Indians with promises and presents to send their children to school now.1
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Reel's upbeat article coincided with her efforts during her first years in office to pass a compulsory education law that would have removed most Indian children from their homes and communities and required them to attend boarding schools. Like many white women reformers of her time who worked with Indian peoples in the American West, she regarded it as her maternalistic duty to rescue indigenous children from what she considered a savage background and to raise them instead in a "civilized" environment. |
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Reel's efforts illuminate a neglected area of study in the history of gender and women in the American West. White women, primarily as reformers, but also as teachers and administrators, were integrally involved in promoting, carrying out, and sometimes challenging the removal of American Indian children to boarding schools. They also contributed to the racialized and gendered representations of Indian peoples that made such policies possible. White women reformers in the American West, however, were not alone in promoting the removal and institutionalization of indigenous children. |
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Consider that in Australia in 1929 itinerant missionary Annie Lock explained to her sister reformer, Constance Cooke, "We are trying to solve the problem with the natives up this way [in the Northern Territory]. The only thing I can see would [be] to get the children right away from their parents and teach them good moral, clean habits & right from wrong & also industries that will make them more useful & better citizen[s] by & by." Like Reel, Lock declared: "The parents are willing to give them over to me."2 Thus, in Australia too, white women reformers believed it their special province to "save" indigenous children by removing them from their families. |
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Studying white women's involvement in the removal of indigenous children in a comparative, international context offers an opportunity for recasting the history of women and gender in the American West as part of a larger story of gender and settler colonialism around the globe. The potential value of such comparative history, is that it may, in the words of George Fredrickson, "jolt historians out of accustomed ways of thinking about their original areas of specialization and enable them to look at the familiar in a new way."3 |
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