11 - “Overcoming all obstacles”: The assimilation debate in Native American women's journalism of the Dawes era

Summary

In an apparent contradiction, Native American women argued both for Pan-Indianism and for many of the assimilationist policies of the Dawes Era in their early journalism. The journalism examined here reproduces, at times, dominant assimilationist discourse. However, it does not predicate assimilation on a rejection of Native identity and culture. Native women refused to accept Dawes Era ideologies that defined white dominant culture and traditional Native American cultures simply as binary opposites. Their early journalism demonstrates, I argue, a complex negotiation between Native and non- Native practices that suggests cultural dynamism rather than cultural loss as a paradigm for assimilation.

Native women wrote political journalism in English for Native American periodicals and the journals of the off-reservation boarding schools in the early twentieth century. Most of the women whose writing is examined here attended or were affiliated with offreservation boarding schools and were influenced by assimilationists like General Richard Henry Pratt. Many also belonged to a Pan-Indian organization, the Society of American Indians. I focus primarily on material from this society's journal, the American Indian Magazine, whose audience and contributors came from various tribes and white reform organizations.

The Dawes Era is generally represented as the period from the passage to the reversal of the General Allotment or Dawes Act (1887–1934). The act was named for its sponsor, Henry Dawes, who was an advocate of Indian assimilation and chair of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.