Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1990. 1st Edition, Hardbound, about 9.25 inches tall, 235 pages. Notes, bibliography, index. Includes a map and a short section of black and white illustrations. Helen Hunt Jackson became known as the Harriet Beecher Stowe for Native Americans with the overwhelming success of her book, Ramona. This is part of the American Studies Series under the general editorship of William H Goetzmann.

Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy (American Studies Series)

Literature & Fiction

Mathes, Valerie Sherer

History & Criticism

Univ of Texas Pr

Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy is a detailed account of the last six years of Jackson’s life (1879–1885), when she struggled to promote the rights of American Indians displaced and dispossessed by the U.S. government. Valerie Sherer Mathes places Jackson’s work within the larger nineteenth-century Indian rights movement and details her crusade of traveling, writing, and lobbying government officials. Jackson’s efforts culminated in the publication of A Century of Dishonor, an indictment of the government’s Indian policy, and the novel Ramona, a sympathetic portrayal of the plight of California’s Mission Indians. Her influence was felt immediately in the actions of subsequent reform workers in the Women’s National Indian Association, the Indian Rights Association, and the Lake Mohonk Conference.

Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy

History

Americas

University of Oklahoma Press

Inseparable from the history of the Indians of Southern California is the role of the Indian agent—a government functionary whose chief duty was, according to the Office of Indian Affairs, to “induce his Indian to labor in civilized pursuits.” Offering a portrait of the Mission Indian agents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Reservations, Removal, and Reform reveals how individual agents interpreted this charge, and how their actions and attitudes affected the lives of the Mission Indians of Southern California. This book tells the story of the government agents, both special and regular, who served the Mission Indians from 1850 to 1903, with an emphasis on seven regular agents who served from 1878 to 1903. Relying on the agents’ reports and correspondence as well as newspaper articles and court records, authors Valerie Sherer Mathes and Phil Brigandi create a vivid picture of how each man—each a political appointee tasked with implementing ever-changing policies crafted in far-off Washington, D.C.—engaged with the issues and events confronting the Mission Indians, from land tenure and water rights to education, law enforcement, and health care. Providing a balanced, comprehensive view of the world these agents temporarily inhabited and the people they were called to serve, Reservations, Removal, and Reform deepens and broadens our understanding of the lives and history of the Indians of Southern California.

Reservations, Removal, and Reform: The Mission Indian Agents of Southern California, 1878–1903

Brigandi, Phil

Charles Cornelius Coffin Painter (1833-89), clergyman turned reformer, was one of the foremost advocates and activists in the late-nineteenth-century movement to reform U.S. Indian policy. Very few individuals possessed the influence Painter wielded in the movement, and Painter himself published numerous pamphlets for the Indian Rights Association (IRA) on the Southern Utes, Eastern Cherokees, California Indians, and other Native peoples. Yet this is the first book to fully consider his unique role and substantial contribution. Born in Virginia, Painter spent most of his life in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, commuting to New York City and Washington, D.C., initially as an agent of the American Missionary Association (AMA), later as an appointed member of the Board of Indian Commissions (BIC), and, most significant, as the Indian Rights Association's D.C. agent. In these capacities he lobbied presidents and Congress for reform, conducted extensive investigations on reservations, and shaped deliberations in such reform bodies as the BIC and the influential Lake Mohonk conferences. Mining an extraordinary wealth of archival material, Valerie Sherer Mathes crafts a compelling account of Painter as a skilled negotiator with Indians and policymakers and as a tireless investigator who traveled to far-flung reservations, corresponded with countless Indian agents, and drafted scrupulously researched reports on his findings. Recounted in detail, his many adventures and behind-the-scenes activities--promoting education, striving to prevent the removal of the Southern Utes from Colorado, investigating reservation fraud, working to save the Piegans of Montana from starvation--afford a clear picture of Painter's importance to the overall reform effort to incorporate Native Americans into the fabric of American life. No other book so effectively captures the day-to-day and exhausting work of a single individual on the front lines of reform. Like most of his fellow advocates, Painter was an unapologetic assimilationist, a man of his times whose story is a key chapter in the history of the Indian reform movement. &nbsp;

Charles C. Painter: The Life of an Indian Reform Advocate

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Amelia Stone Quinton and the Women's National Indian Association: A Legacy of Indian Reform (Volume 2) (Women and the American West)

Divinely Guided: The California Work of the Women's National Indian Association (Women, Gender, and the West)

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.

Business & Money

Job Hunting & Careers

Texas Tech University Press

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