The Indian Industries League and its support of American Indian arts, 1893-1922: a study of changing attitudes toward Indian women and assimilationist policy

Abstract

This study examines the history of the Indian Industries League (IIL), a Boston reform organization established in 1893 to foster "civilized" industries among American Indians. The original aim was to assimilate Indians into the national life, but by 1900 the goal had shifted to promoting Indian arts. This study examines why so many Indian reformers abandoned their assimilationist goals after 1900. It finds that these reformers changed their minds not, as other scholars have suggested, because they had despaired of Indians' ability to assimilate, but because they came to value Indian artistic production and, by extension, Indian cultures themselves. Chapter 1 argues that the IIL organized to help Indian women develop civilized domestic industries in response to prevailing negative images of Indian women, images expressed in the literary works of Frances Sparhawk, the IIL's founder. Chapter 2 looks outside the Indian reform movement at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and at a subsequent decade of Arts and Crafts Movement rhetoric, both of which recast "primitive" women as skilled craftswomen and articulated defenses of Indian arts that the IIL itself would use after 1900. The third chapter suggests that female field workers affiliated with the IIL increasingly reported their growing respect for Indian cultures and pressured the IIL's leadership to rethink some negative stereotypes about Indians. Chapter 4 describes how Nellie Doubleday and other influential IIL members seized on field workers' reports, extolled the beauty of Indian arts, pointed to the income potential of such arts, and redirected the IIL’s support to a range of native industries — Oklahoma beadwork, California basketry, Pueblo pottery, Navajo weaving — that would benefit Indian women. Chapter 5 argues that in the IIL's efforts to revive, protect, and promote Navajo weaving, it anticipated some policy positions taken by later generations of Indian reformers. The final chapter analyzes the writings of IIL member Constance Goddard Du Bois to demonstrate that in their promotion of Indian arts, reformers could develop probing criticisms of American culture and sensitive understandings of Indian cultures.