The White Man's Sins and the Indian Question: The Woman's Christian Temperance and American Indian Reform

This paper traces the intersecting political projects of white and American Indian temperance reformers.  It argues that many such activists intended to reform white men and masculinities as much as, and in tandem with, Indian men and manhood.  It finds that reformers drew on a long tradition of criticism of the social and political conduct of white men, particularly those who raped, stole land, broke treaties, bought elections, and sold liquor—a tradition rooted in the history of Indian temperance organizations and taken up and revised by white women in their own political challenge to white men. Differences emerged among white women about the relative promises and problems of “the white man’s laws, the white man’s school and the white man’s church.”  Indeed, in contrast to popular white stereotypes of “drunken” Indians, white temperance reformers held up certain American Indian men as models of sobriety, leadership, and protective manhood and as evidence of the broader failures of powerful white men and of white paternalism.  This led white reformers into political ventures with American Indian men, at times to the exclusion of Indian women. 

The paper situates temperance women’s Indian reform within the movement’s, and the era’s, racial discourse of “home protection” that involved white, black, and American Indian women—and men-- in debate about who needed protection, against whom, and from whom.