About this Event
This talk takes up the aesthetics and politics of domestic space in relation to nineteenth century U.S. federal Indian policy. It examines a seemingly minor self-help homebuilding and home loan project for students and graduates of Indian boarding schools funded by the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA), a ladies’ aid society that became an important state proxy for social programs for Native peoples. Administrators used the project to argue for the success of individual land tenure as an assimilative tool in congressional deliberations over the Dawes Act (1887), which resulted in ninety million acres of Indigenous land loss through its redistribution policies. The WNIA instrumentalized both the authority of rational-legal state bureaucracy and the aesthetics of homebuilding, homemaking, and even home financing as feminized forms of care to wrest power for themselves within patriarchal government systems while buttressing the gendered and racial hierarchies of White supremacy. For participants, homebuilding presented opportunities for exercising rights typically denied them without citizenship status, even while they often rejected attempts to control their financial and social activities. With its origins in the physical violence of the boarding school and its outcomes in the symbolic violence of dispossession, this talk argues the model cottage made material new forms of tutelary governance which would characterize U.S. imperial projects in self-help housing and school building over the following century.
Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Heyman Center for the Humanities, East Campus Residence Hall, New York, United States
