Founded in Philadelphia in 1879, the Women's National Indian Association 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 Indian homes, missionary cottages, schools, and chapels, supported government teachers and field matrons, and funded 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 Northern California from 1886 to 1900, the WNIA concentrated their efforts at the Round Valley and Hoopa Reservations and realized their most unusual undertaking-the funding of the Green ville 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 in the organization's history, 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 eras sense of sphere, service, and sisterhood. Book jacket.