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1. Making the Modern Meskwaki Nation
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1. Making the Modern Meskwaki Nation In 1934 the four hundred residents of the Meskwaki settlement were as much in need of a new deal as the rest of the nation. They lived in small, wood-framed houses without electricity or running water, as did many of their white neighbors in the days before Franklin D. Roosevelt’s rural electric cooperatives lit up the countryside. Meskwaki women drew water from outside hand pumps and carried it to their homes, did their washing by hand, and chopped the wood they burned to stave off the bitter cold of long Iowa winters. Still, their two-room houses often were cold. In warm weather people compensated for their small houses in part by the widespread use of summer houses—rectangular pavilions with plank floors and benches along the walls—where families slept, lounged, and ate during pleasant weather. Women did much of their food preparation and other work outside beneath a cook shack—a roof of tree branches supported by four poles. Even twenty years later, anthropology students who stopped by for interviews sometimes took note of a stew simmering in an iron pot suspended over a fire by a chain.1 Many families lacked their own wells, and some had to carry their water a mile or more. Washday was particularly difficult for women with large families, who did the washing outside in the summer in a tub or, in some cases, with the aid of a gas-powered washing machine . “When I have to wash . . . hard work,” said a mother of nine who had only a washtub for laundry. The settlement school tried to make up for the lack of indoor plumbing by offering weekly baths for children. Although white medical care paid for by the federal government was available from a Tama doctor, some people preferred 30 making the modern meskwaki nation their own cures and picked special plants to make teas or soups for stomach aches and other ailments. Despite the hard conditions, the Meskwaki community grew steadily during the 1930s, adding an average net of ten people a year from 1934 to 1944.2 Some men farmed portions of the tribe’s 3,253 acres, but the tribe’s informal land assignment system over the years had resulted in wide variances in land distribution. A few families had as much as 60 acres of land while others had only enough for a homestead and garden. Even the larger holdings were not viable farming operations given the glutted commodity markets of the 1930s. The jobs in surrounding towns that had been the backbone of the Meskwaki cash economy mostly vanished when the Great Depression erased much of the nation’s economic activity. In the late 1930s, as the low prices of the Depression-era farm economy choked off business activity in rural areas, half of the Meskwaki depended on federal relief. Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace, an Iowan, noted that the Depression left the cash-poor Meskwaki with little to live on besides corn, beans, and squash.3 In 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt named John Collier to be head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (bia), and the same year Collier promised Native Americans a new deal to parallel that being designed for the rest of society. The centerpiece of the Indian New Deal, the Indian Reorganization Act, passed in 1934 and was intended to give tribes more independence in running their own affairs, greater religious freedom, and more ways to improve their local economies. On the Meskwaki settlement the Indian New Deal also brought immediate relief in the form of Civilian Conservation Corps (ccc) jobs and paychecks to some people. Young men planted a pine forest as the start of a timber program, installed erosion control measures on Meskwaki farmland, and built a road three-fourths of a mile long. ccc workers also started, but did not finish, a stone building on Meskwaki land bordering U.S. Highway 30 that was designed to be used for selling souvenirs to passersby on the transcontinental highway. In 1937 the Works Progress Administration set up a cannery that helped women preserve a portion of their garden produce for winter consumption. It [54.172.169.199] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:46 GMT) making the modern meskwaki nation 31 closed, however, when the government employee who started it died. For those without jobs, the Indian New Deal also brought government relief in the form of surplus commodities such...