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chapter 14 “Assaulting the Ears of Government” The Indian Homemakers’ Clubs and the Maori Women’s Welfare League in Their Formative Years Aroha Harris Mary Jane Logan McCallum Introduction In the summer of 1945, Indian Homemakers’ Clubs from southern Ontario congregated in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory for their first annual convention. The gathering marked eight years of the Clubs’ existence in Canada and signaled a significant era of First Nations women’s cultural and political activity. Six years later in September 1951, some 300 Maori women gathered in Wellington, New Zealand, to attend the inaugural conference of the Maori Women’s Welfare League. The first such meeting of Maori womanhood, it was the pinnacle of many months of organizing, and many decades of Maori women’s participation in women’s voluntary organizations. The Clubs and the League represented new units of social and political organization—units sponsored into existence by the Department of Indian Affairs in Canada and Maori Affairs in New Zealand. The departments relied upon the Indigenous women participants to further state goals of assimilation , integration, and citizenship within Indigenous communities, urging the women to apply themselves, in the spirit of self-help, to the important role of providing happy and integrated, yet culturally distinct, home environments that produced citizens of the modern world. Meanwhile, the women involved viewed their womanhood and citizenship through the lens of Indigeneity, and from that position authoritatively discussed and debated welfare issues in their respective communities while simultaneously devoting themselves to the broad goals of Indigenous development. Consciously or not, they also shaped the social and political histories of Indigenous women in Canada and New Zealand. This chapter aims to complicate depictions of mid-twentieth-century Indigenous women’s organizations as conservative or complicit with the state.1 We challenge common historical narratives about Indigenous women, which place them apart from the modern world, as fixed and passive objects colonial policies and systems processed and eventually exceeded. In fact, the Maori Women’s Welfare League and the Indian Homemakers’ Clubs are an important link between earlier Indigenous women’s social and reform efforts of the late nineteenth century and Indigenous political movements of the 1960s. Our collaborative trans-Indigenous research also recognizes the women’s interactions and negotiations with the state as distinctly Indigenous. While materially and practically tied to the state’s policies of integration, the women involved consistently prefaced their womanhood and their citizenship with their Indigeneity. Focusing on the formative years of the Clubs and the League (the late 1930s to the 1960s), this chapter explores some of the key activities of the two organizations . In addition to local activities, each organization coordinated efforts on a broader scale, including developing their constitutions and hosting regional conventions in Canada and national conferences in New Zealand. At all levels, members organized activities and discussion that reflected the priorities of the groups themselves including their concerns about the state. Our analysis of the constitutions and meetings shows that Indigenous women were active participants in workable (though often strained) relationships with the Departments of Indian and Maori Affairs. These government agencies were neither anonymous nor unknown and were optimally positioned to direct government resources to Indian and Maori communities. Club and League women recognized and even respected state expectations, yet reworked state goals to meet their own. They creatively navigated the tensions that existed between state expectations and the women’s aspirations for themselves, their families and communities. They used the organizations to enter the public sphere and engage with what they saw as the most important and relevant Indigenous political and community issues of the mid–twentieth century. Formation and Organizational Structures The founding and expansion of the Indian Homemakers’ Clubs hinged on a number of overlapping developments. Dr. Thomas Robertson, Inspector of Indian Agencies for Saskatchewan, is commonly cited as the founder of the Clubs, with the first Club established in 1937 in Saskatchewan (Milne 2004: 63; Magee 2009: 28). By 1940, a “large number” of Clubs had been initiated under Robertson’s direction, in addition to “a number of somewhat similar groups” organized in British Columbia, Manitoba and Ontario (DMRRIAB 1941: 187). Regional differences in Clubs have influenced contemporary historical scholarship (for example, Milne 2004; Magee 2009; Edwards 2005; Barkaskas 2009) and the analysis of the Homemakers’ here focuses primarily on Clubs located in the “Eastern Region,” an area covering southeastern Quebec to southwestern Ontario. 226 aroha harris and mary jane mccallum [3.144.42.196] Project MUSE (2024-04-19...

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