Eugenic maternalism and the figure of the ‘Indian maiden’ in young women’s organizations: the Wauneita Society and the Camp Fire Girls

In the early twentieth century in North America, as Philip J. Deloria (Dakota) has observed, non-Indigenous women began to join the men who had been ‘playing Indian’ since the late eighteenth century. This paper considers the Wauneita Society, formed in 1910 as the women students' organization at the University of Alberta in western Canada. Like the young women's organization the Camp Fire Girls, also formed in 1910, the Wauneitas' costumes and performances drew on the figure of the ‘Indian maiden’ that circulated in commercial and popular culture in Canada and the US. This paper draws attention to similarities between the Wauneitas and the Camp Fire Girls, situating both organizations in settler colonial ideologies of eugenic maternalism. It suggests that when white women dressed up as ‘Indian maidens,’ they enacted the ‘logic of elimination’ that Deloria has shown is fundamental to all Indigenous impersonation, while also affirming that the logic of elimination has as its ideological correlative a logic of population. In this register the work of white women as eugenic ‘mothers of the race’ would be central, and the image of the early twentieth-century white ‘Indian maiden’ would index the colonial state's increasing interference with Indigenous women's reproductive bodies.