Shall We Repeat Indian History in Alaska?, (23 January 1947) Philadelphia, PA

Context

Ruth Muskrat Bronson was born in 1897 as a member of the Cherokee Nation. Bronson described her hometown as “a little place called Whitewater, in Oklahoma, no town, just a lovely little stream out in the hills.”1 Bronson spent her early years at Cowskin Prairie, Oklahoma, where she lived with her parents James Muskrat and Ida Kelly.2 Her father’s ancestors were forced to walk the Trail of Tears and he was a member of the Keetoowah Society, a political organization formed in 1859 by full-bloods to protest the forced transfer of Indian tribal lands to individuals.3 His membership in the Society helped him interpret for the Dawes Commission.4 As a child, Bronson was forced to attend a federally controlled boarding school. Many American Indian children were forced to attend boarding schools to separate them from their culture and encourage them to assimilate into white society. Bronson attended Carlisle Indian School led by Richard Henry Pratt, who rejected any attempts to include American Indian culture in the curriculum and was known for his belief, “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”5 Bronson’s heritage and her upbringing led her to a life as an American Indian rights advocate and mentor.

Bronson’s career as an educator began when she taught in Oklahoma public schools from 1917 to 1919.  She went on to attend the University of Oklahoma in 1919, majoring in English and maintaining a busy social life as a member of the American Journalist Association, the Delaware County Club, the Christian Fellowship League, and Theta Sigma Phi, a professional fraternity for women in journalism and communications. Bronson soon left school for financial reasons and began working with the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in 1920. Her position was defined as a “residential coordinator.”6

Bronson extended her mentoring support to young American Indian girls in other states. At the Mescalero Apache Tribe in New Mexico in 1920, she aided these girls in readjusting to life after attending boarding schools. Bronson’s essay about this time in her life attracted the attention of two organizations—the YWCA and the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF). As Bronson expressed in her own words, this mentoring position “was the beginning of my determination to devote my energies to the Indian people.” The following year, the WSCF invited Bronson to represent American Indians at their conference in Beijing, China.7

Throughout this time, Bronson continued to take classes at two different universities. The YWCA awarded her a three-year scholarship to attend the University of Kansas where she enrolled in 1921 to study journalism. After her scholarship funds ran out, she became the first American Indian to enroll at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts where she studied English, economics, and sociology.8

Upon graduating from Mount Holyoke, Bronson joined the faculty at the Haskell Institute dedicated to educating American Indian and Alaskan Native students in Lawrence, Kansas.9 As an eighth-grade teacher, Bronson instilled Native-centered values in her students and inspired them with words like: “Indians are people too. Don’t forget that.” She also incorporated Native legends into English lessons when the students read Longfellow’s Evangeline.10 During her Haskell days, she found a life partner in John F. Bronson. They married and later adopted a baby girl.11

Across her career, Bronson continued her activism in support of American Indian rights. Most significantly, she delivered a speech at the White House addressed to President Calvin Coolidge during the 1923 Committee of One Hundred meeting.12 Her speech emphasized the need for American Indians to preserve their unique civilization and she called for expanding and strengthening the school system for American Indian children.13 Bronson also gave lectures in support of American Indian rights, which brought her to southeast Alaska in the late 1940s.14 During this period, Bronson opposed the Tongass Timber Act that permitted pulp companies to exploit American Indian lands in the Tongass National Forest. The Haida and Tlingit Nations were especially harmed by this act. Their protests, however, were disregarded. The act passed in Congress and President Harry S. Truman signed the act into law on August 8, 1947.15 This act ultimately led to the U.S. Forest Service selling “1,500,000,000 cubic feet” of timber from the Tongass National Forest.16

Bronson spoke out against the Tongass Timber Act in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania when she delivered the keynote address at the Indian Rights Association Convention in 1947.17 Her visit to Alaska in 1946 influenced her remarks as she garnered support for the Tlingit and Haida’s case against the U.S. government. She explained that despite being excellent traders and fishers, the Tlingit and Haida groups inched closer to poverty because fishing corporations illegally placed traps on their land and stole their supply of salmon. Bronson insisted that protecting American Indian property rights was an urgent and important matter, because defeating would “justify all the years of our existence as an organization to protect the rights of a defenseless minority.”18

Bronson’s unprecedented accomplishments continued across her career. She became the first woman Guidance and Placement Officer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.19 She secured loans and scholarships that sent over 2,300 American Indian students to college.20 She was also the Executive Secretary of the National Congress of American Indians (the leading American Indian rights organization) and the editor of their newsletter, the Washington Bulletin.21

Bronson’s commitments to American Indian causes was not deterred by her resignation from the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1943 and retirement in 1956.22 Her legacy continues in her poems, such as The Hunter’s Wooing, the short story, “The Serpent,” and her full-length book, Indians Are People, Too.23 As Bronson wrote in the latter, “for the Indian, past history is living history . . . As for America, it is well that she should remember those dark years lest she allow herself to be lulled once more into forgetfulness of the rights of her people.”24 Bronson spent the final years of her life with her husband in Arizona and took her final breath at age 84 on June 12, 1982.25

Endnotes

  1. Kirby Brown, Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Cherokee Writing (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), 174; “Her Kin Find Her a True Friend,” Christian Science Monitor, July 11, 1933, 2.
  2. Bronson’s mother was an English-Irish immigrant from Missouri. For more information about her mother and family, see: Brown, Stoking the Fire, 174-176; Liz Sonneborn, A to Z of American Indian Women, rev. ed. (New York: Facts on File, 2007), 31.
  3. Michael Lee Weber, “Redbird Smith Movement,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=RE015.
  4. The Dawes Commission was established by the U.S. Congress on March 3, 1893. It was a U.S. government-led effort and its members negotiated with full-bloods. The commission was authorized “to negotiate agreements with the Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Cherokee Indian tribes . . . to divide tribal land into plots which were then divided among the members of the tribe.” See: “Dawes Record,” National Archives and Records Administration, https://www.archives.gov/research/native-americans/dawes#:~:text=About%20the%20Dawes%20Commission&text=The%20commission%20became%20known%20as,the%20members%20of%20the%20tribe.
  5. Addison Kliewer, Miranda Mahmud, and Brooklyn Wayland, ‘“Kill the Indian, Save the Man’: Remembering the Stories of Indian Boarding Schools,” Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of Oklahoma, https://www.ou.edu/gaylord/exiled-to-indian-country/content/remembering-the-stories-of-indian-boarding-schools; Anne Ruggles Gere, “Indian Heart/White Man’s Head: Native-American Teachers in Indian Schools, 1880-1930,” History of Education Quarterly 45, no. 1 (2005): 51.
  6. Theta Sigma Phi, Nu Chapter papers, University of Minnesota Archives, https://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/14/resources/1415; Brown, Stoking the Fire, 175-176.
  7. “Her Kin Find Her a True Friend,” 2; Brown, Stoking the Fire, 175.
  8. Brown, Stoking the Fire, 176.
  9. “Her Kin Find Her a True Friend,” 2; Now a university, Haskell Indian Nations University has been operating for over 117 years and primarily focuses on educating American Indian and Alaskan Native students. See: “School History,” Haskell Indian Nations University, 2017, https://www.haskell.edu/about/history/.
  10. Esther Burnette Horn and Sally J. McBeth, Essie’s Story: The Life and Legacy of a Shoshone Teacher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 41-43.
  11. Sonneborn, A to Z of American Indian Women, 32.
  12. The Committee of One Hundred was a group of Indian leaders consisting of activists, scholars, and policy specialists who advised the federal government on issues pertaining to American Indians. In 1923, they spoke before President Coolidge to advocate for better educational facilities for American Indians. See: Linda D. Wilson, “Bronson, Ruth Margaret Muskrat (1897-1982),” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=BR035.
  13. Melanie Albanesi, “Read a Speech by a Native American Activist from the Early 1920s,” PBS, April 8, 2019,  https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/stories/articles/2019/4/8/speech-ruth-muskrat-bronson.
  14. Gretchen Smith, “Council of Church Women Plans 20th Annual Session,” The Sunday Star, September 17, 1944, B10.
  15. Stephen W. Haycox, “Economic Development and Indian Land Rights in Modern Alaska: The 1947 Tongass Timber Act,” Western Historical Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1990): 22–32.
  16. “Forest Service Offers Tongass Timber For Sale,” Nome Nugget, November 12, 1947,  https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84020662/1947-08-11/ed-1/seq-1/.
  17. We infer that this speech was given in Philadelphia based on our knowledge of the Indian Rights Association, but in some places, we have seen the speech location only listed as “Pennsylvania.” Finding Aid for Collection 1523: Indian Rights Association Records, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, April 2009, https://hsp.org/sites/default/files/legacy_files/migrated/findingaid1523ira.pdf.
  18. Ruth Muskrat Bronson, “Shall We Repeat Indian History in Alaska?,” para. 17.
  19. “Ruth Muskrat Gets Unique Indian Work, Cherokee Girl to Find Jobs for Educated People of Her Race,” Washington Post, January 25, 1931, A1.
  20. Sonneborn, A to Z of American Indian Women, 32.
  21. Thomas W. Cowger, The National Congress of American Indians: The Founding Years (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 53.
  22. Sonneborn, A to Z of American Indian Women, 32; Brown, Stoking the Fire, 206.
  23. Alexander Cavanaugh, “Re-Membering Cherokee Justice in Ruth Muskrat Bronson’s ‘the Serpent,’” The American Indian Quarterly 44, no. 1 (2020): 37-39; Ruth Muskrat Bronson, “The Hunter’s Wooing,” University of Oklahoma Magazine 10, no. 1 (October 1921).
  24. Ruth Muskrat Bronson, Indians Are People, Too (New York: Friendship Press, 1944), 34.
  25. Brown, Stoking the Fire, 206-207.