Remembrance and reform: A multi -generational saga of a Euro -American -Indian family, 1739-1924

"Remembrance and Reform: A Multi-Generational Saga of a Euro-American-Indian Family, 1739-1924" presents an historical narrative of Indian/white relations through the histories of the Huebner and Gibson families. The primary sources, which have been inaccessible to other historians, reveal an extensive and intimate family history that spans two centuries of American history. Their story integrates multiple histories of the American West chronologically and spatially, and it complicates the traditional narratives of conquest and dispossession. This dissertation shows how one group of Euro-Americans and Indians came together to form families and communities in order to survive the difficulties that surrounded them. These associations were not free of conflicts. This study examines how later generations remembered their ancestral histories, which inspired some of them to work in Indian reform movements during the 1920s.;Through an examination of individuals from the Huebner family, this study traces the complicated history of the Moravians' evangelization of North American Indians, which was both egalitarian (in comparison to other European missionaries) and ethnocentric. The Moravian church's most successful effort at forming interracial Christian communities with Euro-Americans and Indians ended tragically with the massacre of ninety-six Indian converts at Gnadenhutten, Ohio in 1782. In 1800, the Moravians made a final attempt at interracial co-existence in the borderland regions of Ohio, but this too ended when internal tensions in the Indian mission community and external pressures from the new and expanding nation prompted the permanent removal of the Moravian Indians to Oklahoma territory in 1823.;As a racially integrated Scots-Irish/Indian family in the trans-Appalachian west in 1800, the Gibsons' experience stands in contrast to the traditional historical narrative of the westward expansion of Anglo-Americans onto Indian lands. The matriarch of the family, Nancy Larison Gibson, was herself a Native American. She was a prominent midwife and healer in her community in Ohio (1807-1870), and her presence in the midst of a Scots-Irish family forces a reconsideration of an older historical narrative based on Euro-American advance and indigenous retreat.;The massacre at Gnadenhutten in 1782 challenged the Moravians' calling to evangelize the Indians and brought their identity as a church and a people of God into question. This study largely turns on the events of that day and analyzes how, over the course of the nineteenth century, the leadership of the Moravian church at Bethlehem and the congregants at the local level sought to understand the meaning of the massacre at Gnadenhutten through commemoration, memorials, and pageantplays. This dissertation explores the relationship between the collective memory of the village of Gnadenhutten and the private memory of the Huebner family. It examines how the community's commemorations of both its indigenous heritage and the massacre shaped its residents' understanding of indigenous history and the Moravians' specific actions in the past.;The marriage of Francis Huebner and Anna Gibson Alloway in 1898 brought together two family heritages of Euro-American-Indian intersection. "Remembrance and Reform" concludes with an examination of the Indian reform-mindedness of Francis and Anna, whose shared commitment to better the lives of Native Americans inspired them to work for land rights and religious freedom on the behalf of Indians.;Historians of Indian reform have generally focused their attention on two late-nineteenth century ideological strains, assimilation and primitivism. Both reform strains imposed white reformers' ideas of what they thought was best for Indian peoples, which in the end limited Native Americans' agency and self-determination. Anna and Francis's ideas about white/Indian relations represented a third ideological strain of white Indian reformers who advocated both assimilation and the preservation of Indian culture. My study argues that this strain of reform afforded Native Americans a higher degree of agency. By the 1920s, it gained national currency through the reform work of an unexpected alliance between California clubwomen, like Anna Huebner, Indian reformer John Collier, and the Pueblos of the Southwest. Their efforts culminated in the transformative 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, which reversed the 1887 Dawes Act and strove to ensure tribal sovereignty and self-determination.