Last updated: May 11, 2026
Article
Alice Longfellow and the Massachusetts Indian Association
By Dr. Benjamin Pokross, Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow
On the morning of December 4, 1901, Alice Longfellow welcomed delegates from across the country to the annual meeting of the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA), held at the Old South Church in Boston. Longfellow, who a year earlier had been elected president of the Massachusetts Indian Association (MIA), took the opportunity to connect her organization’s work to better living conditions for Native people with the long history of Indigenous education in the state. “Even before the formation of the Indian Association,” she told the crowd, “the public mind of Massachusetts was occupied with the civilization and education of its Indian tribes.” Returning to the earliest days of European settlement, she described John Eliot’s seventeenth-century translation of the Bible into Wôpanâak (the Massachusett language) and the establishment in the 1640s of Harvard University’s “Indian College,” a school for Native Americans students. “The silent Indian figure on the Coat of Arms of the State,” she declared, “should remind us that his cause is ours, and that the Indian we have always with us.”1
“Indian reform”, as it was called at the time, consistently interested Alice Longfellow from the 1880s until the end of her life. Within the movement, she held leadership roles within the MIA and its Cambridge Auxiliary Branch, two of the most prominent organizations devoted to Native causes in Massachusetts. Longfellow’s work sheds light on the effect of these groups, who promoted an individualistic, Western approach to self-improvement that conflicted with Indigenous social structures and belief systems. Their advocacy for the promotion of the privatization of Indigenous land, assimilative educational practices, and missionaries were extremely disruptive to Native communities. It is difficult to ascertain Longfellow’s exact feelings about what she was doing with the MIA and the Cambridge Branch, as “Indian reform” was not a major topic of her correspondence. But examining the work of these organizations reveals the harm inflicted on Native communities by white philanthropists.
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The late 1870s and early 1880s was a period of increasing activism around issues involving Native people. Although there had been nation-wide missionary and reformist groups focused on Indigenous people and communities since at least the 1830s, the end of formal treaty making between the United States government and Native nations in the early 1870s brought new urgency to debates about the political, social, and economic future of Native Americans. In the minds of white reformers, the so-called “Indian question” hinged on the possibility of assimilation: Could Native people be brought into broader American culture, or was the only solution military subjugation?2 These discussions gained popular attention with the publication of Helen Hunt Jackson’s exposé on federal Indian policy A Century of Dishonor (1881) and her bestselling novel Ramona (1884), which together brought the plight of Indigenous people to a wide audience.
Boston was one of the centers of “Indian reform.” The publicity around Ponca leader Standing Bear’s successful lawsuit in 1879 to secure standing as a person before the law inspired the founding of the Boston Indian Citizenship Committee.3 Alice Longfellow was a member of this group, which aimed to raise money for the Poncas, who had been removed from their homelands in 1877.4 She also began supporting Indigenous and Black students at the Hampton Institute in 1883. Although now known as a historically Black college, Hampton was founded to educate not only Black but also Native students. Letters from many of these students thanking Alice Longfellow and describing their experiences at Hampton remain in the Longfellow House collections.
Yet Longfellow seems not to have been a member of the Massachusetts Indian Association when it was founded in Boston on January 22, 1883.5 The group was created as an auxiliary of the Women’s National Indian Association, an organization based in Philadelphia that attempted to influence federal Indian policy and fund missionary and educational efforts. The MIA was meant to assist in these efforts, focusing on two key missions, as laid out in its constitution:
First—To awaken, by every means in its power, a Christian public sentiment which shall move out Government to the abolition of all oppression of Indians within our national limits, and to the granting them the same protections of law that other races among us enjoy, and
Second—Itself to aid in education and mission work for and among Indians6
Its membership was made up of women from elite Boston society, including Harriet Hemenway, later a cofounder of the Audubon Society, Nancy Wyer Houghton, wife of the publisher Henry Oscar Houghton, and author Louisa May Alcott. Longfellow, it seems, joined the group early, as she appears as a “life member” in the first annual report published in January of 1884.
Longfellow took a more active role, however, when the “Indian Reform” movement came to Cambridge. She was influential in organizing the Cambridge Branch of the Massachusetts Indian Association from their first meeting on January 21, 1886. She was part of the team that wrote the Cambridge Branch’s constitution and served on the organization’s executive committee from its founding until November 1893. In 1886, she was also elected chair of public meetings, serving in that position until the end of 1890.7
Longfellow’s participation in “Indian reform” organizations was bolstered by her family and social connections to other members. Her uncle, Samuel Longfellow, was elected the first president of the Cambridge branch of the Indian Rights Association, the men’s counterpart to the MIA, in 1885. The 1886 list of members of the Cambridge Branch of the MIA includes Alice Longfellow’s aunt Mary Greenleaf and sister Anne Allegra Longfellow Thorp, several close friends from childhood and adulthood, and her co-founders of Radcliffe College Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Mary Greenough, and Lilian Horsford.8
As chair of public meetings, Alice Longfellow helped to organize events with prominent figures in the “Indian reform” movement. The Cambridge Branch hosted at least one speaker a year, often collaborating with the other local groups interested in Native issues, such as the Boston Indian Citizenship Committee and the Cambridge Branch of the Indian Rights Association.9 They held lectures and talks with speakers liker Omaha writer and activist Susette La Flesche, founder of the Women’s National Indian Association Alice Quinton, and General Samuel C. Armstrong, the director of the Hampton Institute. Longfellow organized some events even after she was no longer chair of public meetings. For example, she hosted the Northern Arapahoe priest and educator Sherman Coolidge and the missionary Mary C. Collins at her Cambridge home in July 1895.10
Longfellow took on an even more active role in the movement when she was elected as president of the MIA on December 18, 1900. It is not completely clear what led Longfellow to seek this position. One event that may have reignited her interest in issues surrounding Indigenous people was her and her family’s visit that summer to Desbarats, Ontario. The family had been invited by members of the Garden River First Nation to attend the first performance of their adaptation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem, The Song of Hiawatha. While there, Alice, her sister Anne Allegra Thorp, and their nephew, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, all received certificates giving them Ojibwe names.
Museum Collection (LONG 7563) / NPS Photo / James Jones
While its influence on her desire to become MIA president is uncertain, this visit, which was heavily covered in the press, certainly had an impact on the members of the association who voted for her. Announcing Alice’s new position, Mary E. Dewey, recording secretary for the MIA, offered three reasons for her election: “her own character, the memory of her distinguished father, the poet whom we all love and honor, and…the unique position she holds among the Ojibway Indians as an adopted daughter of their tribe.”11
During Alice’s tenure, the Massachusetts Indian Association continued its focus on financially supporting missionary and educational efforts among Native people across the United States. Closer to home, they also opened a bureau of information office on Beacon Street in downtown Boston to distribute information and advertise upcoming events.12 These events ranged from welcoming prominent speakers to hosting the National Conference of the Women’s National Indian Association in December 1901.
Alice Mary Longfellow Papers (LONG 16173)
Alice Longfellow was at the heart of all these activities. One final example shows her central role in supporting charitable work among Indigenous communities during this time. On July 12, 1903, Longfellow held a reception at her home for educators who worked with Native children and were in Boston for the National Educational Association’s annual meeting. “On one pleasant summer afternoon,” Mary Dewey wrote in her report for that year, “about one hundred and fifty teachers and other people interested in the Indian cause, were invited to Craigie House by Miss Longfellow, to enjoy the charms of the historic home and of its gracious mistress.” They had a special tour of the house and a reception on the lawn, where “Indian music” was performed. “Most pleasant was the reunion of those laborers in many far-separated fields,” Dewey concluded.13
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But what did the Massachusetts Indian Association and its Cambridge Branch actually do? Where was its money going? If Alice’s efforts were largely organizational and logistical, hosting speakers and raising money, they were in the service of these “Indian reform” groups’ overriding project: the assimilation of Native people. And the three main tools to make this happen were Christianization, education, and the privatization of land.
Breaking up collective ownership of land was the first goal these “Indian Reform” organizations pursued.14 They were major supporters of the 1887 General Allotment Act (known as the Dawes Act), federal legislation that allowed the government to divide tribal lands into individual plots, called “allotments.” Sponsored by Massachusetts Senator Henry L. Dawes (whose wife, Electa Allen Sanderson Dawes, was a founding member of the MIA), the law’s passage in 1887 was intended to promote assimilation among Native people by pushing them away from traditional subsistence practices towards farming and disrupting longstanding relationships with the land. Most profoundly, though, the law aimed to reshape Native American tribal communities into groups of individuals. As one Indian reformer put it, “the allotment system tends to break up tribal relations. It has the effect of creating individuality, responsibility, and a desire to accumulate property.”15
The work of “creating individuality”, was not finished, however, after the passage of the Dawes Act. As Alice herself suggested in her welcome speech to the WNAI in 1902, fifteen years after the law came into effect, “The question of tribes and agencies is still in a very unsatisfactory condition. The relation of the Indians to the National Government is unnatural, and stands in the way of the development of manhood and citizenship.”16 For women’s groups such as the MIA and the Cambridge Branch, their task after the Dawes Act was to financially support religious and educational training across Indian Country.
Although both groups paid students’ scholarships to attend large, off-reservation boarding schools such as the Hampton Institute and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, their primary focus was on paying the salary for teachers and missionaries going directly to Indigenous communities. They would often support the first several years of work in a particular place, before turning it over to a Christian missionary society.17 For the MIA and the Cambridge Branch, this pattern was repeated in several communities across the country, including among the Otoes of what was then called Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), the Dinè (Navajo) community around the San Juan Valley in New Mexico, and the Apache prisoners who had been removed from their homelands in Southern Arizona to Mobile, Alabama in the mid-1880s.
These teachers were instructing in traditional academic subjects, but the true aim of their pedagogy was to promote Western, Christian values. “It is for us to see,” wrote Mary Dewey in the MIA’s annual report for 1890, “that their instruction is supplemented by lessons in religion, morality, purity, and temperance, without which the ordinary school work is of small avail in forming character, that highest end of education.”18 The reports of the MIA and the Cambridge Branch are filled with letters from the field describing how Native pupils across the country were learning prayers, how to cook, and what clothes to wear and how to wash them. If the large boarding schools of the era are now known for the violence of their assimilative practices, these smaller, seemingly more benign institutions were no less committed to remaking their pupils into Protestant Americans.
Alice Mary Longfellow Papers (LONG 16173)
The work of assimilation occurred at more subtle levels as well. One place where this becomes apparent is in the practice of sending “Christmas boxes” of presents and supplies to Native communities, an activity undertaken by both the MIA and the Cambridge Branch. At the suggestion of Cora Folsom, a longtime instructor at the Hampton Institute, Longfellow proposed in November 1889 that the Cambridge Branch prepare one of these “Christmas boxes” to be sent to a school in the Sac and Fox Nation (located in what was then called “Indian Territory”).19 The school was overseen by Walter Battice, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation and a former student at Hampton who had corresponded with Longfellow for several years. In a letter thanking her, he described the influence the presents had on the community. “The xmas box came in due season and in good condition and the contents made many little souls happy,” he wrote. “It did us workers so much good to see the many bright faces that night. Our little School house was not large enough to hold all who came.”20
But the gifts were not only meant to spread holiday cheer. As noted in a report on their activities published in The Indian’s Friend, the Cambridge Branch included “among the toys…those that could be used for object-lessons in housekeeping, like a doll’s bedstead and dinner service.”21 These are gifts that would have been common to send to any child, regardless of race, during the period. But in this context, they cannot help but be part of a larger effort to push Indigenous youth to adopt Western customs of domesticity. Proponents of “Indian reform” thought that this focus on cooking, cleaning, and homemaking was essential to making Indigenous people “civilized.” Even toys could be tools to encourage Native children to adopt American customs.22 The Cambridge Branch’s gifts were both a personal gesture from Longfellow to her friend and part of a broader effort to assimilate Indigenous people.
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Alice Longfellow took a step back from her duties as president in 1904. She was unable to preside over the annual meeting at the end of 1903 and missed many of the organization’s gatherings and events the following year. She cited rheumatism as the reason for declining to attend the annual Mohonk Conference on Indian Affairs in 1902, and perhaps it was this illness that was hampering her work with the MIA.23 Nevertheless, on December 7, 1905, Alice Longfellow was elected honorary president in recognition of her work for the organization.24 She would hold this position for the rest of her life. Largely a ceremonial role, this title nevertheless suggests the esteem in which Longfellow was held by other members of the MIA.
What is the importance of exploring Alice Longfellow’s activities as a “Friend of the Indians”? “Indian reform” was just one of the many philanthropic and educational projects she promoted throughout her life. A strong supporter of education for women, for example, she was a key part of the founding of Radcliffe College (although she was much less vocal about women’s suffrage.) And by the time of her death in 1928, the “Indian reform” movement she had championed was in decline. The Cambridge Branch had been disbanded for five years and, while the MIA would survive until 1951, when the Women’s National Indian Association dissolved, its influence was already greatly reduced.25 Its aims were also increasingly critiqued; even government investigations such as the 1928 Meriam Report exposed the failures of “Indian reform’s” projects of allotment and boarding school education. Indigenous-led organizations like the Society of American Indians, founded in 1911, were becoming more prominent, allowing Native people to advocate more strongly for themselves.
Yet Alice Longfellow’s work for “Indian reform” is worth revisiting for how it allows us to understand how the intention of white philanthropists in the late 1800s and early 1900s to support Indigenous communities resulted in such harmful impact. For however sincere Longfellow was in desiring to establish “the entire relationship between the Indian and the American people…on a far better, juster and more reasonable basis,” the actions of the organizations she worked with did just the opposite.26
Perhaps no one expressed the failure of these white philanthropists more clearly than Yankton-Dakota writer Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Bonin). In a series of articles published in The Atlantic Monthly during the early months of 1900, Zitkala-Ša described her experiences both attending missionary schools and later serving as a teacher at the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Focusing on the everyday indignities of assimilationist policies, Zitkala-Ša’s series ended with a fierce denunciation of the white patrons who funded these institutions. Zitkala-Ša emphasized the complacent satisfaction white benefactors felt on tours of Carlisle as they examined examples of neatly printed essays written by Indigenous students. “But few there are,” she concluded, “who have paused to question whether real life or long-lasting death lies beneath this semblance of civilization.”27
It was that very “semblance of civilization” that Alice Longfellow promoted as a member of the MIA and the Cambridge Branch. The missionaries and educators these organizations supported aimed to transform the lives of Indigenous people across the United States in order to make them productive Americans. But a failed understanding of Indigenous society and its values meant that Longfellow and her fellow reformers undermined Native culture in their attempts to assimilate Indigenous individuals. Zitkala-Ša’s words are a reminder of the costs of this assimilation, costs that were unknown to people like Alice Longfellow.
Sources
- Longfellow’s speech was printed in The Indian’s Friend, the monthly magazine put out by the Women’s National Indian Association. Alice M. Longfellow, “The Address of Welcome”, The Indian’s Friend XIV.6 (February 1902), 2.
- Larry E. Burgess, “Introduction: What is a Woman Worth?” in The Women’s National Indian Association: A History, ed. Valerie Shere Mathes (University of New Mexico Press, 2015): 3-7.
- Valerie Sherer Mathes, “Boston, the Boston Indian Citizenship Committee, and the Poncas,” Massachusetts Historical Review, 14 (2012), 119-148.
- A full list of the members of the Boston Indian Citizenship Committee was published in 1891, with Alice Longfelow’s name appearing. “Boston Indian Citizenship Committee Memorial,” appendix to Thomas Jefferson Morgan, The Present Phase of the Indian Question (Frank Wood, 1891), 22–23.
- Alice Longfellow is not listed on a promotional circular meant to increase interest in the group. Massachusetts Indian Association, "[Circular]" ([Boston, 1883?]), Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA.
- Annual Report of the Massachusetts Indian Association, January 1884 (Frank Wood, 1884), 4.
- For the early days of the Cambridge Branch, see Vol. I, 1886-1888, Box 1, Folder 1, Cambridge Branch of the Massachusetts Indian Association Records, 1886-1923, History Cambridge, Cambridge, MA.
- “The Constitution of the Cambridge Branch of the Massachusetts Indian Association and a List of its Officers and Members,” 1886, in Series I. Personal Materials, 4. Charities, in the Alice Mary Longfellow Papers (LONG 16173), Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters NHS, Cambridge, MA.
- Valerie Sherer Mathes, “The Banner Association: Twenty-Five Years in Massachusetts” in The Women’s National Indian Association, ed. Mathes (University of New Mexico Press, 2015), 155.
- For Coolidge and Collins’ visit, see “Massachusetts Indian Association: Cambridge Branch: Annual Report 1895,” 4.
- Nineteenth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Indian Association, November 1901, (Miss A.F. Grant, 1902), 7. Alice Longfellow’s “adoption” by the Ojibway is also mentioned in an article reporting on her election. “The Nation’s Ward” Boston Evening Transcript, December 18, 1900.
- Nineteenth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Indian Association, November 1901, (Miss A.F. Grant, 1902), 7.
- Twenty-First Annual Report of the Massachusetts Indian Association, November 1903 (Powell Press, 1904), 7.
- For a concise overview of the effects of the Dawes Act, see “Introduction: What’s Done to the People Is Done to the Land” in Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations under Settler Siege, ed. Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O’Brien (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), xi-xxviii.
- Quoted in Justice and O’Brien, “Introduction”, xvi.
- Alice M. Longfellow, “The Address of Welcome,” The Indian’s Friend XIV.6 (February 1902), 2.
- Mathes, “The Banner Association,” 154.
- Eighth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Indian Association, November 1890 (J Stillman Smith & Co., 1890), 6.
- Cambridge Branch Records, Vol. 2, p. 31. Cambridge Branch of the Massachusetts Indian Association Records, 1886-1923, History Cambridge, Cambridge, MA.
- Walter Battice to Alice Mary Longfellow, 7 January 1890, Series II. Correspondence, C. Scholarship Student Correspondence, 1874-1925, in the Alice Mary Longfellow Papers (LONG 16173), Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters NHS, Cambridge, MA.
- “From the Cambridge Branch,” The Indian’s Friend ii.7 (March 1890), 3.
- For more on the “object-lessons” of the WNAI, see Jane E. Simonsen, Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860-1919 (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
- Longfellow was invited to the Lake Mohonk Conference on Indian Affairs yearly from 1900, when she was elected president of the MIA, to 1907. For the letter where she describes her rheumatism, see Alice Longfellow to Albert Smiley, October 16, 1902, Smiley family papers (HC.MC-1113), Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections, Haverford, PA.
- Twenty-Third Annual Report of the Massachusetts Indian Association (Canton: 1905), 5.
- Mathes, “The Banner Association,” 166.
- Alice M. Longfellow, “The Address of Welcome,” The Indian’s Friend XIV.6 (February 1902), 2.
- Zitkala-Ša, “An Indian Teacher Among Indians,” The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 85, Issue 509 (March 1900), 386.