Lydia Maria Child’s Advocacy and An Appeal for the Indians

Evolution of Literary Advocacy and Indigenous Rights Lydia Maria Child’s An Appeal for the Indians represents a late-career return to Indigenous rights, a core theme that first animated her literary work in her 1824 novel Hobomok. Across four decades, Child consistently addressed Native American experiences across multiple genres, including short fiction, journalism, and children’s literature. She integrated Indigenous perspectives into her comparative treatise History of the Condition of Women (1835) as well as her broader abolitionist writings. Published after 44 years of active literary engagement, An Appeal for the Indians serves as her most comprehensive statement on Native American policy while reflecting both the strengths and constraints of 19th-century abolitionist reform models.

An Appeal for the Indians was initially serialized in the National Anti-Slavery Standard under the title "A Plea for the Indian" on April 11 and 18, 1868, before being reissued as a standalone pamphlet later that year. Child urged fellow reform activists to champion Indigenous rights while maintaining active vigilance over the civil and political rights of newly emancipated African Americans following the Civil War (1861–1865). The post-war era saw intense westward expansion, where expanding railway and road infrastructure threatened the bison herds central to Plains Indian economies, leading to heightened conflicts with white settlers. Major military clashes erupted, including conflicts with the Minnesota Santee Sioux in 1862 and the Colorado Teton Sioux and Cheyenne in 1864–1865. These hostilities included the Sand Creek massacre of 1864, in which U.S. troops killed and mutilated 105 Cheyenne women and children, as detailed in congressional testimony.

In response to widespread regional instability, the U.S. Congress established the Indian Peace Commission, which submitted its official report on January 7, 1868. The commission recommended confining Native American tribes to reservations administered by federal authorities, transitioning indigenous economies from hunting to agriculture and manufacturing, shifting social structures from communal to individual landholding, and eliminating tribal identity by eradicating indigenous languages to create a uniform national population. Child directly cited and evaluated these policy recommendations in the opening section of her treatise.

Refutation of Racial Hierarchy and Educational Innovations Lydia Maria Child addressed An Appeal for the Indians directly to the Indian Peace Commission and a public that largely held the belief that Indigenous peoples were inherently incapable of adopting European-style civilization. Drawing on the analytical framework established in her 1833 work An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, Child systematically rejected theories of biological racial hierarchy. She noted that European societies themselves originated from tribal or "barbaric" roots, arguing that historical and modern atrocities committed by European nations equaled or exceeded the violence attributed to Indigenous warfare. Furthermore, Child emphasized that Native American traditions of religious tolerance and child-rearing practices provided positive moral models for European Americans.

Critiquing what she characterized as "haughty Anglo-Saxon ideas of force" embedded in federal peace policies, Child advocated for educational programs rooted in positive incentives and cultural pride. She proposed creating bilingual educational readers for Native American students that incorporated selections from tribal literature and history. Modeled after her 1865 educational anthology for freed slaves, The Freedmen's Book, this pedagogical proposal anticipated modern multicultural curricula.

Despite her progressive educational proposals, Child’s overarching reform framework ultimately viewed cultural assimilation as the primary objective for Native American education. Her commitment to racial integration, derived from her abolitionist principles, led her to reject cultural separatism. Additionally, Child subscribed to 19th-century unilineal evolutionary theories that ranked human societies on an ascending scale from "savagery" and "barbarism" to pastoralism and "civilization". Consequently, her theoretical model assumed that social progress required Indigenous communities to gradually set aside traditional cultural practices in favor of Western societal structures.

Pedagogical Discussion Points and Analytical Prompts For Discussion or Writing
1. Analyze how Lydia Maria Child structures the core arguments in An Appeal for the Indians. How does her organizational framework serve her rhetorical goals, and what impact might this structure have on her target audience?

2. Examine Child’s short story "Willie Wharton" (published five years prior to An Appeal for the Indians) in conjunction with her 1868 pamphlet. How do these two works complement each other, and what do they collectively reveal about her views on the position of Native Americans within U.S. society?

3. Compare An Appeal for the Indians with Child’s 1833 treatise An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. What similarities and differences emerge regarding her conceptualization of race, culture, and rhetorical strategy across these two reform texts?

4. Contrast Child’s arguments in An Appeal for the Indians with William Apess’s essay "An Indian’s Looking-glass for the White Man". How do their respective rhetorical styles, strategies, and perspectives on Native American rights compare?