a biography of the day-mary lucinda bonney (educator, native american rights activist)
Biography: Mary Lucinda Bonney
Most 19th century female activists took on the causes of temperance and woman's suffrage. But Mary Lucinda Bonney tackled a different issue. Angered by Congress' attempt to nullify treaties that had reserved land for Native Americans, Bonney took action. She would be one of the most important figures in the movement for the protection of Native Americans' lands.
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While head of the Ogontz School, Bonney became active in missionary circles and associated with groups such as the Interdenominational Woman's Union Missionary Society of America for Heathen Lands. She turned her efforts toward domestic issues, however, when she heard of the Native Americans' plight.
Bonney drew on her missionary contacts to stop Congress from voiding treaties that guaranteed the Native Americans' reservations. In this work she promoted an approach originally favored by President Ulysses S. Grant in his peace policy of the late 1860s. By 1880 her petition campaign had 13,000 signatures and was sent to the notice of President Rutherford B. Hayes and Congress. The next year, Bonney stepped up her efforts and produced a second petition that won 50,000 signatures. This petition was presented to the Senate. By this time, Bonney's organization had come to be formally known as the Indian Treaty-Keeping and Protective Association. She was named its president.
Bonney's cause gathered strength. In 1882 she produced a petition that had twice as many signatures as the last one. This petition included a proposal for the distribution of tribal lands to Native Americans. Similar groups began to pop up including the men's Indian Rights Association. To distinguish themselves from this organization, Bonney's group changed its name to the Women's National Indian Association in 1883.
Although she resigned from the presidency of the association in 1884, Bonney remained vigorously active in missionary activities and Indian affairs. After her retirement from the Ogontz School four years later she met Reverend Thomas Rambaut at a conference for Protestant missionaries. Bonney was 72 when she married him. In her last years, she eventually returned to her hometown of Hamilton, New York. She died there on July 24, 1900.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/biography/grant-bonney/\
Mary Lucinda Bonney (1816-1900)
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When not attending to her school duties, Bonney spent her energy and time on supporting missionary work. She joined the Woman's Union Missionary Society of America for Heathen Lands, an interdenominational association that sent female missionaries to Asia to work with women there. Also a devout member of Philadelphia’s First Baptist Church, she became president of its Women’s Home Mission Circle, organized by Ella Covell Boardman, wife of the church’s pastor, Reverend George Dana Boardman, D. D., LL.D. This mission circle, which worked on behalf of America’s Indians, played an important role in the formation of the WNIA.
In April 1879, distressed to learn that Missouri Senator George G. Vest was pressing Congress to open up Indian-held lands in Indian Territory to both white settlement and the construction of railroads, Bonney appeared before the monthly meeting of the missionary circle with a petition written by Reverend Dr. Henry L. Wayland, editor of the National Baptist, protesting this invasion. Frustrated that the circle adjourned for the summer before it could consider the petition, and believing this invasion was “a moral evil” and would “hinder the work of Christianizing the Indians,” Bonney turned to her friend Amelia Stone Quinton, who had once taught at Chestnut Street Female Seminary and now attended her church. Together the two women pledged to do what [they] could to awaken the conscience of Congress and of the people. Like other upper-and-middle class American women, Bonney and Quinton were influenced by the growing importance of “women’s sphere,” a place for female political action that nonetheless differed from that of men. Together the two educators and reformers founded the Woman’s National Indian Association.
With Bonney providing the funding, nearly $500 during the first two years, and Quinton doing the research, they set to work. Denied the right to vote, they adopted the long established tradition of the petition drive. During the summer of 1879 they circulated some 7,000 copies of Reverend Wayland’s original petition, requesting that the president and Congress prevent white encroachment upon Indian lands. They circulated the petitions to officers of various women’s missionary groups and other benevolent societies. Bonney and two other members of her missionary circle presented the 300-foot long petition, signed by 13,000 citizens, to President Rutherford B. Hayes in February 1880.
Encouraged by their success, on May 5, 1880, Bonney suggested that the women form a Committee of Ways and Means within the missionary circle to aid in the distribution¬ of petitions and tracts. With Bonney acting mostly behind the scenes, Quinton, who was twenty years her junior, investigated official records, wrote leaflets, and attended meetings of missionary circles. Separating themselves from the First Baptist Church, they assumed a nonsectarian status, thus welcoming women of other Protestant denominations as members. They also went through various names changes before settling upon the WNIA.
In late January 1881, the women presented their second petition, again stressing the prevention of white encroachment and adherence to treaty provisions. This petition had been signed by 50,000 citizens representing a broad segment of the country’s population. Then on March 17, 1881, Bonney was elected as chairman of the small band of reformers with Quinton as organizational secretary. Before long Quinton had carried the organization’s work to twenty states and in February 1882, the group’s third petition, measuring 400-feet long and signed by 100,000 was presented to the president and Congress.
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http://www.nwhm.org/education-resources/biography/biographies/mary-lucinda-bonney/
