“Every Conveyance Known to This Country”: Native Mobility and Gender in the Early 20th Century

In 1927, Marie Bottineau Baldwin (Chippewa/French) related her history to a reporter in a way that drew upon familiar tropes of the progress of the frontier and vanishing Indians while also undermining those tropes. She explained that she had traveled in “practically very conveyance known to this country”—including travois, prairie schooner, and canoe—and then concluded with an enthusiastic account of herself flying over the nation’s capital in an airplane. This paper demonstrates how Baldwin and other Native women used their relationship to transportation technologies to defy stereotypes about Indigenous immobility (and thus primitivism) and to assert their place in the contemporary world. Ideas about Indigenous people and movement changed drastically over the course of the nineteenth century: non-Native people moved away from criticizing Indians as inveterate wanderers to describing them as confined to reservations and stuck in time. By the early twentieth century, popular culture emphasized the sharp contrast between new technologies of transportation and the solemn Indian standing by the side of the tracks or at the edge of the airport runway. In fact, however, some Native people were becoming the most mobile and modern in the nation. Building on historians who have demonstrated how Native people’s economic strategies in seeking out agricultural labor, going on the performance circuit, and engaging in urban construction work resulted in a great deal of Indigenous movement, this paper focuses on a group of Native women who used their high public profiles to deliberately and systematically engage the new technologies of transportation. These women used automobiles and airplanes to signal their place in modernity and to subvert non-Native attempt to portray them as primitive and exotic holdovers from the past.