I

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, three major philanthropic organizations for the protection of Indigenous rights were established around the Anglophone world: the British Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS, 1837–1947); the American Indian Rights Association (IRA, 1882–1994); and the Australian Association for the Protection of Native Races (APNR, 1911–51). Influenced by their respective local contexts, these organizations developed unique analyses of the barriers to peaceful colonization, devised unique methodologies for tackling those barriers, and adopted different roles within their territorial boundaries. Moreover, each organization belonged to a fundamentally different political formation: the APS to an imperial metropole, the IRA to an independent nation-state, and the APNR to a self-governing colony. Such differences have dissuaded historians from considering these organizations within the same analytical frame, yet there were also substantial similarities across the groups beyond their contextual differences. They were each based on the same premise, that Indigenous peoples suffered greatly from colonization by Western powers. They shared the same overarching project of facilitating the colonization of Indigenous lands by conciliating Indigenous peoples and amalgamating them under British authority. They also shared the same overall structures, consisting of governing committees packed with notable politicians, clergymen, and anthropologists working together to raise public funds and influence public opinion.

Bringing these organizations together under one analytical frame provides new insights into humanitarian entanglements with colonial governance across the Anglo World. Specifically, I argue that these organizations all shared the same function within their greater political systems: that is, each was explicitly dedicated to subsidizing, supporting, and strengthening their government’s capacity to implement policies towards Indigenous peoples. For the APS, public apathy towards Indigenous peoples was perceived as the chief obstacle, inasmuch as the lack of pressure by public constituencies failed to generate sufficient motivation on the part of their parliamentary representatives to formulate humanitarian policies. The APS consequently dedicated itself to making Indigenous affairs interesting to the British public by ‘communicat[ing] in cheap publications, those details which may excite the interest of all classes’.Footnote ¹ The IRA, too, had a focus on public engagement, working ‘to enlighten the public upon Indian affairs, and bring a direct and indirect influence to bear on their representatives in Congress’.Footnote ² However, instead of apathy, the IRA believed that public ignorance was the biggest barrier to developing effective Indigenous policies. Thus, unlike the APS, whose contentment with regurgitating facts it collated from newspapers and private correspondents led to constant problems with false and unreliable information,Footnote ³ the IRA devised the unique strategy of obtaining its own facts by ‘constantly send[ing] its representatives to the widely-scattered Indian reservations for the purpose of getting fresh and accurate information’.Footnote ⁴ The APNR, upon its founding, proclaimed a nearly identical raison d’etre as the IRA, founded upon countering the negative impacts of ‘insufficient local knowledge’ by gathering accurate intelligence and disseminating it via the public press.Footnote ⁵ In operation, however, the APNR was less concerned with rousing the public to apply pressure on their political representatives than it was with chastising the public for failing to support the administrative measures already put in place. As it wrote in its second year of operation, ‘the association fully recognizes the efforts which the State Governments are making to deal with the difficult aboriginal problem, and is anxious to encourage and assist the Governments by rousing a better public opinion in the community’.Footnote ⁶

By exploring the shared function of the APS, IRA, and APNR in generating public support for crafting and implementing Indigenous policies, I contribute to a rapidly expanding historiography on the entanglement of humanitarian discourses in the construction of colonial governmental systems. Much of this scholarship traces back to Alan Lester and Fae Dussart’s trail-blazing work, which explored how a series of British imperial administrators constructed colonial governmental systems in which the administration of Indigenous welfare was fundamentally integrated into the purposes of settler states.Footnote ⁷ This idea has since been expanded in various directions. Amanda Nettelbeck, examining the development of Indigenous protection policies across the Australian colonies, shows that Australian governments adopted humanitarian discourses of protection in order to regulate Indigenous labour and assert settler legal jurisdiction over Indigenous lands, all in an overarching project to transform Indigenous peoples into ‘governable colonial subjects’.Footnote ⁸ Rebecca Swartz, focusing on educational facilities in the settler colonies, demonstrates how humanitarian ideas about the civilization of barbarous peoples merged with settler demands for a cheap labour force to produce the transnational phenomenon of Indigenous industrial schools.Footnote ⁹ This scholarship has generated valuable insights into the contingency of colonial governmental systems on their appropriation of humanitarian discourses.

However, by focusing on the adoption of humanitarian discourses by government officials, this work has so far failed to attend to the role of voluntary humanitarian activism, which has largely developed along an entirely different historiographical strain. Henry Reynolds provided one of the first in-depth examinations of Australian individuals, mostly missionaries, who criticized their societies and their governments for unjust, dishonourable, and immoral relations with Indigenous peoples. Such humanitarians, according to Reynolds, were hated, lonely, and most often ‘outsiders, eccentrics, [and] obsessive personalities’, yet he also contends that their critiques are evidence that questions about the morality of colonization were present from the very beginning.Footnote ¹⁰ Celia Haig-Brown and David Nock released a similar anthology of notable settler humanitarians, again often missionaries, but this time focused on Canada. Haig-Brown and Nock use the criticisms that these ‘exceptional people’ heaped upon their society’s exploitation of Indigenous peoples to problematize notions that settler societies were monolithically hostile to indigeneity, and to challenge ‘the presentist claim that, at the time, “we” Canadians thought that we were doing the right thing’.Footnote ¹¹

A series of more recent scholarship has problematized the representations forwarded by Reynolds, Haig-Brown, and Nock of settler humanitarianism as a niche ideology of eccentrics and exceptional people, instead demonstrating the embeddedness of humanitarian debates within settler public discourse. Kenton Storey contends that while ‘evangelical humanitarianism’ representing ‘a commitment to protect all Indigenous peoples’ may have been the province of a few exceptional people, ‘rhetorical humanitarianism’ representing ‘the strategic, and often cynical, use of humanitarian language to promote the interests of colonists’ was widespread in late-nineteenth-century New Zealand and Vancouver Island.Footnote ¹² Similarly, Alison Holland identifies crucial differences between white humanitarian demands and Indigenous demands in Australia in the early twentieth century, demonstrating that whereas Indigenous activists tended to demand self-determination, white humanitarians typically limited their demands to enlightened political reforms that ultimately maintained the status quo of settler political hegemony.Footnote ¹³ Jane Lydon argues that the mass circulation of images of Indigenous Australians in chains through the twentieth century, although intended to inspire sympathy by a small group of humanitarian actors, actually ‘functioned less as proof of inhumanity than as a means of naturalizing the subjugation of Aboriginal people’.Footnote ¹⁴ And Ann O’Brien argues that Australian humanitarian activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who demanded urgent action to save a ‘dying race’ functioned to naturalize the forceful assimilation of Indigenous peoples ‘for their own good’.Footnote ¹⁵

There have thus been two separate historiographical trajectories on the links between humanitarianism and colonization, one focused on government policies, and the other focused on individual voluntary activism. These trajectories have certainly intersected at various times, such as when O’Brien explores how humanitarian activists in Australia augmented their government’s ability to construct assimilatory infrastructure by raising private donations for building mission stations and hiring teachers, a convergence of private philanthropic and government policy echoed in Canada’s alliance with church and missionary groups for funding and facilitating residential schools.Footnote ¹⁶ For the most part, however, humanitarian philanthropists continue to be represented as opponents rather than allies of government, as when Joanna Cruickshank and Patricia Grimshaw suggest that one of the tensions ‘inherent in settler colonial humanitarianism’ was an ‘insistent emphasis on the collective responsibility of the settler state’ that precluded reflection on ‘personal culpability in colonization’.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet the APS, IRA, and APNR were not inherently antagonistic towards their governments. James Heartfield points out that, especially in the late nineteenth century, the APS was very much supportive of the British Colonial Office, in that it was ‘pressing for the protection of the aborigines by extension of colonial rule over greater territory’.Footnote ¹⁸ The IRA explicitly stated at its inauguration that it was ‘in hearty sympathy with the general policy advanced by the Indian Bureau’,Footnote ¹⁹ and the APNR was equally open about its willingness ‘to strengthen the hands of the Government’.Footnote ²⁰ By exploring how these organizations went about strengthening the hands of their governments through generating public interest, producing knowledge, and building public support for government initiatives, I aim to demonstrate some of the ways in which public humanitarian activism and humanitarian governance were intertwined over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Problematically, bringing the APS, IRA, and APNR together under a single analytical frame may flatten somewhat the long and complex history of humanitarianism, which obviously changed drastically between the creation of the APS in 1837 and the decline of the APNR in 1951. By the mid-nineteenth century, a range of factors including scientific debates over evolution (i.e. the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859), reactions to conflicts like the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865, and political debates over democratization had facilitated a shift in British perceptions of race. Whereas the APS was founded upon the early-nineteenth-century idea that all races had been made equal by the Christian god (ab uno sanguine, or ‘of one blood’, was the APS’s motto), by the late-nineteenth century this belief in human equality came under siege by pseudo-scientific ideas around survival of the fittest and ‘fatal impact theory’, in which Indigenous peoples were theorized as doomed to extinction upon contact with ‘superior’ races.Footnote ²¹ The social and political role of humanitarian organizations also shifted dramatically over this period. The APS was rooted in what Michael Barnett calls ‘alchemical humanitarianism’, in which activists sought to fundamentally alter what they perceived to be negative social elements (i.e. slavery, heathenism, or ‘savagery’).Footnote ²² Conversely, by the early twentieth century, the popularity of international humanitarian campaigns such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (1863) and the Save the Children Fund (1919) had crystalized a new approach of ‘emergency humanitarianism’, in which activism was directed towards relieving specific temporally and geographically defined moments of suffering without attending to deeper social maladies.Footnote ²³

Importantly, however, these changes were not as totalizing as some accounts would suggest. In terms of racialization, Hilary Carey demonstrates that earlier beliefs in a shared religious humanity were not so much abandoned as they were adapted to new scientific discourses.Footnote ²⁴ Similarly, Kathleen Vongsathorn uses the example of Britain’s ‘fight against leprosy’ between 1890 and 1960 to show that there was no clean division between alchemical and emergency humanitarianism, but that elements of both approaches blended together in myriad ways over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ²⁵ My purpose in bringing together the APS, IRA, and APNR is not to deny, ignore, or flatten historical differences, but to problematize an over-emphasis on such differences which have tended to overshadow the significance of continuities. These were certainly different organizations with vastly different temporal contexts, yet they also shared fundamentally similar relationships with their respective government structures that highlight substantial continuities in Indigenous rights protection over the early nineteenth and the mid twentieth centuries.

Lastly, I want to make a brief statement on my choice of organizations to include in this article. These three groups were not by any means the only Indigenous welfare groups formed by white people in the Anglo World in this period. Such groups also included: the National Indian Defense Association and the Women’s National Indian Association (in the United States);Footnote ²⁶ the Canadian Indian Research and Aid Society and the Friends of the Indians of BC (in Canada);Footnote ²⁷ and the Aborigines' Friends' Association and the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Association (in Australia).Footnote ²⁸ I declined to include these groups in my analysis because each was either more of a mission society than an activist organization, or else was very short lived, or both. It is also important to emphasize that the APS, IRA, and APNR were each organized by white Britons, Americans, and Australians, and only incorporated Indigenous voices and perspectives to a limited extent. A growing scholarship on Indigenous uses of imperial humanitarian networks demonstrates that Indigenous peoples around the world found ways to adapt imperial humanitarian discourses and resources to their own needs, although these adaptations were always structured by white humanitarian expectations of properly ‘civilized’ and deserving indigeneity.Footnote ²⁹ Moreover, by the late nineteenth century, Indigenous peoples around the empire were establishing their own political organizations, such as the Australian Aborigines Progressive Association (1924–27) and the Society of American Indians (1911–23), many of which established ongoing relationships with the APS, IRA, and APNR.Footnote ³⁰ This article does not address such organizations, but this is not to say that Indigenous peoples had no active role in the operation of white humanitarian organizations. The history of Indigenous peoples’ engagements with white humanitarian organizations is long and complex, and requires careful examination that is beyond the scope of this article, preferably conducted in collaboration with relevant Indigenous stakeholders.Footnote ³¹

II

The Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) was a London-based voluntary organization founded in 1837 that emerged directly from the British anti-slavery movement and the findings of the 1835–6 Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines, which concluded that the only way for Britain to atone for rampant settler violence was to place the oversight of settler–Indigenous relations under the control of the metropolitan government in London.Footnote ³² The APS used the intelligence it received from informants and gathered from colonial newspapers to lobby the Colonial Office and publish its journal, The Aborigines’ Friend. While the impact of these activities on actual policy was limited, recent scholarship (largely my own) has increasingly approached the Society from the perspective of its hundreds of British, Indigenous, and settler correspondents and members, demonstrating that the APS played a substantial role in shaping imperial identities by providing a venue for discussing imperial morality and performing imperial humanitarianism.Footnote ³³

The Society’s entanglement with public discourses and public opinion was explicitly outlined in 1840, when, after three years of operation, the APS addressed the quintessential question of its existence: ‘How may we secure to our unfortunate brethren the present acknowledgement and future possession of their rights? By the force of public opinion, correctly taught, extensively spread, and expressed with deliberate firmness’.Footnote ³⁴ This statement demonstrates how the Society, from a very early stage in its existence, identified public education as its number one priority. This position was elaborated on at the Society’s eleventh anniversary in 1848, when the annual report ruminated on ‘the chief obstacle to the permanent success of your Society, namely, the apathy of the community’.Footnote ³⁵ Such an apathy pushed the Society to focus its efforts on ‘eradicating the ignorance and the consequent prejudice which obtain to the detriment of the Aborigines as a race’.Footnote ³⁶ In 1894, after the Society had gone through two changes in management (from Thomas Hodgkin, to Frederick Chesson, to Henry Fox Bourne) and the British Empire had been vastly altered by the rise of responsible government in the settler colonies and the dawn of New Imperialism, the Society retained its focus on public education, proclaiming that ‘under present arrangements and rivalries for “the exploitation of Africa,” there is greater need than ever of zealous endeavour to enlighten public opinion’.Footnote ³⁷

To carry out its public education mission, the Society placed the bulk of its faith in its periodical, the Aborigines’ Friend. This periodical took on different shapes over the Society’s century of operation, but in every iteration, its primary purpose was to convince the British public, first, that Indigenous affairs were important and worth their attention, and, second, that pressuring governments to adopt ‘humane’ policies towards Indigenous peoples was in their best interest. One of the ways it sought to achieve this purpose was by publishing parliamentary debates in which parliamentarians themselves explicated the impact of Indigenous polices on British society. A prime example of this tactic can be observed in the coverage of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s acquisition of Vancouver Island in 1849.

The July 1848 issue of the Aborigines’ Friend reprinted an extensive debate in the House of Commons in which William E. Gladstone, MP for Oxford, attacked the Company’s ability to effectively manage Vancouver Island. Within this debate, Gladstone’s critiques of the Company highlighted many ways in which the administration of Vancouver Island was relevant to the British public. Gladstone particularly argued that the interests of a fur-trading corporation in preserving its monopoly over fur was antagonistic to Britain’s desire to develop complex colonial markets and extract diverse resources, including whales, lumber, and minerals.Footnote ³⁸ Reprinting such critiques in the Aborigines’ Friend helped show the British public the relevance of Indigenous affairs on their own lives, inasmuch as it represented the decision of who should rule the Indigenous peoples of Vancouver Island as directly impacting potential economic opportunities for Britons in the fisheries, mines, and farms of Vancouver Island. Yet this debate did little to directly connect the humane administration of Indigenous peoples on Vancouver Island with British interests, so the Society took the added initiative of publishing in the subsequent issue of the Friend a commentary on the debate by Alexander Isbister, in which Isbister argued that the Hudson’s Bay Company’s administration of Vancouver Island put British subjects and industry at risk of an Indigenous rebellion.Footnote ³⁹ By elevating the tone of the discussion from a banal consideration of economic development to a much more sensationalist story of a potential colonial rebellion, the APS was making an argument for why the British public should be interested in actively participating in political debates about Indigenous affairs on Vancouver Island.

The Society’s determination to evoke public interest in Indigenous affairs inevitably led to patterns in the curation of material. Consider, for example, the February 1875 issue of the Aborigines’ Friend. Of the seven main articles contained within, one was about the purported ‘rebellion’ of Langalibalele in South Africa, four were about kidnapping and/or human trafficking, and one was about frontier massacres in Australia. The focus on cases of kidnapping and human trafficking played particularly strongly into the Victorian public’s fascination with slavery, which Bronwen Everill and Richard Huzzey demonstrate was a powerfully resonant theme for stimulating British humanitarian intervention.Footnote ⁴⁰ The APS relied on these stories of slavery, warfare, and other forms of danger and intrigue to capture the public’s attention, and by doing so, it contributed to popular assumptions about the colonies. As I demonstrate elsewhere, the overwhelming justification that British supporters of the APS provided for their allegiance to the Society was their belief that devising humane colonial policies was necessary to protect themselves or their loved ones from the threat of colonial warfare and violence.Footnote ⁴¹ It is difficult to determine if such perceptions were the result of the APS’s public education campaign, or whether they were the inspiration for it, pushing the APS to emphasize pressure points that it knew would resonate with the British public. Regardless, the APS’s public education campaign certainly played a role in disseminating the idea that Indigenous affairs in the colonies were intimately connected with the economic and physical well-being of the British public.

The APS’s need to interest and motivate the British public also influenced the policies it adopted as the solution to immoral colonization. Although the APS’s proposed solutions changed over its century of operation, James Heartfield demonstrates that the one idea it became most attached to, and which it was most influential in implementing, was the idea of the protectorate.Footnote ⁴² However, as the APS acknowledged in 1870 when it began lobbying for a protectorate over Fiji, such a protectorate was adamantly opposed ‘by a preponderating weight of opinion both in and out of Parliament’.Footnote ⁴³ The Society therefore set out to convince the public that ‘a state of things is growing up in the Fijis which will demand the active interference of the British Government’. It pointed first to ‘the valuable trade which has grown up between the Fijis and the Australian colonies’, which it estimated as worth £385,603, and their claim that this trade was ‘giving employment to hundreds of colonial seamen’ contained the implicit argument that a protectorate over Fiji would lead to greater employment opportunities for British subjects. Even when the Society faced criticisms that protectorates did not provide economic benefits to Britain, it found ways to redefine economic benefit. For instance, in the May 1874 issue of the Aborigines’ Friend, the Society responded to a House of Commons debate over whether or not the protectorate over the Gold Coast should be maintained in the face of exorbitant military expenditure during the Second and Third Anglo-Ashanti Wars (1863–4 and 1873–4). In response, the Society argued that while giving up the Gold Coast protectorate would save British taxpayers in military expenses, it would cost Britain much more in lost business opportunities. Exerting influence over the protectorate provided a means ‘to open up a peaceful trade with the interior … and, finally, to promote at the expense of the natives themselves, the sanitary, industrial, and educational improvement of the protected territories’.Footnote ⁴⁴

The centrality of the Society’s public education mission has, for the most part, been ignored by historians who have primarily approached the APS as a governmental lobbyist. It has only received in-depth examination in an unpublished PhD thesis by Roderick Mitcham, who contended that, although the Aborigines’ Friend was a relatively unpopular periodical in hindsight, it was nevertheless a core element of the APS’s work, designed ‘to create and sustain the attention of humanitarian publics’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Mitcham’s arguments were largely limited to the geographic aspect of the Aborigines’ Friend, wherein he pinpoints how the APS used their periodical to instil in the British public an ‘imaginative geography’ of the empire.Footnote ⁴⁶ But Mitcham’s approach is insightful into the ways the APS, by working to overcome public apathy in Indigenous affairs, positioned itself as a partner in colonial governance. By framing protectorates as economic necessities, rebellions as security threats, and Indigenous welfare as inseparable from colonial stability, the Society actively constructed a humanitarian rationale for state intervention. What is more, it did so through voluntary labour and private donations, demonstrating how imperial humanitarian governance was underwritten by non-governmental agents who set about making governance relevant to the electorate. In this sense, the APS was not merely a pressure group but an essential component of imperial infrastructure.

III

The APS, after several decades of operation, admitted that generating knowledge about the colonies was a task best left to others, as it had been ‘superseded by the books of travel, the articles in magazines and newspapers, and even the Blue Books’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Consequently, while the Society actively worked to collect information from a vast network of correspondents, it only once set out to produce information of its own through eyewitness investigation, when it sent its secretary John Harris and his wife to Rhodesia in 1914 to collect affidavits from Rhodesian Africans whom they were supporting in a case before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.Footnote ⁴⁸ Conversely, between 1882 and 1927, the Indian Rights Association (IRA) conducted at least twenty-eight transcontinental journeys to visit Indigenous reservations in over twenty-four American states.

Founded in Philadelphia in December 1882 by Herbert Welsh and a group of thirty east coast philanthropists, the IRA quickly became the most influential Indian reform movement of its era. The organization’s founders believed the best path forward for Native Americans was assimilation into white society. To achieve this, the IRA championed the policy of allotment, which sought to break up communally held tribal lands into individually owned plots in order to transform Indians into yeomen farmers and destroy the basis of their native cultures.Footnote ⁴⁹ Operating independently from the government, the IRA was a highly active organization that maintained a full-time lobbyist agency in Washington to influence legislation and dispatched its own investigators into the field to gather firsthand information on reservation conditions, conducting the aforementioned twenty-eight transcontinental investigative journeys. Importantly, these twenty-eight journeys only represent those specifically reported upon in the IRA’s annual reports, but the number is certainly higher, given that the Association’s political agent in Washington was reported to have conducted annual tours of ‘the Indian country’, but such tours are not mentioned in every annual report. Moreover, these journeys are the key distinguishing factor between the IRA and the APS, and thus provide a different perspective on the relationship between philanthropic Indigenous rights activism and humanitarian governance. Through painstaking documentation of affairs on Indigenous reservations, the IRA became a valuable intelligence-gathering apparatus for the federal government, driven by voluntary initiative and funded by private donations, that directly subsidized the humanitarian governance of Indigenous Americans by enabling more precise and efficient bureaucratic control.

As Stephen Rockwell demonstrates, American westward expansion was driven first and foremost by a massive system of civil administration centred around the Bureau of Indian Affairs, so that ‘the rapidity and thoroughness with which the federal government pacified, removed, contained, and dispossessed American Indians and tribes across North America is an awesome display of coordinated public administration’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Surveillance was at the heart of this civil administrative project. As Keith Smith demonstrates in Canada,

The same situation existed in the United States, only on a much larger scale. American Indian policy in the mid-to-late nineteenth century hinged around confining Indigenous peoples on centralized reservations under the constant surveillance of Indian Agents who would then generate reports for the Indian Bureau, enabling one centralized assimilationist policy to be applied across thousands of separate locations simultaneously. The sheer number of bureaucrats involved in this system was extraordinary: between 1851 and 1897, the number of field agents involved in the surveillance of Indigenous reservations ballooned from 108 employees to over 3,900. And Rockwell points out that it wasn’t just the number of agents that was increasing, but the precision of their reporting was also expanding to meet the surveillance needs of this massive public administration project.Footnote ⁵² Annual reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs increased from around 300 pages in the 1850s to well over 1,000 pages in the 1890s, and indexes of letters received between 1893 and 1899 exceed 2,500 pages.

Processing this vast sea of data, identifying problem areas that required priority attention, verifying information in circumstances of contrasting evidence, and developing solutions to unique local problems posed a substantial administrative and logistical challenge. The Indian Bureau was both well-funded and well-staffed for tackling this challenge, but it still found itself in constant need for external assistance. On multiple occasions, the US government directly reached out to the IRA to request its assistance in obtaining accurate intelligence. For example, over the summer of 1887, the IRA conducted an investigatory journey through Oklahoma, Arizona, California, and New Mexico at the direct request of President Grover Cleveland and Secretary of the Interior Lucius Lamar. Cleveland and Lamar were facing pressure from Congress and the Indian Bureau to relocate various Indigenous groups (the Cheyennes, the Arapahoes, the Wichitas, the Kiowas, and the Comanches) from western Oklahoma to eastern Oklahoma in order to open up western Oklahoma to white settlement.Footnote ⁵³ Congress and the Indian Bureau targeted these specific groups because they did not technically live on treaty lands. The Cheyenne and Arapaho had originally been assigned a reservation in north-central Oklahoma through the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, but President Ulysses S. Grant had signed an executive order in 1869 moving the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation to the south-west, outside of the Medicine Lodge Treaty boundary. Conversely, the Kiowas, Comanches, and Wichitas had no ratified treaties at all. As such, Congress and the Indian Bureau insisted that the President could legally remove these groups by executive order more easily than other groups who lived within the boundaries of ratified treaties. Consequently, the IRA found itself asked ‘both by the President and Secretary Lamar to look into the question whether this is advisable, and report to them [our] conclusions’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Following their investigation, the IRA reported that the nations proposed to be moved ‘are bitterly opposed to the plan, and it ought not to be attempted’. Instead, they suggested that the Seminoles and Creeks living in central Oklahoma were far more open and likely to negotiate the sale of their treaty lands, and recommended that ‘steps ought to be taken at once to gain the consent of the Seminoles and Creeks to throw this land open to settlement’.Footnote ⁵⁵ President Cleveland followed the IRA’s advice and refrained from relocating the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Wichita, and Kiowa, although his successor, President Benjamin Harrison, would go on to reverse this decision.

The relationship between the Indian Bureau and the IRA was not always as explicit as a direct request for assistance from government officials, and most IRA investigative journeys began at the IRA’s own initiative. Invariably, however, the IRA adapted its investigations to the needs of the Indian Bureau. For example, on 30 April 1885, IRA secretary Herbert Welsh set off to visit various Navajo, Pueblo, and Hualapais reservations in New Mexico and Arizona, with the simple object of ‘securing fresh and living facts … whereby the work in which our Society is engaged might receive greater momentum and clearer guidance’.Footnote ⁵⁶ One of the major findings of this expedition was that ‘water is the great need of this country’, and they learned that the Indian Agent Major Riordan had previously requested the government ‘do something for the development of water on this Reservation. There are places where the supply of water is barely sufficient for the needs of a few, and where, I think, a small sum properly expended would develop sufficient water to irrigate considerable land’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Indian Bureau initially complied with Major Riordan’s request, spending $12,000 in 1888 to build a system of irrigation ditches, but the following year, Indian Agent C.E. Vandever reported that ‘I have been over the ground where the work was done, and am sorry to say it amounts to nothing. The ditches were evidently built without any regard to utility, durability, or knowledge of the subject’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Congress then appropriated an additional $40,000 in March 1893 ‘for the construction of irrigating ditches and the development of the water supply on the Navajo Reservation’,Footnote ⁵⁹ and on 23 February 1894 the Indian Agent E.H. Plummer wrote to the Indian Rights Association to request their assistance in executing the new irrigation project.Footnote ⁶⁰

The IRA subsequently sent Charles F. Meserve, President of Shaw University and former superintendent of the Haskell Institute industrial school, to the Navajo reservation ‘to examine into the progress and possibilities of irrigation on its semi-desert reservation’.Footnote ⁶¹ Meserve concluded that it would certainly be possible to construct a profitable and sustainable irrigation system, reporting that ‘a hundred thousand acres can easily be irrigated. Alfalfa, corn, oats, and wheat, and possibly other grains, can be raised in large quantities’.Footnote ⁶² However, Meserve emphasized that this would require a long-term commitment to a massive project, which ‘must be begun in a small way and increased from year to year by additional appropriations from Congress’.Footnote ⁶³ Meserve’s report was presented to Congress, which immediately appropriated an additional $25,000 for expanding the irrigation project,Footnote ⁶⁴ and yearly appropriations continued with piecemeal additions until 1940, by which point more than 700 acres were brought under irrigation.Footnote ⁶⁵

Sometimes, the IRA simply acted as a consultant for the Indian Bureau, pulling upon its knowledge derived from dozens of investigative journeys. In 1888, for example, Secretary of the Interior William Vilas personally reached out to Herbert Welsh to assist him in the planning of the Sioux Commission of 1888. Six years previously, Congress, motivated by the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, had established the Sioux Commission of 1882 to investigate whether the Sioux would be interested in ceding around half of the Great Sioux Reservation in return for clear title to six separate reservations. This 1882 Commission was led by Newton Edmunds, the former governor of Dakota Territory, who went beyond the mandate of investigating Sioux opinion by applying under-handed tactics to pressure and deceive the Sioux into ceding their territory. Afterwards, many Sioux rightfully protested that they had been defrauded, and the Indian Rights Association played a major role in pressuring Congress to dismiss the 1882 land cession.Footnote ⁶⁶ With the 1887 Dawes Act, Congress obtained a legal framework for allotting treaty territory in individually-owned plots of land, but the Treaty of 1868 still required Congress to obtain consent from three-quarters of the adult male Sioux population before it could apply the Dawes Act to the Great Sioux Reservation. Congress therefore established a second Sioux Commission in 1888 to obtain that consent,Footnote ⁶⁷ but the Secretary of the Interior, William Vilas, faced significant difficulty identifying the right people to lead the commission. Thanks to the fraudulent activities of the 1882 commission, Sioux trust in the US government was at a record low, so Vilas needed to find someone who the Sioux would trust despite the government’s track record. Unfortunately for Vilas, the only two men he believed capable of such a job, George Crook and Thomas Ruger, declined his invitation.Footnote ⁶⁸

With no other ideas, Vilas turned to the IRA. Vilas knew that Herbert Welsh had previously conducted a three-month inspection of the Great Sioux Reservation over the summer of 1887,Footnote ⁶⁹ and so was sure to know who the Sioux would be most likely to trust. For that reason, Vilas personally reached out to Welsh to ask for his input on who he should appoint as members of the Sioux Commission, as well as to attend an in-person interview to help craft the mandate of that Commission.Footnote ⁷⁰ Following this consultation, Vilas successfully secured the services of two long-time partners of the IRA. First was Captain Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the Hampton and Carlisle Indian Industrial Schools, whom the IRA had extensively eulogized in an 1886 pamphlet gleefully celebrating his zealousness for cultural assimilation.Footnote ⁷¹ Second was Reverend William J. Cleveland, a missionary on the Great Sioux Reservation who frequently conducted investigative journeys for the IRA and in 1888 had just translated an IRA recruitment pamphlet into the Dakota language and circulated it around the reservation.Footnote ⁷² Regardless of the IRA’s advice, the 1888 Sioux Commission was a complete failure, plagued by the wisdom of the Sioux to distrust any proposals offered by the US government. Yet Vilas’s call for assistance from the IRA had reinforced the cooperative relationship between the IRA and the US government regardless. Commenting afterwards on his personal meeting with Vilas, Welsh expressed to Vilas his ‘satisfaction at the agreeable interview held with you last evening, and my hope that the co-operation of the Indian Rights Association may be of some service to you in the important and difficult work of your office’.Footnote ⁷³

This cooperative relationship underscores the entanglement of Indigenous rights organizations with the operation of settler colonial governments, with the IRA functioning as a shadow intelligence service of the US government, generating, verifying, and transmitting the data needed by the American bureaucratic colonial machine. The IRA’s investigative machinery – funded by private donations and staffed by volunteers – ultimately served as an extension of the federal government’s administrative reach, providing the detailed surveillance that enabled more precise bureaucratic control.

IV

The IRA made no explicit reference to its indebtedness to the APS, although there is ample circumstantial evidence that the IRA was deliberately copied from the APS template. The secretary and guiding force of the IRA, Herbert Welsh, was the son of an American ambassador to the United Kingdom, had spent much of his youth in England, and must certainly have come into contact with the APS at some point. Moreover, Welsh was closely embedded in the strongly humanitarian Quaker community of Philadelphia, the very same community that Thomas Hodgkin, the APS’s first secretary and guiding force, had been enmeshed with, and it is unquestionable that the APS was a topic of conversation in Welsh’s social group. For whatever reason, however, Welsh refrained from making any reference to the APS in any IRA publication. The opposite was true for the Association for the Protection of Native Races (APNR). When it was first established in 1911, it declared that it would ‘seek to exert in these nearer regions the same kind of humane and philanthropic influence which the well-known British Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society has for many years past … been exercising in many parts of the world’.Footnote ⁷⁴

The APNR was the most active Australian Indigenous rights organization with a national perspective during the inter-war period.Footnote ⁷⁵ Its initial and enduring objective was to persuade the federal government to assume responsibility for Indigenous peoples throughout the country, demanding a positive national policy that included a federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs, the extension of reserves, the payment of cash wages, and justice system reforms. The APNR also became deeply involved in critiquing Australian imperialism in the New Hebrides. Like the APS it sought to replicate, as well as the IRA, the APNR operated largely as an information collecting and processing machine, inviting correspondence from eye-witnesses around the country and trying to mobilize its members in organized petitions. Yet while the APNR sought to replicate the APS, it differed in various ways, most significantly in its obsequious relationship with Australian governments. The APS’s popularity with British governments fluctuated depending on who was in office, but it never held back from chastising incumbent officials when it deemed necessary. The APNR, on the other hand, made its dedication to supporting government initiatives very explicit. Following a public meeting of its executive council held in Sydney in January 1912, in which glowing support was heaped upon Queensland’s Chief Protector of Aborigines for ‘the humane feelings’ he encapsulated, the APNR published a statement in the Daily Telegraph that ‘the association fully recognizes the efforts which the State Governments are making to deal with the difficult aboriginal problem, and is anxious to encourage and assist the Governments by rousing a better public opinion in the community’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Of course, it is not unheard of for people standing up to those in power to strategically adopt deferential language, something historians have referred to as a ‘rhetoric of humility and disavowal’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Compared to the APS and the IRA, however, the APNR’s willingness to perform obsequiousness, rhetorical or not, was excessive, and bled through most of the APNR’s public activities. For example, one of the first issues the APNR addressed was a punitive expedition launched by Western Australian police in September 1911, wherein fourteen Indigenous individuals were murdered in retaliation for their suspected murder of two settlers. The APNR proclaimed vocally in the press that, if the story was true, it was indicative of ‘an unduly loose conception of justice’ that would ‘arouse the deepest indignation in any civilized community’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Crucially, however, rather than focusing on obtaining justice for the impacted communities or securing changes that would prevent further occurrences in the future, the APNR was more interested in giving ‘the Government of West Australia the opportunity of clearing itself of any suspicion which may rest upon it’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Explaining that ‘news of scandals and wrongdoing towards the natives … has a very damaging effect upon the reputation of the State, both in Australia and also in England’, the APNR insisted that its only reason for denouncing the incident was ‘in order to strengthen the hands of the Government … in its dealings with local public opinion and the local press’ to ‘carry on and extend the humane policy towards the aborigines initiated by their predecessors’.Footnote ⁸⁰

John Scadden, Premier of Western Australia, responded by asking for the APNR’s help in identifying the most pressing issues that needed attention, writing that ‘I shall be glad if you will mark on the accompanying copy of the report of the Royal Commission on the Condition of the Natives (W.A.) those sections of the same which, in your opinion, should receive consideration at the hands of the Government’.Footnote ⁸¹ The APNR subsequently praised the Western Australian government for its dedication to humane policy, writing that ‘the tone of the Premier’s letter and the request made in it are regarded by the association as most satisfactory proof that the present West Australian Government is as anxious as the late Government was that the aborigines should be treated with justice and humanity’.Footnote ⁸² Moreover, upon providing Scadden with a list of priorities from the Roth Report, Scadden published a public response listing exactly how the Western Australian government was already fulfilling each recommendation, leading to public recognition by the APNR that ‘it is evident that the Government of that State is taking great pains and expending a considerable sum annually in order to continue the philanthropical treatment of the natives’.Footnote ⁸³ Thus, far from agitating public pressure against the Western Australian government, the APNR’s efforts led to the redemption of government officials in the eyes of the public.

A similar incident took place that same year between the APNR and Josiah Thomas, the Minister for External Affairs. In August 1912, the secretary of the APNR, Reverent Lefroy, delivered a public address in which he strongly condemned ‘the awful wrongs which the aborigines had suffered at the hands of some white men’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Yet Lefroy was very careful about who he represented as responsible for the maltreatment of Indigenous peoples. ‘If only the churches could be roused to their present tremendous responsibility, and the public be roused by their means, he did not doubt that the Federal and State Governments, who were very favorably disposed, would soon throw themselves with increasing energy into the great national work of saving and uplifting the remnant of the aboriginal race [emphasis added]’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Lefroy clearly blamed the churches and the public for failing to stand behind governments that were more than willing to adopt humanitarian policies if only they received enough support. In the House of Representatives, the member for Western Australia, Hugh Mahon, was agitated by Lefroy’s address, which contained specific references to the poor treatment of Indigenous peoples in Western Australia, and he demanded Joshia Thomas, the Minister for External Affairs, ‘ask this reverend gentleman for his authority on these statements’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Thomas did so, and Lefroy went to great lengths to stress that he was not intending to cast aspersions on any government’s dedication to humane policy. He wrote, firstly, that ‘I plainly stated in my original statement that I was referring to the past and not to the present’,Footnote ⁸⁷ so that his comments were not meant to reflect on any current government’s actions. He also insisted that he was not criticizing any government officials whatsoever, but ‘that I had in view the mean, the low, and unscrupulous, the cruel, the criminal members of the community’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Finally, Lefroy gave his full endorsement to all policies adopted by the federal government, stating that ‘my high expectations have been realized by what the Federal Government has actually done. I have therefore given unstinted praise to the Federal Government at all times and in all directions’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Lefroy went as far as to publish his response in the Register and Advertiser, ensuring that no one would question the APNR’s endorsement of the Australian government’s moral, just, and honourable disposition towards Indigenous peoples.

The APNR’s obsequiousness to Australian governments certainly shifted over time, becoming ever more frustrated with the status quo and more willing to speak against government officials. The association became inactive between 1923 and 1927, and when it resumed activities, it came out swinging. One of the first major cases it took up was the Coniston Massacre of 1928, in which a punitive police expedition resulted in the murder of a disputed number of Indigenous individuals ranging from 17 to 200, but most likely somewhere around 70.Footnote ⁹⁰ The Australian government appointed a Board of Enquiry to investigate the massacre, which ruled that not only had all the killings been justified as self-defence, but that the root cause of the massacre was missionaries ‘preaching the doctrine of equality of man’.Footnote ⁹¹ The APNR spoke out vehemently against the Board’s findings, and it did so by explicitly denouncing the government’s inhumanity, writing that ‘the report was about what could be expected considering the official nature of the board. The Government needed education on what was expected of it in relation to the aborigines’.Footnote ⁹² Aubrey Abbott, the Minister for Home Affairs, retaliated by calling the APNR a group of race-traitors, writing that ‘he had a definite responsibility to the white settlers, and he was afraid that some of the associations concerned with aborigines were blinding themselves towards the equally pressing need of their own people’.Footnote ⁹³ This level of antagonism between the APNR and Australian governments persisted throughout the 1930s, and it was accompanied by an exodus of government officials from the association’s governing committee. Whereas the committee of the 1910s contained more than five MPs, MLCs, and MHRs, by 1930, there was not a single government official left.

Yet even when the APNR became more willing to criticize the government, it continued to frame its proposals in ways that deliberately shifted responsibility for the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples away from government and towards a host of other systemic causes. For example, one of its cornerstone policy proposals was the creation of a permanent Commission of Native Affairs separate from both state and federal jurisdiction. The logic behind this proposal was that although governments and their officials were themselves dedicated to the humanitarian treatment of Indigenous peoples, their dedication was hindered by bureaucracy and the structure of the political system. One major issue was the constant change of administrations. In 1935, the APNR complained that ‘during the last ten years there have been at least seven successive Ministers in charge of the Department dealing with aboriginal affairs, and in each instance the new Minister has had no previous experience’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Transferring Indigenous affairs from ministerial control to a permanent commission was thus not intended to challenge the humanity of ministers themselves, but simply to ensure ‘a continuous policy’ safe from the fluctuations of party politics.

In addition to blaming poor Indigenous policies on the high turn-over rate of government offices, the APNR also emphasized the role of inefficiencies or barriers within the justice system. The APNR explained that it received many reports of physical assaults on Indigenous peoples, which it attempted to remedy through the courts, but that ‘although the Governments concerned take action when informed, justice is too often frustrated by delay’.Footnote ⁹⁵ These delays took various forms, but typically revolved around local police forces failing to report incidents before key witnesses had left the area, or local courts refusing to recognize Indigenous testimony as reliable evidence. In both cases, responsibility was effectively shifted away from the government.

Scholars of settler colonialism have given significant attention to the ways in which settler societies displace and disavow their responsibility for colonial violence. Richard Price points out that ‘colonial violence required a series of public defense mechanisms that enabled the contradiction to be reconciled between the self-image of a civilizing mission and the barbaric realities in colonies. … Ways had to be found to deflect the recognition that colonization brutalized and de-humanized the colonizer’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Lorenzo Veracini similarly argues that silences about colonization and denial of its violent nature were key elements of these public defense mechanisms, and he explores how settlers renarrativized colonization as a humanitarian process for the betterment of Indigenous peoples in order to convince themselves that they were good people.Footnote ⁹⁷ The efforts of the APNR to sanctify its government’s actions align with this larger trend, but also suggest the contingency of the construction and dissemination of such narratives on voluntary organizations dedicated to constructing and disseminating them. Rather than presuming that such narratives were inevitable and an inherent element of settler colonial societies, attending to the APNR’s deliberate construction of these narratives emphasizes the historical process by which settler society was built deliberately and piecemeal by actors throughout the community. This contributes to Alissa Macoun and Elizabeth Strakosch’s efforts to counter ‘colonial fatalism’,Footnote ⁹⁸ the tendency to over-emphasize structural elements of settler colonialism, by highlighting the historicity and individual agency that went into building the settler humanitarian fantasy.

V

The APS, the IRA, and the APNR emerged in distinct corners of the Anglo World – imperial Britain, independent America, and self-governing Australia – yet all three organizations shared a common function: they strengthened their respective governments’ capacity to implement Indigenous policies by shaping public discourse, generating knowledge, and legitimizing state intervention. While historians have often treated humanitarian governance and humanitarian activism as separate fields – the former focusing on state actors, the latter on missionaries and dissenters – this study has demonstrated how philanthropic organizations straddled both spheres, serving as critical intermediaries between colonial states and their publics. The APS, IRA, and APNR were not merely lobbyists or watchdogs; they were key components of colonial rule, filling gaps in state capacity while enabling governments to disclaim direct responsibility for the violence of dispossession. Their histories reveal how settler and imperial regimes depended on ostensibly independent humanitarian actors to sustain their authority.

Each organization examined here adapted its strategies to local political conditions. The APS, based in the imperial metropole, confronted British public apathy toward distant Indigenous struggles. To make Indigenous governance politically salient, it curated sensationalist narratives of rebellion and economic opportunity, binding Indigenous welfare to imperial interests. The IRA, working within a settler society where public interest in ‘the Indian question’ was already intense, positioned itself as a corrective to misinformation, conducting on-the-ground investigations that federal agents lacked the resources or trust to perform. The APNR, meanwhile, functioned as a public relations arm for Australian governments, deflecting critiques of state violence by blaming public ignorance or bureaucratic inefficiency rather than officials themselves. Despite these differences, each group served as critical intermediaries between states and their publics, shaping policies while obscuring the violence of dispossession behind narratives of reform.

This analysis challenges the bifurcation that has long dominated scholarship on humanitarianism and colonialism. On one side, historians like Henry Reynolds, Celia Haig-Brown, and David Nock have framed settler humanitarians as marginalized critics, voices of conscience in otherwise hostile societies. On the other, scholars such as Amanda Nettelbeck and Rebecca Swartz have traced how colonial officials co-opted humanitarian language to justify assimilationist policies. The APS, IRA, and APNR complicate this dichotomy. They were neither outsiders nor state agents but hybrid entities that blurred the line between activism and administration. The IRA’s role is particularly illustrative. When President Cleveland and Secretary Lamar tasked the IRA with investigating potential relocations in Oklahoma, they were not capitulating to humanitarian pressure but enlisting the IRA as a subcontractor for federal policy. Similarly, the APS’s campaigns for protectorates did not challenge imperial sovereignty but made it more palatable to metropolitan audiences. Even the APNR’s later critiques of massacres like Coniston focused on improving governance rather than contesting its underlying authority. These organizations thus exemplify what Patrick Wolfe called the ‘logic of elimination’ in settler colonialism: they sought to mitigate the most visible brutalities of dispossession while ensuring its continuation in more bureaucratically sanitized forms. Moreover, these organizations demonstrate that colonial governance was fundamentally contingent on non-state actors, with the British, American, and Australian states all incorporating philanthropic organizations to perform functions they could not fully replicate. Highlighting the efforts of the APS, IRA, and APNR to support humanitarian governance through voluntary labour and private funding provides a snapshot of how public-private collaborations worked over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and I hope will stimulate more investigations into historicizing the role of non-state actors in the development and elaboration of colonial regimes.