Handbook on Humanitarianism and Inequality - Chapter 27 - Humanitarianism and Native America

December 16, 2025

Every two weeks I am going to feature one of the chapters of our Handbook on Humanitarianism and Inequality which was published in spring 2024.
This week we are taking a closer look at Chapter 27 - Humanitarianism and Native America - contributed by Barbara Gurr.

From the introduction
This chapter offers consideration of assimilationist and genocidal tactics harbored under the guise of ‘humanitarianism’ in two distinct but inter-related areas. I begin with the role of religion, and particularly Christianity, in providing what might be understood as humanitarian aid long before the abolition movements that so commonly mark the origin point of humanitarianism as a distinct field of endeavor. The work of missionaries, predominantly Jesuit and Franciscan, to convert the Indigenous peoples of what is now called North America to Christianity directly served imperialist purposes, but was performed under the guise of ‘saving souls’ and, later, providing education and even healthcare. This work, which began in the early 1500s, was itself potentially influenced by the earlier work of Jesuit missionaries in Japan (Abé, 2010) and provided a model for the Christian evangelicals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who understood their missionary efforts as specifically linked to humanitarian motivations and a moral charge to those perceived as morally inferior (Hoxie, 2001; Barnett, 2011; Viswanath, 2014). The impacts of Christianity and Christian missions on Native American communities and cultures has been widely considered (see e.g. Kidwell et al., 2001; Blackburn, 2004; Martin and Nicholas, 2010; Stevens, 2010), though rarely considered through the lens of humanitarianism. Expanding the historical (and present) consideration of humanitarian aid to include historical (and present) missionary work throughout Indigenous America reveals the dangerous consequences of the comingling of settler colonialism, religion, and an early humanitarian ethos in Native America; it also sheds light on the potential dangers of religion, as a tool of imperialism, being relied upon to define and provide humanitarian aid. I then briefly consider the role of education and educational institutions. The depravity and consequences of the boarding school system have come under increasing scrutiny since the discovery of several unmarked graves at a residential school in Canada in 2021; one of the results of this is the promise of a comprehensive review of the boarding school system in what is now called the United States, instigated by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland. Residential schools for Native American children were begun with the specific goal of assimilation, although this was consistently framed as protecting and serving the needs of Native Americans, rather than the settler colonialist nation. Residential schools provide an essential perspective on the uses of education as humanitarian aid in the service of imperialism; better understanding the far-reaching devastation caused by residential schools for Indigenous people of Turtle Island is essential to better understanding the role, function, and best aspirations of education in twenty-first century humanitarianism.

Note on contributor
Barbara Gurr is an associate professor in Residence with the Women’s, Gender, and
Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Connecticut.
She is the author of Reproductive Justice: The Politics of Healthcare for Native American Women (Rutgers University Press, 2015), editor of Race, Gender and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), and co-editor of Feminist Research in Practice (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019).
Her research focuses on settler colonialism in the United States.