This article traces the history of Native American women clubs from 1899-1955. In its heyday in the early 1900s, the women's club movement attracted about two million participants nationwide. Excluded from higher education at the time, women were moved to create their own opportunities to learn, meeting regularly in small groups to study such subjects as literature, geography, and the fine arts. The long history of "constraints" imposed on Native Americans is well known, as they were at various times killed, removed from their homelands, isolated on reservations, manipulated and robbed, and forced to "Americanize." Post-contact Indians and their cultures were threatened at every turn. In response, Native American clubwomen organized activities to affirm their Indian identities, to attempt to relearn what had been lost, and to lift up their people. They studied tribal histories and discussed the lives and contributions of prominent Native Americans. Native American women's clubs, with their educated memberships, perpetuated a cultural phenomenon attributed to Indian schooling--a sense of unity across tribes and a common identity as Native Americans (Adams 1995; Child 2000).