Dispossessory Citizenship: The Settler Colonial State and the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Relocation Program, 1952–1972

Abstract

Abstract Through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) relocation program starting in 1952, the United States sought to terminate federal trust restrictions for American Indians and while relocating reservation and rural-residing Indigenous people to cities to be assimilated into the American “mainstream.” I analyze the BIA’s program as part of the specifically settler colonial structure of the U.S. state. Using primary and secondary sources, I ask what explains the BIA’s shifting spatial strategies and imaginaries from the rise of the relocation program to its demise? The BIA’s project derided reservations as fiscal burdens, depicted the postwar city as a place of “Indian freedom,” engaged in gendered surveillance of Indigenous families, and negated Indigenous peoples’ histories in U.S. cities. As the program ended, the BIA shifted rhetoric from assimilation to self-determination to maintain the settler colonial relation while paying lip service to critiques of the colonial tactics of relocation. These different moments of the relocation project articulated a type of dispossessory citizenship as a racial and empire state strategy of enacting and justifying settler colonialism. This work analyzes the settler colonial dimensions of the state and its technologies of violence and territory used when it presents itself as supposedly moving past its colonial past.