Paternalism to Partnership: The Administration of Indian Affairs, 1786–2021 by David H. DeJong (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Paternalism to Partnership: The Administration of Indian Affairs, 1786–2021 by David H. DeJong Ryan Hall (bio) Keywords Indigenous peoples, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Native American history Paternalism to Partnership: The Administration of Indian Affairs, 1786–2021. By David H. DeJong. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Pp. 510. Cloth, $70.00.) Until relatively recently, government administrators exercised an extraordinary degree of power over Indigenous people. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officials could dictate almost every aspect of Indigenous people's lives, including where they lived, how and what they bought and sold, what they owned, what they wore and ate, the languages they spoke, how they received and managed money, how they organized their governments, and even how and whether they raised children. Indigenous people resisted, but these policies had undeniably important, and often disastrous, consequences for generations. Yet historians still have an incomplete understanding of the BIA and its inner workings, and in recent decades there have been disappointingly few studies of the Bureau (and of its pre-1824 antecedents in the War Department). Bureaucracy is, after all, an unattractive and intimidating area of study. By design, bureaucracies perpetuate [End Page 352] themselves by producing enormous piles of bloodless and abstruse documentation, the sheer volume of which make them frustratingly difficult for historians to use or comprehend. Paternalism to Partnership seeks to bring some clarity to the study of Indian affairs bureaucracy by focusing on specific individuals. Using separate chapters for each, it offers historical sketches of the sixty-three men and two women who held the highest administrative position in the federal government's Indian affairs system from 1796 through 2021. It typically provides a two- to four-page biographical sketch for each administrator, along with several pages of primary-source excerpts that demonstrate his or her "personal philosophy" (xv). By structuring its analysis in this way, the book contends that individual administrators played essential roles in determining the course of Indian affairs, and by extension, the history of Indigenous people in America. These chapters illuminate the major questions and controversies that preoccupied generations of administrators: for instance, whether the BIA should be under civilian or military control; to what extent the government should manage Indigenous trade; whether treaties should be the primary mechanism for dealing with tribal nations; whether Indian agents should be political appointees or career civil servants; to what extent the BIA should force or advocate for cultural assimilation; and how the BIA should manage Indian lands and money. The chapters also show substantial change over time. While administrators in the nineteenth century generally came to the job with little experience in Indian affairs and were committed to policies of forced assimilation and land dispossession, by the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries top administrators mostly came from Native communities themselves, and advocated policies of economic development and limited tribal sovereignty. In DeJong's telling, the paternalist BIA of the nineteenth century gave way, bit by bit, to the BIA of today, which is ostensibly focused on serving tribes in a spirit of consultation and partnership. This book gleans these observations from a modest source base. The biographical sketches draw heavily from Robert Kvasnicka and Herman Viola's volume The Commissioners of Indian Affairs (Lincoln, NE, 1979) and a relatively small number of other primary and secondary sources. The primary-source excerpts, which make up about half of the book's total length, come mostly from the annual reports that administrators made to their superiors. These excerpts would not be difficult for historians to find on their own—the commissioners' annual reports are all online and [End Page 353] familiar to any historian of the subject—and the author never introduces or contextualizes them, their intended audience, nor the specific moment when they were written. Still, compiled together they provide snapshots of each administrator's views at a particular point in time. This approach shows what individual commissioners believed and sought to achieve during their tenure, but it also limits the book's perspective on how Indian affairs operated. For example, one of the shortest chapters (just a page and half) discusses William Clark, the famed Corps of Discovery co-captain...