Bureau Of Indian Affairs Research Articles

Native Agency: Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs

Native Agency: Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs

Indian Preference and the status of American Indians and Alaska Natives in the federal service: Employment, earnings, authority, and perceptions of fairness

AbstractPublic administration scholars have largely ignored American Indians and Alaska Natives in their studies of racial disparities in the federal service, despite strong reasons to believe they face discrimination. Using three large federal data sets (the American Community Survey, federal personnel records, and the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey), we compare the status of American Indians and Alaska Natives in the federal service to both Whites and other minorities. We find that, largely due to Indian Preference, American Indians and Alaska Natives are much more likely than Blacks, Whites, Latinos, and Asians to hold federal jobs, but they are highly concentrated in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service, agencies with which they have a sordid and fraught history. This concentration allows them to work in positions that may advance the interests of their communities and increases their probabilities of being supervisors, but it does not prevent them from being among the poorest‐paid and least‐satisfied employees in the federal service.

Native Agency: Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs by Valerie Lambert (review)

Native Agency: Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs by Valerie Lambert (review)

Architectures of Coloniality

The Owens Valley Paiute, traditional caretakers of the “Land of Flowing Water,” face continued threats to their livelihood due to decades of water extraction from the region by the city of Los Angeles. The precarious state of Indigenous lands and peoples across California is entangled with historical processes supported by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the off-reservation boarding school system. During the first half of the twentieth century, Paiute, Mission Indian and other Indigenous youth were sent to the Sherman Institute in Riverside, the last of twenty-five boarding schools to be built and operated by the BIA. Accompanying its Mission Revival style façade and the associated narratives of racial uplift, the school aimed to distance students from tribal affiliations, teaching them Anglo, heteropatriarchal forms of domesticity, and training them to become wage laborers in the farming, construction, and domestic service trades. After graduation, many students were employed by the federal government to convert tribal lands to agricultural plots and private property, while many others found low-wage, unskilled positions in the building and maintenance of Southern California’s expanding metropolis. This paper investigates the role of the Sherman Institute in the exploitation of Indigenous lands and labor for regional development, and therefore, the production of racialized precarity for Indigenous peoples. By engaging with Indigenous epistemologies, the paper works to stretch the limits of history/theory, to expose systems of confinement for their racialized underpinnings, and to introduce more fluid conceptions of land, property, and personhood.

Native Agency: Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, By Valerie Lambert

Native Agency: Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, By Valerie Lambert

Obstacles to Federal Policy Adoption: The Case of Special Domestic Violence Criminal Jurisdictions in Native American Tribal Nations

A core tenet of representation is that individuals should expect government to actively protect their human security. In the issue area of domestic violence in the United States, government largely fails to do this for women, who comprise three-quarters of all victims of domestic violence. Nowhere is this more apparent than for Native American women living on tribal lands. In terms of lifetime physical violence, nearly 52% of Native American women will be physically abused compared to 30.5% of white women, 41.2% of African American women, and 29.7% of Hispanic women (Crepelle 2020; Institute for Women’s Policy Research 2023). One of the main obstacles to keeping Native American women safer is that tribal nations have been functionally prohibited from prosecuting non-Native offenders of violence against Native Americans on their lands. Non-Native offenders comprise the bulk of domestic violence abusers in these communities. To address this inequity, the 2013 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) created Special Domestic Violence Criminal Jurisdictions (SDVCJs). Through an application process, federally recognized tribal nations can create these jurisdictions to provide justice for the many women who are victims of domestic violence at the hands of non-Native persons. In this article we explore which tribal nations created these jurisdictions using an original dataset of the 354 tribal nations that were eligible to adopt an SDVCJ following the 2013 VAWA reauthorization. As of 2022, 31 tribal nations have adopted SDVCJs across 13 states, which have led to 74 domestic violence convictions. In this article, we explain adoption of these courts as a function of population, tribal nation fiscal capacity, federal grant support, and having an existing self-governance compact with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Indian Ideology in The Warpath: Lehman Brightman’s Red Power Journalism

The Warpath, the “angry Indian” newsletter founded by the militant but oft overlooked journalist Lehman Brightman, was one of several Red Power publications founded in the late 1960s as part of the social and cultural upheavals of that era. Brightman’s publication deployed several major themes as he argued for Native American rights and against the federal Indian bureaucracy, especially “America’s colonial office,” the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In The Warpath, Brightman demanded Indian liberation and self-determination, calling for direct political action at places like Alcatraz and Mount Rushmore, a place Brightman and other activists occupied in 1970. Brightman also celebrated Indian history and culture, criticized Indian stereotypes, excoriated moderate Indian leaders and, perhaps most significantly, investigated the appalling conditions at underfunded and understaffed Indian schools. His principal achievement was the articulation of a strident anti-racist and anti-colonial ideology that continues to resonate in Indian Country.

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

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...

Between and Across Institutions: Multiple Removals, Settler Colonialism, and Histories of the West

In the early 2000s, Faith O’Neil (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) sought answers about what had happened to her family members incarcerated at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians—a federal facility opened in South Dakota in1902 and overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Around the same time, I sought answers in the National Archives, trying to understand lived histories in Canton’s locked wards. As I researched and started writing a book about people on the inside of Canton and their kin outside of it, I collaborated with tribal historians and activists. When I began contacting descendants to offer digital copies of archived sources about their kin, Faith O’Neil answered my letter. O’Neil’s decision to share her own historical sources and family memories with me, and our joint research efforts while I completed my book project, set in motion a different approach to interpreting institutions and Western history.1 (1) According to Faith O’Neil, her mother Cora Winona Faribault was born on September 28, 1926, at the Canton Asylum. Faith’s grandmother, Elizabeth Alexis Faribault (Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota), had been detained at the Indian Asylum since 1915. For years she was forced to work in asylum superintendent Harry Hummer’s bungalow—right up until she gave birth to Cora Winona. Shortly after delivering the child, Dr. Hummer informed concerned administrators at the Bureau of Indian Affairs that Faribault’s inherent defectiveness caused the unexpected pregnancy. Hummer—the same person who exploited Faribault’s coerced work—assured the BIA that Faribault was well cared for at the institution. He further argued that it was in her best interest to remain there. The commissioner concurred. Mother and child would be kept together in locked wards for several more years.2 (2)

David Littlefield, Michelle Littlefield, Tracy Acord, Deborah Canary, Francis Canary Jr., Veronica Casey, Patricia Colbert, Vivian Courcy, Will Courcy, Donna Defaria, Antonio Defaria, Kim Dorsey, Kelly Dorsey, Francis Lagace, Jill Lagace, David Lewry, Kathleen Lewry, Michele Lewry, Richard Lewry, Robert Lincoln, Christina Almeida, Carol Murphy, Dorothy Peirce, and David Purdy, Plaintiffs,v.United States Department of the Interior; Debra A. Haaland, in

Gaming Law ReviewVol. 27, No. 4 CaseDavid Littlefield, Michelle Littlefield, Tracy Acord, Deborah Canary, Francis Canary Jr., Veronica Casey, Patricia Colbert, Vivian Courcy, Will Courcy, Donna Defaria, Antonio Defaria, Kim Dorsey, Kelly Dorsey, Francis Lagace, Jill Lagace, David Lewry, Kathleen Lewry, Michele Lewry, Richard Lewry, Robert Lincoln, Christina Almeida, Carol Murphy, Dorothy Peirce, and David Purdy, Plaintiffs,v.United States Department of the Interior; Debra A. Haaland, in her official capacity as Secretary of the Interior; Bureau of Indian Affairs; and Bryan Newland, in his official capacity as Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs; Defendants, and MASHPEE WAMPANOAG TRIBE, Intervenor-Defendant.United States District Court, D. Massachusetts.Case No. 22-CV-10273-AK.Memorandum and Order on Cross Motions for Summary JudgmentFebruary 10, 2023.Published Online:15 May 2023https://doi.org/10.1089/glr2.2023.29076.casAboutSectionsView articleView Full TextPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail View articleFiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 27Issue 4May 2023 InformationCopyright 2023, 2023 Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishersTo cite this article:David Littlefield, Michelle Littlefield, Tracy Acord, Deborah Canary, Francis Canary Jr., Veronica Casey, Patricia Colbert, Vivian Courcy, Will Courcy, Donna Defaria, Antonio Defaria, Kim Dorsey, Kelly Dorsey, Francis Lagace, Jill Lagace, David Lewry, Kathleen Lewry, Michele Lewry, Richard Lewry, Robert Lincoln, Christina Almeida, Carol Murphy, Dorothy Peirce, and David Purdy, Plaintiffs,v.United States Department of the Interior; Debra A. Haaland, in her official capacity as Secretary of the Interior; Bureau of Indian Affairs; and Bryan Newland, in his official capacity as Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs; Defendants, and MASHPEE WAMPANOAG TRIBE, Intervenor-Defendant.United States District Court, D. Massachusetts.Case No. 22-CV-10273-AK.Memorandum and Order on Cross Motions for Summary JudgmentFebruary 10, 2023..Gaming Law Review.May 2023.218-231.http://doi.org/10.1089/glr2.2023.29076.casPublished in Volume: 27 Issue 4: May 15, 2023PDF download

Gale Primary Sources: Indigenous Peoples of North America, Part II, The Indian Rights Association, 1882‐1986

Indigenous Peoples of North America is included in the Gale Primary Sources series and is in two parts. This database, The Indian Rights Association, 1882‐1986, is the second of the two. The Indian Rights Association (IRA) is the first organization to address American Indian rights and interests, and this collection includes its organizational records; incoming and outgoing correspondence; annual reports; draft legislation; photographs; administrative files; pamphlets, publications, and other print materials (including documents from the Council on Indian Affairs and other American Indian organizations); and manuscripts and research notes on Indian traditions, both social and cultural. Founded in 1882 by White philanthropists, the IRA's initial approach to American Indians was both assimilationist and paternalistic, leading it to advocate for the detribalization of America's Indigenous peoples, maintaining it would improve their social and economic status. Nevertheless, it was one of the first organizations to report on and expose the corruption of federal government officials tasked with working with and for American Indians. Eventually, the IRA would discard assimilationism and work with other, newer, occasionally Indian-run organizations such as the Association on American Indian Affairs, the Society of American Indians, and the National Indian Defense Association. The IRA sought to debunk misconceptions and half-truths about American Indians and their condition in the United States, which were too often the basis for policy and legislation related to Native Americans. It also sent association representatives to Indian reservations to make note of local conditions there, not only to evaluate the actions of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) but also to provide background information for legislation related to Indigenous peoples.This database's search functions often produce results relevant to the query submitted, and both its search and browse functions can be navigated with relative ease. This database can be subscribed to or purchased with an annual hosting fee. The purchase price, based on a variety of factors, can start as low as $2,796 for public libraries or $3,994 for academic libraries, with starting annual hosting fees of $22 and $32, respectively. Whether institutions find this pricing reasonable depends on their need for the materials covered by the Indigenous Peoples of North America collection. The licensing agreement for this database is too long and detailed but standard in its composition and therefore is of no concern.

Native American Voting Rights in Utah: Federal Policy, Citizenship, and Voter Suppression

Native American Voting Rights in Utah: Federal Policy, Citizenship, and Voter Suppression

Theft: Grave robbery, territorial conquest, and irrigation

This paper explores the process of settler colonialism in Washington State's Yakima Valley in the early twentieth century as an example of a regional power bloc that sought to maximize white access to natural resources while dispossessing Native Americans of their lands and access to water. Through a multiscalar approach, I consider how colonization and white supremacy were normalized through infrastructural projects crucial to agricultural development and economic prosperity in the US West. A discussion of a 1906 Native American grave robbery operates as an anchor for a larger analysis of how irrigation infrastructure and other reclamation projects served the colonizing aims of the US federal government. In the US West, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and Bureau of Reclamation (BoR) were both federal agencies that played critical roles in an era where public lands were being converted to private property and allotted Native American reservation land was significantly diminished after being sold to non-Natives. The grave robbery itself and ensuing trial serve as indications of everyday life in the Yakima Valley in 1906, revealing the interconnections between infrastructural advancements, white supremacist settler colonialism, and grave robbery.

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

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.

Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century

In Reproduction on the Reservation, Brianna Theobald orients the history of reproductive justice around Native American women and the history of Native sovereignty around reproduction. In her analysis of the twentieth-century policies that shaped Native women's reproductive health, Theobald emphasizes Native women's stories. This is a conscious—and political—choice, reflecting Theobald's rejection of common narratives where sterilization abuse appears as the defining feature in the history of Native women's lives. Instead, Theobald illustrates a longer and more nuanced history of reproduction, pregnancy, and birthing practices throughout the twentieth century. This history is inextricably intertwined with the history of Native kinship, women's power within their communities, and cultural knowledge.Theobald balances her study between “depth” and “breadth,” alternating chapters between specific analyses of her case study of the Crow Reservation in southern Montana and a wider, national story of policy and activism. Her sources include oral histories of Crow and Northern Cheyenne women, bureaucratic records, government studies, ethnographic reports, memoirs, and the records of activist organizations. An expert at reading colonial sources against the grain, she finds Native women's resistance and negotiation in the words of Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) agents.Theobald identifies links between two distinct time periods: the early twentieth century and the 1960s to 1970s. Both periods were characterized by the “eliminatory logic” of the state and by Native women's activism. As Theobald notes, Native women navigated both periods with “fortitude and creativity,” negotiating, adapting, and refusing the federal government's prescriptions on childbirth and reproductive health (p. 12).Theobald's first chapter primarily focuses on Crow birthing and child-rearing practices, as she explains the system of “flexible childrearing,” where children, who had many parents and grandparents, were raised communally. In her second chapter, Theobald argues that the Progressive-era “Save the Babies” campaign was a “cornerstone of early twentieth-century federal Indian policy,” (pp. 44–45) illuminating the connection between the maternalist mission of field matrons, reformers, and other state agents and the medicalization of childbirth on reservations. In her analysis of the relationships between Native women and BIA personnel in the first decades of the twentieth century, she argues that BIA efforts to “persuade” Native women to conform to Americanized childbirth practices reveal how effectively Native women negotiated with BIA staff in matters of reproductive health.Reproduction on the Reservation has implications for our understanding of how Native people experienced the eugenics campaigns of the early twentieth century. In short, Theobald effectively demonstrates that the widespread coercive sterilization of Native women in the 1960s and 1970s was not an anomaly. In her third chapter, Theobald explores the conflict and interpersonal dynamics among BIA leadership on the Crow Reservation in the 1930s (including the superintendent, Robert Yellowtail, the first Native superintendent of his own reservation), non-Native and Native staff at the agency hospital, tribal council members, and Native women. In the 1930s, Crow women were “far from silent regarding health and politics,” and pushed reproductive health concerns into reservation politics (p. 85).Theobald's treatment of Native women's experiences of relocation in chapter 4 illuminates the dynamics of bureaucracy where assimilative policies and reproduction meet, including how Native women navigated health insurance and urban public hospitals. On relocation, Native women maintained and adapted their ties with reservations, practiced flexible childrearing in new environments, and, through Indian centers, established the infrastructure that the BIA sorely lacked. Theobald's definition of termination as a “host of policies and practices—not limited to the dissolution of a tribe's political status—that affected virtually every aspect of reservation life,” pushes scholarly discussions of termination outside of the political realm and into the everyday experiences of women and their families (p. 124). Specifically, in chapter 5, Theobald considers the role of terminationist policymakers’ decisions to close reservation hospitals—ostensibly as a way of saving money, but really as a way to ensure assimilation—in her analysis of Crow political opposition to termination.Theobald's focus on the activism among Native nurses, including Susie Yellowtail (Crow) provides needed context to the scholarly conversations around sterilization-related activism in the 1970s (p. 157). Her final chapter elucidates the contributions of Native women's organizations like Women of All Red Nations (WARN), the pan-Native women's organization founded in 1978, in the fight for decolonization, which required, “restoration of women's strength and the reclamation of their reproductive control” (p. 165).The definition of Native women's political activism should include reproductive health. For example, Native women have employed midwifery as a response to sterilization abuse and have advocated for access to health care using the language of treaty rights. Reproduction on the Reservation is a rich contribution to the historical fields of twentieth-century Native American activism, women's history, the history of reproductive justice, and Indian policy. Theobald reminds readers that reproductive health was and is a matter of tribal sovereignty.

Providing for the People: Economic Change among the Salish and Kootenai Indians, 1875–1910 by Robert J. Bigart (review)

Reviewed by: Providing for the People: Economic Change among the Salish and Kootenai Indians, 1875–1910 by Robert J. Bigart Thomas Biolsi (bio) Providing for the People: Economic Change among the Salish and Kootenai Indians, 1875–1910 by Robert J. Bigart University of Oklahoma Press, 2020 ROBERT J. BIGART is librarian emeritus at Salish Kootenai College on the Flathead Reservation. Providing for the People is not a typical scholarly history. This is a detailed narrative of the gradual changes in the reservation economy of the Salish and Kootenai and the result of what the author describes as over fifty years of research. The narrative is focused largely on how Salish and Kootenai adapted—very effectively, it quickly becomes obvious—to changing circumstances, and description is tightly linked to the archival sources. The book is copiously documented and draws on the author's long career locating documents of many kinds. The main lesson of the narrative is abundantly clear: The Salish and Kootenai peoples made a gradual transition from dependence on hunting, fishing, and foraging to primary dependence upon cattle and farming by 1910 (although foraging continued to play a role in subsistence into the twentieth century). Another lesson is that this transition was made without any need for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to "civilize" or otherwise induce the Salish and Kootenai to farm; they made the transition on their own, with some very modest assistance from the agency in the form of seeds and farm implements (paid for with Indian labor). Furthermore, the Salish and Kootenai never became heavily dependent upon BIA rations. The picture Bigart carefully paints makes the reader wonder why on earth the transition to agriculture and "self-support" (as the BIA anxiously and judgmentally called it) was supposedly so vexed on other reservations—or even if the fraught histories of poverty and supposed resistance to agriculture on other reservations was more the outcome of the BIA failures than the "buffalo culture," much less the "indolence" of Native people. The last buffalo hunt took place in 1881, and at that point adaptations were already apparent on the reservation. Both horses and cattle were grazed on the open range (with an annual roundup); numbers varied by individual, of which 105 owned cattle. Most livestock were owned by mixedbloods and white men married into the tribes, but sixty-seven fullbloods owned at least some. The impact of family ownership of even a few cattle for cash sale [End Page 181] and for subsistence was, of course, significant. A good deal of small-scale farming was also taking place by 1881, including subsistence gardens, but also wheat and oats acreages (two to ten acres in the case of wheat). Notably, this was prior to the allotment of the reservation; there was no need to impose "private property" to induce what the BIA called "industry." Chiefs had an important role in allocating farmsteads and in adjudicating disputes over land (apparently there was little need for a Court of Indian Offenses). Even though economic productivity varied by family—a few families owned large herds or farms and also opened reservation businesses—one must consider that surviving traditional customs of pooling and sharing spread basic resources and even cash more widely than might be the case among non-Indians. The tribes also continued to forage both on and off the reservation (including deer, elk, trout, bitterroot, and berries); access to the original homelands beyond reservation boundaries was guaranteed by the terms of the Hellgate Treaty of 1855. Families that continued to rely on this source of subsistence combined it with livestock and farming, leaving for trips when crops or cattle did not need intensive attention. Gradually, the role of foraging in subsistence declined (but never disappeared), while cattle raising, farming, and (fairly limited) wage work became more prominent. The BIA agent reported in 1910 that "practically every family on the reservation is engaged in the cattle business to a certain extent, and the herds vary from two or three cows to as high as a thousand head of cattle" (144). It was the imposition of new laws in the twentieth century that put this Indigenous economic adaptation at risk. Most importantly...

Voice of the Tribes: A History of the National Tribal Chairman's Association by Thomas A. Britten (review)

Reviewed by: Voice of the Tribes: A History of the National Tribal Chairman's Association by Thomas A. Britten Paul McKenzie-Jones (bio) Voice of the Tribes: A History of the National Tribal Chairman's Association by Thomas A. Britten University of Oklahoma Press, 2020 THOMAS A. BRITTEN has produced a meticulously researched history of the short-lived and often-forgotten American Indian advocacy group, the National Tribal Chairman's Association (NTCA). Founded in 1973 and ended in 1987, the NTCA sought (often unsuccessfully) to present itself to the U.S. federal government and Indigenous people within the lower forty-nine U.S. states as the sole "bona-[fide representative of] federally recognized Indians" (104) when lobbying the government for Indigenous rights. Britten tracks the genesis of the organization—as a perceived antidote to the "wrong Indian voices" (42) of urban Indian activism and the structural uncertainties that beset the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Britten argues that the elected tribal leaders who sought to chart a more conservative approach to American Indian rights reform saw an opportunity to fill a vacuum and seize control of the narrative and direction of the self-determination movement. The text is preceded by a foreword from founding member of the American Indian Press Association and former NCAI director Charles Trimble, who hints at the still-lingering resentment felt over the ideological divisions between American Indian rights advocates from that era. In the current climate of Indigenous rights activism, the foreword can best be described as tone deaf in the way Trimble excoriates and seeks to invalidate the youth movements of the NCAI and the American Indian Movement as being rude, divisive, disrespectful, radical, and violent. Fortunately, while the book exposes the tensions that existed between the various groups fighting for American Indian rights during the 1960s and 1970s, Britten takes a much more measured and diplomatic tone than Trimble when discussing these divisions. As Britten shows, there was a certain amount of lateral violence and prejudice behind the decision to create an organization of elected tribal chairman and attempt to position themselves as the sole voice of American Indians within the United States. This prejudice included resentment at the NCAI opening its membership to include urban Indians. The charter [End Page 187] members of the NTCA saw urban Indians as inauthentic, illegitimate, and undeserving of either a voice in the Indian rights movement or government funding. In their eyes, the only "real" Indians were reservation-based Indians. As such, they determined that their organizational membership was exclusively limited to democratically elected tribal leaders. Fundamental to this exclusivity was the NTCA founders' determination to take a more measured and conservative approach to fighting for reform by using official channels of diplomacy and more politically "traditional" practices of lobbying, rather than protests, blockades, or occupations. The strength of Britten's history of the NTCA is his honest evaluations of the success of the organization in shifting or directing government policies toward American Indian communities and people. He offers a measured judgment that reflects the ambiguity with which the NTCA was viewed within Indian Country. Some saw NTCA as de facto mouthpieces for the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) while others resented their disdain for nonreservation based American Indians. Connecting the mistrust from both sides of this argument was a collective distrust of NTCA insistence on conservative approaches to federal policy reform and insistence on framing themselves as the exclusive authentic voice of American Indians and tribal nations. As Britten points out, many more tribal chairmen were members of the NCAI than were members of the NTCA. Somewhat ironically, the downfall of the NTCA was a result of the very factionalism and aggressive activism that the organization was created to counter. "Radicalized" (181) by the stringent budget cuts of the Reagan administration, NTCA leaders became much more vocal in their criticism of the government and government policies. Ultimately, this more vocal approach resulted in the government pulling away funding that the organization relied on. Unsurprisingly, the demise of the organization went largely un-mourned in Indian Country, except for those members involved. Britten shows how some former...

Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West by Cameron Blevins

Reviewed by: Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West by Cameron Blevins Susan Schulten (bio) Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West. By Cameron Blevins. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 232. Cloth, $34.95.) The U.S. Post has drawn far less attention than other federal agencies in the settlement of the West, particularly the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the General Land Office, and the U.S. military. Yet, in Paper Trails, Cameron Blevins argues that the postal network was essential to the conquest and settlement of this vast and geographically diverse region. By facilitating communication through a loose yet responsive network, the U.S. Post provided "the underlying spatial circuitry of western expansion" (3). Blevins describes the U.S. Post from the 1860s through the early twentieth century as "big, expansive, fast moving, and unstable" (5). This statement captures his nuanced and original thesis. The Post Office Department operated as a highly decentralized organization that relied on "agents" at the local level to convey letters, newspapers, and later money across the country. Blevins argues that its tenuous, unstable nature was precisely what enabled post offices and postal services to appear swiftly alongside new communities—such as mining towns—but also to contract just as quickly when those towns disappeared, as was so common across the West. To capture this dynamic, he terms the postal system in this era a "gossamer network." Blevins uses this observation to rethink the operation of state power. The temporary and flexible agency model enabled the postal network to keep up with the extraordinary pace and reach of western colonization in the late nineteenth century. It might be tempting to see the decentralized and privatized nature of postal operations as a limitation or disadvantage, particularly given our long-standing assumptions about bureaucracy and administrative power. But Blevins argues that the early western postal system was effective not in spite of its institutional weaknesses but because of them. In other words, it was "the absence of so many traditional hallmarks of bureaucratic strength that made the gossamer network such a crucial part of the American state's efforts to incorporate the western United States" (13). By the early twentieth century, he writes, this peculiarly unstable yet flexible style of federal power helped to "transform the western United States from a sprawling and remote territory over which the state had only a tenuous hold into an integrated region occupied by American settlers, industry, and government" (158). Blevins relies on several different types of sources and analysis to make his case. Students of the digital humanities will appreciate his ability to [End Page 417] extract meaningful patterns from an enormous data set that identified thousands of post offices in the second half of the nineteenth century. He asks two questions of this data: Where were post offices established, and when? He successfully maps two-thirds of these 166,000 post offices and, through careful accounting for error and missing information, helps to randomize what cannot be firmly established. With this aggregate data, he is able to see that post offices were constantly being established but also closed across the American West. This dynamic of simultaneous expansion and contraction sets the West apart from the rest of the country. Abundant maps in the study help guide the reader through this western dynamic of boom and bust, but readers will be even more intrigued by the extensive companion website to the book (www.gossamernetwork.com). In a site that is intuitive and thoughtful, Blevins and his colleagues show in real time how the postal network followed—and sometimes anticipated—the rapid dispossession of Native lands in the West. By aggregating and analyzing the location of postal networks, Blevins shows what would otherwise be invisible to historians of the West, answering critics of digital history as confirming what we already know. But Blevins is not strictly engaged with quantitative data. At one end, he relies on individual stories of western migrants whose geographically expansive lives were made possible by the postal network. By facilitating the movement of white Americans into the West, the postal network advanced the conquest of...

Crow Dog’s Trial and Ledger Drawing: Cultural Production and Tribal Nation in the Maw of the American Empire

Abstract The 1882 trial of Crow Dog (Kangi Súŋka), for the murder in 1881 of Spotted Tail (Siŋté Glešká), a leader of the Sicangu/Brulé Lakota, had all of the hallmarks of a twentieth- or twenty-first-century celebrity trial. People came for miles around Deadwood, Dakota Territory and far-flung parts to the west in order to attend the trial and rub shoulders with the participants. From the point of view of government officials in the Bureau of Indian Affairs who engineered the trial, the goal was to wrest criminal jurisdiction from Indian governments on reservations. A number of drawings on paper, “ledger drawings,” produced by Crow Dog and other Lakota participants engulfed in the trial and related activities, show another colonial process at work—the appropriation and resignification of the Native voice within the public sphere. The confluence of national, regional, and local events swirling around Deadwood, Dakota Territory, and the legal case that becomes Ex-parte Crow Dog before the Supreme Court, resituates the historical significance of this genre of “Captivity Ledgers” both for Lakota and settler sensibilities during the post-Civil War and early reservation era.

Recent zooarchaeological investigations at the Boarding School site (24GL302), Glacier County, Montana

This article presents an analysis of the bison assemblage recovered from excavations at the Boarding School site (24GL302), located in Glacier County, Montana. Excavations at the site took place following the inadvertent discovery of a large bone bed uncovered during foundation construction for a new school by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The assemblage represents contexts associated with both the adjacent Late Precontact period bison kill site first excavated by Thomas Kehoe in the 1950s and the later occupation of the site during its use as a boarding school for Blackfoot children in the first half of the twentieth century. Through these remains, this work provides new insight into this continually used landscape.