Federal fathers & mothers : a social history of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933

Cahill, Cathleen D. (Author). William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies. (Added Author).

Summary: Established in 1824, the United States Indian Service (USIS), now known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was the agency responsible for carrying out U.S. treaty and trust obligations to American Indians, but it also sought to "civilize" and assimilate them. In Federal Fathers and Mothers, Cathleen Cahill offers the first in-depth social history of the agency during the height of its assimilation efforts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cahill shows how the USIS pursued a strategy of intimate colonialism, using employees as surrogate parents and model families in order to shift Native Americans' allegiances from tribal kinship networks to Euro-American familial structures and, ultimately, the U.S. government.

Record details

ISBN: 0807834726
ISBN: 9780807834725 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN: 0807834726 (cloth : alk. paper)
Physical Description: print
xv, 368 pages : illustrations, map ; 25 cm.
Publisher: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, c2011.

Content descriptions

General Note:	"Published in association with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University."
Bibliography, etc. Note:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Formatted Contents Note:	Pt. 1. From Civil War to civil service -- There is an honest way even of breaking up a treaty : the origins of Indian assimilation policy -- Only the home can found a state : building a better agency -- pt. 2. The women and men of the Indian Service -- Members of an "Amazonian corps" : white women in the Indian Service -- Seeking the incalculable benefit of a faithful, patient man and wife : married employees in the Indian Service -- An Indian teacher among Indians : American Indian labor in the Indian Service -- Sociability in the Indian Service -- The Hoopa Valley Reservation -- pt. 3. The progressive state and the Indian Service -- A nineteenth-century agency in a twentieth-century age -- An old and faithful employee : the Federal Employee Retirement Act and the Indian Service.