Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933 (review)

Embedding her work within recent historical currents that treat the American West as a colonial site, Cahill argues that the federal government designed the Indian Service as a form of “intimate colonialism.” Relying on a familial model of interactions within the boarding schools and on reservations, the Office of Indian Affairs sought to “harness personal relations in the service of the state” (137).

Cahill organizes her book into three parts: (1) a discussion of how federal Indian policy during the assimilation era shaped the Indian Service, (2) an examination of day-to-day experiences of Indian Service employees, and (3) a survey of changes in policy brought about in part by the unique demographics of the Indian Service.

While reviewing much other historical scholarship in her first section on policy, Cahill offers some fresh insights. First, she convincingly argues that policymakers modeled the Indian Office after the Freedmen’s Bureau, especially in regard to its educational initiatives. Second, she points out that the government’s policy shift from treaty making to assimilation represented a “key episode in the formation of the modern state” (18). Third, she observes that the mindset of the Office of Indian Affairs—that everyone connected with the Indian Service had a role in preparing Indians for “civilization”—“made the personnel of the Indian Service and the reservation landscapes into key components of a totalizing strategy of cultural change” (58).

The second part of her book contains the most original contribution. Cahill focuses on the unique demographics of the Indian Service, namely, that it employed large numbers of white women, married couples, and Indians—a unique configuration of workers that the U.S. government deemed necessary to carry out “intimate colonialism” among Indian communities. Although many historians before Cahill have commented on the number of women involved in the Indian Service, particularly its boarding-school personnel, Cahill amasses the quantitative data to show just how true, and how unusual, this profusion was.

At its heart, the book explores a central paradox at the core of the Indian Service—that thousands of Indian people sought and accepted employment there even though it functioned as “the administrative arm of a conquering state,” as Cahill puts it (2). The government’s reliance on this “colonized labor force” was meant to showcase assimilated Indians as models for other Indians to follow. However, as Cahill demonstrates in her chapter on the Hoopa Reservation, many Indian people pursued work in the Indian service not to assimilate but to improve their economic status and to maintain family ties. Indian parents often tried to secure employment at the very boarding schools that their children attended.

Cahill includes a fascinating chapter on “Sociability in the Indian Service” that shows the unintended consequences of intimate colonialism. In one captivating photograph, she shows that some white field matrons on the Hoopa reservation began to use Hoopa baskets to carry their supplies. More troubling still to authorities, many interracial romances between white women and Indian men bloomed within the service.

The final section of the book studies the influence of Progressive reforms on the Indian Service. The era’s increased focus on professionalization, rationalization, and efficiency—and its new requirement of credentials for employment—ironically blocked certain avenues of advancement for Indian people. This part of the book is weaker and not as well integrated into the overall narrative, but in the scheme of things, this is minor criticism.

Overall, Cahill’s work is perceptive and astute. Her investigation of the unique workforce of the Indian Service offers uncommon insights into myriad other topics—the link between the maternalism of white women reformers (“maternal politics”) and the welfare state, the rise of the bureaucratic state, the role of the American West in the rise of this state, Progressivism, American Indian labor history, and “intimate colonialism.”