Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933 by Cathleen D. Cahill (review)

Cathleen Cahill’s Federal Fathers and Mothers provides the first in-depth examination of the men and women employed by the Indian Office at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries—a period significant in federal policy for its intense focus on assimilating Native people into the larger Euro-American body politic as quickly as possible. The book is a product of innovative research in dramatically under-used federal personnel files and reminds readers how important it is to study policy development “by paying close attention to the people who actually carried it out ‘on the ground’” (257). Cahill does more, though, intervening into several foundational historiographic trends in United States, Western, and Indigenous history.

Following the Civil War, Cahill argues, the federal government sought to transform the west by dispossessing Indigenous people of their homelands, destroying Native cultural identities, and assimilating them into the citizenry. Although there was already a long history of conquest and dispossession in North America, policymakers employed new techniques, which the author asserts represented “perhaps the most deliberate instance of…‘intimate colonialism’” in federal Indian affairs (6). Building upon the theoretical foundations of Ann Laura Stoler among others, Cahill makes a major contribution to the historical literature by demonstrating how intimate colonialism functioned in the United States context, specifically focusing on the ways assimilation policy administration worked to disrupt relationships between Native children and their families, to shift and shape Indigenous marriage relations and gender roles within the home, all the while pressuring these communities to adopt white middle-class norms. The Indian Service evolved in the late-nineteenth century reflecting these policy directives and the men and women it employed became models and object lessons—the federal fathers and mothers of Cahill’s title. In this period, the Indian Office employed more women, Native people, and married couples than any other federal bureaucracy.

Cahill makes a second major contribution in her contextualization of the Indian Service within broader narratives of state development in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Here she argues that policymakers borrowed ideas from earlier Reconstruction-era programs in the South, especially those related to education and vocational training. In this way though, bureaucrats in the federal government made an important distinction that would affect social policymaking into the twentieth century. Rather than creating programs that rewarded past or future service to the nation (as was the case in social provisions for veterans and mothers), policies for freedpeople and Indians emerged out of “a sense of national obligation for wrongs committed against them, [and] became a justification for compensatory social programs intended to prepare blacks and Indians for full citizenship” (26). In advancing this argument, Cahill pushes at the temporal and conceptual boundaries that have confined our understandings of state development in very productive ways.

White women played a significant role in late-nineteenth century Indian affairs because the maternalist underpinnings of federal policy rendered them essential to fulfilling its assimilation goals. This is a third major corrective offered in Cahill’s book as she demonstrates that it was not the Women’s and Children’s Bureaus of the early-1900s that first employed large numbers of women, but the Indian Service as early as the 1880s. By 1925, she cites, female Indian Office personnel numbered over 1,000, while the Children’s Bureau employed 120 and the Women’s Bureau just 45 (65). Importantly, she asserts that women who worked among Native people became agents of the state and a vital part of U.S. colonial bureaucracy. While ideas about “women’s innate moral authority” made them ideal candidates to administer assimilation policy designed around education and gender roles within the home, in reality the women of the Indian Service “embodied the coercive power of the national state” (71). As female federal...