Reservations, Removal, and Reform: The Mission Indian Agents of Southern California, 1878–1903 by Valerie Sherer Mathes and Phil Brigandi (review)

For more than a century now, scholars have written extensively about the history of California Indians. With each passing decade, we have a fuller picture of the breadth and complexity of pre-contact Native California, the degree to which Spanish colonization and Franciscan missions challenged California Indians' existence, and the ways in which the advent of Mexican rule and then mission secularization upended Native accommodations and presented California Indians with new existential threats. Further, scholars have explored the impacts of the Gold Rush on California's Indigenous people, and most recently the genocidal practices of American settlers and California militiamen have captured both public and scholarly attention. Yet, by and large, with the notable exception of the fine monographs of George Harwood Phillips, the administration of federal Indian policy in California in the first half of the century of American statehood has received little scholarly attention. Therefore, the publication of Reservations, Removal, and Reform: The Mission Indian Agents of Southern California, 1878–1903, by Valerie Sherer Mathes and Phil Brigandi, is a most welcome addition to the already expansive historiography on California Indians.

Reservations, Removal, and Reform takes as its focus the federally appointed Indian agents who oversaw southern California's reservations and Indian schools between 1878, when the government authorized funding for a permanent Mission Indian Agency, and 1903, when the federal Indian commissioner dissolved the agency. The book itself is composed of eight chapters. Chapter one covers the period before the agency was created and discusses in detail and in chronological order the various federal officials (superintendents and special agents) who grappled with how the government might deal with a scattered and diverse California Indian population whose numbers had been thinned and whose leadership had been decimated by Spanish missions, Mexican ranchos, and Anglo-American settlers. As chapter one shows, even before the Mission Indian Agency was established, it was apparent that federal Indian policy, shaped as it was by issues arising on large Indian reservations elsewhere in the American West, would be a bad fit for California, where there were so few reservations and no treaties guaranteeing Indians' rights, annual support, or land tenure. As would be the case later in the agency years, federal support was minimal, and the agents and the degree to which they were informed and committed to the job varied.

The seven chapters that follow the introductory chapter—each one devoted to a different agent—have a somewhat predictable feel. All open with an overview of the agent discussed in the chapter and then move to a larger discussion of the agent's travels to various reservations and schools and a narration of the major issues of those years as documented in the agency's annual reports. The authors describe again and again how the foibles and limitations of the agents themselves, along with a chronic shortage of resources, contributed to and prolonged Indian poverty and suffering. In this sense, this volume resembles arguments advanced decades ago in The Great Father, Francis Paul Prucha's magisterial study of federal Indian policy. Yes, there are important and diverse stories to be told in these chapters, from the creation of various reservations by executive order to the removal of the Cupeño from their lands in 1903. And, yes, each Indian agent's years in office were marked by different controversies and varying degrees of actual commitment to the bettering of Indian welfare. Perhaps the most compelling portrait is of Agent Francisco Estudillo (1893–1897). Estudillo, despite his own California ancestry and the fact that he was related to many of the Indians who were his charges, was, like other agents, eventually forced from office by Indian and non-Indian opponents alike. Also of great interest is the discussion of how provisions of the Dawes Act, which was on its...