Explore the vast range of titles available.

Established in 1824, the United States Indian Service, 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. InFederal 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.Making extensive and original use of federal personnel files and other archival materials, Cahill examines how assimilation practices were developed and enacted by an unusually diverse group of women and men, whites and Indians, married couples and single people. Cahill argues that the Indian Service 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. In seeking to remove Indians from federal wardship, the government experimented with new forms of maternalist social provision, which later influenced U.S. colonialism overseas. Cahill also reveals how the government's hiring practices unexpectedly allowed federal personnel on the ground to crucially influence policies devised in Washington, especially when Native employees used their positions to defend their families and communities.

Two key events in suffrage history parallel important moments in Native history. In 1890, national suffrage organizations reunited to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) during the pinnacle of federal assimilation policies that aimed to destroy the cultural and political structures of Indigenous nations and to assimilate them into the citizenry of the United States. The year 1920 fell amid what is often called the nadir of Native history, characterized by poverty, disease, massive land dispossession, and little to no political power, all of which were the direct result of federal policies. These concurrent developments are rarely discussed in tandem, but some Indigenous feminists engaged in debates over Indian citizenship and voting rights and were in conversation with mainstream suffragists. While the Nineteenth Amendment did not enfranchise the roughly one-third of all Native adults who were not US citizens in 1920, Indigenous feminists loudly and directly called upon newly enfranchised white women to address \"the Indian situation as it is today\" upon ratification. This essay focuses on two Native feminist intellectuals, Laura Cornelius Kellogg (Wisconsin Oneida) and Gertrude Bonnin/Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Dakota). These two women may have been eligible to vote in 1920—it is unclear if they were and unknown if they did—and they participated in suffrage debates.3 In their dialogues with white women, they offered a vision of US citizenship for American Indians that could be coterminous with sovereignty for Native nations. Indeed, their primary concern was the survival of their communities, and they saw US citizenship and suffrage as useful tools in support of that goal.

Both white and Chinese American suffragists in the United States closely watched and discussed the events of the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and the establishment of the Chinese Republic (1912–1949). They were aware of the republican revolutionaries’ support for women's rights, which conflicted with American stereotypes of China as a backward nation, especially in its treatment of women. Chinese suffragists, real and imagined, became a major talking point in debates over women's voting rights in the United States as white suffragists and national newspapers championed their stories. This led to prominent visual depictions of Chinese suffragists in the press, but also their participation in public events such as suffrage parades. For a brief time, the transnational nature of suffrage conversations was highly visible as was the suffrage activism of women in U.S. Chinese communities. However, because Chinese immigrants were barred from citizenship by U.S. immigration law, white activists tended to depict Chinese suffragists as foreign, resulting in the erasure of their memory in the U.S. suffrage movement.

[...]a series of conflicts and loss in her friendships, including her struggles with Gertrude Bonnin (Yankton Sioux), which were both personal and about the direction of the Society, led her to withdraw from the organization and the national scene of Native activism after 1919. The agreement was meant to settle land title disputes that had been ongoing since 1882, but the federal commission had refused to recognize the legitimate leaders of the tribe, and the reservation agent threatened Bottineau with arrest if he set foot on the reservation.

[...]the scholars in this collection bring into focus the contributions of women whose suffrage activism was by necessity part of a broader civil rights agenda, as well as a diverse set of women who linked their demands for the vote to a range of women's issues, including but not limited to racial equality, bodily integrity, sexual autonomy, economic independence, and self-determination. Throughout, we center a diverse array of lesser-known women in the hopes of offsetting the cultural propensity to forget women's contributions to American life—especially those of women of color (an imperfect term that encompasses Black, Indigenous, Asian-American, and Latinx women). [...]the authors in this issue reconsider the Nineteenth Amendment in the broader political landscapes in which women lobbied for and against the vote, before and after 1920. [...]while only one of the six essays (Thomas Dublin's) is expressly about African American women, it is scholars of African American women who have long encouraged historians to look beyond NAWSA to understand the full scope and chronology of the campaign for women's suffrage and to reconsider the sources and methods we use.3 In shaping this special issue, we rely on these insights to expand the cast of suffrage characters—especially with an eye to racial diversity and the myriad genealogies of feminist activism—and acknowledge that doing so changes the stories we tell. [...]we realize that changes in voting rights happen as the result of changes in ideology.

When Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, an attorney in the Indian Office, submitted a photograph for her personnel file in compliance with the federal civil service administration, she made a radical choice to indigenize her record. Baldwin, who had lived in Washington, DC for many years, had photographs of herself dressed in the highest turn-of-the-century fashion, such as the portrait of her in a silk dress with her hair swooped and fastened with a fashionable feather clip. She knew the picture would go into the federal record. As an employee of the Indian Office, she also knew the agency's emphasis on assimilation and that the photograph told a different story. Despite the overtly resistant nature of this photograph, there was no mention of it in her file. Over time she became more influential in the Indian Office, even as she became less invested in the project of assimilation.