Paternalism to Partnership: The Administration of Indian Affairs, 1786–2021 by David H. DeJong (review)

Reviewed by: Paternalism to Partnership: The Administration of Indian Affairs, 1786–2021 by David H. DeJong Valerie Lambert (bio) Paternalism to Partnership: The Administration of Indian Affairs, 1786–2021 by David H. DeJong University of Nebraska Press, 2022 RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN Native people and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) are fraught for many reasons, one of which is the agency's long history of trying to exterminate Indigenous Peoples and dispossess us of our land. Another is the often very personal nature of the federal-Indian relationship: as one of many expressions of the solemn, treaty-based trust responsibilities of the United States toward our sovereign Native Nations, most of us are tethered to the BIA from womb to tomb or from cradle to grave. Although the BIA has had and continues to have a significant impact on Indian Country, the scholarship about the BIA is alarmingly sparse. Authored by the federal director of the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, who is a prolific writer and holds a doctorate in American Indian studies, this valuable reference book helps address this lacuna in the literature. For this reason alone, this work makes a valuable contribution to Indigenous studies. Yet readers will, in addition, find much that is of value and interest in this book, including its central focus on the views of Indian Affairs leaders—in their own words—on numerous topics, including Indian land and land tenure, Indian education, Native youth, and tribal economic development. An introduction and conclusion bookend sixty-five chapters—one on each individual who has headed Indian Affairs. Tackling a period that spans 235 years, the chapters address eight superintendents of Indian Affairs, one chief clerk, thirty-nine commissioners of Indian Affairs, and fourteen assistant secretaries of Indian Affairs. The chapters are composed primarily of extended, uninterrupted excerpts from these leaders' public writings. DeJong mines these officials' words, relying heavily on the annual reports that these leaders produced until 1965. DeJong's undertaking was massive: during the allotment era, for example, certain commissioners' annual reports totaled fifteen hundred pages. DeJong uses these officials' writings to illuminate the conditions in Indian Country as these top bureaucrats saw them, their own and others' Indian policies, major events that were impacting Indian Country, and these leaders' political philosophies. Every chapter begins with a formulaic but comprehensive and usually insightful biography End Page 122 of each leader, helping contextualize subsequent pages of their public writings or oratory. The initiatives that particular Indian Affairs leaders championed but failed to bring to fruition are especially interesting. The primary sources that ground each chapter reveal that generations before the passage of the General Allotment Act of 1887, numerous heads of Indian Affairs fiercely advocated that our reservation lands be privatized. Other examples of policies thwarted during the years a leader held office include Charles Rhoads's fight to transfer all Indian irrigation projects to the Bureau of Reclamation in the early 1930s and Eddie Brown's battle to remove Indian education from the BIA in the early 1990s—more than a decade before the Bureau of Indian Education was created as a separate unit within Indian Affairs in 2006. Extensive passages testify to the strident, unapologetically anti-Indian words and actions of the dozens of non-Natives who led the BIA through the late 1970s. As their own words make clear, non-Native officials consistently disrespected the federal trust responsibility, stereotyped Indians as lazy and inferior, insisted that the Indian land base was too large, and problematically racialized Indian identity as part of their larger efforts to undermine tribal sovereignty and nationhood. Their statements contrast markedly with those of the Natives who headed the BIA. The latter insisted that treaties and the trust responsibility were of paramount importance, prioritized the expansion of an Indian land base they understood as too small, doggedly worked to combat the racialization of Indian identity, and fought for tribal sovereignty. This otherwise outstanding reference book suffers from only a few minor weaknesses. First, the characterization of "partnership" in the title is misleading. Although assistant secretaries of Indian Affairs often speak about partnering with tribes, "partnership" is something that, for BIA leaders, remains mostly aspirational. Assistant secretaries of Indian Affairs...