Native Agency: Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs by Valerie Lambert (review)

Reviewed by: Native Agency: Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs by Valerie Lambert Samuel R. Cook (bio) Native Agency: Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs by Valerie Lambert University of Minnesota Press, 2022 FOR AMERICAN INDIANS and those familiar with Indian affairs in the United States, the mere mention of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is bound to elicit a preconditioned negative response, even though over 95 percent of its employees are Native. In Native Agency, anthropologist Valerie Lambert (Choctaw Nation) challenges contemporary views of the BIA by asking the simple question: "What is the impact of Indians having seized control of this space within the settler state?" (4). The author fuses personal experience as a former BIA employee, historical research, and a theoretical foundation that includes critical perspectives on bureaucracy from Max Weber to Akhil Gupta, to present a realistic assessment of an agency that has been in transition for at least four decades. Lambert's experience as an anthropologist interning at the BIA provides context for her ethnographic research with the actual people working in the agency, delivering a cogent message that for many Indians, working for the BIA is "a way to leverage the power of the settler state to their own ends . . . For many of these employees, working for the BIA is a form of resistance to colonial rule" (11). Chapter 1 provides a brief history of the BIA prior to the advent of Indian hiring in the 1970s. Situating the original Office of Indian Affairs in the War Department, then noting that the transition to the Department of the Interior was based on a settler belief in the "vanishing American" motif, Lambert illuminates one of the central problems with Indian affairs—that non-Indigenous agents are too often credited with definitive policy initiatives, while Native acts of resistance or circumvention go uncredited. While policymakers such as commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier and President Richard Nixon are credited with some of the most "progressive" initiatives in Indian Affairs, the influence of Indigenous activists in buffering and manipulating the directions of Indian policy are frequently overlooked. Yet the BIA became the de facto "steward" of the trust relationship between Indigenous Nations and the federal government. Thus, chapters 2 and 3 elaborate on how—as "Indian preference" became the norm in federal hiring within agencies dealing with Indigenous issues, Natives in the ranks seized the opportunity to effect a paradigm shift within the Bureau that seeks End Page 124 clarification of the trust relationship as a good faith understanding that Native lands, rights, and sovereignty are sacrosanct. The remaining chapters rely much more on ethnographic data, as they focus on BIA employees at different levels during and after the mid-1990s (during Lambert's BIA tenure). Chapter 4 focuses on upper-level officials (notably, the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs) and how Native people in that position—particularly Ada Deer and Kevin Gover, for whom Lambert worked in respective terms, held strong convictions about working for Indians rather than managing their affairs from afar. Chapters 5 and 6, respectively, deal with rank-and-file employees (housed in the central office), and field employees, demonstrating that many of the constraints of traditional bureaucracies still afflict an Indian-controlled organization, but illustrating that the commitment of most employees to strengthening and upholding the trust relationship has made a difference. While Lambert avoids excessive criticism of some of the more controversial assistant secretaries—notably Ross Swimmer, who served during the first Reagan administration—she provides compelling examples of moments when all BIA employees felt a sense of purpose when confronted with common crises: most notably in the context of the 2009 Cobell v. Salazar decision where the Supreme Court determined that the BIA had mismanaged individual trust accounts. Lambert's book, intentionally or not, serves as a practical guide to how the BIA works, including specifics about operations such as Individual Indian Money accounts and how they are managed at each level of the federal bureaucracy. Lambert is not, however, an apologist. As Native scholars once again endeavor to bring about coherence in Indian law—something that is lacking largely due to centuries of non-Indigenous control...