the birth of the reservation: making the modern individual among the Lakota

This article traces the means by the which the Lakota people of Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations in South Dakota were internally pacified, that is, penetrated by the state apparatus in the form of the United States of Office of Indian Affairs during the period from 1880 to the mid‐1930s. The focus is on how the state constructed new kinds of bureaucratically knowable and recordable individuals, with new kinds of self‐interests that could be predicted and manipulated by the officials. These new Lakota individuals were made by means of four administrative processes that I call, after Foucault, modes of subjection: property ownership, determination of “competence,” registration of Indian “blood” quanta, and recording of genealogy. Native Americans, colonialism, internal pacification, Lakota, political economy, subjection