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Federal Fathers and Mothers

A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933

Cathleen D. Cahill

Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 06/2011
Pages: 384
Subject: Social Science, History | University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9780807877739

DESCRIPTION

Established in 1824, the United States Indian Service (USIS), 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. In Federal 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. Cahill shows how the USIS 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.