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.