The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA, periodically referred to during its history as the Indian Bureau, the Indian Office, the Indian Service, and the Indian Desk) is responsible for administering the United States's overall relationship with more than five hundred tribes and Alaskan communities. Each tribe, depending on its history, treaties, and applicable congressional laws and legal decisions, maintains a separate and unique relationship with the United States. For many tribes the bureau has represented mistrust, fraud, and cultural destruction; for the national government it has represented both the goal of fair dealing and the reality of mistreatment.
In the colonial era, Britain, France, Spain, and their colonies courted the Indian nations as trading partners and military allies. In North America, tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy as well as Cherokees, Creeks, and others adeptly played one competitor against another, negotiating trade and friendship treaties to their advantage. Following the American Revolution, the new nation's internal growth and development hinged on its ability to obtain new lands from these same tribes for white settlement. The country's international security depended upon its ability to prevent alliances between Indian nations and European powers. To attain these vital national objectives, the newly formed federal government assumed from the individual colonies total control over Indian affairs. Federally appointed Indian agents and superintendents, working closely with territorial governors and reporting to the secretary of war, handled the government's relations with tribes. Guided by the Trade and Intercourse Acts, these individuals were responsible for promoting "civilization," restricting the liquor trade, issuing trade licenses, and detailing Indian activities to the War Department.
In 1824, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun administratively created within the War Department the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Calhoun appointed Thomas McKenney as the bureau's first head and instructed him to oversee treaty negotiations, manage Indian schools, and administer Indian trade, as well as handle all expenditures and correspondence concerning Indian affairs. In 1832, at the behest of McKenney, Congress formally mandated the bureau and approved the appointment of a Commissioner of Indian Affairs, under whose authority rested the management and direction of all Indian affairs.
By the mid-1830s, the tribes' relationships with the United States had changed dramatically. The defeat of Great Britain in the War of 1812 and the United States's annexation of Spanish Florida deprived the Indian nations of powerful European allies. No longer concerned with the tribes' military power or their potential for collaboration with Europeans, President Andrew Jackson viewed the tribes solely as obstacles to American expansion. The Indian Removal Act and other federal legislative initiatives sought to separate Indians from the path of settlement. By 1840, the bureau and the American military had relocated more than thirty tribes west of the Mississippi. During the 1850s the number of Indians under bureau control more than doubled as Congress organized the territories of Texas, Oregon, California, Arizona, and New Mexico.
In 1849, shortly before this expansion in bureau responsibilities, Congress shifted the Indian Office from the Department of War to the newly created Department of the Interior. This structural change also symbolized a new federal objective in Indian relations. Led by Commissioners Luke Lea and George Manypenny, who served, respectively, from 1850 to 1857, the bureau energetically espoused the "civilization" of Indians through the creation of the reservation system. By negotiating treaties with tribes for their settlement on reservations, the Indian Office hoped to protect tribes from whites and to offer alternatives to traditional lifeways.
The Civil War disrupted the bureau's agenda and services to tribes. Many tribes, especially those in and around Indian Territory, were drawn into the conflict. With the war's end in 1865, the bureau embarked on an ambitious program to dismantle tribal governments and assimilate Indian people into the American mainstream. In a policy strongly supported by Ely S. Parker, a Seneca who served as the first Indian commissioner of the bureau, the government initiated a series of reforms designed to decrease corruption within the bureau and to Christianize and civilize Indians as quickly as possible. In 1869, Congress created the Board of Indian Commissioners, staffed with unpaid businessmen, to supervise bureau expenditures. In a further move to stem mismanagement and speed assimilation, the bureau, acting on initiatives begun with President Ulysses S. Grant, turned over the administration of many functions to religious denominations. Church and religious lay leaders filled the posts of schoolteachers and super-intendents and worked as Indian agents.
As Indian agents increased their control over the distribution of rations, goods, and lands, tribal leaders were divested of their authority. The establishment of Indian police forces in 1878 further undermined the traditional role of clans and leaders in resolving disputes. Other federal regulations forbade the practice of Indian ceremonies and required Indians to perform manual labor for their rations.
The passage of the General Allotment (or Dawes) Act in 1887 paved the way for an attack on the last cultural mainstay of tribal existence—communal ownership of land. Directed to break up the tribal land base, bureau agents surveyed reservations, divided them into individual parcels, and assigned lands to individual Indians. The agents also oversaw the sale of what were labeled "surplus" lands to white settlers. Over the next four decades, the Indian Office allotted and issued patents to more than 7 million acres, a process that ultimately reduced Indian landholdings from 138 million acres to 48 million.
As the government sought to destroy the tribal community and provide care to its individualized wards, the bureau's responsibilities, personnel, and budget increased dramatically. Its bureaucratic structure, which since 1846 had contained a Land Division, a Civilization Division, and a Finance and Records Division, had by the 1890s grown to include a Medical and Education Division and a Depredations Division.
In 1901, the Board of Indian Commissioners emphasized that the Indian Office's purpose was "to make all Indians self-supporting, self-respecting, and useful citizens of the United States." Taking this mandate to heart, Commissioner Cato Sells in 1917 issued a "Declaration of Policy" that announced the bureau's intention to sever all ties to "competent" Indians. "Competents" would be Indians of less than one-half native ancestry, or those holding high school diplomas. These individuals would cease to be federal wards. They would receive a fee patent for their land allotments, would not be eligible for any federal services, and would be divested of their share in tribal property.
Commissioner Sells's enthusiastic pursuit of improved health care for Indians proved more beneficial than his policy declaration. As detailed in a 1912 survey, Indians suffered from high rates of tuberculosis, poor nutrition, high infant mortality, and blindness from trachoma. Sells increased appropriations for the Medical Division and focused attention on health issues, but improvements were minimal. In 1928 the Meriam Report detailed continuing inadequate services and expenditures in all areas of bureau administration, especially health care, housing, and education.
In 1933, the social worker John Collier replaced Charles Rhoads as commissioner. For the first time, tribes had a head of the bureau who was both knowledgeable and respectful of tribal cultures and values. Supported by the reform momentum of Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal," Collier successfully stopped the allotment of Indian lands, improved Indian education programs, and sought to restore tribal political authority through the passage of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act.
Collier's campaign to restore authority to the tribes incurred considerable hostility from the American public. The commissioner was heavily criticized during the later years of his twelve-year tenure in office, and in 1948, the Hoover Commission, reporting to a Republican-dominated Congress, asserted that the assimilation of Indian people into American society must once again be the dominant objective of federal policy. Toward this end, the bureau implemented a number of bureaucratic reforms designed to speed the entry of Indians into the mainstream. Congress also terminated bureau responsibility over more than one hundred tribes and bands, a move that ended both government control and government protections for these communities.
The termination era of the 1940s and 1950s magnified what had evolved into a love-hate relationship between Indians and the bureau. From the perspective of Native Americans, the bureau, for all its ineptitude and maladministration, embodied the federal government's trust obligation toward tribes. Severing the bureau's responsibilities deprived tribes of a visible acknowledgment of their rights and status as quasi sovereigns vis-ŕ-vis the American political system.
Opposition to the Indian Bureau's terminationist tendencies took many forms—petitions, lobbying, and militant protests such as the takeover of the bureau's offices in Washington, D.C., in November 1972. These efforts achieved success in the mid-1970s with the passage of significant legislation such as the Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act and the Indian Child Welfare Act, which directed the bureau to shift its efforts from paternalism and control to service to tribes in their quest for self-determination. This new policy was put into effect by a bureau work force that was increasingly (and, by the mid-1970s, predominantly) Indian. In 1934, when Indian hiring preference was first legislated, Indians made up 34 percent of the bureau's employees. By 1980, this figure had risen to 78 percent. And since 1966, with the appointment of Robert Bennett, an Oneida from Wisconsin, as commissioner, Indians have held the top leadership positions in the bureau through both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Currently the Indian Bureau is formally committed to allowing tribes to assume responsibility for the administration of programs and services funded by the federal government. In 1991 Congress passed the Tribal Self-Governance Demonstration Project Act, raising to thirty the number of tribes who are in the process of assuming total control from the bureau of all local programs and services. Despite bureaucratic foot-dragging and tribal concerns that self-determination may revive congressional support for termination, the bureau's relationship with Indian nations is coming full circle. The bureau is slowly returning to its original role as the government's negotiator with and protector of more than five hundred inherently sovereign political communities that maintain a special relationship with the United States.
Francis P. Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians 2 vols. (University of Nebraska Press, 1984; Theodore Taylor, The Bureau of Indian Affairs (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1984).
Sharon O'Brien
University of Notre Dame
