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The Real Takeover of the BIA: The Preferential Hiring of Indians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Steven J. Novak
Steven J. Novak
Affiliation:
An Editor of the Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90024.
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Abstract

An early long-running federal social policy experiment was the preferential hiring of American Indians at agencies, reserations, and shools. This government employment was designed to accelerate the assimilation of the natives and to reduce their resistance to education and economic change. Instead, the program inadvertently created a form of dependency. This ironic outcome was due to the power of the natives to shape the policy according to their needs and values.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , September 1990 , pp. 639 - 654
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1990

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References

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2 In 1980, 29 percent of all employed Indians worked in the public sector, as opposed to 27 percent of blacks, 18 percent of Asian-Americans, and 16 percent of whites; U.S. Bureau of the Census, General Social and Economic Characteristics of the 1980 Census of Population, vol. 1, part 1 (Washington, DC, 1983), pp. 99–100.Google Scholar

3 Recent efforts to explain the poverty of domestic minorities have employed a colonialism model in which the colonizers first rob the subject peoples of their resources and then keep them dependent by starngling them with bureaucracy and appeasement benefits such as welfare, jobs, and schools. For example, Gary Anders likened American Indians who participated in BIA programs to the compradors of the Spanish Empire whose alliance with the conquerors promoted “the interests of the white economy at the expense of the tribe,” see Anders, Gray C., “Theories of Underdevelopment and the American Indian,” Journal of Economic Issues, 14 (09 1980), p. 694CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Brown, Michael K. and Erie, Steven P., “Blacks and the Legacy of the Great Society: The Economic and Political Impact of Federal Social Policy,” Public Policy, 29 (Summer 1981), pp. 299–329.Google Scholar There are two main problems with using the colonialism model to explain Indian employment in the BIA. First, North American whites had little interest in exploiting Indian labor. Cardell Jacobsen, Matthew Snipp, and Stephen Cornell have pointed out that the U.S. government sought to expropriate the Indian lands but not their labor. The government hoped to handle the Indian peoples as quickly and cheaply as possible; see Jacobsen, Cardell K., “Internal Colonialism and Native Americans: Indian Labor in the United States From 1871 to World War II,” Social Science Quarterly, 65 (03 1984), pp. 167–68;Google ScholarSnipp, Matthew, “The Changing Political and Economic States of the American Indians: From Captive Nations to Internal Colonies,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 45 (04 1986), p. 151CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cornell, Stephen, The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence (New York, 1988), pp. 28, 30, 54. Second, the colonialism model stresses the power of the colonizer and minimizes the strength of the colonized, when in some instances colonizers are not omnipotent or colonized totally impotent.Google Scholar

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10 Besides the Annual Reports of the commissioner of Indian Affairs, after 1834 the secretary of War published a somewhat less useful list of “Persons Employed in the Indian Department.” To my knowledge the BIA never published a memorandum on the effects of Section 9 preferential hiring. My compilation required judgments about the ethnicity of the employees. Sometimes their Indian name is obvious (Wah-pe-ka-no-sho-may, a Menominee blacksmith of 1847), or the name might be translated (Jerry Crow, a Seneca blacksmith that same year). For natives with Anglicized names, race or tribe might be given in parentheses. Thus the 1839 personnel list contained Choctaw teacher “T. McKenny (native)” and interpreter “James Vallier (a Quapaw).” Place of birth is another clue, as with the 1855 interpreters Joseph W. Bourassa, born in “Pottawatomie nation,” and Baptiste Peoria, nativity “Indian country.”Google Scholar

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14 Prucha, , The Great Father, vol. 2, p. 656.Google Scholar The BIA's long struggle to transform Indians into farmers is analyzed in Hurt, R. Douglas, Indian Agriculture in America, Prehistory to the Present (Lawrence, KS, 1987). Although natives farmed both before and after government programs, Hurt concludes that federal efforts failed because they were tried on infertile lands and because they “required too great a cultural change,” p. 233.Google Scholar

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27 Annual Report 1901, p. 537;Google ScholarGranzer, Loretto Mary examined Haskell students seeking federal exployment in “Indian Education at Haskell Institute, 1884–1937” (M.A. thesis, University of Nebraska, 1937), pp. 241–52.Google Scholar A sociologist tracking Haskell graduates in the 1920s found that two-thirds of those employed held government positions. See Blackmar, Frank Wilson, “The Socialization of the American Indian,” American Journal of Sociology. 34 (01 1929), pp. 657,659.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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29 Hoxie, A Final Promise, pp. 173, 179.Google Scholar

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53 This is the recommendation of a recent Senate report, see U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Indian Affairs, Special Committee on Investigations, A New Federalism for American Indians (Washington, DC, 1989).Google Scholar