Citizens with Reservations: Race, Wardship, and Native American Citizenship in the Mid-Twentieth-Century American Welfare State

This dissertation investigates how conflicts of mid-twentieth-century Indian wardship and citizenship manifested in political debates and public opinion. By considering Indian termination policies in conjunction with welfare policies of the same era, Citizens with Reservations explores how Native people challenged broad definitions of American citizenship undergirded by racialized and gendered notions of dependency and opportunity. This dissertation defines what Indian wardship and citizenship meant for both non-Native and Native people in ideological terms, and explores how Native people experienced wardship and citizenship in their day-to-day lives. While non-Native politicians, state agents, and the public defined wardship as Indians’ perpetual dependency on the federal government, Native people saw it as the United States’ legal obligation to fulfill the terms of historical agreements and treaties negotiated with Indian tribes. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, state agents employed “ward” a racialized and gendered term positioned in opposition to “proper” American citizenship. Citizens with Reservations is a history of Native peoples’ pursuit of welfare benefits, and a history of how the racialized construct of “Indian wardship” shaped larger political debates over welfare dependency within the United States. To explore the complex intersections between wardship and welfare, this dissertation examines the “quotidian structures of wardship”—the daily decisions, conversations, and correspondence between Native people and BIA agents. After situating wardship within a longer history of Indian racialization, Citizens with Reservations examines how wardship impacted Native peoples’ efforts to obtain welfare benefits under the Social Security Act, Servicemen’s Dependents Allowance Act, and the GI Bill; and explores eleven unsuccessful termination bills proposed by conservative congressmen between 1944-1954 which would have “emancipated” “competent Indians from wardship. It analyzes how and why Native people claimed rights to welfare benefits as citizens, while retaining their right to wardship as they defined it. By interrogating the racialized and gendered constructions of “proper” citizenship in the mid-twentieth century, this dissertation puts debates and battles over Indian access to welfare into a longer history of assimilation and settler colonialism in the United States