Native Agency: Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs

The history of relations between the U.S. government and American Indian tribes has long provided a framework for the study of American Indian history. Beginning with President Ulysses S. Grant's peace policy in the 1860s, the United States went from using military force against Native peoples to utilizing bureaucratic management via the federal agency now called the Bureau of Indian Affairs (Bia). Even as scholarship has moved to other topics, the assimilation era (1880s–1920s), the New Deal period (1930s–1940s), the termination and relocation era (1940s–1950s), and the self-determination era (1960s to the present) continue to be the basic periodization based on federal policy. In many ways this is fitting, since members of federally recognized tribes over the past 150 years have shared a complicated relationship with the Bia.