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Wardship and the Welfare State

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Mary Klann discusses the ideological dimensions and practical intersections of public policy and Native American citizenship, Indian wardship, and social welfare rights after World War II.

Image courtesy of interviewee. September 4, 2024

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The speaker discusses their motivations and research focus on the concept of Indian wardship, which lacks a clear definition but has been historically utilized in U.S. policies regarding Native Americans. This video term, which has roots in legal rulings from as early as 1832, often appears in discussions about assimilation and the treatment of native peoples as wards needing guidance. Despite the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granting citizenship to Native Americans, the term "wardship" continued to be used in a derogatory sense, associating Native Americans with negative stereotypes of dependency and welfare.

The speaker initiated their research in 2014, motivated by earlier studies on Native American participation in tourism. They explored various government records and archival materials to understand how Native Americans engage with policies and state agents, particularly during the expansion of the federal welfare state in the mid-20th century.

Their analysis specifically examines legislation like the Social Security Act and the GI Bill, highlighting how Native Americans interacted with these welfare benefits amidst bureaucratic oversight from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The speaker argues against conflating "wardship" and welfare, asserting that they represent different concepts—wardship embodying treaty rights and obligations of the U.S. government towards Native nations, while welfare pertains to individual assistance.

The speaker advocates for a nuanced understanding of citizenship, critiquing the simplification of citizenship as solely a positive status without considering its implications for Native sovereignty and rights. They emphasize the need for further research into termination policies and their ongoing impact on Native nations. Overall, the speaker calls for a critical exploration of welfare and citizenship concepts in relation to Native American history and experiences.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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Think the motivations for the book, were actually

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to find out what Indian wardship is.

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Um, it's a really interesting concept

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that doesn't really have a firm definition,

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even though it's been sort of deployed by policymakers

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and state agents, people who work for the Bureau

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of Indian Affairs, so people who were working

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for the government in very different ways.

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So I first started,

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I first became interested in this concept when I was doing

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research for a different project when I was in grad school,

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looking at how native people participated in tourism events.

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And I was looking at like, you know, the, the first part

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of the 20th century, so between the nine 1910s

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through the 1940s, and I kept seeing this word warship

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come up, in the, you know, towards the middle

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of the 20th century, which I thought was really interesting

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because usually

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where you hear it is when people are talking about

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assimilation policy.

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So it's first comes up in Indian policy in 1832.

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It comes into this, very famous Supreme Court case,

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Cherokee Nation versus Georgia.

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And it's usually deployed as like a way to,

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justify the US going in

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and teaching, quote unquote teaching native people

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how to be citizens.

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So whether that was like allotment policy,

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dividing up tribal land, taking native kids out

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of their homes and sending them to boarding schools,

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any sort of policy that was gearing them

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to enter into the American polity.

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Um, not as award somebody who needs guidance,

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but as a citizen, somebody who's supposed to be independent.

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Now the Indian Citizenship Act passes in 1924.

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So after that, like everyone's a citizen,

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all native people are a citizen if

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they're born in the United States.

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But I still see this term wardship coming up a lot,

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and that's because it is really like,

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doesn't have a clear legal definition.

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Um, so it's deployed in the 1940s, fifties

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and sixties as basically a reason to quote,

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terminate the Bureau of Indian Affairs

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to free native people from wardship,

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to let them like basically set them free

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to be citizens like anyone else.

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Yeah, they're already citizens.

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They don't need to be set free from anything.

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And, basically what you see is people using

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that term ward as essentially all the negative stereotypes

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you could think of when we think of people

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who use welfare benefits in the United States.

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So like they're just mooching off the government,

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they're lazy, they're dependent on us, they're perpetually,

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like, they're never gonna be independent.

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So that's essentially the term, like the base of the term

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that I boiled down to is Ward is someone who's dependent on

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the government or on a spouse or a parent

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or the state used to hear that term, like ward of a state.

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And then a citizen is someone who's self-sufficient,

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an independent and like needs no help from anyone,

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especially not the government.

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And so obviously that definition is,

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doesn't really work for a lot of people.

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So I started the research in 2014,

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so 10 years ago when I was a graduate student.

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So it was part of my dissertation.

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Um, I wanted to focus on native people in the American West.

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So I'm in San Diego. The closest,

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national Archives branch to me is

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one in Riverside, California.

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So that's where I went first.

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And basically when starting research about native folks

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and looking at legal terms

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and how they're citizens, I went to the government records.

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So I went to the records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs,

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the records of the US Senate, personal papers

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of US congressmen,

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and then state boards of welfare, basically state agencies

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that take a lot of notes on what they do.

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Um, and then I went

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to several different historical societies

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and university collections in the American West, so Arizona,

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Nevada, and New Mexico.

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Um, I took a trip to the Harry Truman Library in Missouri,

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which is to look at the papers of the staff

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who worked on Indian affairs under that administration

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and then went to Washington DC and to the National archives

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and was able to visit the, Smithsonian National,

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museum of the American Indian Archive Center.

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So that was where I found, the records

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of the National Congress of American Indians,

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which was basically, well, is selective,

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a lobbying organization for native people.

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So they do a lot with engaging with the state.

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They go to con congressional hearings, they, meet

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with politicians, they conduct surveys, like all this sort

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of political organizing work.

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So basically research process,

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writing process was reading a lot of government opinions,

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but then also being really excited to see how

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deeply engaged native people were with the state.

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Like I think my students

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and average folks like think

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that the governmental archive is basically like the co colon

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colonial point of view, but native people

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are there all the time.

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So they show up to an agent's office, they make phone calls

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that are sort of written down, they send letters,

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tribal councils post resolutions,

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they attend hearings, they testify.

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So, so really looking

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for the ways in which native people were actively engaging

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with state agents

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and found a lot of things in those records.

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But timing framework for my research is basically like

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when the US expanded the federal welfare state, like what,

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how native people experience the expansion of the state.

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So this is a time period in which everyone, no native

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and non-native, all people in the US are experiencing more

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government presence in their lives.

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The big, reason is the 1935 Social Security Act.

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That's probably the, the biggest

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and most important example

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of like the modern social welfare

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apparatus that we have now.

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So we're all coming out of the Great Depression.

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People are dealing with poverty and different ways

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and have different expectations for the government to help.

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So you have things like social, what we now know

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as social security, which is old age insurance,

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unemployment, insur insurance,

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disability insurance, which

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In the 1935 Act is specifically a to the blind, the

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1942 Servicemen's Dependence Allowance Act, which is not

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as well known as the Social Security Act,

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but it was a, piece of legislation that was passed

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during World War ii, essentially to give the dependents,

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so the spouses, the, children

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and then elderly parents, sometimes siblings, people

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who were dependent on those

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who were serving in the military, during World War ii.

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So it was like a method of paying them a monthly stipend

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through both the servicemen's pay paycheck

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and then also a contribution from the state.

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So it's essentially a way in which the state

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intervened in marriage in a way, like basically making sure

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that everybody who was entitled to this benefit got it.

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Meaning like encouraging soldiers that you have

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to send money back home

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or everyone who got it was spending it, right?

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So for native people,

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they were under oversight from the BIA.

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So the, the Bureau of Indian Affairs could basically say,

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you're not spending the money the way you should,

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you're not using it for the benefit of the children who gets

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to decide what the benefit is, like the agent.

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So there was some convoluted oversight, in that act.

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And then the last one is the 1944 GI Bill,

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and this is another really huge one.

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Um, this was the act that

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provided a wide range of services for veterans.

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So, low cost loans for homes, for businesses,

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or farm equipment.

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Um, and then the educational provisions which allowed them

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to attend, colleges or take correspondence courses

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or, vocational training for free,

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and then receive a stipend,

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while they were doing their training.

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Um, so basically the idea was

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that the GI bill would ward off another economic depression

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so that people were worried.

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Obviously the war was an economic

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boost for the United States.

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After the war's done, people are worried

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veterans are gonna come back dealing with all

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of the stuff they dealt with in the war,

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and they wanted people to have jobs basically for stability.

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So this was a way for that to happen.

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Um, and native folks in my book, I look at

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how they access the educational provisions of the GI bill,

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so how they, were able to use that money

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to attend schools, mostly the schools that were run

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by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

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So they were boarding schools essentially

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that were in the early 20th century places

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where they might have attended as young students

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and now able to get their high school diplomas

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and, take vocational trainings.

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I have two kind of core arguments about this.

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The first one is more, it's more of like a investigation

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of these terms, welfare benefits and wardship

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and how they work together, because

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that really translates into

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how people received the benefits they were entitled to.

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So they were often these terms, wardship

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and welfare, I argue they're absolutely not the same.

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They're not the same thing.

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And native people also argue

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that they are entitled to both of these things.

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They're different, but non-native politicians,

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especially those who were really worried about the fact

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that the government's expanding

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and everybody's getting welfare benefits

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and mostly like anti welfare conservative arguments,

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we're basically using these two terms interchangeably.

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So using it as a, like a,

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a scare tactic almost saying like,

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if everybody keeps getting welfare benefits,

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we're all gonna end up like native people on reservations.

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Like the ward is like the ultimate example

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of a welfare recipient, and that's not good for us.

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So my, like, my argument is that

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that's a really bad argument that they were making

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and that it also undercuts

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what wardship actually is in many ways is a,

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an agreement, a legal agreement between the United States

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and native people through their,

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through treaties agreements, all of these like, legal ways

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that they have inter interacted with the United States.

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So wardship essentially is like all the stuff you'd get

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as a member of a native nation.

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So your land is held in trust, you have, things

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that are guaranteed by treaty like healthcare education,

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your reservation land is, tax exempt.

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Like all of these things that are basically the,

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the Na Native Nations relationship with the US as nations

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welfare is just individual citizens who need assistance

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or are entitled to GI bills.

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So there's like, there's no reason to equate them,

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unless you really wanna get native land

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and you wanna undo welfare benefits, which is

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what they did, they did want.

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So that's like kind of the first argument.

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The second one is how native people got these things.

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So they consistently maintained

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that these are two different things,

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and you can see it in both, in the ways in which they,

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mounted like campaigns against, legislation

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that was designed to dissolve the Bureau of Indian Affairs

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to get rid of the trust relationship.

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There were, you know, as I mentioned

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before, lobbying to congress, sending resolutions,

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consistently visiting their BIA office

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to inquire about their welfare benefits, just sort

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of ways in which they were negotiating with the state

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and pushing back against that rhetoric,

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which was very powerful in the mid 20th century.

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There was this notion of like,

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we gotta set native people free.

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This is a good thing for everyone.

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Like they can get rid of this wardship, like the,

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it's, it's better for them.

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And they really push back on that idea

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because essentially warship is, my, my argument is

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that they were using that term native folks were

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as a precursor to the term

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that we use now, which is sovereignty.

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So understanding this as an obligation the US

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was like, was required to fulfill rather than

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as this negative thing that people were taking from the us.

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So I'm more of like trying to flip this understanding

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of wardship as an automatic negative term.

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We think, somebody is sort of pushed down

11:51.175 --> 11:52.835
by their relationship to their

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Guardian, but no, the ward is asking the guardian to do

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what it's supposed to do, which is protect land,

11:59.485 --> 12:01.485
safeguard resources, all of the things

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that are guaranteed by treaties.

12:03.805 --> 12:06.795
I think the most important thing

12:07.695 --> 12:10.335
I hope readers take from the book is more of a willingness

12:10.335 --> 12:14.795
to interrogate that idea of citizenship as a

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unequivocally positive term.

12:18.135 --> 12:21.155
I'm thinking of like, 'cause in the book I sort of engage

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with a parallel movement that's going on at the same time,

12:23.435 --> 12:24.875
which is civil rights movement.

12:25.015 --> 12:27.955
And this idea of becoming a citizen,

12:27.955 --> 12:30.675
especially a first class citizen, this idea of like,

12:31.175 --> 12:34.755
you have nobody who's saying you can't enter certain areas

12:34.755 --> 12:35.795
because of your race

12:35.975 --> 12:38.035
or you, you wanna have like the most opportunity

12:38.035 --> 12:40.115
to get whatever job is available to you.

12:40.135 --> 12:43.025
All of the things that we think of as like freedom

12:43.565 --> 12:45.625
as a citizen, those are all great.

12:45.725 --> 12:50.285
Yes, we like that. But, the ways in which politicians,

12:50.985 --> 12:53.325
certain members of the Bureau of Indian Affairs

12:53.905 --> 12:56.725
and like pundits of people who were writing in conservative,

12:56.825 --> 12:59.325
publications, were talking about citizenship,

12:59.745 --> 13:03.495
was essentially undermining the rights

13:03.495 --> 13:05.975
that native people have as members of Native Nations.

13:06.155 --> 13:08.175
So they were kind of using one thing that everybody

13:08.835 --> 13:12.615
agrees on is a good thing to take away something else

13:12.645 --> 13:14.255
that nobody really quite understands.

13:14.255 --> 13:16.015
Nobody knows, knows what a word is.

13:16.015 --> 13:17.255
They're like, they hear that word

13:17.255 --> 13:19.455
and they think that we gotta get rid of that.

13:19.835 --> 13:21.935
So I think that's what I want people

13:21.935 --> 13:24.175
to take away from is like we should interrogate these terms

13:24.175 --> 13:27.175
that we think are net positives

13:27.435 --> 13:29.255
and that there's something more

13:29.475 --> 13:31.335
to do once people become citizens.

13:31.335 --> 13:34.815
It's not just like everything's great, you're a citizen.

13:34.875 --> 13:37.455
Now that there's more, there's more political stuff

13:37.455 --> 13:38.535
to engage with after that.

13:38.755 --> 13:40.815
So there's a lot of really exciting research

13:40.875 --> 13:43.775
that's coming up now about the mid 20th century.

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I think that for native, for like the Indian policy folks,

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people who write about like termination policy, especially,

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it's, it's a growing field.

13:52.855 --> 13:55.615
I think it's kind of like, I hope that this is a,

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a even more growing field

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because we have like individual tribal histories

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of termination policy looking at the ways in which the,

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different tribes are, are dealing

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with the federal government's decision

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to terminate their status.

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But I think that,

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looking at it from a national scale is more important.

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Looking at termination policy

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and how it engages with other policy stuff

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that's going on at the same time is also important.

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Um, and then I think, lingering impacts of it

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to on tribal and tribal nations today

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is also important to look at.

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So I guess I hope more policy research comes out.

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Sometimes people think that policy research is really

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boring, but it's not.

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And I hope there's more of it.

00:00 - Think the motivations for the book, were actually to find out what Indian wardship is. it's a really interesting concept that doesn't really have a firm definition, even though it's been sort of deployed by policymakers and state agents, people who work for the Bureau

00:16 - of Indian Affairs, so people who were working for the government in very different ways. So I first started, I first became interested in this concept when I was doing research for a different project when I was in grad school, looking at how native people participated in tourism events. And I was looking at like, you know, the, the first part of the 20th century, so between the nine 1910s through the 1940s, and I kept seeing this word warship come up, in the, you know, towards the middle

00:46 - of the 20th century, which I thought was really interesting because usually where you hear it is when people are talking about assimilation policy. So it's first comes up in Indian policy in 1832. It comes into this, very famous Supreme Court case, Cherokee Nation versus Georgia. And it's usually deployed as like a way to, justify the US going in and teaching, quote unquote teaching native people

01:13 - how to be citizens. So whether that was like allotment policy, dividing up tribal land, taking native kids out of their homes and sending them to boarding schools, any sort of policy that was gearing them to enter into the American polity. not as award somebody who needs guidance, but as a citizen, somebody who's supposed to be independent. Now the Indian Citizenship Act passes in 1924. So after that, like everyone's a citizen,

01:41 - all native people are a citizen if they're born in the United States. But I still see this term wardship coming up a lot, and that's because it is really like, doesn't have a clear legal definition. so it's deployed in the 1940s, fifties and sixties as basically a reason to quote, terminate the Bureau of Indian Affairs to free native people from wardship, to let them like basically set them free

02:06 - to be citizens like anyone else. Yeah, they're already citizens. They don't need to be set free from anything. And, basically what you see is people using that term ward as essentially all the negative stereotypes you could think of when we think of people who use welfare benefits in the United States. So like they're just mooching off the government, they're lazy, they're dependent on us, they're perpetually, like, they're never gonna be independent.

02:32 - So that's essentially the term, like the base of the term that I boiled down to is Ward is someone who's dependent on the government or on a spouse or a parent or the state used to hear that term, like ward of a state. And then a citizen is someone who's self-sufficient, an independent and like needs no help from anyone, especially not the government. And so obviously that definition is, doesn't really work for a lot of people. So I started the research in 2014,

02:59 - so 10 years ago when I was a graduate student. So it was part of my dissertation. I wanted to focus on native people in the American West. So I'm in San Diego. The closest, national Archives branch to me is one in Riverside, California. So that's where I went first. And basically when starting research about native folks and looking at legal terms and how they're citizens, I went to the government records.

03:23 - So I went to the records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the records of the US Senate, personal papers of US congressmen, and then state boards of welfare, basically state agencies that take a lot of notes on what they do. and then I went to several different historical societies and university collections in the American West, so Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico. I took a trip to the Harry Truman Library in Missouri,

03:50 - which is to look at the papers of the staff who worked on Indian affairs under that administration and then went to Washington DC and to the National archives and was able to visit the, Smithsonian National, museum of the American Indian Archive Center. So that was where I found, the records of the National Congress of American Indians, which was basically, well, is selective, a lobbying organization for native people. So they do a lot with engaging with the state.

04:19 - They go to con congressional hearings, they, meet with politicians, they conduct surveys, like all this sort of political organizing work. So basically research process, writing process was reading a lot of government opinions, but then also being really excited to see how deeply engaged native people were with the state. Like I think my students and average folks like think that the governmental archive is basically like the co colon

04:46 - colonial point of view, but native people are there all the time. So they show up to an agent's office, they make phone calls that are sort of written down, they send letters, tribal councils post resolutions, they attend hearings, they testify. So, so really looking for the ways in which native people were actively engaging with state agents and found a lot of things in those records.

05:11 - But timing framework for my research is basically like when the US expanded the federal welfare state, like what, how native people experience the expansion of the state. So this is a time period in which everyone, no native and non-native, all people in the US are experiencing more government presence in their lives. The big, reason is the 1935 Social Security Act. That's probably the, the biggest and most important example of like the modern social welfare

05:38 - apparatus that we have now. So we're all coming out of the Great Depression. People are dealing with poverty and different ways and have different expectations for the government to help. So you have things like social, what we now know as social security, which is old age insurance, unemployment, insur insurance, disability insurance, which In the 1935 Act is specifically a to the blind, the 1942 Servicemen's Dependence Allowance Act, which is not

06:06 - as well known as the Social Security Act, but it was a, piece of legislation that was passed during World War ii, essentially to give the dependents, so the spouses, the, children and then elderly parents, sometimes siblings, people who were dependent on those who were serving in the military, during World War ii. So it was like a method of paying them a monthly stipend through both the servicemen's pay paycheck and then also a contribution from the state.

06:34 - So it's essentially a way in which the state intervened in marriage in a way, like basically making sure that everybody who was entitled to this benefit got it. Meaning like encouraging soldiers that you have to send money back home or everyone who got it was spending it, right? So for native people, they were under oversight from the BIA. So the, the Bureau of Indian Affairs could basically say, you're not spending the money the way you should,

07:01 - you're not using it for the benefit of the children who gets to decide what the benefit is, like the agent. So there was some convoluted oversight, in that act. And then the last one is the 1944 GI Bill, and this is another really huge one. this was the act that provided a wide range of services for veterans. So, low cost loans for homes, for businesses, or farm equipment. and then the educational provisions which allowed them

07:30 - to attend, colleges or take correspondence courses or, vocational training for free, and then receive a stipend, while they were doing their training. so basically the idea was that the GI bill would ward off another economic depression so that people were worried. Obviously the war was an economic boost for the United States. After the war's done, people are worried

07:52 - veterans are gonna come back dealing with all of the stuff they dealt with in the war, and they wanted people to have jobs basically for stability. So this was a way for that to happen. and native folks in my book, I look at how they access the educational provisions of the GI bill, so how they, were able to use that money to attend schools, mostly the schools that were run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. So they were boarding schools essentially

08:17 - that were in the early 20th century places where they might have attended as young students and now able to get their high school diplomas and, take vocational trainings. I have two kind of core arguments about this. The first one is more, it's more of like a investigation of these terms, welfare benefits and wardship and how they work together, because that really translates into how people received the benefits they were entitled to.

08:44 - So they were often these terms, wardship and welfare, I argue they're absolutely not the same. They're not the same thing. And native people also argue that they are entitled to both of these things. They're different, but non-native politicians, especially those who were really worried about the fact that the government's expanding and everybody's getting welfare benefits and mostly like anti welfare conservative arguments,

09:08 - we're basically using these two terms interchangeably. So using it as a, like a, a scare tactic almost saying like, if everybody keeps getting welfare benefits, we're all gonna end up like native people on reservations. Like the ward is like the ultimate example of a welfare recipient, and that's not good for us. So my, like, my argument is that that's a really bad argument that they were making and that it also undercuts

09:36 - what wardship actually is in many ways is a, an agreement, a legal agreement between the United States and native people through their, through treaties agreements, all of these like, legal ways that they have inter interacted with the United States. So wardship essentially is like all the stuff you'd get as a member of a native nation. So your land is held in trust, you have, things that are guaranteed by treaty like healthcare education, your reservation land is, tax exempt.

10:08 - Like all of these things that are basically the, the Na Native Nations relationship with the US as nations welfare is just individual citizens who need assistance or are entitled to GI bills. So there's like, there's no reason to equate them, unless you really wanna get native land and you wanna undo welfare benefits, which is what they did, they did want. So that's like kind of the first argument. The second one is how native people got these things.

10:35 - So they consistently maintained that these are two different things, and you can see it in both, in the ways in which they, mounted like campaigns against, legislation that was designed to dissolve the Bureau of Indian Affairs to get rid of the trust relationship. There were, you know, as I mentioned before, lobbying to congress, sending resolutions, consistently visiting their BIA office to inquire about their welfare benefits, just sort

11:02 - of ways in which they were negotiating with the state and pushing back against that rhetoric, which was very powerful in the mid 20th century. There was this notion of like, we gotta set native people free. This is a good thing for everyone. Like they can get rid of this wardship, like the, it's, it's better for them. And they really push back on that idea because essentially warship is, my, my argument is

11:26 - that they were using that term native folks were as a precursor to the term that we use now, which is sovereignty. So understanding this as an obligation the US was like, was required to fulfill rather than as this negative thing that people were taking from the us. So I'm more of like trying to flip this understanding of wardship as an automatic negative term. We think, somebody is sort of pushed down by their relationship to their

11:53 - Guardian, but no, the ward is asking the guardian to do what it's supposed to do, which is protect land, safeguard resources, all of the things that are guaranteed by treaties. I think the most important thing I hope readers take from the book is more of a willingness to interrogate that idea of citizenship as a unequivocally positive term. I'm thinking of like, 'cause in the book I sort of engage with a parallel movement that's going on at the same time,

12:23 - which is civil rights movement. And this idea of becoming a citizen, especially a first class citizen, this idea of like, you have nobody who's saying you can't enter certain areas because of your race or you, you wanna have like the most opportunity to get whatever job is available to you. All of the things that we think of as like freedom as a citizen, those are all great. Yes, we like that. But, the ways in which politicians,

12:50 - certain members of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and like pundits of people who were writing in conservative, publications, were talking about citizenship, was essentially undermining the rights that native people have as members of Native Nations. So they were kind of using one thing that everybody agrees on is a good thing to take away something else that nobody really quite understands. Nobody knows, knows what a word is. They're like, they hear that word

13:17 - and they think that we gotta get rid of that. So I think that's what I want people to take away from is like we should interrogate these terms that we think are net positives and that there's something more to do once people become citizens. It's not just like everything's great, you're a citizen. Now that there's more, there's more political stuff to engage with after that. So there's a lot of really exciting research

13:40 - that's coming up now about the mid 20th century. I think that for native, for like the Indian policy folks, people who write about like termination policy, especially, it's, it's a growing field. I think it's kind of like, I hope that this is a, a even more growing field because we have like individual tribal histories of termination policy looking at the ways in which the, different tribes are, are dealing with the federal government's decision

14:07 - to terminate their status. But I think that, looking at it from a national scale is more important. Looking at termination policy and how it engages with other policy stuff that's going on at the same time is also important. and then I think, lingering impacts of it to on tribal and tribal nations today is also important to look at. So I guess I hope more policy research comes out.

14:32 - Sometimes people think that policy research is really boring, but it's not. And I hope there's more of it.

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