In 1920, the employees of the Rapid City Indian School in South Dakota organized a local chapter of the Federal Employees Union (later the National Federation of Federal Employees, NFFE). They elected Chauncey Yellow Robe (Lakota) as their president and Bernhilda Tibbets as their secretary.Footnote ² Yellow Robe and Tibbets, disciplinarian and teacher, Native and non-Native, male and female, respectively, were quite representative of the employees of the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA, later the Bureau of Indian Affairs), the most racially and sexually integrated federal agency at the time. Neither one evokes the usual image of a federal employee or union member of the era.Footnote ³ But perhaps they should. Recent scholarship has depicted the federal government employing more diverse workers than previously recognized.Footnote ⁴ These studies have mostly examined agencies that administered the nation's colonial possessions.

The federal Indian Service (a branch of the OIA) offers an entry point into larger questions of state development, labor, and social provision in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The Indian Service's development as a large and active maternalist bureaucracy allows for a reexamination of the shift from a patronage system to a merit-based civil service at both the federal and state levels. The Indian Service's unusually large numbers of Indigenous and female employees also reveals how race and gender operated in this bureaucratic development. Those identities shaped not only the service, but also the way employees experienced civil service reform. This also reminds us that many civil servants worked not in Washington, DC, but on the nation's borders, in its cities, and throughout its colonial spaces. This essay follows the lead of Eric S. Yellin by analyzing “the state's power to bureaucratize racism and shape class formation.”Footnote ⁵ It focuses on the debates over federal employee pensions, an outgrowth of civil service reform and the issue around which the NFFE formed. The pension system had particular consequences in the Indian Service due to its racialized employment categories. Examining employee engagement in these debates—including their union activity and personal connections—encourages scholars to rethink this moment as one of both possibilities and constraints.

Moreover, Yellow Robe and Tibbets were part of a movement whose legacy stretches into the present. The successful efforts to organize federal employees have continued in today's NFFE and a second union, the American Federation of Government Employees, formed in 1932. These two unions currently represent over three-quarters of a million members.Footnote ⁶ Most scholarship on federal, state, and municipal employee unions has focused on the post-WWII era,Footnote ⁷ but actually they grew out of civil service reform efforts. Looking specifically at the employees in the Indian Service illuminates other threads in the history of these unions, including the participation of women as part of maternalist agencies, the connections between social provision and federal pensions, and the ways that race shaped federal employee benefits.

The Indian Service grew rapidly in the post-Civil War years, when questions of labor and concerns about unearned provision and charity were paramount in national debates.Footnote ⁸ While federal policy had always emphasized “civilizing” Native populations, after the war the newly expanded federal government devoted greater resources and energy to that effort.

In 1871, Congress ended the signing of treaties with Native nations and began making “agreements” subject to bicameral ratification. This shifted Indian affairs from international relations to domestic policy. Policy makers sought to end federal treaty obligations to Native nations. Congressmen, reformers and administrators argued that by assimilating Native people into the citizenry and eliminating Indigenous polities, the federal government could stop expending resources to protect tribally held land, pay treaty obligations, or recognize Native nations. Instead, “excess” tribal land would be opened to U.S. citizens, and Native people become productive laborers indistinguishable from their neighbors. This was often justified as a benevolent action that offered Indians the “gift” of civilization, even though it involved breaking solemn treaties.Footnote ⁹

At the heart of this assimilationist vision stood the Anglo middle-class domestic ideal. Reformers, especially female ones, urged the government to educate Native women and girls responsible for socially reproducing the next generation.Footnote ¹⁰ Administrators characterized Native mothers as especially conservative; success therefore depended on removing their children to the care federal employees who would serve as surrogate parents—especially surrogate mothers. These policies required a dramatic expansion of the Indian Service, which grew from just over 500 employees in 1869 to almost 4,000 by 1897. The government began building off-reservation schools in 1879, and by 1893 the OIA had established at least ninety-eight on- and off-reservation boarding schools.Footnote ¹¹ To staff the educational programs the OIA hired thousands of women. By the 1890s, approximately 60 percent of the School Service division of the Indian service was female.Footnote ¹²

Initially, the government experimented with staffing these positions through cooperation with churches, much as it had done with Reconstruction-era Freedmen's Schools. Reformers applauded this contract school system for keeping the delicate work of assimilation out of the hands of corrupt patronage politicians. It soon became clear, however, that the Catholic Church was successfully capturing much of the funding. Sectarian tensions and the broader push for civil service reform led to calls to apply that reform to the OIA. In 1893, Republican President Benjamin Harrison extended the merit service system to the positions of Indian school superintendent, assistant superintendent, teacher, matron, and doctor. In 1896, Democratic President Cleveland responded with an executive order placing most remaining Indian Service positions under civil service administration.Footnote ¹³

With this shift, the role of Indian employees in the Service required adjustment. Policy makers needed Native workers in their program for both pedagogical and economic reasons. Administrators believed employment would teach Indians the value of work, and they could staff perennially underfunded programs by paying Native workers at a lower “Indian rate.”Footnote ¹⁴ For Native people, these positions were often the only cash-paying jobs available on reservations; for the well-trained, they were also a path to middle-class positions such as teacher, doctor, nurse and clerk that racism made nearly unattainable outside federal employment due to prejudice. This resembled African American experience in Washington, DC, where federal positions helped create a black middle class.Footnote ¹⁵ The need to keep employing Indians after the implementation of civil service reform yielded a special exemption from competitive exams. “Indians employed in the Service at large” were appointed without examination, while Native applicants for more skilled positions needed only to pass a noncompetitive exam.Footnote ¹⁶ The percentage of Native employees thus climbed steadily throughout the 1880s and 1890s, and by 1912 they made up almost 30 percent of the Service's 6,000 employees. Moreover, that number only reflected the “regular” Indian employees; thousands more served in “temporary” positions.Footnote ¹⁷

The expansion of the OIA mirrored larger trends in postwar government growth, including the expansion of the state apparatus and the implementation of civil service reform; but it differed in its goals and the nature of its workforce. These similarities and differences would have particular consequences as the ramifications of civil service reform became apparent in an aging workforce.

By the 1910s, employees who had entered under the civil service requirements of the 1890s were reaching their second and even third decades in the Service. Many could not afford to retire, and as elderly workers remained in their posts, the problem of superannuated employees came to occupy administrators' time and influenced their calls for efficiency.

In developing the bureaucracy of assimilation, administrators endowed Indian Service work with patriotic and emotional weight by casting the employees as participants in a national mission. Such rhetoric, however, made it difficult for administrators to fire old but “faithful” employees.Footnote ¹⁸ Recognizing the limits of elderly employees, superintendents struggled to reconcile the need for efficiency with their sense that the government owed long-term employees for their loyal service. In lieu of actual pension legislation, supervisors often dealt with employees who had trouble physically keeping up with their jobs by resorting to ad hoc arrangements to keep them on the payroll while easing their duties. Not everyone was sympathetic, however; many accused elderly civil servants of being lazy and improvident, using precisely the same language non-Natives had used to describe Natives when debating Indian policy in the 1870s and ‘80s. In those years, the questions of the nation's obligations to Indians and whether they deserved social provision had been central to congressional debates. The solution had been to substitute social programs designed to assimilate Indians in place of treaty-stipulated obligations. A few decades after that decision, Congress was confronted with the question of what it owed the employees of those programs and whether it should extend social provision to them in the form of retirement pensions.

The Indian Service was not the only federal bureau to experience problems with elderly personnel: pension legislation for federal employees was introduced in every session of Congress between 1900 and 1920.Footnote ¹⁹ The debates over what became the 1920 Federal Employee Retirement Act (FERA) demonstrate that the problem of aging civil servants was the logical result of the merit system.Footnote ²⁰ As one astute congressman noted, the need for a pension system was “a concomitant of the nonpartisan method of appointment.” Unlike patronage politics, in which employees were removed from office by partisan opponents when their own party fell from power, the merit system offered lifelong employment that ended only when the employee chose to retire or was forced out by administrators. However, elderly workers were not choosing to retire, in part because many could not afford to do so. Struggling departments thus implored Congress to pass the pension legislation.

Some congressmen recognized that supervisors such as the commissioner of Indian affairs often made staffing decisions with their hearts rather than their heads.Footnote ²¹ Representative William N. Vaile of Colorado described the consequences of that sympathy, observing that “we have, in effect, been pensioning many old civil service employees for some time, merely because the simplest dictates of humanity forbade throwing out upon the street or into the poorhouse old people who had faithfully served the Government for years, even though they were no longer able to earn their pay.” The retirement act, he asserted, would “substitute … a scientific system” in place of “this haphazard, unofficial, and inequitable, although well-intentioned pensioning.”Footnote ²²

Federal employees pensions also corresponded to nineteenth-century models of social provision that were premised on selective groups of beneficiaries. Unlike the social programs for Indians that administrators justified as the government's moral obligations to its wards, federal pensions rewarded a group for its service to the nation. As scholars such as Theda Skocpol and Linda Gordon have demonstrated, such programs, especially those created for veterans, laid the foundations of a distinctly American welfare system based on earned entitlements.Footnote ²³ Indeed, pension proponents argued that civil servants were “analogous to soldiers in the army.”Footnote ²⁴ Like soldiers, civil servants who dedicated their lives to government service had made sacrifices for their country.Footnote ²⁵ Pension proponents also argued, that in choosing civil service government employees eschewed the opportunities of the private sector.Footnote ²⁶ The bill “rests upon the proposition that the Government requires a class of permanent employees,” Senator King of Utah declared, “persons who … are expected to give their lives to their duties and therefore should feel assured that in their declining years they will not be turned adrift without means of support.”Footnote ²⁷ Not only efficiency, but also the honor of the nation was at stake.Footnote ²⁸

The pension bill did not have unanimous approval. Its opponents drew upon stereotypes of government employees as lazy, imprudent, and apathetic. Pension legislation, they argued, created a “special class” that benefited at taxpayer expense. “What right have we,” asked one, “to take the people's money year in and year out and pay it for civil pensions[?]” The ironic result of this legislation, contended another, would be to turn federal employees into “ward[s] of a nation.”Footnote ²⁹ Strikingly similar to concerns about the creation of social programs for Indians that had taken place four decades earlier, these debates highlighted the ongoing use of the language of obligation and fears of dependency in considerations of federal social provision.

Federal employees also engaged in the debate over pensions using a range of strategies to make their cases, including union organizing and activating personal networks and connections that harkened back to the politics of patronage.

Employees began to organize locals of the Federal Employees Union in 1916 and made the passage of a retirement law one of their primary goals. By 1917 they joined to form the NFFE as a member union of the American Federation of Labor. An initial glance through early union records suggests the key role of white women. While women did make up a large number of clerks in Washington, DC, it is striking that maternalist and colonial agencies, including the Indian Service, Children's Bureau, Southern Extension, Panama Canal Branch, and Bureau of Insular Affairs contributed many of the female leaders.Footnote ³⁰ This trend continued into the 1930s when two more federal employee unions formed out of political differences with NFFE. In 1944 the United Federal Workers of America elected Eleanor Nelson, an economist in the Children's Bureau, as their president, making her the first female president of a Congress of Industrial Organizations union.Footnote ³¹

Because the union branches in Washington held frequent meetings, it appears that the most active members came from the federal corps in the capital city. Despite only having a small force of employees in the Washington Office, Indian Service workers played a large role in union activities. In 1917 two women and one man from the Washington Indian Office served on the union's board of representatives. Florence Etheridge, an OIA probate attorney, was the union's first treasurer and later one of its vice-presidents. Like many female civil servants in DC, Etheridge brought feminist concerns about job mobility and equal employment opportunity to her union work and also fought for woman's suffrage.Footnote ³² She testified before Congress and contributed frequently to the union's journal, The Federal Employee. Footnote ³³ The journal's articles and other union literature suggest an early focus on retirement and pension legislation, but also attention to wages, sex inequality, and the length of the work week.Footnote ³⁴

Indian Service employees in the field pursued similar goals, some through solidarity and others individually. Like Yellowrobe and Tibbets, many joined the union and received The Federal Employee at their posts.Footnote ³⁵ Their total numbers and the agendas of their union locals remain unclear, but there are some suggestions.Footnote ³⁶ In 1921, for example, the non-Native superintendent of the Greenville Indian School in Northern California urged union officials to focus on the reclassification of salaries because low pay was a source of “inefficiency, indifference, and restless spirit” in the field service.Footnote ³⁷ Organizing in solidarity with their fellow employees made sense despite the geographically scattered nature of service positions. Both Natives and non-Natives had a professional identity nurtured by the language of mission that surrounded their work, the frequency of transfers within the system, and the boarding school newsletters that included employee news.Footnote ³⁸ Was this similar for other federal employees in the field? How did the professional identity coalesce in the Park, Lighthouse, and Forest Services or in other colonial bureaucracies such as the Panama Canal Service, Philippines Service, or in Puerto Rico? Nonetheless, the fact that race was a powerful category in shaping the Indian Service also worked against solidarity as Natives encountered prejudice from coworkers, were overlooked for promotions, and Native women were particularly susceptible to being pushed into low-paying manual positions.Footnote ³⁹

Also, as historians of the African American experience have suggested, calls for efficiency could mask racially motivated agendas that disempowered non-whites.Footnote ⁴⁰ Nor was the transition between patronage and merit always smooth and immediate. In one article, Etheridge argued that reform was imposed in a patchwork manner, leaving loopholes in which powerful positions remained in control of appointments. Yellin demonstrates how these positions were used by Republicans to award jobs to African Americans after the Civil War until President Wilson mobilized the language of efficiency to segregate the civil service. Indeed, the union recognized this segregation, but did not seem to offer African Americans a compelling strategy with which to address it, and very few blacks actually joined its ranks.Footnote ⁴¹ This may also have been true for Native employees. One of the union's major triumphs, the passage of pension legislation in 1920, failed to include most Native employees.

Nonetheless, participation in union activity may have played an important role in Indigenous activism over the course of the twentieth century. Current scholarship only hints at this, but, for example, in the 1940s the founders of the National Congress of American Indians used the charter of the FEU No. 780 in Chicago to which several belonged as the model for the organization's constitution and bylaws.Footnote ⁴²

Despite its detractors, FERA was approved on May 22, 1920. The bill covered “all members in the classified civil service of the United States,” ranking them into “six classes of membership” determined by their “years of service and time of retirement.” Retirement was set at age seventy and made compulsory.Footnote ⁴³ With a few exceptions, FERA's language excluded Native employees because of the OIA's special hiring policy, which had exempted many of them from competitive classified status. But because only classified employees qualified for pensions, Native employees were shut out from those benefits. A few had taken competitive exams (probably at the urging of sympathetic superintendents) in order to access the pension benefits, but most had not or could not do so. Commissioner Burke cavalierly suggested that the retirement act would be an “inducement” to the “intelligent and progressive Indians who are now filling exempted positions” to take a competitive exam to become classified, but in fact it was not always as easy as he suggested.Footnote ⁴⁴

Although some Native employees did join the union, it is unclear how many of them went to it for help with labor disputes. Instead, personnel files reveal that employees often drew on personal networks. Katie Brewer's story demonstrates the way federal bureaucracies shaped race and class. It also exemplifies how hiring policy left Native employees at a financial disadvantage, and that even in the 1920s personal politics may have been more useful to Native employees than the union.

Brewer was a Native woman of mixed heritage who was born in 1865 in Sitka, Alaska. When the Forest Grove (later Chemawa) Indian School in Oregon opened in 1880, she was one of the first students to attend, making it through the sixth grade. At the school she met and married David Brewer, a Native man from the Puyallup nation in Washington. After graduation they stayed on as employees of the school, Katie serving first as laundress and later as cook, baker, and matron, while David worked as the school's disciplinarian until his death in 1906.Footnote ⁴⁵ They raised seven children together. White officials praised the couple for having “helped establish the school,”Footnote ⁴⁶ and described Katie as “the mother of Chemawa” who had been there “ever since the school was first opened.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Brewer's superiors universally acknowledged her as an excellent and loyal employee.Footnote ⁴⁸

Despite this praise Brewer experienced a ten-year struggle to qualify for a pension.Footnote ⁴⁹ Although Brewer “desired to be included” in the new pension provisions, she had entered the service in 1883, over a decade before the positions came under the civil service oversight, and because she was an Indian employee, she had never taken an exam to become classified. Initially the OIA responded to her request by saying that she was too old to take the exam. It might have ended there, but Brewer enjoyed the support of Oregon's Senator Charles L. McNary, who personally wrote to the commissioner on her behalf. The commissioner proposed that Congress fix the Retirement Act.Footnote ⁵⁰ Katie Brewer, her superintendent, and the senator kept up the pressure for six years until 1927, when an Indian Office clerk wrote that despite her age she would be allowed to take a civil service exam and try to qualify.Footnote ⁵¹ Brewer passed the exam (if she had failed, she would not have been eligible despite her years in the Service), but Indian Office rules stipulated that employee lists could only be submitted twice a year, forcing her to wait several more months. During that time, President Coolidge issued Executive Order #325 declaring that “all efficient Indians now serving under a noncompetitive status will be given a classified status effective April 1, 1929,” and the commissioner noted, “Mrs. Brewer's case will be taken care of at that time.”Footnote ⁵² While President Coolidge's executive order conferred classified status upon all of those currently holding regular positions, it also stipulated that after April 1, 1929, “Indians entering the service, except in certain minor positions, are required to qualify in open competitive examination.”Footnote ⁵³ In other words, it undid the special hiring policy that had been in effect for almost four decades.

Katie Brewer was lucky. Her superintendent and a U.S. senator were on her side. Moreover, she was able to remain in the service for ten additional years while continuing to fight for her pension. All told, she served for over fifty years. But of the thousands of Native men and women who worked in the Indian Service, few received pensions. Even when those eligible did receive pensions, severe structural disparities remained. Special hiring policies that allowed for the employment of Indians in the Service in “at large” positions (laundress, cook, and baker) without any formal civil service entry exam facilitated job opportunities for Native people, but also encouraged them to accept lower-paying positions. This combined with unofficial practices of channeling Native employees, especially women, into menial positions. Because pensions were estimated on a percentage of the employee's salary, these wage disparities between Native and white employees affected the amount of pension benefits earned by each group. These differences, along with the fact that the majority of Indian employees were never eligible for pensions in the first place, contributed to ongoing economic inequalities between Native and white Americans in government service.

As Phil Deloria argues, at the turn of the century, an extensive set of cultural productions constantly reinforced the idea that Indians were not modern. As this essay suggests, those ideas that Indians need to be taught to work often consigned them to lower-paying positions without benefits that their superiors argued better fit their capacities as unassimilated or uncivilized wards. Indigenous people, however, met these assumptions with assertions that their labor was valuable. As we have seen, they engaged the modern economic system as workers, pension seekers, and union members. Yet our narratives of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era do not yet fully reflect these stories. They remain overshadowed by the ongoing power of those anti-modern images created at the time, which have also affected historians' approaches to Native people. Scholarship often overlooks their direct participation in the marketplace as valued workers, especially in the case of Native women. As a result, scholars often do not account for the implications of Indigenous people's presence in the labor force. Nor have they considered Native workers influence on the development of the national state as a result of the state's interest in their labor. Why, for example, are we surprised to find Indians organizing in unions? Nor are Native Americans the only group whose labor concerns were masked by administrative statements that drew upon intersecting assumptions about race and gender. What did that look like for other colonized groups, for example? Reestablishing the centrality of work to their experiences as well as determining how constructed images may have masked their labor with racialized assumptions is an important task for scholars of labor and the state in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to consider in their work.Footnote ⁵⁴