Bureau of Indian Affairs

Abstract

The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is an agency of the US government with a complex relationship to Native Americans, their lands, their cultures, and their sovereignty. American Indians and Alaska Natives possess a unique government‐to‐government status vis‐à‐vis the United States stemming from treaties, which transferred indigenous land rights in return for federal promises. The BIA (now in the Department of the Interior) was designed to help fulfill these obligations. When treaty making ended in 1871, the BIA began to administer new federal policies of assimilation affecting Indians, like boarding schools and the break‐up of reservation lands. In the twentieth century, the BIA Commissioner John Collier implemented an “Indian New Deal,” partnered with anthropologists, and reversed course on policies of assimilation. A target of American Indian Movement protests in the 1970s, the modern BIA (under Native leadership) continues to fulfill the federal trust responsibility to American Indians and Alaska Natives.