Labor’s Limits: Outing Work and Changing Ideas about Native Sovereignty, 1900–30

Between 1900 and 1930, the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) sent thousands of Native people to work for beet producers in eastern Colorado and western Kansas. While this program resembled other efforts to assimilate Native people through vocational education and labor, it differed in a key respect: it was run by Native people. This paper traces the experiences of George LeMieux (Bad River Ojibwe) as he reformed this longstanding government labor program. While LeMieux brought improvements in living and working conditions, he could not overcome the power of the sugar companies to fire Native workers in favor of more permanent workers. His experiences highlight the limits of the power wielded by Native educators and bureaucrats in reforming assimilationist education systems, and the ongoing need to push the federal government to better access to employment as Native people re-envisioned the relationship between labor and sovereignty in the twentieth century.