“More Profitable to the Indians Than White Men or Indians”: Slavery, Racemaking, and Indian Agency Employment, 1832–50

The Office of Indian Affairs’ hiring practices during the era of forced removal reveal a tension between its official assimilation program and its widespread reliance on enslaved labor. Indian Territory housed a cadre of federal employees hired to transform Native lifeways, including Indian agents, but also blacksmiths, farmers, millers, and interpreters. Reformers imagined that Native men, especially those who graduated from federally funded mission schools, would eventually fill these positions, gaining steady employment while personally exemplifying the success of the nation’s civilization policy. The Office’s regulations gave preferential hiring to Native laborers while prohibiting the employment of enslaved people in government positions. Yet this policy imagined Native people not as equals of white Americans but instead as a racialized underclass engaged in mechanical and agricultural work. In practice, moreover, many agents hesitated to employ Native men, instead hiring enslaved African Americans from nearby settlers. This routine violation of both O.I.A. regulations and federal law prohibiting slavery in northern Indian Territory betrays any national investment in a free labor system for the United States’s racialized peoples.