Waging Sovereignty

Native Americans and the Transformation of Work in the Twentieth Century

Colleen O’Neill

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469687209
• Print ISBN:
  9781469693286
  9781469693279
• Subtopic: North American History

Wage work was supposed to “kill the Indian and save the man,” or so thought Richard Pratt and other late nineteenth-century policymakers. Nevertheless, even as American Indians entered the workforce, they remained connected to their lands and cultures. In this powerful history of resilience and transformation, Colleen O'Neill uncovers the creative strategies Native workers employed to subvert assimilation and fight for justice in the workplace, their collective strength expanding the very meaning of sovereignty.

Drawing on federal archives, Native memoirs, oral histories, and field research, O'Neill traces a sweeping story that stretches from the era of boarding schools to the contemporary world of high-stakes gaming. For more than a century, federal policymakers tried to reshape Native lives through labor. In some cases, children were sent to pick crops and scrub settlers' homes. In others, families were relocated to distant cities for permanent year-round jobs that were designed to replace traditional seasonal labor and lifestyle patterns. But Native workers persevered. They rebuilt their communities, fought to reclaim control of the reservation workplace, and developed distinctive institutions to defend their cultural, political, and economic sovereignty. As Waging Sovereignty illuminates, wage work was a focal point of assimilationist efforts and, in turn, labor became a key factor in Native workers’ anti-colonial struggle.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Introduction: Beyond the Civil Rights Paradigm: Thinking about Class, Native American Workers, and Colonial Legacies
• 1 The Civilizing Machine: Indian Boarding Schools as Labor Contractors
• 2 Building, Digging, and Sewing: Working for Wages on Federal Relief Projects in the 1930s
• 3 The Limits of “Positive Programming”: American Indians, Gender, and the Postwar Urban Relocation Program
• 4 Jobs and Sovereignty: The Development of the Tribal Employment Rights Movement
• 5 Labor Rights or Sovereignty Rights? The Challenge of Gaming
• Conclusion: Sovereignty Rights and Work: Anti-Colonial History in the Making
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index