The Transimperial Indian New Deal, 1923-1953

A lecture by David Kerry '20.
"The Transimperial Indian New Deal, 1923-1953" situates the “Indian New Deal”—a transformative set of U.S. federal Indian policies that halted the large-scale allotment of tribal lands, created a mechanism for federal recognition of tribal governments, and introduced new socio-economic programs on tribal reservations—as a productive site of transimperial interaction with the broader imperial world of the mid-twentieth century. It contends that during the New Deal period, members of the Indian Office thought of themselves as imperial officials engaged in the administration of colonized populations and consequently looked to, communicated with, and emulated other imperial functionaries around the globe. Writing against scholarship that attributes the Indian New Deal’s profound policy changes to domestic reform movements, "The Transimperial Indian New Deal" instead locates their genesis in three distinct imperial undertakings: the Spanish “Law of the Indies” and its application to Pueblo forms of self-government in colonial New Mexico; British “indirect administration” in Tanganyika and Fiji between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries; and the indigenista policies of the post-Revolutionary Mexican state in the 1920s and 30s. By tracing the networks of people, practices, and ideas that linked the Indian Office with each of these endeavors this project demonstrates how Indian Office officials actively operated within and ultimately came to shape global regimes of imperial administration.
David Kerry '20 is a doctoral candidate in history at Yale University specializing in global imperial history with a focus on Native North America and U.S. Empire. His scholarship positions U.S. federal Indian policy as a generative site for American engagement with other imperial powers by exploring the intellectual, social, and material connections linking the ongoing colonization of Native Americans with contemporaneous projects of global colonial administration. He is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Reed history department.
Free and open to the public.