Valerie Lambert is associate professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. An enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation, she is author of Choctaw Nation: A Story of American Indian Resurgence, winner of the 2007 North American Indian Prose Award.
"Punch line for Native humor, punching bag for Native anger, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has long been staffed by Indians. In this fascinating and groundbreaking study, Valerie Lambert details how BIA leaders and employees have transformed a colonial institution through Indigenous creativity and commitment. Native Agency: rarely has a title captured its subject with such complexity and crystalline clarity!"—Philip J. Deloria, author of Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract"In this much-needed book, Valerie Lambert provides a fine-grained examination of the role of American Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. By highlighting their agency, her analysis contests notions of acquiescence or cooptation of Natives in the BIA, and her nuanced look at the complexities of Native participation challenges simplistic renderings of the workings of settler state power. Native Agency is a powerful book, certain to reshape our understandings of Native engagement with the BIA and, ultimately, with the settler state."—Shannon Speed (Chickasaw Nation), author of Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State
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