This dissertation investigates how conflicts of mid-twentieth-century Indian wardship and citizenship manifested in political debates and public opinion. By considering Indian termination policies in conjunction with welfare policies of the same era, Citizens with Reservations explores how Native people challenged broad definitions of American citizenship undergirded by racialized and gendered notions of dependency and opportunity. This dissertation defines what Indian wardship and citizenship meant for both non-Native and Native people in ideological terms, and explores how Native people experienced wardship and citizenship in their day-to-day lives. While non-Native politicians, state agents, and the public defined wardship as Indians’ perpetual dependency on the federal government, Native people saw it as the United States’ legal obligation to fulfill the terms of historical agreements and treaties negotiated with Indian tribes. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, state agents employed “ward” a racialized and gendered term positioned in opposition to “proper” American citizenship.

Citizens with Reservations is a history of Native peoples’ pursuit of welfare benefits, and a history of how the racialized construct of “Indian wardship” shaped larger political debates over welfare dependency within the United States. To explore the complex intersections between wardship and welfare, this dissertation examines the “quotidian structures of wardship”—the daily decisions, conversations, and correspondence between Native people and BIA agents. After situating wardship within a longer history of Indian racialization, Citizens with Reservations examines how wardship impacted Native peoples’ efforts to obtain welfare benefits under the Social Security Act, Servicemen’s Dependents Allowance Act, and the GI Bill; and explores eleven unsuccessful termination bills proposed by conservative congressmen between 1944-1954 which would have “emancipated” “competent Indians from wardship. It analyzes how and why Native people claimed rights to welfare benefits as citizens, while retaining their right to wardship as they defined it. By interrogating the racialized and gendered constructions of “proper” citizenship in the mid-twentieth century, this dissertation puts debates and battles over Indian access to welfare into a longer history of assimilation and settler colonialism in the United States.

This dissertation argues that Synanon offered an alternative to the experiences of institutional confinement that dominated the lives of heroin users and addicts in post-World War II Los Angeles, and that its philosophy of getting clean forwarded alternative ways of living and structuring society. It focuses on Synanon’s origins and formative years, from 1958 to 1965, and the perspectives of Synanon people themselves in order to explore their creation of a recovery counterculture. Moving away from prevailing attitudes about sobriety as a path to middle-class respectability, Synanon saw sobriety as a springboard to social experimentation and self-realization. They also rejected the dominant postwar policy of mandatory addiction treatment, and instead demanded autonomy from government and professional medical authority. The story of Synanon, often reduced to a simplistic narrative of “drug rehab turned cult,” actually has far-reaching implications for the fields of addiction and recovery, nonconformity and dissent, and utopian communities and social movements in the twentieth-century United States.

This dissertation examines the transformation of the gay rights movement from 1954 to 1973 through the lens of ASH, a mental institution for male sex offenders located two-hundred miles north of Los Angeles. During this period, homosexual patients at the institution claimed that they were being subjected to painful and invasive treatments to change their sexual orientation. Their allegations of abuse made ASH a potent symbol of the state’s oppression of homosexuals, a Dachau for queers, which could be used by activists to discredit the proponents of aversion therapy and the APA. However, ASH was not only a site of contestation that consolidated gay rights activism but also a site that created ruptures within the movement.

Significantly, those ruptures were generated by competing notions of gay community and identity. For early activists of the accomodationist movement, responding to the plight of ASH’s homosexual patients was particularly problematic. As convicted sex offenders, these patients challenged the movement’s central proposition that gays and lesbians were law abiding citizens who only wished to be assimilated into mainstream society. Paradoxically, the proponents of sexual liberation of the late 1960s and early 1970s were confronted with a far more intractable problem, for by that time, most of ASH’s homosexual patients had been convicted of sex offenses against minors and children. This inconvenient truth threatened to undermine public sympathy for ASH’s patients and activists’ depiction of the hospital as a Dachau for queers. In order to resolve these dilemmas, the conservative and militant wings of the gay rights movement had to reconceptualize the boundaries of gay community and identity in ways that neither had anticipated.