The Indians of Today

Abstract

Marie Bottineau Baldwin saw the segregation of the federal civil service under the Wilson administration first-hand from her position in the Interior Department where she had been working for almost a decade. A large number of Native people were not U.S. citizens. In this increasingly rigid racial regime, white Americans had trouble classifying Métis people like Bottineau Baldwin who were of mixed Native and French descent and generally decided that if they kept ties to their Native kin, they remained Indians. As the Wilson administration built racial inequality into the civil service, it raised a number of very personal and immediate questions for Bottineau Baldwin. She went on the offensive. If Americans thought of her as an Indian, she would prove that Indians were different from African Americans. Echoing the language of the Wilson administration, she raised the specter of interracial relations.