Established in 1824, the United States Indian Service (USIS), now known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was the agency responsible for carrying out U.S. treaty and trust obligations to American Indians, but it also sought to "civilize" and assimilate them. In her book “Federal Fathers and Mothers,” Dr. Cathleen Cahill, Associate Professor of History at the University of New Mexico, offers the first in-depth social history of the agency during the height of its assimilation efforts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.