.... The Australian policy of exemption and the U.S. policy of competency did not represent a true change in direction from past policies of protection. In contrast to the nineteenth century, though, these twentieth-century policies offered protection to only a deserving few. Drawing on records of exemption...

...Katherine Ellinghaus Scholarship on Native American economic activity in the assimilation period tells a story of unscrupulous whites, fraud, and failure, often identifying the policy of competency as the culprit. Judging from these accounts, one might assume that being declared competent...