1 gen 1934 anni - Indian Reorganization Act

Descrizione:

A 1934 law that reversed the Dawes Act of 1887. Through the law, Indians won a greater degree of religious freedom, and tribal governments regained their status as semisovereign dependent nations.


Native Americans had long been one of the nation’s most disadvantaged and powerless groups. In 1934, the average individual Indian income was only $48 per year, and the unemployment rate was three times the national average. New Dealers sought to address their plight, with mixed results. Roosevelt appointed sociologist John Collier to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Collier, a progressive critic of past BIA practices, understood what Native Americans had long known: that the government’s decades-long policy of forced assimilation, prohibition of traditional religions, and confiscation of lands had left most tribes poor, isolated, and without basic self-determination.

Collier helped to write and pass the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, sometimes called the “Indian New Deal.” On the positive side, the law reversed the Dawes Act of 1887 (see “Breaking Up Tribal Lands” in Chapter 15), which had sought to break up tribes as social units and replace them with a system of individual land ownership. Collier’s legislation instead promoted Indian self-government through formal constitutions and democratically elected tribal councils. A majority of Indian peoples — some 181 tribes — accepted the reorganization policy. Through the new law, Native people won a degree of religious freedom, and tribal governments regained their status as semisovereign dependent nations. The latter achievement would have major implications for Native rights in the second half of the twentieth century.

Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier poses with chiefs of the Blackfoot Indian tribe in 1934. Collier helped reform the way the U.S. federal government treated Native Americans. As part of what many called the Indian New Deal, Collier lobbied Congress to pass the Indian Reorganization Act, which gave Indian tribes greater control over their own affairs and ended many of the most atrocious federal practices, such as forcing Indian children into white-run boarding schools and dividing up and selling reservation land.


Like so many other federal Indian policies, however, the Indian New Deal was flawed. The act imposed a model of self-government that proved incompatible with some tribal traditions and languages. The Papagos of southern Arizona, for instance, had no words for budget or representative, and they made no linguistic distinctions among law, rule, charter, and constitution. Ongoing BIA policies alienated many groups, even as the new law proposed to empower them. The nation’s largest tribe, the Navajos, rejected the new policy, in large part because of controversial mandatory livestock reductions ordered by Collier’s agency, to make room for the Boulder Dam project. In theory, the Indian Reorganization Act expanded Indian self-determination, and many tribes did benefit. In practice, however, the BIA and Congress continued to interfere in internal Indian affairs and retained financial control over reservation governments.

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