In the first decades of the 20th century, Indians found themselves drawn deeper and deeper into the mire of poverty. Even before the United States plunged into the Great Depression, only 4 percent of the Indian population earned annual incomes of more than $200. In an effort to address the needs of poor Indians, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed John C. Collier as the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in 1933. Collier struck many as a radical choice: a founding member of the American Indian Defense Association, a Washington-based lobbying group, Collier had long been one of the bureau’s most virulent critics.
Collier’s appointment indeed proved to be a watershed in contemporary Indian history. His work at the BIA helped to bring attention at last to the problems of Indian groups, which policy makers had long been happy to ignore. He also forced Washington to forge a new relationship with Indian peoples, in which they were given a greater say than ever before in policies that affected their lives.
Collier’s new approach to federal Indian policy was presented in a 48-page bill that became the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Also known as the Indian New Deal, the IRA abolished Allotment, the policy that since the 1880s had robbed Indians of much of their remaining landholdings. It also offered loans for Indian students, established funds for tribal economic development, and provided for the purchase of new lands for the exclusive use of Indians. To help implement these and other social and economic programs, the IRA created guidelines by which groups could establish new tribal governments with elected leaders and written constitutions. Although many Indian groups resisted Collier’s efforts to reorganize their governments following a non-Indian model, 92 tribes eventually adopted constitutions according to the IRA’s provisions. Throughout the rest of the century, these new tribal governments would often be on the forefront of the continuing battle for Indian sovereignty.
As significant as the passage of the IRA was, the American involvement in World War II perhaps had an even greater impact on individual Indians. Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Indian men and women signed up for military service in unprecedented numbers, while thousands more from Indian communities joined the war effort on the home front. The experiences of these Indians, particularly those of servicemen sent overseas, profoundly affected their relationship to non-Indian society. Indian soldiers who had previously spent little time outside of reservations were suddenly in foreign nations, fighting side by side with non-Indian soldiers against a common enemy.
Such experiences left many Indian servicemen more confident and far less willing to accept unchallenged white prejudices against them and their people. For others, the war and its aftermath were more disorienting than empowering—a situation tragically illustrated by the death from alcoholism of Pima war hero Ira Hayes in 1955. The difficulty of many veterans in readjusting to reservation life after the war later provided the subject of N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), two of the best Native American novels of the postwar era.
In addition to changing Indians’ view of mainstream America, Indians’ military experiences also changed how policy makers saw them. In the years immediately after the war, non-Indians in government came to question the special legal status of Indians and the logistics of the reservation system. In a complete reversal of Collier’s progressive legislation, the new architects of federal Indian policy increasingly sought to get out of the “Indian business.” This goal was often presented as a means of eliminating government interference in Indians’ lives, although advocates often had far less benevolent motives. Faced with funding massively expensive federal programs for veterans, many Washington officials were eager to save the millions spent annually to administer reservations and to provide benefits and services guaranteed to Indians by treaty.
These aims resulted in the two dominant policies of the 1950s and early 1960s: Termination and Relocation. Most completely articulated in the House Concurrent Resolution 108 of 1953, Termination meant dissolving the reservations of specific tribes and thereby ending their special tribal status. In theory, Termination was to be applied only to relatively affluent tribes that could withstand the loss of tribal lands and the income they produced. In fact, few tribes had the resources to cope with Termination’s economic costs. One of the most notorious instances was that of the Menominee of Wisconsin, who were an early target for Termination because they had more than $10 million of tribal funds in the U. S. Treasury. However, over the course of eight years, these funds were nearly depleted by the U. S. government in the process of implementing the policy. By the time the Menominee’s Termination was official in 1961, they were desperately poor.
The Relocation policy was developed to help returning Indian veterans, who found few opportunities for employment on reservations or in other Indian communities. It sought to encourage these men to move to cities, where employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs would help them find jobs and affordable housing. Some Indians were already eager to relocate, while others were persuaded by the promises of the government—promises that frequently proved empty. Many relocatees, unable to obtain either work or adequate homes, merely exchanged rural poverty for urban poverty.
For a large number of Indians, the effects of Termination and Relocation were devastating. Yet from these disastrous policies emerged a renewed fervor in and focus for Indian political activism. Largely to protest Termination, the National Congress of American Indians helped to organize the week-long American Indian Chicago Conference in 1961. Attended by more than 500 tribal representatives, the event sparked an increased commitment among Indian leaders from different tribes to band together to fight against the mistreatment of all Indians.
By the late 1960s, young Indians in urban areas also began to embrace a pan-Indian approach to protesting the government’s policies. Many were the children of the original relocatees; born in the city, they often had almost no direct experience with traditional Indian societies. Gathering in Indian centers established to help new relocatees, this new generation of activists were drawn together by their shared anger at non-Indian authorities. From their ranks would emerge the American Indian Movement, the Indians of All Tribes, and other multitribal groups whose confrontational tactics and media savvy would draw international support for American Indian rights during the 1970s.
World History
