Despite efforts to ameliorate the poverty and isolation of Native Americans during the Great Depression and World War II, conditions for the most part did not significantly improve. But in the longer run, the period provided new experiences and important changes in government policy that laid the groundwork for later grassroots mobilization for civil rights.
Native Americans in the United States made up a diverse group (approximately 170 distinct tribes, bands, or peoples) who lived mainly west of the Mississippi River, especially in Oklahoma, Arizona, and the upper Great Plains. The population, which had been declining since the first European contacts, began to experience growth after 1900 (237,000 in 1900; 366,000 in 1940). Different languages, cultures, and tribal rivalries had combined with the impact of federal policy to leave Native Americans isolated, internally fractured, and often living in desperate poverty.
The federal government had established reservations for Native Americans in the 19th century, and under the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, reservation Indians were considered wards of the government, overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The Dawes Act guided federal policy toward Native Americans into the 1930s, a policy sometimes called “coercive assimilation” for its emphasis on teaching American values such as individualism and private property through boarding schools for children and individual land allotments. The only significant change in federal policy between the 1880s and 1930s came when Congress bestowed United States citizenship on Native Americans in 1924.
By the 1920s, a growing number of social reformers were denouncing assimilation policy as a failure. A significant 1928 Brookings Institution report, The Problems of Indian Administration, called on the federal government and the BIA to reject that approach in order better to address the economic, educational, and social needs of Native Americans. Economic and social indicators provided glaring proof that assimilation had indeed failed to help Native Americans. By the time of the Great Depression, more than half of all reservation Indians were landless (many had sold or rented their land allotments to white neighbors); more than half had incomes of under $200 per
Two of the Navajo code talkers in World War II (National Archives)
Year; infant mortality was three times that of white Americans; and crime and alcoholism on reservations were well above the national averages. Native Americans were the most impoverished ethnic group in the United States, with overall poverty rates higher than those of African Americans in the South.
Reform of Indian policy was accomplished during the New Deal under Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier. Collier especially had become a vocal critic of federal Indian policy during the 1920s, and with Ickes’s support proposed what has been called the “Indian New Deal.” The centerpiece was the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which aimed to restore self-government and cultural pride to Native Americans and ended land allotment. While only 71 tribes elected to participate in the act and it generally failed to achieve its goals, the seeds of self-government begun by the experience would be a precedent for Native American organization in later decades.
The New Deal also brought various relief and work programs to the reservations. The Civilian Conservation Corps (which had an Indian Division) and the Works Progress Administration provided employment and agricultural improvements on reservations, and the Public Works Administration built much-needed new school and hospital facilities. The Indian boarding schools, the hated symbol of assimilation policy for most Native Americans, were gradually replaced by new day schools, with Collier giving preference to Native American teachers and trying to implement a more Indian-centered curriculum. And although the poverty rates among Native Americans did not significantly improve, the “Indian New Deal” did bring desperately needed social services to reservations and at least stabilized their economic circumstances.
As it did for many other ethnic groups, World War II brought new opportunities for Native Americans. Some, including not only the well-known Navajo but also Hopi, Choctaw, and Cherokee, were “code talkers” for the military. Using their native languages, they made military messages unintelligible to Axis code breakers. But Native American participation in the war was much broader than just the code talkers. About 25,000 Native Americans served in the armed forces, while another 40,000 found employment in defense work, migrating especially to the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas. The war provided the first major experience for many young Native Americans in the larger American culture.
During World War II, Native Americans also began efforts at organizing across tribal lines. With Collier’s support, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) was created in 1944. Initially formed by major Oklahoma tribes, particularly the Cherokee, the NCAI became the leading intertribal political organization, lobbying for Indian rights and trying to dispel stereotypes about Native Americans.
The experience of Native Americans from 1929 through 1945 provided significant new departures. The Indian Reorganization Act and Collier’s leadership reversed (at least temporarily) assimilation policy. World War II brought many Native Americans off the reservations and initiated the first significant urban migration, particularly among the younger generation. But the poverty and isolation of many Native Americans were only marginally alleviated. After the war, the “Indian New Deal” was rolled back, with the federal government replacing it with the “termination” policy of the 1950s that paid a lump sum to tribes to sever the “ward” relationship with the federal government. But the 1929-45 period helped to plant the seeds for the later Pan-Indian movement to demand full civil and political rights for Native Americans.
Further reading: Alison R. Bernstein, American Indians and World War II (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Kenneth R. Philp, John Collier’s Crusade for Indian
Reform, 1920-1954 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977); Graham D. Taylor, The New Deal and American Indian Tribalism: The Administration of the Indian Reorganization Act, 1934-1945 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980).
—Katherine Liapis Segrue
World History
