The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 was a major piece of New Deal legislation aimed at reforming the relationship of the federal government with Native Americans. The centerpiece of John Collier’s “Indian New Deal,” the act sought to restore self-government and cultural pride to
Native Americans. While the act fell far short of Collier’s initial intent, it reversed federal policy designed to assimilate Native Americans and provided a precedent for Indians to organize in later decades to demand full political and civil rights.
The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 had guided federal policy toward Native Americans until the Great Depression. Providing for an allotment of 160 acres to family heads living on a federal reservation, the Dawes Act was intended to weaken tribal authority and to assimilate Indians through private property and individualism by providing them with land to make a living as farmers. By 1933, however, it was obvious that allotments had not improved the lives of Native Americans, whose economic and social circumstances were often dreadful.
The major advocate of reforming Indian policy was the commissioner of Indian affairs, John Collier. A social worker
Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes handing the first constitution issued under the Indian Reorganization Act to delegates of the Confederated Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation (Library of Congress)
By EDUCATION and training, Collier had been a major critic of federal Indian policy during the 1920s. Deeply influenced by Chief Justice John Marshall’s 1832 decision that described Native American tribes as roughly comparable to foreign nations, meaning they should have limited selfgovernment, and impressed by the Pueblo Indian reservation’s agricultural success and cultural cohesiveness, Collier wanted to overhaul Indian policy to give tribes autonomy over their land, local politics, and cultural identity.
Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act, popularly known as the Wheeler-Howard Act, on June 18, 1934, though only with the personal intervention of Secretary of the Interior Harold L. IcKES and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The act effectively ended the allotment policy, allowing those who held land allotments to exchange them for shares in newly created tribal corporations. The corporations were able to hire legal counsel and oversee all issues arising from the communally held land, including disputes with state governments. For those who wanted to retain ownership of their land, inheritance rights were retained. Surplus land, meaning reservation land not allotted, reverted to the tribal corporation. Two million dollars were appropriated to allow reservations to acquire new lands to consolidate their land, while a $10 million fund was set up for tribes to modernize their reservations. For those tribes who voted to participate, a fund was set aside to assist them to set up a tribal corporation.
A tribal referendum was the mechanism to decide whether to participate in the Indian Reorganization Act. If a tribe rejected participation, it remained under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. If the referendum accepted the act, an election for tribal council members was then held; and once one-third of the members asked for a tribal corporation, a charter was written and a majority vote put the tribal corporation into effect. In the year following the act, tribes held referendums on whether to accept the act, with the larger reservations generally accepting the act and the smaller ones rejecting it. Only 71 tribes voted to participate and fully incorporate under the act.
The self-government that Collier had wanted through the Indian Reorganization Act did not work as effectively as he had envisioned. Many white westerners opposed the reform, and Native Americans were not unified in their support of the new policy. Many tribal leaders had been raised and educated under assimilation policy, and Collier could not convince them that the land reform would benefit them in the long term. A major blow came when the Navajo reservation voted in June 1935 to reject the act. Finally, Congress had weakened the legislation in 1934 to secure its passage, and provisions for an autonomous Indian court and another that made the tribal corporations the equivalent of municipalities were taken out of the act. Tribes who participated in the Indian Reorganization Act thus had something less than the self-government Collier had intended.
Opposition to significant reform began building as early as 1934. Funding for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Reorganization Act was cut in each succeeding year, especially as Collier himself became more unpopular in Congress among opponents of the New Deal. He resigned as commissioner in 1945. In the 1950s, Congress tried to undo the Indian New Deal and return to assimilation with its “termination” policy of ending both public support of Indians and their special status under the law, but that policy was largely ignored and then ended in the 1960s.
Ultimately, the Indian Reorganization Act failed to significantly improve the economic and social conditions of Native Americans living on reservations, though it did have some residual success. It did end the allotment program, and by implication, reversed assimilation policy. And the tribal corporations that the act allowed for were able to reignite a sense of unity among Native Americans that would turn into a larger Pan-Indian movement in later decades.
Further reading: Kenneth 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, 1934-1954 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980).
—Katherine Liapis Segrue
World History
