Indian-White Relations in the United States

SIGNIFICANCE: Since 1934, relations between Native Americans and the U.S. government have ranged from open displacement of Indigenous rights to self-determination policies.

The landmark Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which remained the legislative model for relations between the U.S. government and Indigenous tribes until the mid-1950s, was based on a massive 1928 report entitled The Problem of Indian Administration (also called the Meriam Report). This report had been requested by Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work. It was intended to reexamine the effects of the General Allotment Act of 1887. Briefly stated, the 1887 act provided for the allotment of a specific plot of land to each Indigenous family within their tribe’s “traditional” holdings. Under this law, after titles had been held for twenty-five years, families would gain full property rights, including the right to sell their land. Any tribal land that was left after plot allotment to families was to be sold to the government for homesteading. It is estimated that, when the Indian Reorganization Act came into effect in 1934, Indigenous people held legal rights to only one-third of the land they had before the General Allotment Act. This fact, coupled with a number of other critical factors pointed out in the Meriam Report (including inferior conditions in the areas of health care and education), led to the policy changes embodied in 1934’s Indian Reorganization Act. Most of the responsibility for implementing these changes rested with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s appointee to the post of Commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier.

Indian Reorganization Act

In addition to slowing the loss of Native American lands, the 1934 act brought a new philosophy to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). It proclaimed a need to reverse a long-standing policy of forced assimilation of Native Americans into “mainstream” America and to build stronger bases for the retention of local Indigenous cultures. In Collier’s words, it aimed at “both the economic and spiritual rehabilitation of the Indian race.”

In the first domain, plans were laid to appropriate funds to buy back the tribes' land that had been lost since 1887. The BIA also initiated a program to spread knowledge of land and timber conservation technology to receptive tribes and began steps to provide local development loans. Although the deepening of the Great Depression soon made special appropriations impossible, much surplus government land that had not gone to homesteading was returned. In its bid to encourage a greater sense of local tribal identity, the 1934 act also offered aid for drawing up and implementing tribal constitutions as the basis for their own local government.

World War II

In the period between 1934 and the next major redefinition of BIA policy in 1953, many domestic policy factors intervened to affect what Roosevelt’s policymakers had seen as the long-term goals of the BIA. The greatest single factor affecting tens of thousands of Indigenous lives during the decade of the 1940s, however, was initially set in play by forces far beyond the reservations. This factor was military service in the US forces during World War II. More than twenty-five thousand Native Americans served between 1941 and 1945. Many thousands more left reservations to work in war-related industrial factories. Indian women were also welcomed as volunteers in the army nurses’ corps and the Red Cross.

Whatever their experiences in the ranks of the armed forces, still strictly segregated along racial lines, clear problems confronted thousands of returning Indigenous veterans at the end of the war. Part of the dilemma stemmed from continuing economic underdevelopment on the reservations they left. Equally debilitating, thousands of returning American Indigenous veterans felt alienated from their own people after experiencing life off the reservation.

Problems such as these impelled US lawmakers to consider once again whether assimilation, rather than “protected separation,” was the best policy to pursue in Indian affairs. Parties supporting the former, including outspoken conservative Republican Senator Arthur Watkins from Utah, introduced what became, in House Concurrent Resolution Number 108, the policy of “termination and relocation.”

Termination Act of 1953

When HCR 108 became law in mid-1953, it pledged “to make Indians . . . subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as . . . other citizens . . . and to end their status as wards of the United States.” Even as HCR 108 was about to become law, a number of Indigenous spokesmen for the first tribes scheduled for termination (which meant stopping various forms of federal government “protective” intervention in their affairs) openly questioned Senator Watkins’s claims that, since there were multiple sources to develop potential wealth on their reservations, the tribes should be able to “go it better alone.”

Menominee leader Gordon Keshena was not alone in expressing worries that, if BIA supervision over local Indigenous affairs ended, the tribes’ lack of experience would produce a deterioration of many Native American material interests. Some congressional supporters of the general principles behind HCR 108 also admitted that the government might find itself spending large amounts of money trying to prepare the weakest and poorest Indigenous groups to know what forms of local autonomy might suit them best.

In fact, just as local termination bills began to appear in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower seemed prepared to increase budgetary allocations to encourage the establishment of new industries in or near tribal areas. For example, by 1956, $300,000 of tribal funds formerly held in trust were earmarked to induce industrial plant owners to locate on the fringes of Navajo territory. Two companies constructed factories, one manufacturing baby furniture, the other making electronic equipment, near Flagstaff, Arizona.

In 1957, the Indian Vocational Training Act was intended to provide job skills to Indigenous applicants to make them attractive to potential employers, even if such jobs meant relocating off reservations. More than a hundred different occupations were included in the curriculum of free schools located in twenty-six states. This ambitious program continued to expand even as the economic recession worsened in 1956 and 1957. Native American policy makers seemed convinced that the overall objectives of the 1953 termination laws would be best served if Indigenous people who could not expect to gain employment on economically backward reservations relocated to off-reservation towns. Ideally, such a movement of families would also ease pressures on the limited economic means of their respective homelands.

Relocation

A separate budget for relocation came by the mid-1950s, to avoid negative consequences for Native Americans who left the reservations without adequate security. Statistics showed that, of the nearly 100,000 Native Americans who left reservations between 1945 to 1958, some 75,000 had relocated without federal assistance, sometimes causing familial disasters. Thus, job training and relocation funds expended in 1957 doubled in one year, reaching $3.5 million. In the same year, 7,000 Native Americans moved from their reservations. Controversy soon developed over shortcomings in the relocation program.

Realistic prospects for employment fell short of demands; moreover, job layoffs left many Native Americans “stranded” and unemployed in unsympathetic White-dominated environments. At the same time, there were very high dropout rates in BIA-sponsored vocational schools. Nurse’s aide programs for women registered the lowest percentage of dropouts (21 percent), while rates for less challenging factory-type programs for men were very high (a 50 percent dropout rate for sawmill workers and a rate as high as 62 percent among furniture factory trainees).

As the 1960s approached, critics of the effects of termination and relocation, including Sophie Aberle, formerly responsible for the United Pueblos Agency, warned Indian Commissioner Glenn Emmons of trouble ahead. Emmons tried to defend his office by reiterating a philosophy that was not accepted by all—that whatever successes were occurring usually stemmed from individual initiative, whereas groups that fell back on the security of “communal lifestyle” tended to accept status quo conditions. Emmons cited gains that were not so easily measured in paychecks, such as advances in tribal health programs and in education. The number of Indigenous going beyond high school by this date (the 1958–59 school year) showed an increase of more than 65 percent in only three years.

Toward Self-Determination: 1960s and 1970s

Despite the fact that the Eisenhower administration’s last BIA budget (for fiscal year 1960) was the largest ever ($115,467,000), it was during the 1960 presidential campaign that controversy over Native American policy began to come to public attention. Party platform committees actually heard testimony from tribal leaders such as Frank George, a Nez Percé who asked not for abandonment of termination but for improvement in its procedures for aiding needy tribes. Other claims, such as the Miccosukee Seminole demand for all of Florida to reconstitute their sovereignty, received less sympathy. The new tide that was coming was best expressed by La Verne Madigan of the Association on American Indian Affairs, who stated that Indians should have the right to choose freely between assimilation and “life in cultural communities of their own people.”

In general, the Kennedy-Johnson Democratic years (1960–68) witnessed a continuation of termination actions despite the views of Lyndon B. Johnson’s interior secretary, Stewart Udall. It was Udall’s insistence that the BIA should do more to secure better conditions of relocation that led to the replacement of Commissioner Philleo Nash by Wisconsin Oneida tribal member Robert Bennett in 1966. Under Bennett’s influence, the president began, in the troubled political climate of 1967, to declare the nation’s need to end the termination policy. Soon thereafter, Johnson urged passage of the American Indian Civil Rights Act (1968).

The 1970s, under Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, brought what has been described as the “self-determination” policy, emphasizing the development of tribal resources on restored reservations. Perhaps the most dramatic example of reversal of what many perceived to be the harmful effects of termination occurred in 1973, when the Menominee tribe was told that (as the tribe had requested) its twenty-year experience of termination was over and that its entire reservation was to be restored to it as “unencumbered Menominee property.” Yet despite pronouncements of “better intentions” coming from Washington and the BIA, the cumulative effects of decades of misunderstanding were not to be dispelled easily. In the same year that the Menominees regained tribal control over their own destiny, a breakdown in relations between federal troops and Lakota Indians during a seventy-one-day siege on the Pine Ridge Reservation ended in an assault that the Lakotas call “Wounded Knee II.” Similar confrontations with threats of violence came in different regions over different issues, pressing government authorities to review its policy on Indigenous affairs yet again. In the Seattle area, what became known as the Fish Wars occurred, where Pacific Northwest tribal members clashed with the government over fishing rights. The tribe had held onto their traditional fishing rights through the signing of the Treaty of Medicine Creek and those rights were upheld in a Supreme Court decision in 1979.

In May, 1977, the congressional American Indian Policy Review Commission, which included five Indigenous members for the first time, made more than two hundred recommendations, most of which aimed at confirming all tribes’ power to enact laws within the confines of their own reservations. On the heels of this symbol of intended reform, the US Congress passed the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which guaranteed freedom for tribes to practice their own traditional religions. This act ended the mixed legacy of several centuries of insistence that missionary conversion and education following Christian principles were vital aspects of Native American-White relations in the United States.

1980s Through 1995

During the Republican presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush (1980–92), budgetary cuts seriously affected the continuity of existing programs of assistance to Indigenous tribes. In 1981 alone, one-half of the prior budget for health services was cut, while funding for Indigenous higher education was reduced from $282 million to $200 million. By the mid-1980s, the education budget had been cut further, to $169 million.

Despite alarming cutbacks in BIA funding and looming questions of Indigenous demands for restoration of their sovereignty, the Bush administration made one major contribution by enacting the Native American Languages Act, which allowed tribal use of (formerly banned) traditional languages in BIA schools.

The issue of Indigenous land claims was prominent throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court (in United States v. Sioux Nation) upheld a $122 million judgment against the United States for having taken the Black Hills from the Sioux illegally. In 1986, a federal court awarded each member of the White Earth Chippewa group compensation for land lost under the 1887 General Allotment Act. A significant piece of legislation regarding land claims was the 1982 Indian Claims Limitation Act, which limited the time period during which land claims could be filed against the US government.

The issue of Indian sovereignty and the related issue of gambling on Indigenous lands created considerable controversy among Indigenous and non-Indigenous in the early 1990s. The 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act legalized certain types of gambling on reservations, and the vast amounts of income that could be generated appealed to many tribes struggling with widespread poverty. Gambling engendered protests by some non-Indigenous, however, and created tribal divisions that occasionally turned violent; in 1990, violence between gambling and antigambling contingents on the St. Regis Mohawk reservation caused state and federal authorities to intervene. An important court decision involving another aspect of sovereignty was handed down in 1990: The U.S. Supreme Court decided in Duro v. Reina that tribes do not have criminal jurisdiction over non-Indigenous living on reservation lands.

In 1992, a number of American Indigenous groups protested the celebrations planned for the five-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Two events in 1994 symbolized both an increasing respect for and the continuing problems of American Indigenous. The first facility of the National Museum of the American Indian, a new part of the Smithsonian Institution, opened in New York (funding had been approved by Congress in 1989). On the other hand, the National Congress of American Indians and the National Black Caucus announced an alliance, stating that American Indigenous and African Americans continued to face similar forces of political and economic oppression. History was made in 2024 when President Joe Biden apologized for the forced separation of Indigenous families and the role the U.S. government played in instituting Indian boarding schools.

Bibliography

“Biden Makes Historic Apology for ‘Sin’ of U.S. Role in Deadly Indigenous Boarding Schools.” PBS, 25 Oct. 2024, www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-biden-to-make-historic-apology-for-u-s-role-in-deadly-indigenous-boarding-schools. Accessed 12 Nov. 2024.

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