Indian Reorganization Act (Wheeler‐Howard Act).The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 settled a bitter Indian‐policy debate waged in the 1920s. The “protectors,” led by Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall and his commissioner of Indian affairs, Charles H. Burke, wanted to continue government paternalism toward Indian people while denouncing Indian dances and traditional religious practices and advocating open access by non‐Indians to reservation resources and land. The “reformers”—notably John Collier (1884–1968), founder of the American Indian Defense Association, and Gertrude Bonnin, a Yankton Dakota—sought to preserve Native American resources, crafts, culture, land, and spirituality. Collier agreed with the writer Hamlin Garland that government should prevent “missionaries from regulating the amusements and daily lives of the natives” and should protect native lands.
In 1934, Collier, who had become President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt's commissioner of Indian affairs, replaced the “protectors” and “missionaries” in the
Bureau of Indian Affairs with social scientists and reformers and worked actively for passage of the Indian Reorganization Act, sometimes called “the Indian New Deal.” Although the act did not put native peoples in leadership positions in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, it sought to protect Native American religious rights, encourage self‐determination, improve Indian education and health services, fund tribal enterprises, and end the allotment established by the
Dawes Severalty Act by which non‐Indians could acquire title to reservation lands.
Although criticized by some Indians for its paternalism, the act did curb the erosion of the reservation land base. The tribal sovereignty and self‐determination aspects of the act, however, were undermined after 1945. In spite of its shortcomings, the act remains the most significant Indian legislation passed in the twentieth century.
See also
Indian History and Culture: From 1900 to 1950;
New Deal Era, The.
Bibliography
Kenneth R. Philp , John Collier's Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920–1954, 1977.
Graham D. Taylor , The New Deal and American Indian Tribalism: The Administration of the Indian Reorganization Act, 1934–1945, 1980.
Donald A. Grinde Jr.
