Indian Policy

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Indian Policy

Ending Native American Sovereignty. Before the Civil War the federal government had typically negotiated treaties with various tribes, as though they were foreign “nations,” but in its General Appropriations Act of 1871 the House of Representatives specified: “hereafter

no Indian tribe or nation within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power, with whom the United States may contract by treaty.” The act facilitated a paternalistic approach to Native Americans designed to force them to give up their nomadic ways and to settle on isolated reservations, where they were expected to learn farming and take up “civilized” ways of life. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, one of the largest divisions of the huge Interior Department, also established special boarding schools that removed young Native Americans from their tribes, preventing them from learning their own religions and traditions while teaching them the ways of white society.

Federal Paternalism. Despite these assimilationist measures Native Americans were not treated as fullfledged citizens of the United States. In Elk v. Wilkins (1884) the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), which specifies that any person born or naturalized in the United States is a citizen, did not apply to Native Americans. They ruled that an Indian who left the reservation was not eligible to vote because he had not been naturalized, but since reservations were within the territory of the United States, Native Americans were not eligible for naturalization procedures. Thus, the only way they could become citizens was through congressional acts extending citizenship to individual persons or tribes. (All Native Americans were finally granted full citizenship in 1924.) The ruling perpetuated the definition of Native Americans as wards of the federal government who were incapable of handling their own affairs.

The Land Squeeze. After the Civil War and the completion of the first transnational railroad link in 1869, railroads brought more settlers to the mountain states and the Great Plains. As available western lands were occupied by white ranchers, homesteaders, and miners, new federal policies forced Native Americans from lands that were theirs by tradition or treaty and onto reservations., There they often starved and faced mistreatment and even death at the hands of government troops as well as white settlers. During the 1870s several Indian groups resisted relocation to reservations and the white takeover of lands. While a final bloody massacre occurred at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota in 1890, by 1878 the so-called Indian wars were largely over. (See Lifestyles and Social Trends.)

The Dawes Act. In 1887 Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act, ostensibly “to fit the Indian for civilization and absorb him into it” by dividing the lands on each reservation, which were held in common by a tribe, into homesteads for individuals or nuclear families. The act also stipulated that any surplus land could be sold to whites. Over the next decade enactment of the Dawes Act not only stripped western tribes of large portions of their lands but also decimated the internal structures of tribes. With only small allocations of land many could not support themselves. Within twenty years two-thirds of Indian land had been sold to whites, and much tribal culture and tradition was lost.