BIA map of reservations in the United States.

Tribal sovereignty: Map of the United States, with non-reservation land highlighted.

In many cases the lands granted to tribes were hostile to agricultural cultivation, leaving many tribes who accepted the policy in a state bordering on starvation.

Reservation treaties sometimes included stipend agreements, in which the federal government would grant a certain amount of goods to a tribe yearly. The implementation of the policy was erratic, however, and in many cases the stipend goods were not delivered.

Controversy

The policy was controversial from the start. Reservations were generally established by executive order. In many cases, white settlers objected to the size of land parcels, which were subsequently reduced. A report submitted to Congress in 1868 found widespread corruption among the federal Native American agencies and generally poor conditions among the relocated tribes.

Many tribes ignored the relocation orders at first and were forced onto their new limited land parcels. Enforcement of the policy required the United States Army to restrict the movements of various tribes. The pursuit of tribes in order to force them back onto reservations led to a number of Native American Wars. The most well known conflict was the Sioux War on the northern Great Plains, between 1876 and 1881, which included the Battle of Little Bighorn. Other famous wars in this regard included the Nez Perce War.

By the late 1870s, the policy established by President Grant was regarded as a failure, primarily because it had resulted in some of the bloodiest wars between Native Americans and the United States. By 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes began phasing out the policy, and by 1882 all religious organizations had relinquished their authority to the federal Indian agency.

Most Indian reservations, like the Laguna Indian reservation in New Mexico (pictured 1943), are in the western United States, often in arid regions unsuitable for agriculture.

In 1887, Congress undertook a significant change in reservation policy by the passage of the Dawes Act, or General Allotment (Severalty) Act. The act ended the general policy of granting land parcels to tribes as-a-whole by granting small parcels of land to individual tribe members. In some cases, for example the Umatilla Indian Reservation, after the individual parcels were granted out of reservation land, the reservation area was reduced by giving the excess land to white settlers. The individual allotment policy continued until 1934, when it was terminated by the Indian Reorganization Act.

The Indian New Deal

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, also known as the Howard-Wheeler Act, was sometimes called the Indian New Deal. It laid out new rights for Native Americans, reversed some of the earlier privatization of their common holdings, and encouraged self-government and land management by tribes. The act slowed the assignment of tribal lands to individual members, and reduced the assignment of 'extra' holdings to nonmembers.

For the following twenty years, the U.S. government invested in infrastructure, health care, and education on the reservations, and over two million acres (8,000 km˛) of land were returned to various tribes. The Indian Reorganization Act also provided for termination and relocation of certain tribes. This eventually resulted in the legal dismantling of 61 tribal nations.

Life and culture

Many Native Americans who live on reservations deal with the federal government through two agencies: the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service.

Life qualities in some reservations are comparable to the quality of life in the developing world. For example, Shannon County, South Dakota, home of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, is routinely described as one of the poorest counties in the nation.

Gambling

In 1979, the Seminole tribe in Florida opened a high-stakes bingo operation on its reservation in Florida. The state attempted to close the operation down but was stopped in the courts. In the 1980s, the case of California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians established the right of reservations to operate other forms of gambling operations. In 1988, Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act which recognized the right of Native American tribes to establish gambling and gaming facilities on their reservations as long as the states in which they are located have some form of legalized gambling. Today, many Native American Casinos are used as tourist attractions to draw visitors and revenue to reservations.

See also

• Canada: Indian reserve

References

External links

• BIA full-size map of Indian reservations in the continental United States
• BIA index to map of Indian reservations in the continental United States
• FEMA: Federally recognized Indian reservations
• Tribal Leaders Directory
• Gambling on the reservation April 2004 Christian Science Monitor article with links to other Monitor articles on the topic.
• Wheeler-Howard Act (Indian Reorganization Act) 1934
• Native American Technical Corrections Act of 2003
• Chapter 5: American Indian and Alaska Native Areas, U.S. Census Bureau, Geographic Areas Reference manual (PDF)

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