Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life

The Bureau of Indian Affairs was set up to serve as a liaison between the federal government and Indigenous tribes. More crudely, it was organized in the 1800s to handle the “Indian problem.” Originally, relations with Indigenous tribes had been handled by the War Department. The BIA controlled reservations, with the help of Indian agents and missions. They formed treaties with tribes, administered land allotments, provided funds, settled disputes, and oversaw activities and affairs on reservations and at forts throughout the West. In the 1950s, tribes could do nothing without the organization’s approval. All fees for rents went to the bureau. They also oversaw tribal council meetings. Tribes could also only meet with the BIA’s approval. The BIA was later transferred to the Department of the Interior.

Over the course of 95 years, the BIA allegedly withheld as much as $150 billion from Indigenous nations. In 2010, Congress offered a settlement of $3.4 billion as a conciliatory measure. The money withheld was for timber, oil, and land leases. The BIA mishandled records and “exploited computer systems with no audit trails to turn Indian proceeds into slush funds” (94). Only in the 1990s was an Indigenous person, the Menominee activist Ada Deer, installed as head of the BIA.

The Burke Amendment provided patents “in fee simple” for land only to Indigenous people who were regarded as “competent and capable” (98). The amendment worked to take even more land away from Indigenous tribes than the Dawes Act and the Nelson Act had. Some tribal members were given a title for land that was removed from a trust. This then subjected them to taxation, but they were able to sell their land. To determine which Indigenous people were competent enough to hold titles, federal agents relied on ideas from eugenics. They decided that those who had plenty of European ancestry were likelier to understand land ownership. This illegal appropriation of land led to the White Earth Land Settlement Act (WELSA).

Also known as the General Allotment Act, the law provided that, after a trust period, Indigenous individuals would receive a parcel of land on a reservation to cultivate. The law’s purpose was to dissolve tribes and encourage private land ownership among Indigenous peoples. The Dawes Act, named for Republican US Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, was one of numerous attempts made in the 19th century to assimilate Indigenous peoples into white American standards of living. The act also allowed for any “surplus” land to go to white people. By 1932, white residents had already acquired two-thirds of the 138 million acres that Indigenous peoples had held when the act passed.

The Indian Appropriations Act created “the modern Indian reservation” (34). The law marked the shift from a policy of assimilation and removal to one of removal and containment. This was to allow westward expansion, while avoiding the kind of conflict that led to the French and Indian War (1754-63) and Pontiac’s War (1763-66), which resulted from dissatisfaction with British colonialists. Instead of providing tribes with large tracts of land, the federal government offered the smaller parcels that became reservations.

Passed in 1978, the Indian Child Welfare Act was the federal government’s first attempt “in recognizing the disastrous results of boarding schools and zealous foster care families” (193). The main purpose of the ICWA was to keep Indigenous children with their families, thereby restoring the bonds and tribal affiliations that assimilationist policies worked to undo. The ICWA “was not based on race” but on “the political affiliation of Indian children with a specifically recognized tribe or reservation” (146).

The Indian Citizenship Act, which was passed to honor Indigenous Americans who had served in the First World War and to encourage assimilationist policies, made Indigenous peoples both American citizens and tribal citizens. In effect, they became dual citizens.

The Indian Gaming Ruling Act was a “compromise between tribal sovereignty affirmed by the Bryan and Cabazon and Seminole cases and state rights” (173). The law decreed that while states cannot control Indigenous affairs, tribes interested in gaming could only open casinos in states in which gambling was already legal. The states would be unable to “regulate or prevent gambling but could negotiate some terms” (173).

Also known as the Wheeler-Howard Act—after Montana’s Democratic US senator Burton K. Wheeler and Nebraska newspaper editor and Congressman Edgar Howard—and nicknamed the “Indian New Deal,” the Indian Reorganization Act is regarded by many to be “the most significant piece of legislation for Indians in the twentieth century” (79). While Wheeler and Howard were co-sponsors, the law’s architects were John Collier, the commissioner of Indian Affairs appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, and Felix Cohen, an attorney employed in the Department of the Interior’s solicitor’s office.

Signed on June 18, 1934, the Indian Reorganization Act was the federal government’s first attempt to establish self-determination among Indigenous tribes. The law would allow Indigenous peoples to conserve and develop their lands and resources, to form business enterprises, to establish home rule with their own elected officials, to create systems of credit, and to provide vocational education, among other rights. It was a shift away from the government’s traditional policies of assimilation, privatization of tribal lands through allotment, and ethnic cleansing. The act encouraged the development of tribal constitutions, which were often drafted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Tribes had to get a majority vote before agreeing to large-scale land sales and an elected tribal council dealt with local, state, and federal authorities. Blood quantum requirements for tribal enrollment were usually in these constitutions and enforced with the approval of the BIA. These requirements determined who could claim membership to a tribe and receive treaty rights, as well as other tribal and federal benefits.

The Major Crimes Act was passed in 1885 in response to a Supreme Court ruling (Ex parte Crow Dog) that upheld the right of tribes to try crimes committed by Indigenous people against other Indigenous people on Indigenous land. The legislation made murder, assault, grand larceny, and rape “major crimes” that could only be punished in federal courts. For minor offenses, such as vandalism and public intoxication, the federal government had set up the Court of Indian Offenses two years earlier. One of this court’s main purposes was to target those who participated in Indigenous religions, or what the court termed “heathenish rites.” According to Treuer, the form of justice created by the Major Crimes Act and the Court of Indian Offenses was hardly just. The problem was not remedied until the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934 set up constitutional governments with officials elected on reservations by tribal members.

The Nelson Act, part of the “policy of allotment” initiated by the Dawes Act, worked to dismantle tribal affiliations and encourage individual land ownership among Indigenous peoples. While the Dawes Act sought to give tribal members individual parcels of land, the latter act gave the additional parcels “to white lumber companies and farmers” (59). This is partly why white people sometimes live within reservations and why reservations have been opened up to corporate exploitation.

Public Law 280, a piece of “civil jurisdiction legislation,” was passed into law in 1953 (142). Some consider it the most destructive law passed by Congress for Indigenous communities in the 20th century. PL 280 allowed for states to have criminal and limited civil jurisdiction over Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples on reservations. The argument was that PL 280 “was enacted to deal with […] the complete breakdown of law and order on many Indian reservations” (217). Participating states include Arizona, Florida, California, Iowa, Alaska (except the Metlakatla community), Minnesota (except Red Lake Reservation), Nebraska, Oregon (except Warm Springs Reservation), Wisconsin, Nevada, South Dakota, Washington, Utah, Montana, and North Dakota. On some reservations, such as Minnesota’s Bois Forte, citizens “retroceded […] and reassumed jurisdiction over crimes committed on the reservations” (142).

The brutal forced removal of the Cherokee, Seminole, Choctaw, Creek and Chickasaw from their ancestral lands in Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, and South Carolina occurred in the 1820s and 1830s. The tribes were removed to the Indian Territories in present-day Oklahoma. The seminal event was the culmination of a policy of removal that Andrew Jackson led as both a military leader and president. Fifteen thousand Indigenous men, women, and children were marched to the Indian Territories. Four thousand people died during the journey from starvation, typhus, hypothermia, or pneumonia.

The Cherokee were dispossessed of their lands in Georgia. Five thousand Black people whom they had enslaved marched with them. Those who were enslaved remained in bondage until emancipation—though news of freedom did not reach Texas and Oklahoma until up to two years after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.