Native Americans’ Fight for Power in America

Power is a cake. Sharing cake slices is always imperfect. In this case, distributing power to people is always inequitable and prejudiced in systems of economy, conventional politics, healthcare systems, and civic social matters. Millions of Native Americans serve as a demonstration to US act of restraint and regulation to Native jurisdiction. With the many war conflicts and treaties that hope to fractionalize their power and assimilate this into Western bureau, Indigenous people’s independence have been consistently under colonial pressure. The power takeover was the conspiracy to the General Allocation Act of 1887 (Dawe’s Act) through land allotments, and Native power was further influenced through the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 that intended to restore the Dawe’s Act but failed to confront Native independence.

Through the White American history, classification of ethnic groups has been justified by divisionary and power-driven motives. Native Americans, an indigenous group, was classified for the white man’s conquest. They were propelled for assimilation through religious indoctrination and white settler expansion. Distinctively, the General Allocation Act (Dawes Act) was issued in 1887 for large scale private allotments of Native land. The act brought the consequence of fractionation in which Native reservation could become broken up from tribal branch and encourage “individual initiative” (Flanagan 44). This proposes that with the federal government allotting agricultural land based on a set of rules such as age and blood, the surplus of the land or left over after this process could be a resource for the landowner’s scheme to sell to white settlers or would be put under federal government control. Selling surplus land intended to reduce Native reservation because of the allotment eligibility, but it’s consequence “…extricated 90 million acres from Native reservations, leaving tribes with less than 48 million acres” (Goodluck). That is nearly half of the land lost. The substantial land capture was a legal transaction for the non-Natives and way to dissipate Indigenous people’s power as their population plummeted. A cultural destruction happened along with this property division. The tribal community collectively held less reservation and was scattered from their culture, in turn losing their unity. Concerning allotments, its legality for this process and their underhanded grounds is what captured my attention. Especially with the Dawes Act views for private property rights intending for Natives “…not to recognize them as separate communities capable of making governmental decisions about their own lands” (Flanagan 46). As seen, the government has a set of an institutional opposition against indigenous sovereignty and gained more control over any efforts for independency. Which entirely operated towards the assimilation of Natives to US polity. Even though the Dawes Act was enacted centuries ago, it is a history that has made it difficult to retrieve back the original acres and original Native communal identity.

With the centuries of assimilation, handling Indian affairs is a perpetuating issue in terms of large-scale power. With the General Allotment Act in 1887 that took away half of Indians reservation, imposed farming labor as it’s masked self-sufficiency, and granted allotments to non-Natives, clear legislative measures were due against this Americanization. To gain Indian self-governance and recover from these allotments, the federal government espoused the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934. Though even this reformation had its issues during and before its implementation. John Collier with credentials as one of the people that founded the American Indian Defense Association, his advocacy to Native defense, and as the Commissioner of Indian Affairs played a vital role to setting a limited legislation for Native Americans. In his pursuit to pass the IRA through Congress, he traveled to tribal companies and principal stakeholders, but “Many Indians were fearful that the establishment of an IRA tribal council would be detrimental to their interest because it would be controlled by the federal government” (Philp 41). The policy he presented failed to recognize the different tribal competence of values and traditions that existed in each tribe and his perpetuating idea of assimilation against their cultural practices. Its concern is the idea of ‘internal colonialism” (Philp 269) in which self-determination of individual freedom was through the dependence of the commissioner of Indian Affairs. In other words, Philp describes IRA in Indian Self Rule, “The IRA had within it, in its wording and in its instruments, such as the tribal constitutions, the destruction of the treaties and of Indian self-government” (Philip 48). This mentions Natives non-controlled influence in the constitutions or making of the IRA. And didn’t embody the individual interests from the tribe’s history in each tribe community. The Indian reservation act has gone through rigorous rejections from the government committee to its position for the end of allotments, a self-government system in which tribal committee would be elected and Court of Indian Affairs would be established, allowing tribal land into tribal trust (Kehoe 28), and providing a credit system. The development of education was also listed in the document reform with special education. Pushing IRA then outlined the model constitution that covered the amendments, elections, and legal counseling to regulate the sale and leasing of tribal land. This bill would allow these types of accomplishments where the restoration of reservations was confronted through agencies that specialized in physical conservation for vegetation (forestry). It would be certain that an IRA was meant to be a direct to the General Allotment Act’s drawbacks in reservation, but not towards the arching idea for Native American’s own rights and liberty.

As the Dawe’s Act failed in its scheme for “self-sufficiency”, the IRA failed in its scheme of Native’s integration to US politics and society and tribal sovereignty. The American’s notion of self-determination collided with Indigenous people’s interest, hoping to civilize Natives to a dependency transaction. Tribals response to the IRA met with dispute when “Some American Indians had espoused the idea of being progressive men and women, as they often called themselves. Among them was the chairman of the Navajo tribe… Bureau statistics said that 181 tribes voted for the IRA, while 77 tribes rejected it” (Philp 41). The ‘progressive’ ideas to their economic and political self-determination conceded in Collier’s demand for a limited self-government, but it also contrasted with Native people’s actual wills or needs. This built a distrustful relationship which threatens quality of Native affairs because of its misinterpretation from Collier’s and his administration in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Introducing a new system that doesn’t benefit the tribal demographic is contributed by how “Self-government to this extent was already accomplished through the tribal councils and tribal business committees, which, by the way, were organized and functioning long before Collier manifested his great interest in the Indians in general” (Philp 51). In interpretating the bill from the perspective of Native people, it was another tactic to eradicate their culture and self-governance through their supervision. Collier and America intruded the diversity that the Native people built and disregarded the organization in their tribe completely with this act of absorption or Americanization. Indigenous people’s independence was impeded by IRA itself as many Natives—whose relationship with the government was already distrustful—felt that the bill didn’t encapsulate their wills, but instead the government wills.

These injustices are boarded to actual human rights as it attacks the livelihood of millions of Native Americans. The people who’ve been influenced by the established legislations have had to sustain and survive by removing the very culture they hold sacred and it’s the federal government that cornered them to this agenda. White settler colonialism in the past was genocidal and oppressive through slavery. Constitutional rights may have eliminated their approach to the repression of Indigenous People, but they have found ways in the legal system to shroud their colonialism through assimilation. The Dawe’s Act meant to allow Natives to be sustainable, independent, and develop their own land was surface level aid, but during its development the allotment of Native reservation was lost, and many were forced to become farmers as a result. The IRA, which resolved the issue with allotments with its ban, had many flaws as well when it introduced tribal constitutions that could only be screened or drafted by the federal government “…in its wording…” (Philip 48). Following, the act failed to incorporate the diversity of many tribal communities which had their own means of governance and culture. This is why many tribes disagreed with such an act. With the many dictatorial acts to threaten millions of Native Americans, acknowledging and letting more individuals know about this undiscussed issue can be the beginning to a big change for social justice and Native America’s fight for a true self-government.

Works Cited

Flanagan, Tom, et al. Beyond the Indian Act : Restoring Aboriginal Property Rights, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lwtclearningcommons-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3332456.‌

Goodluck, Kalen, et al. “The Land Back Movement Unravels Manifest Destiny.” Sierra Club, www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2023-3-fall/feature/land-back-movement-unravels-manifest-destiny.

Kehoe, Alice Beck. A Passion for the True and Just : Felix and Lucy Kramer Cohen and the Indian New Deal, University of Arizona Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lwtclearningcommons-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3411880.

Philp, Kenneth. Indian Self Rule : First-Hand Accounts of Indian-White Relations from Roosevelt to Reagan, University Press of Colorado, 1995. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lwtclearningcommons-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3442860.