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The land was dying.
In the early 1930s, millions
of acres of Navajo land
were at risk of erosion because
of overgrazing by livestock.
So John Collier, the commissioner of
the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs,
advocated for its conservation.
Sounds like a solid ally move.
Except… it wasn’t exactly.
In a rush to save the land and
use available government funds,
he forced tribes to
dramatically reduce their herds,
in some cases simply by slaughtering them
and leaving them to the buzzards.
This was a big deal—
a Navajo person’s livestock was
their food, income, and stability —
and now it was destroyed.
So, how can a plan with
good intentions go so awry?
Hi! I'm Che Jim and welcome to
Crash Course Native American History.
[THEME MUSIC]
In our previous episode, we talked about
what’s known as the Allotment Period,
which started in 1887 with the passing
of the General Allotment Act,
A.K.A. the Dawes Act.
The law broke up reservations into smaller
chunks of land given to individual Native people.
Their stated intentions were to give Natives
more control over their own land…
and to break up tribes in the process.
This legislation had a lot of negative
consequences for Native people,
and by the 1910s, white folks in government
were starting to take notice.
So, forty years after the Allotment Period began,
Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work
commissioned a report to assess the situation,
putting U.S. Census statistician
Lewis Meriam in charge.
Now, hold up.
This was a huge deal.
The U.S. government had been abusing
Native Peoples for hundreds
of years at this point.
And for the first time, they openly said,
“We might have done something wrong.”
Which, yeah, understatement.
But still, this was new for them.
In 1928, Meriam presented
his research group’s findings
from visiting nearly a hundred
Native American reservations
and interviewing about a thousand Native people.
The survey, which came to be known as
the Meriam Report, was more than 800 pages
— that’s like a whole George R.R. Martin book.
‘Cause it turns out… there was a lot to say.
The results were bad—
worse than “twelfth sequel
in a horror franchise” bad.
The Dawes Act hadn’t made things
better for Native Americans;
it had made just about everything way worse.
Take finances.
Instead of making Natives more self-sufficient,
allotment caused a huge loss of income.
In 1920, the average American was earning
about $21,300 annually in today’s money.
But Native Americans were living off of
what today would be just over $1,500.
And many Natives who left their allotments
to find work in cities found so little support
from white communities that they
ended up living in shantytowns.
And healthcare for Natives had deteriorated, too.
For example, the survey looked at
the Canton Insane Asylum for Indians
and found that food there was insufficient,
tuberculosis was spreading,
and there were so few trained
workers that the people
living there weren’t getting the care they needed.
The research team also found
Native education to be in dire straits.
Native boarding schools were overcrowded,
and harsh punishments were common there.
Native kids were being forced to do hard labor
for hours every day while being malnourished.
Forget learning, they were suffering.
The Meriam Report shocked many in power.
So, Congress funneled its
recommendations into new legislation,
with the help of well-meaning ally of
Navajo Livestock Reduction fame, John Collier.
As Commissioner of Indian Affairs under FDR,
Collier helped broker what’s
often called the Indian New Deal,
and its centerpiece, the
Indian Reorganization Act,
passed by Congress in 1934.
This was huge.
Bigger than the Super Bowl, the Eras Tour,
and the finale of Great British Bake-off combined.
This was the first piece
of legislation that wasn’t
aimed at either assimilating
or destroying Native Americans,
but rather helping them.
Major turning point in Native
American history? Check.
The IRA’s purpose was to
throw down an Uno reverse card
on the federal policy that had come before it.
In the text of the law, the government recognized
that tribes are “qualified to exercise
powers of self-government,
not by virtue of any delegation of powers
from the Federal Government,
but rather by reason of their
original tribal sovereignty.”
Which is a lengthy way of saying:
tribes can rule themselves.
Not because the government says so,
but because tribes say so.
After decades of heavy government control,
this was a major switcheroo for Native tribes
—and a good one, at that.
Along with reinstating
tribal self-governing power,
the IRA encouraged tribes to
“reorganize” their governments
by adopting their own constitutions and
instating tribal councils to enforce them.
The government also pledged to conserve
Indigenous lands and resources,
lessen poverty through a new credit system,
and end the practice of land allotment.
Can we make some noise for the end of
another terrible era?
[blows party horn]
On the surface, this all seemed pretty great.
But here’s the tricky part.
The IRA did pass, but only about 40% of eligible
tribal members voted on whether to adopt it,
meaning many tribes reorganized without all
—or even most—of their members
getting their voices heard.
In the end, 160+ tribes voted
to reorganize under the IRA
and adopted American-style constitutions.
And 77 tribes voted not to reorganize.
But, why?
Didn’t they want to govern themselves?
To have more agency over
their lives and their lands?
Well, think back to the Navajo.
Their pastoral lifestyle had been all but gutted
by the same agency
that was promising them a better future
—even the same guy!
Many Navajo weren’t gonna trust the people
and institutions that had already hurt them.
And some tribes had too much internal
politics going on to focus on an IRA vote,
while others didn’t want to deal with more
meddling from the federal government.
Under the IRA, they’d have to get
government approval for lots of things,
from the wording of their new constitutions
to their spending plans.
But without that strict oversight,
tribes could perform business as usual.
So, what did it look like when a
tribe did reorganize under the IRA?
Let me tell you a story about
the Ute tribes of Colorado…
Collier needed some help
persuading the Southern Ute
and Ute Mountain tribes to adopt the IRA.
So he enlisted the help of Sapiah,
the chief of the Muache band
of the Southern Ute Tribe,
to convince them that the IRA was the way to go.
Sapiah was the poster child
for the IRA’s potential—
he was a successful farmer and leader.
And he managed to sway both tribes—
or at least, the few people who voted—
to adopt the IRA.
But he kept the secret to his
financial success to himself:
preferential treatment from government agencies.
Conveniently left that part out, huh, Sapiah?
At first, things looked
good for the Colorado Utes.
They were able to buy back
220,000 acres of their land
that had been sold to non-Natives—
and not just any land.
Land with coal, gas, and oil deposits.
Hello, land leases. Hello, moolah.
Their communities were bouncing back.
But something strange happened:
the Utes started to lose their culture.
Think: fewer teepees,
more picket fences.
Less traditional clothing,
more jeans and cowboy boots.
Fewer Ute language speakers,
more “I only know English” speakers.
And losing your culture is no laughing matter.
The disorientation many Utes felt
led to rising alcoholism and depression.
So things were on the up-and-up, but at what cost?
And that’s the story of the
Colorado Utes and the IRA.
Many Natives saw the changing
governmental structures
imposed by the IRA to be
another kind of assimilation
— a process where a minority group’s culture
gets absorbed, or erased, into
the more dominant culture.
Written constitutions and hierarchical
governments à la the Founding Fathers
didn’t gel with the ways that tribal governments
had historically functioned.
Like, the Ojibwe tribe had previously
operated through consensus,
where representatives from all villages
had to agree before a measure was taken.
But under the IRA, things had to move more quickly
—to use funds before they lapsed,
for example—and the majority ruled.
On top of that, many Native folks called
the IRA “the Indian Raw Deal”
for the way it kept a lot of power
in the hands of the U.S. government.
New constitutions would require
most actions the tribe took
to be approved by the Secretary of the Interior
and/or the Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
And tribal councils had to
adhere to the whims of the BIA,
whose leadership could change each election.
But that’s not all.
The programs created by the IRA
were also severely underfunded.
And despite promises of restoring land –
or at least paying for what had already
been stolen –
the federal government bought back
only 2 million of the 90 million acres of land
lost to European settlers and
businesses during the Allotment Era.
While land could no longer
be taken by force from tribes,
and the IRA added millions
of acres to existing reservations,
Natives were still only given a
small fraction of what they were owed.
Maybe the main issue, though, was that
the IRA was a single piece of legislation
that was supposed to fix a whole host of
different problems in really different tribes.
Hundreds of years of broken treaties, land grabs,
and punishing legislation took too
high a toll to be fixed by one law.
But hey, it was Congress’s
first shot at rectifying
those centuries of harms against Native Americans.
No one gets it perfect right off the bat.
You just gotta start an ongoing
process of change. Right?
Right???
Except, here’s the thing.
Even with all the other legislation that has been
created in the past century,
the IRA is still in place.
Let that sink in for a sec.
The first attempt—made in 1934
—is still the law of the land.
With all its flaws and shortcomings.
So where does that leave tribes today?
In… a lot of different places.
The IRA still holds up its end
of the bargain in some ways,
like through providing funding
and financial assistance.
And by supporting some Native land use,
even for a handful of tribes that didn’t
organize under the IRA back in the ‘30s.
Which brings us back to the Utes and the Navajo.
The Utes, who lost some of their
culture as a result of this policy,
have been making strides to preserve it —
establishing Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Park,
the Ute Language Project,
and small bison herds on their reservations.
And the Navajo, whose herds were decimated
to prevent erosion and voted not to adopt the IRA,
are still debating the structure
of their tribal government.
Should it be locally-focused or more centralized?
Should they adopt a constitution
or keep operating without one?
The project of Native
government is never really over.
Ninety years later, Native Americans still debate
whether the IRA was a success or a failure.
And there are arguments that can be made for both.
But perhaps the reason it’s
fallen short of its promise
is that that promise was too
big to be tackled in one go.
Still, the IRA shows us how the process
of repairing a relationship
marred by hundreds of years of
generational trauma can begin.
Notice a problem, observe and talk
to folks who are dealing with it,
and bring that knowledge into actionable change.
It’s tough, and it won’t be
perfect, but it’s a start.
In our next episode, we’re going to discuss
Native American relocation and tribal termination.
And I will see you then.
Thanks for watching this episode of
Crash Course Native American History,
which was filmed at our studio
in Indianapolis, Indiana,
and was made with the help
of all these nice people.
If you want to help keep Crash
Course free for everyone,
forever, you can join our community on Patreon.
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