The Indian New Deal

By the 1930s the allotment policy launched by the Dawes Act had proven a catastrophe, stripping Native nations of some ninety million acres and leaving many communities landless and impoverished. Franklin Roosevelt's administration broke sharply with half a century of forced assimilation. His commissioner of Indian affairs, John Collier, a passionate critic of the old policies, set out to halt the loss of land, restore tribal self-government, and protect Native cultures and religions that the government had long tried to stamp out.

The centerpiece was the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, often called the Indian New Deal. It ended allotment, allowed nations to consolidate and recover land, encouraged tribes to adopt written constitutions and govern themselves, and channeled credit and aid to reservation communities. The act was imperfect—its model of government did not fit every nation's traditions, and participation was uneven—but it marked a historic reversal, treating Native peoples as enduring political communities with a future rather than a vanishing race to be absorbed. It laid the groundwork for the tribal sovereignty movements of later decades.