I remember my sister Cheryl saying, 'What happened to these people? These people are all burnt. It was summer, so the kids didn't have school. Back in northern Minnesota, they had been free to go wherever they wanted.
In the city, their mom was too afraid to let them go anywhere. They felt isolated. During the day, their dad went out looking for work. The BIA had promised Clyde a good-paying job.
He could operate heavy machinery. But all he could find was a job as a dishwasher, which didn't pay enough to support his family. But the BIA wouldn't pay for people to return to their reservations. Relocation was a one-way trip. In the late s, a group of venerable white men selected by President Harry Truman began working in Washington, D. This group was the Hoover Commission, named after its chairman, former president Herbert Hoover.
Their job was to figure out how to cut federal spending and streamline the executive branch. They released those findings in an page report in In addition to examining welfare, social security, and education, the commission looked closely at Native Americans and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Educating them properly has proved extremely difficult," reads the report. And they recommended the government eliminate tribal governments and reservations, too. Discussion of assimilating Native Americans was often dripping with eugenic overtones.
The Hoover Commission reported, matter-of-factly, "The Indian population is no longer a pure ethnic group.
Rather it represents a melange of 'full bloods' and people of mixed ancestry. Another government-sponsored report , on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, spent several pages detailing the marriage trends between "full bloods," "half bloods" and "quarter bloods.
However, there wasn't enough intermarriage between whites and Native people, the author lamented. At the time, "blackness" was defined according to the "one-drop rule," but white America believed "Indianness" could be washed away in just a few generations through intermarriage with whites.
This contradictory logic was self-serving for white Americans. More black Americans meant more workers to exploit. Fewer Native Americans meant more land to take.
And, in line with that self-serving logic, federal politicians and bureaucrats believed Native Americans wanted to melt away into the mainstream. And they had earned it because of their efforts in the war.
Why would they if they're out fighting for the United States in the Pacific and in the European and African theaters? This is in the context of United States people wanting to rally around sort of one consensus cultural identity. Native Americans enlisted to serve with an enthusiasm paradoxical to the hardships they had been subjected to.
Among some tribes, as many as 70 percent of eligible men served. All told, around 70, Native Americans left their reservations, often for the very first time, to serve overseas or work in war industries in big cities. One U. Senator, D. Worth Clark of Idaho, described Native Americans as "an inspiration to patriotic Americans everywhere. But when the war ended in , Native Americans returned home to find their reservations had become poorer in their absence.
Many moved away again to find jobs in cities, and conditions on reservations became even more desperate. The post-war boom never reached Indian Country. Most Native people living on or near reservations didn't have electricity or running water. The roads and schools and hospitals were in disrepair, if the reservations had them at all.
Native people were much more likely to die from the flu or pneumonia. Infant mortality was several times higher than elsewhere in the nation. There'd been a tuberculosis epidemic for at least 50 years Dorene's grandparents died from it. The life expectancy of American Indians in the s was 44 years. For white Americans, it was 70 years. Reservations had been poor since they were created in the mids.
With each successive federal policy, they seemed to become only smaller and poorer. The Dawes Act of , for example, did irreparable damage. It chopped up reservations into homesteads and opened up millions of acres of "surplus land" to white settlers. Individual land ownership was supposed to "civilize" Native people. But little thought was given to how the land was divvied up, so people ended up with parcels too small or dry to do anything with. Those who wanted to farm and knew how often couldn't get loans to get started.
Many had to sell their land to survive or pay the taxes. Then, the government forced Native children into boarding schools to be assimilated into the white, Christian mainstream. The founder of the first school summed up his educational philosophy as "Kill the Indian, Save the Man. Many children died and were buried in mass graves or unmarked cemeteries.
The BIA, which had near-absolute control over Native people's lives, was also underfunded, incompetent, and sometimes corrupt. Even the federal government's own assessment of Indian Country — detailed in the page Meriam Report of — laid the blame for its problems squarely at the feet of the federal officials, whose policies "would tend to pauperize any race.
One way the Hoover Commission recommended the government help Native people was to encourage "young employable Indians and the better cultured families" to leave reservations for cities. Congress soon piloted the idea with two tribes.
The Navajo and Hopi reservations had been devastated by blizzards in winter The U. Pressured by public outcry over the poor conditions — the Navajo and Hopi Code Talkers had helped beat the Japanese, after all — Congress passed the Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Act in that was intended to prevent a similar catastrophe in the future. It appropriated tens of millions of dollars in funding to improve conditions on those two reservations. But Congress didn't believe the Navajo reservation, about the size of West Virginia, could support the 55, people living there.
Where in the government was getting rid of "surplus land," in it was concerned about "surplus people. So, they set aside some of the new money to move Navajo and Hopi to cities. The government considered it a success. And then, the BIA got a new commissioner who decided to turn urban relocation into a national program.
His name was Dillon S. He had just finished leading another massive, government-run relocation program: the forced relocation of more than , Japanese-Americans to what the government called internment camps and then on to cities scattered across the country.
Myer brought with him the same strategy and many of the same officials, including one Charles Miller, who had earned the moniker "the great mover of people" for his work on Japanese-American imprisonment and on a program that moved impoverished Jamaicans to the United States.
Myer viewed reservations as prison camps for Native Americans. He thought they were overpopulated wastelands that could never provide a decent living for people.
Anything that might encourage Native people to stay on reservations, like improving schools and hospitals, would be unfairly keeping people in what he described in an oral history as similar to "old time poor houses. In , Myer ordered BIA officers to fan out into tribal communities across the country to recruit Native Americans to move to cities. The BIA's new relocation officers were tasked with finding healthy, working-age men, preferably those who could speak English and had some job training, and signing them up to relocate to one of a few cities: Los Angeles, Denver, or Chicago.
Other cities like Cleveland, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Oakland, Cleveland, and Minneapolis would later be added in an ever-changing line-up of relocation cities. It wasn't much, but according to the BIA, it would be enough to sustain a family until the father got his first paycheck.
Here's how a white BIA official working on the Navajo reservation expressed it to an anthropologist named Ruth Underhill for her educational radio series called "Indian Country" in The BIA promised Native Americans that they would have wonderful lives in cities: good-paying jobs, good schools and good housing. In one promotional BIA video that advertised Chicago, Native men are shown welding, cutting hair, and even preparing lobsters in white chef's outfits.
The video shows kids watching television and women pushing strollers through leafy neighborhoods with white mothers. The narrator warns that city life may be disorienting at first, but "soon you'll be riding the 'L' train with ease. Not all BIA promotional material was so highly produced.
The first relocatees, numbering in the hundreds, arrived in their destination cities in early That modest number doesn't reflect the amount of interest there was in the program. The BIA had received more applications than they had funds available. The same thing happened the next year, and the year after. Relocation officers were given quotas, but it doesn't seem like they had any trouble meeting them.
Even as the government poured more money into the program year after year, demand always outstripped supply. Relocation officers took to advising people to relocate without any financial assistance at all.
At that same time, white veterans used government-subsidized, low-interest loans to move into new homes in the suburbs. But the tens of thousands of Native Americans who served in the military were largely unable to access the education and mortgage benefits guaranteed by the GI Bill. Native people also couldn't get loans to build homes on reservations because they couldn't put the land up for collateral. In the city, Native veterans, like black veterans, were often shut out of the market through racially restrictive covenants and redlining.
Clyde Day struggled to feed his family of eight on his wages as a dishwasher. At least back in northern Minnesota, they could fish, trap, and gather wild rice and blueberries. Without any BIA support to get back, they were left to hope Clyde could save enough money to get them home before they went hungry or homeless.
The Day family story fits a pattern that was being repeated all across the country with tens of thousands of Native families. First, the promise. Then, shock. And then, disappointment and hardship. A woman named Clovia Malatre told me about being sent off on a train with her sister when she was 10 or 11 years old to live with their stepfather on relocation in Chicago. Both their parents had died and their grandmother was struggling in her old age to care for them in her small cabin on the Pine Ridge reservation.
It was so different from being on the reservation where you are primarily living with Indian people, speaking Indian. We didn't have electricity on the reservation, so just using a light switch, that was I was just scared of electricity. I wouldn't go on elevators. School was a challenge.
I remember being in the classroom and deathly afraid of the teacher calling on me because I could not pronounce any of the words. There was quite a few families. Now you go down there and you just see all these tents, but we didn't have them then.
We just went under the bushes, and it worked out fine. She never met anyone from the BIA, which was supposed to help people adjust to the city. Eventually, Malatre ended up in foster care, where she lost all contact with her family. There was no way for me to get back to South Dakota. So I was stuck here. And they couldn't find housing: "There was not enough housing for anybody, much less Indian people," said Sandy King, who relocated from Red Lake to Oakland as a child twice and then to Los Angeles as an adult.
And wanting to leave: "It seemed like everybody got disenchanted with the city life," Ed Strong said. In , in response to criticism of the relocation program, Congress passed the Indian Relocation Act, or Public Law It added vocational training options for Native people to improve their employment prospects. But the criticism continued. Later that year, the Association on American Indian Affairs, an Indigenous advocacy group, published a scathing report on the program.
The group created an inventory of the criticisms it had heard about the program. Among the most common complaints were that the BIA workers "place Indian families in slum housing," that "Indian men and women are driven to alcoholism by the pressure of city life," and that there was "inadequate screening of applicants," so that people were sent on relocation who were suffering with mental illnesses, couldn't speak English, or didn't have any education or work skills.
But the relocation program's success wasn't measured by how well people did in cities. It was measured by how many people stayed for a year. The BIA ensured a higher success rate, in part, by deliberately choosing relocation cities far away from reservations, making it more difficult for people to return, Miller said. Lots of people did figure out how to get back to the reservation. The BIA reported the return rate being around 25 percent, although Native groups believed the rate to be as high as 90 percent.
Discussion often centered on the difficulty of returning the men from the moon to earth One Indian suggested that they send an Indian to the moon on relocation. He'll figure out some way to get back.
It took Clyde Day a month working as a dishwasher to save enough money to get his family out of Cleveland. We didn't have much when we left. But now we had nothing. They wouldn't stay long, though. Like a lot of Native families returning from relocation, they turned around and relocated again and took their chances in another city. In , a year after the relocation program began, the United States took assimilating Native Americans a step further.
Congress decided to begin dissolving treaties, dismantling tribal governments, and eliminating reservations. It was called termination. Congress's decision to terminate Native tribes came in the form of House Concurrent Resolution It's only a few paragraphs long, and Congress barely discussed it before approving it. Its benign language actually reads like it might be a good thing. It says Native Americans are to become "subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as are applicable to other citizens of the United States.
What it did was establish the Congress's intent to eliminate all Native tribes. The president and Congress would have to approve the termination of hundreds of tribal communities, one by one.
They'd also have to convince each tribe to agree. The government expected this to take years, but eventually the expectation was that relocation and termination would wipe away reservations and Native Americans. He was a white anthropologist and president of the Association on American Indian Affairs. He went on to call it "the most serious attack on the rights of the Indians that has occurred literally since the founding of the Republic.
And think that perhaps we could do better if we merely cut these people loose. That was certainly the view of U. Senator Arthur Watkins, a Republican from Utah, who pioneered the termination legislation. He compared it to the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed millions of enslaved African Americans. Watkins also saw reservations as wastelands that kept people in poverty. He believed government aid nurtured dependence and a sense of entitlement.
It's true that the government was paying for schools and hospitals and roads in Indian Country, albeit not very well by the government's own admission.
It was doing so because it had signed some treaties saying it would. In exchange for land and peace, the U. Some tribes were largely funding these services themselves.
For example, the Menominee in Wisconsin and the Klamaths in Oregon both had a lot of timber, and the federal government took the revenue from their mills and doled the money back out in the form of inadequate BIA services. Many Native people wanted to get rid of the BIA because of this kind of paternalism — but not at the price of losing their sovereignty.
On a lot of Indian land that used to be thought to be desert, there is uranium. The Indians own a lot of very valuable timber. There are a lot of reasons why it'd be very convenient to liberate these people so that they had no protection and nobody to defend their rights.
Watkins had another motive for terminating tribal sovereignty. He believed it was God's will. Watkins was Mormon, and in a letter to the leaders of the Church of Latter Day Saints in he wrote, "It seems to me that the time has come for us to What he's referencing — the white and delightsome people — is a prophecy that at least some Mormons took literally. The Menominee in Wisconsin were among the first tribes to be terminated.
They were chosen, in part, because of their profitable lumber mill. They were said to be "ready" to survive after their tribal government turned into a corporation, and their reservation turned into private property. There are approximately Indian reservations in the United States although there are more than federally recognized tribes.
This is because some tribes have more than one reservation, some share reservations, while others have none, often due to a lack of federal recognition. Because of past land allotments for example, under the Dawes Act of some reservations are fragmented, with pieces of tribal, individual, and privately held land, some of it owned by non-Indians. The collective geographical area of all reservations is The U. Minnesota Historical Society.
Minnesota State Senate. Jaeger, Lisa. Kappler, Charles J. Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. Washington: Government Printing Office, Oklahoma State Library, Kellogg Blvd. Skip to main content. American citizenship was also conveyed by statutes, naturalization proceedings, and by service in the Armed Forces with an honorable discharge in World War I.
In , Congress extended American citizenship to all other American Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States. American Indians and Alaska Natives are citizens of the United States and of the individual states, counties, cities, and towns where they reside.
They can also become citizens of their tribes or villages as enrolled tribal members. American Indians and Alaska Natives have the right to vote just as all other U. They can vote in presidential, congressional, state and local, and tribal elections, if eligible. And, just as the federal government and state and local governments have the sovereign right to establish voter eligibility criteria, so do tribal governments. American Indians and Alaska Natives have the same rights as other citizens to hold public office.
Over the years, American Indian and Alaska Native men and women have held elected and appointed offices at all levels of federal, state, and local government. Charles Curtis, a member of the Kaw Tribe of Kansas, served in both houses of Congress before holding the second highest elected office in the nation — that of Vice President of the United States under President Herbert Hoover.
American Indians and Alaska Natives also serve in state legislatures, state judicial systems, county and city governments, and on local school boards. The heavy price American Indians and Alaska Natives paid to retain certain rights of self-government was to relinquish much of their land and resources to the United States. Among those may be hunting and fishing rights and access to sacred sites.
On federal Indian reservations, however, only federal and tribal laws apply to members of the tribe, unless Congress provides otherwise.
In federal law, the Assimilative Crimes Act makes any violation of state criminal law a federal offense on reservations. Most tribes now maintain tribal court systems and facilities to detain tribal members convicted of certain offenses within the boundaries of the reservation. American Indians and Alaska Natives come from a multitude of different cultures with diverse languages, and for thousands of years used oral tradition to pass down familial and cultural information among generations of tribal members.
Some tribes, even if widely scattered, belong to the same linguistic families. Common means of communicating between tribes allowed trade routes and political alliances to flourish. As contact between Indians and non-Indians grew, so did the necessity of learning of new languages. Even into the 20th century, many American Indians and Alaska Natives were bi- or multilingual from learning to speak their own language and English, French, Russian, or Spanish, or even another tribal language.
It has been reported that at the end of the 15th century over American Indian and Alaska Native languages were spoken. Today, fewer than tribal languages are still viable, with some having been translated into written form. English, however, has become the predominant language in the home, school, and workplace. Those tribes who can still do so are working to preserve their languages and create new speakers from among their tribal populations.
American Indians and Alaska Natives live and work anywhere in the United States and the world just as other citizens do. Many leave their reservations, communities or villages for the same reasons as do other Americans who move to urban centers: to seek education and employment. Over one-half of the total U. American Indian and Alaska Native population now live away from their tribal lands.
However, most return home to visit relatives; attend family gatherings and celebrations; participate in religious, cultural, or community activities; work for their tribal governments; operate businesses; vote in tribal elections or run for tribal office; retire; or to be buried. During the Civil War, American Indians served on both sides of the conflict.
Among the most well-known are Brigadier General Ely S. Grant who recorded the terms of Confederate General Robert E. Their patriotism moved Congress to pass the Indian Citizenship Act of Alaska Natives also served in the Alaska Territorial Guard.
In the Vietnam War, 41, Indian service personnel served. In , prior to Operation Desert Storm, some 24, Indian men and women were in the military.
Approximately 3, served in the Persian Gulf with three among those killed in action. There have been 13 assistant secretaries since the post was established in by a DOI secretarial order. The United States Senate confirmed Ms. Sweeney on June 28, She assumed her official duties on July 30, Her final day of service was January 20, Reporting directly to the Assistant Secretary through are the following officers, agencies and offices:.
The bureau implements federal laws and policies and administers programs established for American Indians and Alaska Natives under the trust responsibility and the government-to-government relationship. At the end of the eighteenth century, Congress transferred the responsibility for managing trade relations with the tribes to the Secretary of War by its act of August 20, 1 Stat.
It was later abolished by an act of May 6, 3 Stat. Secretary of War John C. Calhoun administratively established the BIA within the his department on March 11, Congress later legislatively established the bureau and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs post via the act of July 9, 4 Stat.
In the years that followed, the Bureau was known variously as the Indian office, the Indian bureau, the Indian department, and the Indian service. Parker, Seneca ; Robert L. Bennett, Oneida ; Louis R.
Hallett, Red Lake Chippewa For almost years—beginning with treaty agreements negotiated by the United States and tribes in the late 18th and 19th centuries, through the General Allotment Act of , which opened tribal lands west of the Mississippi to non-Indian settlers, the Indian Citizenship Act of when American Indians and Alaska Natives were granted U.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs is a rarity among federal agencies. With roots reaching back to the earliest days of the republic, the BIA is almost as old as the United States itself. For most of its existence, the BIA has mirrored the public's ambivalence towards the nation's indigenous people.
But, as federal policy has evolved from seeking the subjugation of American Indians and Alaska Natives into one that respects tribal self-determination, so, too, has the BIA's mission evolved into one that is based on service to and partnership with the tribes.
The BIA Mission Statement, which is based on principles embodied in federal treaties, laws and policies, and in judicial decisions, clearly describes the bureau's relationship today with the American Indian and Alaska Native people:. We will accomplish this through the delivery of quality services, maintaining government-to-government relationships within the spirit of self-determination.
Today, in keeping with their authorities and responsibilities under the Snyder Act of and other federal laws, regulations, and treaties, BIA employees across the country work with tribal governments in the administration of employment and job training assistance; law enforcement and justice; agricultural and economic development; tribal governance; and natural resources management programs to enhance the quality of life in tribal communities.
The following are just some examples of what we do:. That year, the function was legislatively transferred as the Indian Health Service to the U.
It is responsible for the line direction and management of all BIE education functions, including the formation of policies and procedures, the supervision of all program activities, and the approval of the expenditure of funds appropriated for BIE education functions. The BIE mission, which can be found in 25 C. Part The BIE also shall manifest consideration of the whole person by taking into account the spiritual, mental, physical, and cultural aspects of the person within his or her family and tribal or village context.
The BIE school system has elementary and secondary schools and dormitories located on 63 reservations in 23 states, including seven off-reservation boarding schools and schools directly controlled by tribes and tribal school boards under contracts or grants with the BIE.
The bureau also funds 66 residential programs for students at 52 boarding schools and at 14 dormitories housing those attending nearby tribal or public schools. The school system employs approximately 5, teachers, administrators, and support personnel, while an estimated 6, work in tribal school systems. In School Year , the schools served almost 48, students. In the area of postsecondary education, the BIE provides support to 24 tribal colleges and universities across the U.
It also operates higher education scholarship programs for American Indians and Alaska Natives. There have been three major legislative actions that restructured the Bureau of Indian Affairs with regard to education since the Snyder Act of The Indian Reorganization Act of introduced the teaching of Indian history and culture in BIA schools, which contrasted with the federal policy at the time of acculturating and assimilating Indian people through the BIA boarding school system.
The Education Amendments Act of P. For information about tracing American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry to any of the federally recognized tribes, proceed to "Trace Indian Ancestry". For information about the U. Indian Health Service, visit www.
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