Treatment of Native Americans
The Legacy of the Reservation System
By 1910, the fate of Native American peoples had already been largely determined by a century of displacement and conquest. The reservation system had forced the majority of Native Americans onto parcels of land that were often arid, economically marginal and isolated from markets and services. Tribes had been stripped of vast territories through a combination of military force, broken treaties and legal manipulation. The buffalo herds that had sustained Plains cultures had been deliberately hunted to near-extinction in the 1870s and 1880s.
Into this already diminished world, the Dawes Act of 1887 brought further devastation. The law broke up communally held tribal land into individual allotments — 160 acres per family — and sold the “surplus” land to white settlers. Between 1887 and 1934, Native Americans lost approximately 90 million acres of their remaining land — about two-thirds of what they had held in 1887. The allotment system destroyed the communal economic and social structures on which tribal life depended, without providing meaningful support for individual farming.
The Dawes Act of 1887 broke up communal tribal lands into individual allotments and sold the remaining land to white settlers. Between 1887 and 1934, Native Americans lost approximately 90 million acres — roughly two-thirds of their 1887 land holdings. By 1910, most reservations were poverty-stricken, with inadequate schools, healthcare and economic opportunities.
Native American Boarding Schools
The US government’s official policy towards Native Americans in this period was forced assimilation. The most direct tool of assimilation was the Native American boarding school system. The most famous was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, founded in 1879. The philosophy behind these schools was summed up in the school’s founder Richard Henry Pratt’s phrase: “Kill the Indian, save the man.”
Children were taken from their families — sometimes by force — and transported to schools hundreds of miles away. At school they were forbidden to speak their native languages, wear traditional clothing or practise their religions. Their hair was cut. They were given English names. Punishments for speaking native languages could be severe. Death rates in boarding schools were high, partly from disease in crowded conditions, partly from inadequate care. By the early twentieth century, thousands of Native American children were passing through this system each year.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was responsible for administering reservations and the boarding school system. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the BIA was plagued by corruption and incompetence. Agents who managed reservations often enriched themselves at the expense of the tribes they were supposed to serve. Food, medicine and resources allocated to reservations were frequently siphoned off. Congress periodically investigated scandals but effective reform was slow to materialise.
The 1928 Meriam Report, commissioned by the government, documented the catastrophic conditions on reservations in detail: extreme poverty, malnutrition, high disease rates, inadequate schools, and the failures of the Dawes allotment system. Its findings eventually contributed to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 under President Franklin Roosevelt, which reversed the allotment policy. But through the 1910s and 1920s, conditions remained dire.
The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted US citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States. This was partly in recognition of the 12,000 Native Americans who had served in the US military during the First World War. However, citizenship did not automatically give Native Americans the right to vote in all states — several states maintained laws blocking them from voting well into the 1940s and beyond.
The Indian Citizenship Act, 1924
In 1924, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, granting US citizenship to all Native Americans born within the borders of the United States. It was a significant symbolic recognition, partly prompted by the service of approximately 12,000 Native Americans in the First World War, many of them volunteers. Some Native Americans and their advocates welcomed it as a step towards equal rights. Others were deeply ambivalent: citizenship had not been asked for, came with conditions that undermined tribal sovereignty, and in several states did not translate into the right to vote.
While Wall Street boomed and flappers danced, conditions on most reservations barely changed. The majority of Native Americans lived in deep poverty, with life expectancy significantly below the national average. Unemployment on reservations was chronic. Access to healthcare and education was minimal by national standards. The federal government’s assimilation policy had failed on its own terms — it had destroyed traditional economies without successfully integrating Native Americans into the mainstream economy. The 1920s boom is a particularly stark illustration of the “nation of contrasts” theme: the most prosperous decade in American history to that point was, for Native Americans, simply another decade of dispossession and neglect.