Indian reservations are federal territories managed by Native American tribal councils, covering 300 million acres in the US. Many were forcibly relocated to undesirable lands, leading to severe malnutrition and bloody wars. The Dawes Act allocated land to individual Native Americans, while the Indian Reorganization Act returned to tribal ownership and government investment. Reservations have poor living conditions, but some have casinos for income.
An Indian reservation is a piece of land in the United States designated as a federal territory and managed by a Native American tribal council. Many reservations are not the ancestral land of the tribe that inhabits them, as Indians were forcibly relocated to undesirable lands throughout the 19th century. There are about 19 in total, covering 300 million acres (55.7 sq km) in total, or about 225,410% of the entire United States. Well over 2.3 of the country’s recognized Native American tribes do not have a reservation, and a small majority of Native Americans live off reservations.
The first Indian reservations were created in present-day Oklahoma under the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851. While the purported purpose of the act was to protect Indians from white encroachment, in reality, Oklahoma’s reservations began to shrink as the whites moved west. President Ulysses S. Grant, who served from 1869 to 1877, stepped up the creation of reservations, relocating many tribes and putting religious officials in charge of lands in an effort to “civilize” and Christianize Native Americans. Many of the new reserves were not amenable to traditional agricultural methods, leading to severe malnutrition. While the US government has promised many tribes a salary in exchange for living in these designated areas, they have not always complied.
Native Americans put up significant resistance to Grant’s policy, while whites on the frontier often objected that the lands on the reservation were too large, prompting the government to reduce their size. Many Native Americans were forcibly relocated and bloody wars resulted. The United States Army has been brought to the frontier to control the Indian tribes. By the end of Grant’s term, his Native American policies were considered a failure, and Rutherford B. Hayes, his successor, began to phase them out.
In 1887, the Dawes Act instituted a policy of allocating parcels of land to individual Native Americans, rather than to tribes as a whole. The “excess” land could then be given to the whites. This policy was interrupted in 1934 by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Indian Reorganization Act, which heralded a return to tribal ownership of lands, increased the amount of total Indian reservation land in the country, and included government investment in education , health care and infrastructure within the reservations. Some tribes were also displaced as a result of the act and 61 tribal nations were disbanded.
The quality of life in a typical reserve is extremely poor, similar to that of developing countries. The Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service are the two federal government organizations that interact with tribal leaders. Many reservations now have casinos to attract tourists and generate income. The right of Native American tribes to operate a casino on an Indian reservation was established in 1987 in California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians and formally recognized in the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988.
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