Indian laws

NATIVE AMERICAN LAWS

For Native Americans , the General Allotment Act of 1887 and the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 had radically different effects . The former law was an outright attack on Indian culture and society , devised to make them abandon their communal activity and ethnic identity , while the latter attempted to correct the former injustices and aimed to restore Indian cultural autonomy

Passed in 1887 , during the latter stages of the Plains Indian Wars , the Indian General Allotment Act (usually called the Dawes Act ) divided tribal lands among individual Indians instead

of allowing tribes to hold them communally , as had been their tradition . Each household head received an allotment of 160 acres , which the Bureau of Indian Affairs held in trust for twenty-five years (Only the Five Civilized Tribes ' who were displaced from their lands and forcibly resettled in what became Oklahoma , were exempt ) The act 's aim , according to one Bureau of Indian Affairs official , was to render Native Americans more mercenary and ambitious to obtain riches ' but in a greater sense it aimed to Americanize ' them by turning them into yeoman farmers , much like the white settlers then arriving in great numbers on the central plains

It was part of a larger campaign to take away their culture other laws outlawed tribal religious practices and used Indian schools to teach Native children to behave more like whites by teaching them trades forcing them to follow military-style regimens , and forbidding them from speaking their native languages . The Dawes Act , like related legislation , was deeply damaging to Native American society . Instead of assimilating them , it allowed large amounts of Indian land not allocated to individuals or families to be sold to whites

The Indian Reorganization Act (also called the Wheeler-Howard Act enacted by Franklin Roosevelt 's administration , took a much more tolerant view of Native Americans and seemed designed to undo some of the Dawes Act 's damage . The act promised not only to stop the sale of tribal lands , but also to extend to Indians the right to form business and other organizations to establish a credit system for Indians to grant certain rights of home rule to Indians [and] to provide for vocational education for Indians ' This Indian New Deal ' restored tribal self-government and religious freedom , granted citizenship and voting rights , and treating Indians like wards of the federal government and more like sovereign peoples . The Bureau of Indians Affairs reform-minded commissioner , John Collier , respected and aimed to restore traditional Indian culture by introducing this bill to Congress . Though criticized by some as a plan to transform the reservations into living museums and treat Native Americans as an exotic minority ' Collier 's genuine goal was restoring Indian autonomy and treating them as sovereign peoples , not as wards of the government

The differences between these two laws are almost was part of a greater context of intolerance and warfare against Native Americans and their culture , and was tailored to render Indians more vulnerable . On the other hand , the Indian...