Everything about Indian Reservation totally explained
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Indian reservation is a
land managed by a
Native American tribe under the
United States Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs. Reservations were established when White Americans and American Indians signed treaties, which involved the transfer of land; land was also forcibly taken from the American Indians, who had lived in the
Americas for thousands of years. Because the land is
federal territory and Native Americans have limited national
sovereignty, laws on tribal lands vary from the surrounding area. These laws can permit legal
casinos on reservations, which attract
tourists.
There are about 310
Indian reservations in the United States, meaning not all of the country's 550-plus
recognized tribes have a reservation — some tribes have more than one reservation, others have none. In addition, because of past land sales and allotments, discussed below, some reservations are severely fragmented. Each piece of
tribal,
trust, and privately held land is a separate
enclave. This random mixing of private and public real estate can create significant administrative difficulties.
The collective geographical area of all reservations is 55.7 million acres (225,410 km²), representing 2.3% of the area of the United States (2,379,400,204 acres; 9,629,091 km²).
There are twelve Indian reservations that are larger than the state of
Rhode Island (776,960 acres; 3,144 km²) and nine reservations larger than
Delaware (1,316,480 acres; 5,327 km²). Reservations are unevenly distributed throughout the country with some states having none.
The tribal council, not the local or federal government, has jurisdiction over reservations. Different reservations have different systems of government, which may or may not replicate the forms of government found outside the reservation. Some Indian reservations were laid out by the federal government, others were outlined by the states.
At the present time, a slight majority of Native Americans and
Alaska Natives live somewhere other than the reservations, often in big western cities such as
Phoenix, Arizona and
Los Angeles, California.
History
Reservation beginnings
In 1851, the
United States Congress passed the
Indian Appropriations Act which authorized the creation of Native American reservations in modern day
Oklahoma. Relations between settlers and natives had grown increasingly worse as the settlers encroached on territory and natural resources in the West.
Grant pursued a stated "Peace Policy" as a possible solution to the conflict. The policy included a reorganization of the Indian Service, with the goal of relocating various tribes from their ancestral homes to parcels of lands established specifically for their inhabitation. The policy called for the replacement of government officials by religious men, nominated by churches, to oversee the Indian agencies on reservations in order to teach
Christianity to the native tribes. The
Quakers were especially active in this policy on reservations. The "civilization" policy was aimed at eventually preparing the tribes for citizenship.
In many cases, the lands granted to tribes were not ideal for, and in some cases resistant to agricultural cultivation, leaving many tribes who accepted the policy in a state bordering on starvation.
Reservation treaties sometimes included stipend agreements, in which the federal government would grant a certain amount of goods to a tribe annually. The implementation of the policy was erratic, however, and in many cases the stipend goods were not delivered.
Controversy
The policy was controversial from the start. Reservations were generally established by
executive order. In many cases, white settlers objected to the size of land parcels, which were subsequently reduced. A report submitted to Congress in 1868 found widespread corruption among the federal Indian agencies and generally poor conditions among the relocated tribes.
Many tribes ignored the relocation orders at first and were forced onto their new limited land parcels. In many cases, the policy required the continuing support of the
United States Army in the West to restrict the movements of various tribes. The pursuit of tribes in order to force them back onto reservations led to a number of Indian Wars. The most well known conflict was the
Sioux War on the northern
Great Plains, between 1876 and 1881, which included the
Battle of Little Bighorn. Other famous wars in this regard included the
Nez Perce War.
By the late 1870s, the policy established by Grant was regarded as a failure, primarily because it had resulted in some of the bloodiest wars between Native Americans and the United States. By 1877, President
Rutherford B. Hayes began phasing out the policy, and by 1882 all religious organizations had relinquished their authority to the federal Indian agency.
In 1887, Congress undertook a significant change in reservation policy by the passage of the
Dawes Act, or General Allotment (Severalty) Act. The act ended the general policy of granting land parcels to tribes as-a-whole by granting small parcels of land to individual tribe members. In some cases, for example the
Umatilla Indian Reservation, after the individual parcels were granted out of reservation land, the reservation area was reduced by giving the excess land to white settlers. The individual allotment policy continued until 1934, when it was terminated by the
Indian Reorganization Act.
The Indian New Deal
The
Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, also known as the
Howard-Wheeler Act, was sometimes called the
Indian New Deal. It laid out new rights for Native Americans, reversed some of the earlier privatization of their common holdings, and encouraged
self-government and land management by tribes. The act slowed the assignment of tribal lands to individual members, and reduced the assignment of 'extra' holdings to nonmembers.
For the following twenty years, the U.S. government invested in infrastructure, health care, and education on the reservations, and over two million acres (8,000 km²) of land were returned to various tribes. The Indian Reorganization Act also provided for
termination and relocation of certain tribes. This eventually resulted in the legal dismantling of 61 tribal nations.
Life and culture
Many Native Americans who live on reservations deal with the federal government through two agencies: the
Bureau of Indian Affairs and the
Indian Health Service.
Life qualities in some reservations are comparable to the quality of life in the
developing world .
Shannon County, South Dakota, home of the
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, is routinely described as one of the poorest counties in the nation.
Gambling
In 1979, the Seminole tribe in
Florida opened a high-stakes
bingo operation on its reservation in Florida. The state attempted to close the operation down but was stopped in the courts. In the 1980s, the case of
California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians established the right of reservations to operate other forms of gambling operations. In 1988, Congress passed the
Indian Gaming Regulatory Act which recognized the right of Indian tribes to establish gambling and gaming facilities on their reservations as long as the states in which they're located have some form of legalized gambling. Today, many Indian Casinos are used as
tourist attractions to draw visitors and revenue to reservations.
Further Information
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