Native Americans, Reservation Life

During the 18th and 19th centuries, the United States pursued a strategy of ethnic cleansing to force hundreds of linguistically, culturally, and politically distinct indigenous peoples with their own rich histories of alliances, trade, and cultural exchange onto Indian reservations—remote, poor vestiges of their vast former holdings. The prevailing political discourse cast Native Americans as savages standing in the way of progress and the Manifest Destiny of the white race to settle the continent all the way to the Pacific. On the reservations, proud independent peoples were classified as wards of the federal government, denied individual and collective rights, and subjected to a variety of measures designed to destroy their cultures and assimilate them.

A variety of often contradictory policies, administered at first by the Department of War, and later by the Department of the Interior through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, wrought havoc on the lives of Native Americans but failed to achieve the overall aim of assimilation. Resistance was widespread and sustained. Native leaders often turned the tools of the colonizer to their own account in ongoing efforts to define their own futures. Many Native Americans today express pride in being survivors of a disastrous and vast experiment in social engineering, in having retained significant aspects of their cultures, and in their increasing success at asserting control over their own lives.

Indian reservations, including pueblos in the Southwest and rancherias in California, occupy 56.2 million acres, or 2.3 percent of the United States, a startling figure compared to the 2.38 billion acres they occupied before contact with Europeans a half-millennium ago. Reservations range in size from the 16-million-acre Navajo Nation that sprawls over parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, to tiny homelands with less than 100 acres. There are nearly 300 in 36 states, with concentrations in the West and Midwest. Some were delineated through treaties with the U.S. government; others were established by Congress or through executive orders.

Maintaining a land base is critical to Native American identity, although today only 34 percent of the 3.1 million Native Americans who identify as members of a specific tribe live on Indian reservations. Nevertheless, reservations are seen as homelands, are the locus for the assertion of tribal sovereignty, and have served as enclaves sustaining kinship relations and preserving and elaborating rich cultures.

Tribal governments exercise inherent, albeit limited, sovereignty and officially enjoy government-to-government relationships with the United States. Although situations vary, tribes generally raise revenues, promulgate and enforce laws, manage natural resources, enter into contracts with private companies, negotiate with state and federal authorities, and administer federal programs including education, health, and welfare.

Nevertheless, life for Native Americans on Indian reservations is fraught with the difficulties associated with limited resources, poor economies, inadequate health care and education, and a legacy of ruinous policies promulgated by a colonial or quasi-colonial regime. Too often, the people themselves are blamed for the problems that continue to beset them. But in virtually every instance of a social problem identified on reservations today, other instances of Native people hard at work, attempting to provide creative, culturally sensitive solutions to problems, exist as well.

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