Indian Reservations in the US

8 Key excerpts on "Indian Reservations in the US"

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  Native Peoples of the Americas

  • Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

    (Publisher)

  These changes have had lasting effects on the economic, social, and cultural lives of both native individuals and their tribes. Reservations In the United States, Indian reservations are concentrated in the West and in the Great Lakes region. The largest is the Navajo reservation, which covers some 16 million acres (6.5 million hectares) in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Other large reservations include the Tohono O’odham reservation in Arizona, the Uintah and Ouray reservation in Utah, the Wind River reservation in Wyoming, the Fort Peck and Crow reservations in Montana, and three Sioux reservations—Pine Ridge, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock—in the Dakotas. Most reservation land is owned communally by tribes, though some is held by individuals. Where land is communally owned, tribes generally grant pieces of land to individual members for their use. RESERVATIONS AND URBAN INDIANS The Navajo reservation covers some 16 million acres in the southwestern United States. The region is mostly dry, however, and will not support enough farming and livestock to provide a livelihood for all of its residents. Thousands earn their living away from the Navajo country, and many have settled on irrigated lands along the lower Colorado River and in such places as Los Angeles, Calif., and Kansas City, Mo. David McNew/Getty Images improve the economic, physical, and social health of their communities. Help has also come from people who left the reservations. Many of them continue to consider the reservation to be their true home and provide its residents with financial help and other forms of assistance. Some reservations have also benefited from tourism. Highway improvements in the 1950s and ’60s opened opportunities for tourism in what had been remote areas. A number of tribes living in scenic locations began to sponsor cultural festivals and other events to attract tourists.

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  America's Energy Gamble

  People, Economy and Planet

  • Shanti Gamper-Rabindran(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  5.1 Reservations Lands, Off-Reservation Lands and Ancestral Lands Sovereign Indian tribes once used and occupied vast swaths of land. Today, tribes’ use and occupation of those lands have been restricted to a far smaller collection of reservation lands held in trust by the United States and some treaty- based off-reservation hunting, fishing and gathering rights (Section 5.1.1). Other lands historically occupied by tribes are presently designated as public lands, to which tribes’ rights of use are subject to the decision of the US federal govern- ment that manages those lands (Section 5.1.2). Understanding how the United States arrived at this configuration of rights is essential to comprehending how tribes have carved out legal and political strategies to protect their lands and resources (Section 5.2). 5.1.1 On-Reservation and Off-Reservation Rights Reservation and off-reservations rights were reserved by sovereign Indian tribes in treaties signed with the US government. After the end of the treaty- making era, these reservations were reserved by statutes, executive orders or judicial decisions. 42 (Reserved water rights are created by implication at the moment that a reservation is established by Congress, the president or the judiciary.) Although the specifics can vary across reservation lands, title to the land is generally held by the United States while the tribe or tribes hold an “occupancy title.” xii The lands are held in trust by the federal government. In xii The specific legal status depends on the unique treaties governing the specific reservations. For instance, the Seneca Nation holds its lands in restricted fee status. It does not regard the United States as holding the Nation’ s lands in trust for the tribe. The 1784 Treaty of Canandaigua reserved lands within the specified boundaries as belonging to the Seneca Nation [242]. Native American Lands 159

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  How the Indians Lost Their Land

  Law and Power on the Frontier

  • Stuart Banner, Stuart BANNER(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  If A conveyed land to B but retained some for himself, for instance, the land still owned by A was a reservation; A had reserved it from the grant to B. Reservations in this sense were routine elements of land transactions, whether grants from the government to individuals or sales from one individual to an-other. The idea of setting land aside for Indians was also very old by the nineteenth century. In seventeenth-century Massachusetts, many of the Indians were already living in “Indian villages” or “praying towns” es-tablished specifically for Indian habitation, and there were similar areas set aside for the Indians in other colonies. After the Revolution, Britain continued to set aside parcels of land for the indigenous inhabitants of its other colonies. 2 Some of the earliest treaties between Indian tribes and the United States, from the 1780s and 1790s, defined zones of land reserved for the Indians that were surrounded by areas open to white settlement. Such zones were referred to as “reservations” as early as the Reservations Y 229 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, because they were reservations in the old sense of the word—parcels the tribes retained while ceding the rest of their land to the government. As the white population increased and the Indians sold more of their land, it became increasingly common for tribes to be living on reservations in this sense, surrounded by whites, inhabiting their last remaining tracts of unceded land. After removal, many relocated tribes now lived on reservations in a new sense of the term—land the government had selected from its own land and reserved for the Indians’ use. The areas to which eastern tribes were removed consisted of land the government had only recently pur-chased from western tribes. These were parcels that would have been part of the public domain, waiting to be sold to white settlers, had they not been set aside for the incoming eastern Indians.

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  Landscapes of Defence

  • John R. Gold, George Revill, John R. Gold, George Revill(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  There are just less than two million Native Americans in the United States. Most belong to tribes or cultural groups that occupy diverse environments and typically have their own languages and real or mythical lineages. The US government formally recognises over 330 American Indian tribal groups in the lower forty-eight states and 223 Alaska Native groups. Some of these have petitioned for recognition (BIA 1999a), others for re-recognition (Wilkinson 1992). According to the US Census Bureau, in 1990 about one-quarter of all Indians lived on reservations, with another quarter living close enough to reservations to make frequent trips for family visits and ceremonies. Not all tribes have reservation lands, and some new reservations have been created in recent years. However, each reservation maintains a distinct and separate tribal government and administrative structure. Depending on the definition used, the federal government recognises around 275 to 300 reservations, rancherias and other land-based communities, while states recognise an additional twelve. These Indian lands total 55 million acres, with individual reservations ranging in size from less than 1 acre to more than 17 million acres in the case of the Navajo Reservation. Some tribes are adding to their reservation land base by purchasing non-reservation lands and placing them under federal government trust. Approximately 20 percent of the federally recognised reservation lands are privately owned by individual Indians, while the remainder is held in trust by the federal government and reserved for tribal use (BIA 1999b).

  Figure 9.1 Map of Arizona and New Mexico showing the location of federal Indian reservations and major towns (map by Tina Kennedy)

  Reservations were established to protect non-Indians from the military threat of ‘captive nations’ (Snipp 1994) and are central to the federal government’s policy towards Native Americans (Wilkinson 1992). The first true reservations were established by the state of California shortly after the discovery of gold brought a huge influx of non-Indians to the state (Findlay 1992). The apparent success of this Californian solution to the ‘Indian problem’ quickly spread throughout the west. In most instances, tribes were forced on to reservation lands through a form of forced dependency. Hunting tribes could no longer survive as the open ranges were subdivided and the US Army and other hunters killed nearly all of the buffalo around which their lives revolved (Hagan 1993). The Army also destroyed fields and orchards to force tribal groups on to reservation lands, where they could at least obtain government handouts of food and shelter. The policy was a conscious effort to respond to the American public’s desire for more land and access to resources by concentrating, weakening or even eliminating the only potential threat to that desire, the American Indian.

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  Indigenous Peoples and the Law

  Comparative and Critical Perspectives

  • Benjamin J Richardson, Shin Imai, Kent McNeil(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Many tribal reservations contain within their boundaries lands held by non-Indians, which are not counted in these figures. 9 See statistics held by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), at www.doi.gov/bia. See also K Frantz, Indian Reservations in the United States: Territory, Sovereignty, and Socioeconomic Change (University of Chicago Press, 1999). munities apart from land rights, including their degree of self-governance and the cultural paradigms which shape their lives. 10 In deciphering the legal history of Native Americans, it is worthwhile to begin by sketching some of the distinctive legal issues, and to contrast them to other jurisdictions encountered in this book. Land rights and Indigenous self-governance are vital points of contrast, as explored more fully by Kent McNeil and Shin Imai in their Chapters. While Aboriginal peoples in the British Commonwealth jurisdictions have retained some land in the midst of the colonial onslaught, such as reservations in Canada held under the Indian Act, they have lacked the authority to govern their own affairs in ways that Native American tribes often enjoy. 11 In Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, Indigenous self-governance powers derive primarily from state legislation or treaties. In the US, by contrast, Indian tribes derive their governance powers primarily from their inherent sovereignty. 12 In the British Commonwealth, sovereignty is doctrinally conceptualised as entrenched in the Crown-in-parliament. 13 Tribal sovereignty, however, entitles Native Americans to be ruled by their own laws on their lands. The powers of inherent sovereignty have been recognised by US courts as includ-ing the power to determine tribal membership, power over tribal property, and administration of justice. 14 As long as sovereign tribal rights have not been volun-tarily ceded by treaties or extinguished by the plenary powers of the US Congress, they ordinarily remain intact.

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  Behind Barbed Wire

  A History of Concentration Camps from the Reconcentrados to the Nazi System 1896-1945

  • Deborah G. Lindsay, Foreword by Nigel Hamilton(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Universal-Publishers

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Three American Indian Reservations

  Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race … From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade … Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.

  244

  —Martin Luther King, Jr.

  P rior to its use of concentration camps in the Philippines, the United States government had targeted an “undesirable element” in its own society—the Native Americans. Judging these indigenous people as a threat to the general public, the military confiscated the lands and personal property of the Southeastern Indians and forcibly relocated them into isolated areas west of the Mississippi River. Guarded by the military, the Indians were effectively segregated from mainstream population, i.e., the white citizens. The nomadic tribes of the West, considered an impediment to westward progress of the mostly European white settlers who intended to develop farms and ranches on the vast American plains, were also corralled into stagnant locales that deprived the tribes of their hunting tradition. Although the government labeled these resettlement areas by the more benign term, reservations

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  Indian Country

  Essays on Contemporary Native Culture

  • Gail Guthrie Valaskakis(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Wilfrid Laurier University Press

    (Publisher)

  (581 – 82) Gerald McMaster (1995: 80 – 81) tells us, “Territoriality is important for (Native) Canadians as ‘Indian Reserves’ are spaces that signify ‘home’ … for many (Native) peoples, this does not mean a return to the margins, but rather a return to the centre.” The territories that constitute “cen-tres” for Native North Americans are Indian reservations, parcels of land that Indians reserved for themselves in treaties signed with the United States or Canada. However limited in area or resources, these territo-ries — for which the Ojibway word means “leftovers” — are homelands for Native people, for whom identifying other Native people begins with the question Where are you from? This question, which implies Where is your home? and even Who is your family? both identifies Native people and grounds Native identity. The articulation of territory and home that is connected to identity is not a static configuration of place, but a negotiated sense of relatedness built in experience and affect. As Michael Dorris (1994: 348) writes, “Home is an ongoing character in our lives. It serves as elder, as friend, as reference, as point of origin and return, as haven.” This signification of home is built in the cultural con-nectedness of relationships that seem as old as the land with which they are conjoined. For Native people, the relatedness that constructs “home” is always remembered, imagined, and lived with the land. But the artic-ulated perceptions of home and land do not emerge from a sense of nos-talgia drawn from memories of an ideal time in the past. As Jonathan Windy Boy says in an advertisement for the United States Census 2000 , “My grandfather walked on this land, my father also walked this land, me I like to stroll” ( Lac du Flambeau News , Vol. 8, No. 5. May 2000: 28 ). Valaskakis | Indian Country 114 On reservation lands, relationships reach across time to affirm a cul-tural meaning lived and expressed in the habits of constantly changing collectivity.

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  Serving Their Country

  American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century

  • Paul C. Rosier, Paul C Rosier(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  Parker had argued that “the only just and logical way to understand the Indian and judge his capacity is to watch the Indian who is away from the reservation.” But many Native Americans in the early twentieth century, including others of the first generation of boarding school graduates, had no interest in leaving the reservation, for various cultural and social reasons including endemic racism in American society. Reservations provided a crucial breathing space at a critical time for Native communities to reconstitute themselves culturally and to reimagine themselves politically. The reser-vation, for most Native Americans, was not a prison but a homeland. 26 By the early 1920s, then, Native Americans envisioned the reservation in three principal ways: as a prison, as a homeland, and, in the middle ground between them, as a refuge for those “new Indians” like Montezuma, 60 serving their country Bonnin, and Eastman who still walked in two worlds. The SAI editorial-ized that “the red man and the white man must learn and develop to-gether, and living in one country, both serve its common need.” Self- determination thus took two forms: individual or self-sovereignty and tribal sovereignty, which maintained the porous boundary between two “countries” that permitted crossing in times of crisis such as war and sus-tained the resultant hybrid patriotism. American citizenship for many Na-tive Americans, including SAI intellectuals critical of the reservation as an anachronism, would remain a matter of dual identity in the twentieth century. 27 Citizenship Arrives American Indians’ heroic service during World War I and the arguments of politicians such as Kelly and SAI intellectuals such as Montezuma led to the passage on November 6, 1919, of a bill granting citizenship to World War I veterans, but only to those who asked for it. Few did, as most of the army volunteers already had citizenship, granted by allotment or compe-tency commissions.

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