What She Saw Coming: The New Deal Era
Zitkála-Šá died in 1938, which means she lived to see the beginning of a significant shift in federal Indian policy — the Indian New Deal associated with Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier and the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.
The Indian Reorganization Act — sometimes called the Wheeler-Howard Act — reversed the allotment policy of the Dawes Act era, ended the sale of “surplus” reservation lands, and attempted to restore some degree of tribal self-governance. It was a significant policy change that represented, in some respects, a validation of the critiques that reformers like Zitkála-Šá had been making for decades.
She was ambivalent about Collier’s approach — he was a non-Native reformer whose vision of what was good for Native people was not identical to what Native people themselves advocated — but the general direction of the policy was toward the recognition of tribal sovereignty and the end of the most destructive elements of the assimilation project. The policy change came too late to restore the lands lost under allotment, but it represented a real shift in the direction of federal policy.
Whether she felt vindicated by this change, or whether she viewed it with the specific skepticism of someone who had spent decades watching the federal government fail to deliver on its promises to Native people, is not something the historical record captures with certainty. She was seventy-two years old when she died and had been doing this work for nearly forty years.