The Indian Reorganization Act: A Vindication, Sort Of
The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 — the Wheeler-Howard Act — is the policy document that most directly represents the vindication of the critiques Zitkála-Šá and others had been making for decades.
The Act ended allotment, restored some tribal communal land tenure, authorized tribes to establish formal governments, allowed tribes to hire legal counsel, and provided some restoration of tribal economic functions. It was the most significant reversal of the assimilation policy of the Dawes Act era.
John Collier, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs who was the Act’s primary architect, was a non-Native reformer whose approach to Native policy was shaped by his own perspective on what Native communities needed. Some of his approaches were paternalistic in ways that Native advocates including Zitkála-Šá found objectionable — he had a romantic vision of what “traditional” Native life was that did not always correspond to the actual situation of the diverse Native communities the Act affected.
But the general direction of the Act — away from forced assimilation and toward some degree of tribal self-determination — was in the direction that Zitkála-Šá had been arguing for. The specific provision ending allotment was exactly what she and others in the Native rights movement had been demanding for decades.
She died four years after the Act’s passage. She saw the beginning of the policy shift but not its full implementation. The specific programs and reforms of the Indian New Deal unfolded in the years after her death.
The vindication was partial and imperfect, as she would probably have recognized. The Act did not return the 90 million acres that had been lost through allotment. It did not resolve the questions of sovereignty and self-determination that had been central to Native political advocacy for generations. It was a beginning of a different approach, not a resolution of the accumulated harm.