Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1987
Abstract
Relatively little has been done to trace the political structures of American Indians through the years 1890 to 1940, when reservation economics were undergoing their most dramatic changes. That failure has left the false impression of a fifty-vear institutional vacuum. In fact, the middle years were times of complex reJisrrihutions of power ;md the emergence of indigellous socioeconomic classes. It was also perhaps the earliest period in which Plains Indians enjoyed anything like an Americanstyle, decentralized elective democracy. Federal programs shifted the control of the Indians' food supply. From being skilled hunter- organizers they became recipients of gc)\"ernnwnt patronage, heelme small landholders and, finally, tribal technocrats. In other words, they experienced two cycles of centralization. An agrarian entrepreneurial middle class and a landless bureaucratic class emerged, and their competition for political influence has dominated reservation life ever since. As in many developing countries, modernization was accompanied by a conflict between small-scale agrarian capitalism and central planning. If valid, this thesis requires reversing some well-entrenched historical judgments, i.c., that the Ceneral Allotment Act was bad because it reduced the Indians' aggregate landholdings, and that the Indian New Deal was good because it stopped allotment and encouraged Indian self-government. On the contrary, allotment may have given Indian leaders the opportunity to reestablish their economic and political independence from the Bureau of Indian Affairs-and the New Deal reorganization program crushed this emergent Indian bourgeoisie and its growing power.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 7:2 (Spring 1987). Copyright © 1987 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.