American Indian Culture and Research Journal

If the condition of the Blackfeet Indians at this time is to be taken as an index of the character of trusteeship which the Government imposes upon other Indians, the w d has been a failure. The spectacle is a depressing one and calls not only for immediate relief but for an entire and permanent change in the manner of handling their affairs. --Senator Harry Lane, 1914 Give us a fair and new deal as we know ourselves the old system is no success. -Blackfeet Councilman Rides at the Door, 1933 INTRODUCTION The Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), the cornerstone of the Indian New Deal, is the most important piece of legislation in twentieth-century American Indian policy-making. Earl Old Person, the great full-blooded Blackfeet leader, discussed the IRA’S role in twentieth-century Indian progress in his speech to the 1966 convention of the National Congress of American Indians. “The first breakthrough came with the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. This permitted a Government policy of organization by allowing tribes to adopt constitutions which provided terms for managing their own affairs.”’ The IRA represented the start of a long-sought and much-needed dialogue between Indian leaders and federal officials, whose organizing principle under Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier rested on “the revolutionary proposition that Indians were not obstacles, but peoples.” The IRA became an attenuated version of Collier’s vision of Native political economy- a syncretic economy managed by empowered tribal governments that would adopt white business practices and, Collier hoped, encourage a renewal of Indian culture.