American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Historians who concentrate on studying Native Americans at the turn of the twentieth century have devoted much of their energy to analyzing the impact of the Dawes Act on Indian societies. The act, which mandated the dissolution of reservations, was without question the era's dominant policy initiative. Its primary intention, so its supporters claimed, was to dismantle supposedly archaic tribal bonds by apportioning reservation lands among the tribal population and encouraging Indians, by force if necessary, to become independent farmers, latter-day versions of Jefferson's yeoman farmers. Indeed, those who supported and administered the Dawes Act assumed that, within a few years, Indians would become self-supporting market agriculturalists. This process was supposed to instill in the Indian the notion of private property, stimulate the supposedly innate human desire to accumulate wealth and possessions, and finally lead to complete assimilation of natives into mainstream American society. Yet, while the principal thrust of policy during this period emphasized the creation of a self-sufficient Indian yeomanry, its application proved less than uniform. In fact, on the fringes of policy-making, another philosophy existed, significantly different and seemingly at odds with the agricultural imperative. This was the drive to extract and market natural resources found on or near certain reservations. While the predatory non-Indian interest in Indian wealth was hardly unique to this period, what was new was an evolving Indian interest in promoting economic development. In other words, there is evidence to suggest that some Indians, working in tandem with interested policymakers-so-called friends of the Indian-and sometimes with corporate interests, attempted to use these marketable resources as a means of generating wealth and, eventually, self-sustaining economies. Such efforts took a variety of forms, from commercial fishing to the extraction of petroleum and other minerals, to lumbering. Unfortunately, most enterprises of this nature fell victim to the familiar onslaught of white speculators, soaring production costs, competition from better-funded industries outside, and ill-advised and poorly managed federal programs. Indeed, it is a sad irony that policymakers' narrow interest in promoting Indian agriculture often blinded them to potentially more lucrative projects, thereby undercutting their own professed goal of raising the Indians' standard of living.