The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History

Indians are central actors in American environmental history. They were the primeval users, shapers, and stewards of the land. The natural resources of the lands they occupy—soil, timber, grasses, water, and minerals—have played major roles in how the environment was developed in the past and is used today. Indians, together with the national parks and recreational resources created from their lands, figure preeminently in the evolving attitudes toward nature and the wild that underlie environmental policy. The policies of the United States government toward Indians evolved over time from land acquisition by conquest and treaties, to the removal of tribes to western reservations, to expulsion from the national parks, and finally toward Indian sovereignty, civil rights, and co-management of resources. This chapter surveys conflicts over Indian land and water rights, Indians and the creation of the parks, and the role of the United States government in establishing and administering policies toward Indians.

The lands of the eastern states, beginning with the thirteen original colonies, were ceded to English proprietors by Indians who could neither read nor fully appreciate the implications of the agreements they signed. In many cases, tribal members did not completely comprehend the size of the ceded lands, or that—in many cases—they were giving up long-established hunting and fishing rights. In other cases, whites negotiated with chiefs from whom they could receive the most land, and used fraud and bribery to accomplish their desired ends. The proclamation line of 1763, established at the end of the Seven Years’ War between the French and British, temporarily protected Indians from further settlement and reserved lands west of the Appalachians as hunting grounds. The British Crown retained the exclusive right to negotiate cessions from Indians, and settlement was forbidden to colonists. Between 1768 and 1783, Indians ceded areas west of the proclamation line, but, although the lands were officially ceded, Indians still occupied them, making settlement difficult for Americans and European immigrants.

After the American Revolution, the new United States government continued the British policy of regarding Indian tribes as sovereign nations and regulating relations with them through treaties. In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Confederation Congress declared: “The utmost good faith shall always be observed toward the Indians, their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent.”¹

Government policy became less favorable to Indians, however, in the context of westward expansion and American land hunger in the early nineteenth century. During the War of 1812 against Great Britain, the Indians’ power to resist American demands was shattered by their defeats at the hands of General William Henry Harrison in the Old Northwest and General Andrew Jackson in the Old Southwest. The devastated tribes were forced to accept treaties confining them to reservations on the least desirable lands, thus opening most of the country for white settlement westward to the Mississippi. Indian cessions in the Old Southwest were extorted by General Jackson’s threats that those who resisted his demands would suffer the fate of the Creeks he had annihilated during the war. Although the tribes’ new lands were guaranteed to them “forever,” the government soon began urging them to resettle west of the Mississippi, on reservations created in an “Indian territory” comprising present-day Oklahoma and parts of Arkansas. In 1823, the U.S. Congress changed the legal status of the tribes from sovereign nations to domestic dependent nations, and the next year President James Monroe called for removing all remaining Indians beyond the Mississippi.

American demands for removing Indians mounted as settlement thickened around their reservations, cotton boomed across the South, and settlers began to resent the federal government’s treaty obligation to protect the reservation Indians from white intruders. The extensive reservations still held in the South by the so-called five “civilized” tribes, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole, were particularly coveted by settlers and cotton planters. Their opportunity came when the Indians’ nemesis, Andrew Jackson, won the presidency in 1828. Promptly, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi extended their jurisdiction over Indian reservations in defiance of federal authority. State jurisdiction outlawed tribal governments and subjected Indians instead to local officials for whom they could not vote and to local courts in which they could neither sue nor testify, leaving them helpless to prevent seizure of their lands by white intruders. The Indians’ only hope for survival was the federal government’s obligation to protect them, as promised in the Constitution, which stated that “all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.”²

President Jackson quickly made it clear that states’ rights, in his singular understanding of the Constitution, forbade federal interference with state policy toward Indians. Striking a magnanimous pose, he offered removal as a generous government’s only means of rescuing Indians from state encroachments. “My red Choctaw children, and my Chickasaw children,” he told two of the tribes, “must” move beyond the states, where they would be guaranteed “land of their own … as long as the Grass grows or water runs.”³ In 1830 Jackson persuaded Congress to pass an Indian Removal Act, authorizing the president to move Indians to public lands beyond the Mississippi in exchange for their eastern reservations.

The Supreme Court responded by pronouncing the states’ invasion of Indian reservations and rights to be unconstitutional. This 1832 case, Worcester v. Georgia, involved two white missionaries who were jailed under a Georgia law forbidding their presence on Cherokee lands without a permit from the governor. The Court ordered their release, because, in the words of Chief Justice John Marshall: “The Indian nations had always been considered as distinct, independent political communities, retaining their original natural rights as the undisputed possessors of the land from time immemorial.”⁴ But without support from the executive branch, the Court pronounced and ordered in vain. “John Marshall has made his decision,” a defiant Jackson reportedly scoffed: “now let him enforce it!”⁵

During the 1830s, the U.S. Army forcibly corralled members of the “civilized” tribes and marched them westward. In 1831, the Choctaw were removed, many dying en route. When the Creek were removed in 1836, many went in chains, and 3,500 died along the way. Then, in 1837, the Cherokee, who—in white terms—had been the most civilized of the Indian nations, were also sent west. They had adopted a constitution, taken up private property, grown grain, and built mills and stores. But the army herded them into stockades and removed 15,000 people, about one quarter dying along their “Trail of Tears.” The army faced dogged resistance before it managed to extract some of the Seminole from Florida’s swamps and herd them along the same route in 1842. Subsequently, the prairie tribes of the Sac and the Fox were sent from Iowa and Illinois to reservations in Indian territory.

As Euro-Americans invaded the Trans-Mississippi plains after the 1840s seeking range, farm, and mineral lands, battles between settlers and the western Indian tribes stimulated a new round of removals to a new set of reservations. During the 1850s, the government prevailed on fifty-two tribes to relinquish large acreages of land that settlers wanted in return for protection on smaller tracts of reservation lands that settlers did not, as yet, want. In 1871, the status of Indians changed again. Congress declared that “hereafter no Indian nation or tribe … shall be … recognized as an independent … power with whom the United States may contract by treaty.”⁶ Indian nations were reclassified as non-national entities, and weaker legal “agreements” replaced formal treaties.

In 1864, minerals were discovered on western lands that Indians retained, and new battles ensued between whites and Indians. Black Kettle of the Cheyenne was tricked and more than one hundred members of his band killed in 1864, while the tribe was in the process of surrendering to the governor of Colorado, and in 1868 Black Kettle himself met the same fate while leading his band to join tribes friendly to the government. In 1866, the Sioux War was fought when miners who had invaded Sioux lands wished to remove the tribe from the mineral-rich areas. The Sioux, in retaliation, ambushed and destroyed the soldiers who entered their land. In 1875, similar problems occurred with gold prospectors in the Black Hills of South Dakota, resulting in the Battle of Little Big Horn. Then in 1886, the Apaches—the last Indian tribe in the Southwest to hold out against the government—surrendered; and in 1887, the Nez Perce, under Chief Joseph, after a thousand-mile flight through Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, were captured just before reaching a haven in Canada.

Defeated and in despair, the Plains Indians, in 1888, began a revival they called the Ghost Dance movement. The Ghost Dance was a tribal effort to renew Indian ways of life and preserve Indian traditions. The dance itself revealed a paradise in which Indians could live free of pain and suffering. Most wanted to live harmoniously, but a radical faction wanted to eliminate whites. The religion represented a threat to white expansion, and so, in 1890, the government banned the Ghost Dance on the Sioux reservations. This act precipitated the so-called “final battle” of the Indians against the whites, the 1890 Battle of Wounded Knee, in which Sioux leader Sitting Bull (1831–90) was killed and more than three hundred Indians died.

Underlying the removals to reservations was a policy of assimilation by turning Indians into farmers. The progress of civilization, which was the major narrative of Western culture, required that Indians should become civilized and move up from the level of “savagery” and “barbarism” (hunting/gathering and pastoralism) to that of farming and commerce. The idea of progress, prevalent in the work of John Locke, Adam Smith and other philosophers of the Enlightenment, was reinforced by Social Darwinist ideas that the white race was the highest of all the races. The goal was to “civilize” Indians by converting them to farmers. First in time came the supposedly “wild” Indian, then the partially “civilized” Indian who had donned a few western clothes and habits, and finally the totally educated, “civilized” Indian who had been incorporated into and made a full part of American society. Reformers such as Richard Henry Pratt, with government funding, started boarding schools (e.g., the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, founded in 1879), where Indian children were taught English and Anglo-American culture in the belief that obliteration of Indian beliefs and practices would bring about assimilation.

Between 1877 and 1881, under Interior Secretary Carl Shurz, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA, created in 1824) moved toward greater centralized control over Indian culture through appointments of professional bureaucrats loyal to Washington rather than to local agents or Indian tribes. In the 1880s, the Bureau banned such Indian practices as medicine-making, the Lakota Sun Dance, and ritual bundles associated with spiritual release of the dead. Indian education and the banning of tribal rituals made up two parts of a three-pronged program of “civilizing” the Indian. The third component was the transformation of communal reservation lands into private property.

In order to “civilize” Indians and turn them into settled farmers, Euro-Americans believed that private property should replace the communal property Indians held on reservations. In 1887, the General Allotment (or Dawes) Act, sponsored by Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes, authorized the allotment of reservation lands to individual Indians in 160-acre parcels, the official homestead unit. The objective was to create independent Indian farmers and to dissolve the tribes. The Secretary of the Interior could negotiate sale of the remaining tribal lands, and after an initial period of federal trusteeship, Indians could sell their 160-acre allotments. So much land passed to non-Indians through both processes that Indian landholdings of 155 million acres in 1881 had shrunk to 56.6 million acres by the 1990s. Only five percent of the lands distributed by the Dawes commission remain in Indian hands.

“[T]he … most effective means of encouraging the tribes to meld into white society,” as legal historian Lloyd Burton explains the Dawes Act, “was simply to relieve them of much of their well-watered, arable land.”⁷ In the process, Indian population declined steadily to 237,196 individuals by 1900. Western travel writer Samuel Bowles stated bluntly the underlying rationale for this drastic change in Indian policy. Arguing for dispossessing Indians of their lands, he wrote, “We know they are not our equals; we know that our right to the soil, as a race capable of its superior improvement, is above theirs.” The Indian did not belong in the West, Bowles maintained. “Let us say to him, you are our ward, our child, … ours to displace, ours to protect.… We want your hunting grounds to dig gold from, to raise grain on, and you must ‘move on.’”⁸

The Dawes Act meshed strategically with the conversion of Indian lands into national parks during the late nineteenth century. For white settlers and exploiters, as historians Robert Keller and Michael Turek explain, the “opening of reservations for settlement compensated for millions of acres withdrawn from the public domain by national forests and parks.”⁹ Whites gained at both poles of this Euro-American bargain, as demand for recreational resources joined demand for natural resources in motivating expropriation of Indian lands. The saga of Indian removal from the parks, as revealed by a flood of recent scholarship, is the dark side of environmental history’s most celebrated creation story.

That Indians, always and everywhere, had to “move on” was demonstrated most forcefully when Henry David Thoreau’s dream of preserving wildness achieved its greatest triumph in the creation of the national parks. The very idea of a national park was first articulated by the painter of Indian life George Catlin (1796–1872), who wanted, like Thoreau, to save both vanishing wildness and the vanishing Indian. Proposing a national park on the Great Plains in his 1844 book North American Indians, Catlin imagined the vanishing buffalo “as they might in future be seen (by some great protecting policy of government) preserved in their pristine beauty and wildness, in a magnificent park, where the world could see for ages to come, the native Indian in his classic attire, galloping his wild horse, with sinewy bow, and shield and lance, amid fleeting herds of elks and buffaloes. What a beautiful and thrilling specimen for America to preserve and hold up to the view of her refined citizens and the world, in future ages! A nation’s park containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty!”¹⁰

But when parks came, Indians were expelled from lands they had long inhabited and ranged to create recreational resources for whites. Except as tourist attractions, Indians vanished from memory as well as from view. Wilderness was redefined as untainted by human presence, and parks were conceptualized as places where white tourists could be inspired by the sublimity of depopulated natural beauty. “Generations of preservationists, government officials, and park visitors have accepted and defended the uninhabited wilderness preserved in national parks as remnants of a priori Nature (with a very capital N),” writes environmental historian Mark David Spence. “Such a conception of wilderness forgets that native peoples shaped these environments for millennia.”¹¹

Indians were expelled from the national parks by techniques of removal perfected over three centuries of Euro-American settlement—military force, treaties of cession, and violation of treaty stipulations. The victims were often dehumanized in the process, states Philip Burnham, as tourism businesses in and around parks “used Indians as advertising icons” or isolated them “in ‘model’ settlements.”¹² The varied processes and rationales by which Indians were displaced from parks are illustrated by four cases—at Yosemite and Yellowstone by military force and intimidation in the nineteenth century, and at Glacier and Mesa Verde by legal subterfuge and protracted negotiation in the twentieth.

Especially rich in pathos is the saga of Indian removal from California’s magnificent Yosemite region. When Congress and President Abraham Lincoln ceded Yosemite Valley to the state for preservation in 1864, it had already been cleared of Indians. In the decade following the 1849 Gold Rush, a hundred thousand Indians disappeared from California’s population. When miners flooding the foothills of the Sierra Nevada met resistance to staking their claims on Indian lands, a state-armed Mariposa Battalion of volunteering miners invaded Yosemite in 1851. Determined “to sweep the territory of any scattered bands that might infest it,”¹³ this force systematically burned the Yosemite Indians’ villages and food caches to starve them into accepting removal to a reservation on the Fresno River in the Sierra foothills. Dr. Lafayette Bunnell, a member of the battalion who published his account of the Discovery of the Yosemite and the Indian War of 1851 (1880), was both enthralled by Yosemite’s sublime beauty and sympathetic to its Indians. His account left no doubt, however, that the Indians had to go.

After the last defiant Yosemite were routed from their high-country refuge on a stunningly beautiful alpine lake (now the scenic jewel of the park’s Tioga Road), Bunnell tried to console their despairing Chief Tenaya by telling him that “we had given his name to the lake and river. At first he seemed unable to comprehend our purpose, and pointing to the group of glistening peaks near the head of the lake, said, ‘It already has a name; we call it Py-we-ack [Shining Rocks].’ Upon my telling him that we had named it Ten-ie-ya, because it was upon the shores of the lake that we had found his people, who would never return to it to live, his countenance fell.… indicat[ing] that he thought the naming of the lake no equivalent for his loss of territory.”¹⁴

Many years after Yosemite’s ancient inhabitants were “removed,” some of the refugees charged in a petition to Congress that whites were despoiling “our beloved” Yosemite Valley by “gradual destruction of its trees, the occupancy of every foot of its territory by bands of grazing horses and cattle, the decimation of the fish in the river, … [and] the rapacious acts of the whites in the building of their hotels and stage lines.” Complaining that “all seem to come only to hunt money,” they claimed that “this is not the way in which we treated this park when we had it.”¹⁵ Meanwhile, a remnant of Yosemite had left the reservation for a camp in their ancestral valley, where they were tolerated for several decades as a tourist attraction, performing dances, posing for a fee before visitors’ Kodaks, and selling the women’s beautifully woven willow baskets. These “unwelcome guests,” the petition alleged, were “the object of curiosity … to the throngs of strangers who yearly gather in this our own land.”¹⁶ Eventually the Army expelled these showcase Indians, and park managers burned their camp as an eyesore. The goal was to reaffirm the national park ideal of a wilderness sublimely uninhabited, except for hikers and campers.

Yellowstone, by contrast, presents a saga of coerced expulsion of Indians after the park was created, justified by tendentious claims that Indians were threats to tourists. Here, after several expeditions publicized the area’s natural splendors, and after a campaign spearheaded by a railroad hungry for tourist traffic, Congress authorized the country’s first national park in 1872. The economies and cultures of Crow, Bannock, Shoshone, Salish, Nez Perce, and Northern Paiute depended on seasonal visitation to the Yellowstone high country for hunting, harvesting the dietary staple camas, lodgepole cutting, and ceremonial or intertribal gatherings. Because of the Yellowstone plateau’s high altitude, however, averaging 8,000 feet, its only year-round residents were small bands of Shoshone, called Sheepeaters because they lived by hunting bighorn sheep in the loftiest and most remote areas. The reclusive Sheepeaters fled Yellowstone to escape management by the U.S. Army, which administered the early national parks until the National Park Service was created in the twentieth century. They departed under the assurances of a treaty negotiated in 1868, which insured their right to hunt in Yellowstone in return for ceding their lands. But once they were gone, the government refused to ratify the treaty or to recognize the claims of the other tribes who had long depended on seasonal use of the area.

The park then banned all Indian entry, allegedly to protect tourists, on the basis of several incidents. In 1877, nine white visitors were briefly held captive and one of them was wounded when they encountered 750 Nez Perce Indians, who were in a thirteen-day flight across Yellowstone while being pursued by two thousand U.S. troops through Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. Then, in 1878, a group of Bannock alarmed park Superintendent Philetus Norris by crossing the park boundary in pursuit of cattle that had destroyed gathering areas on their reservation. The final provocation was the so-called Sheepeater War of 1889 in central Idaho, when the U.S. cavalry hunted down 51 Sheepeaters, mainly women and children with less than a dozen firearms, who were suspected of involvement in a murder of Chinese miners. Although this incident occurred far from Yellowstone, Norris erected a fort to protect the park from further encroachment by Indians. The result was another chapter in the cultural construction of wilderness as an area where visitors could view sublime nature unimpeded by Indian presence.

Congress and the courts replaced military force as instruments of Indian removal when western Montana’s Glacier National Park was created in 1910. On the Blackfeet reservation where the park came to be located, the Indians had traditionally gained their sustenance by moving freely between the mountainous western part of their territory and their homes on the more easterly plains. By the 1880s, warfare, disease, and disappearing bison had reduced the Blackfeet to some two thousand individuals. After several hundred starved to death in the harsh winter of 1883–84, they yielded sweeping land cessions, including their prized Sweet Grass Hills, to the United States in order to obtain provisions.

Meanwhile the Blackfeet were befriended by George Bird Grinnell (1849–1938), naturalist, admirer of Indian cultures, conservationist editor of the widely read Forest and Stream, and founder of the Audubon Society. Dreaming of preserving the spectacular “Backbone of the World” along the Rocky Mountain crest in the western part of the Blackfeet reservation as a national park, he cooperated with potential exploiters of the area in persuading the Indians to sell it to the government. In 1895, they finally agreed to a price of $1.5 million, but only when the government promised that Blackfeet would have the right “to go upon any portion of the lands … and to cut and remove wood … and to hunt upon said lands and to fish in the streams thereof so long as the same shall remain public lands of the United States.”¹⁷

When valuable minerals believed to be in the ceded area failed to materialize, a campaign led by Grinnell, along with the Sierra Club and the Great Northern Railroad, finally persuaded Congress to create Glacier National Park in 1910. But the act creating the park invalidated the Blackfeet’s 1895 agreement, government lawyers maintained, giving rise to a running conflict in the courts, and contestation that continues to this day along the park’s hundred-mile boundary with the Blackfeet reservation. Meanwhile the Great Northern Railroad built a large hotel beside its tracks at the park’s southern entrance and extensive tourist facilities within the park. Both the railroad and the park developed an extravaganza of Indian display and entertainment by recruiting “some good type Indians … who … have good costumes, put on a good show, and live in peace and harmony” to participate in this early ecotourism.¹⁸

Mesa Verde, in the red-rock canyon country of southwestern Colorado, presents a final example of expropriation, this time to memorialize ruins left by Indians long dead by taking land from living Indians who were absent from the park. The lands were part of a reservation assigned to the Mountain Ute in return for larger tracts they had ceded in 1874 and 1880. Settling down here and utilizing gifts of wagons, tools, and cattle in compliance with white reformist hopes, they provided food and clothing for themselves through farming, constructed sawmills and gristmills, and set up schools. All this went for naught when, in the 1870s, whites discovered on their lands the multistoried cliff dwellings occupied by the Anasazi (Ancient Ones) until drought drove them out around A.D. 1300. Preservationists sought cession of these ruins, which the Ute seldom visited, not wishing to disturb the spirits of the dead.

The Ute were understandably reluctant to surrender part of their reservation for a park, fearing that they might be removed in the process. While white women, organized as the Colorado Cliff Dwelling Association, collected petitions from women’s clubs and other groups for preserving the Anasazi ruins, their leader, Mrs. Virginia McClurg, met nothing but rebuffs through ten years of negotiation with the Indians. Finally in 1906, the Ute ceded 42,000 acres, and President Theodore Roosevelt signed a bill creating Mesa Verde National Park. Only then did the government discover that its faulty survey had left most of the ruins outside the Ute cession. After Congress unilaterally placed another 175,000 acres of mostly tribal land under park administration, a further cession was demanded from the Ute. A long deadlock was broken only when the government sent in its most skilled troubleshooter in Indian affairs, and the Indians were bluntly informed that “the government is stronger than the Utes.… [and] Congress is going to have that land.”¹⁹ Finally the Ute consented in 1911 to trade 10,000 acres in the ruins area for almost twice that acreage elsewhere, only to discover later that, due to government error, the land they received in exchange was land they already owned.

Mesa Verde enabled the government to commemorate an ancient pueblo people, while obscuring the violent wars against the Indians of the recent past and ignoring the present Indians upon whose lands the park was created. As Philip Burnham assesses the outcome: “First, Indian cultures could now be perceived to have come and gone long before the days of Manifest Destiny.… Second, the government was now cast in the role of resurrecting the memory of Indian people, not destroying them.”²⁰ Unlike Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Glacier National Parks, Mesa Verde memorializes Indian archeological remains, but like them it celebrates a cultural landscape in which living Indians no longer dwell.

These four parks exhibit a variety of rationales for removing Indians: protection of parks to create tourism, protection of tourists from Indians, protection of sublime canyons and mountains at the expense of Indians, and protection of archaeological sites delineating ancient Indian cultures. Variations on these themes are exhibited by most national parks and monuments—including the Grand Canyon, Mount Ranier, the Everglades, Death Valley, the Great Smoky Mountains, the Badlands, the Black Hills, and Grand Teton—as well as most of the national forests and outdoor recreational sites administered by the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Fish and Wildlife Service. However varied in other respects, relations between park lands and Indians almost everywhere exemplify two consistent themes. Indians had to “move on,” unless they could be used to entertain tourists. And the Indians’ ancestral lands had to be repackaged for consumption by tourists as wild Nature, uncontaminated by human presence.

The dialectical relationship between the parks and Indian lands had been evident from the inception of the national park system. Within a year of Yellowstone’s creation in 1872, Indian tribes lost their sovereignty, and the shift from formal treaties to agreements made land cessions from Indians more available and concessions to Indians more revocable. Indian lands were ideal raw material for parks, offering the remote and unprofitable scenery least in demand for private development, and therefore available in large parcels at low cost. While the parks commemorated the grandeur of American scenery, the reservation system removed unwanted people to unwanted lands. While the parks depended on attracting tourists, reservations restrained Indians from bothering tourists. After 1916, the parks and the reservations vied for the same resources within the Department of the Interior. The former succeeded at the expense of the latter.

In the twentieth century, government policy moved sporadically toward greater autonomy for Indians, retroceding at times before moving forward again. The first important movement in this direction occurred in the courts and involved the hotly contested issue of western water rights. Although historical events had usually conspired against Indians when land was being appropriated by speculators, in the case of the Blackfeet Indians’ appeal for water rights, the courts actually ruled in favor of Indians. “In January 1908,” writes Lloyd Burton, “the U.S. Supreme Court issued its seminal decision in Winters v. United States, the first case in which the federal courts explicitly affirmed the water rights of Indian reservations.”²¹

The Blackfeet Indians, soon to be barred from the Glacier National Park created on part of their reservation, claimed they did not have enough water on the reservation for watering cattle or buffalo, or even for farming, at a time when the 1887 Dawes Act was promoting Indian agriculture. In the resulting Winters Doctrine, Indians were designated as the senior appropriators of the water on their reservation. The date a reservation was established, in most cases before white settlers arrived and began diverting water for irrigation, determined the date of water appropriation. As a result, in many cases, reservation tribes became the senior appropriators with the right to use millions of acre-feet of water in the western United States. Moreover, their rights were not subject to quantification—i.e., the “use it or lose it,” principle of western water law—but they were instead entitled to as much water as the reservation required. From 1908 to the present, the Winters decision has spawned numerous water conflicts in the West and numerous court cases between the states and private companies who wished to divert water despite the rights of Indian reservations.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs had been responsible for protecting Indian rights since the nineteenth century, but by the New Deal era of the 1930s, Indian lands were reduced to sixty-five million acres. In 1934, under BIA director John Collier, Indian policy was reconfigured through the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). Collier sought to preserve Indian cultural heritage and to give Native Americans more power to manage their lands and natural resources. Although controversial among both Indians and non-Indians at the time, the IRA, known as the “Indian New Deal,” reconstituted the tribes as sovereign entities. It stopped the Dawes Act land allotments to individual Indians, prohibited the sale of non-allotted lands to non-Indians, and stopped the subjection of allotted trust lands to the states. Until then, the states had been able to intervene in Indian affairs, a situation that had weakened Indian control over their remaining lands. The act allowed Native Americans on reservations to establish self-governance and permitted tribal corporations to develop reservation resources. It established programs for forest management, health services, and education, including teaching tribal culture. On Collier’s recommendation, President Roosevelt also abolished the entrenched Board of Indian Commissioners, which had overseen the BIA since 1869, thereby allowing the reforms to proceed.

The Depression of the 1930s, combined with drought and recordbreaking summer temperatures, was especially hard on Indians, who already had the deepest poverty levels of any ethnic group in the United States. Collier pressed Congress to pass the Pueblo Relief Act in 1933, and established the Indian Emergency Conservation Work program, which created seventy-two camps on thirty-three reservations and employed eighty-five thousand Native Americans between 1933 and 1942. Under the program, Indians worked to improve roads, protect forests, construct dams, dig wells, and erect fences. Collier worked with Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace to assist Native Americans in purchasing purebred cattle to improve the quality of their herds, with Harry Hopkins, director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, to allocate relief funds to reservations, and with the Department of War to distribute surplus clothing and shoes. The Public Works Administration (PWA) employed Indians to construct hospitals, schools, and sewer systems on reservation lands, while the Resettlement Administration assisted them in improving water distribution. Collier also worked with Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and President Roosevelt to cancel Indian debts for roads, bridges, and irrigation systems. Although sweeping in scope, Collier’s programs were not always positive for Indians. In some cases the reforms drew Native Americans as individuals more tightly into wage-dependent work, while weakening existing tribal economies.

The pendulum swung briefly but sharply the other way in the 1950s, when the “termination” policy of the Eisenhower administration sought to end federal responsibility for tribes deemed able to fend for themselves. A total of 109 tribes were terminated, and lost title to 1.4 million acres of tribal land. Federal trust responsibility and supervision were halted on terminated reservations, along with federal health, education, and welfare programs and funds. The terminated tribes were assessed state taxes and subjected to state laws, as well as state criminal and civil jurisdictions. They lost sovereignty over all land that had been sold to both Indians and non-Indians. Most Indians reacted with alarm, and some of the terminations were reversed during the ensuing Kennedy administration of the early 1960s. Congress stopped the terminations in 1962, and in 1963 it reaffirmed the Winters’ decision that considered Indians the first appropriators of water on reservation lands.

Tribal autonomy was further protected by the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, which declared that the states could no longer extend civil and criminal jurisdiction over Indian lands without the tribes’ consent. Indian policy generally seemed to unfold politically along the same lines Lloyd Burton describes for water policy. “From the 1908 Winters decision up through the 1960s,” he writes, “the federal courts for the most part have tended steadfastly to uphold Indian water rights as preemptive federal obligations, while Congress and the executive—because of the Indians’ relative lack of political clout—have tended either to ignore the Indian right or to subvert it directly.”²² When the Congress and the Executive Branch had power, especially under Republican administrations, they gave Indian jurisdiction to the states, and the states then undercut Indian power. Throughout American history therefore, the judiciary has often been the strongest defender of Indian rights.

Despite this history, however, the Republican administration of Richard Nixon brought the protection of Indian autonomy, as well as the environment, to a high-water mark in the early 1970s. “Termination of tribal recognition will not be a policy objective and in no case will it be imposed without Indian consent,” Nixon had promised as a candidate. “… The right of self-determination of the Indian people will be respected and their participation in planning their own destiny will actively be encouraged.”²³ Indeed, after his election, the termination policy was decisively repudiated in the Menominee Restoration Act (1973), reversing for a Wisconsin tribe one of the largest terminations. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (1971) assigned 40 million acres and nearly one billion dollars to village and regional corporations managed by Alaska’s native peoples, laying the basis for autonomous development of indigenous economies and societies on an unprecedented scale.

Perhaps the most important Nixon policy in the long run was to encourage active participation by Indians in managing the federal health, education, and welfare programs provided for their benefit. Originally the administration offered a “takeover” bill, transferring to Indians full responsibility for managing services, with the federal government providing the funds along with technical assistance. But Indians considered the proposal too radical, fearing that it was but another step toward termination. Instead, they opted for a substitute bill providing for Indian management by contract under the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (1975). By sharing responsibility with federal agencies, most tribes quickly came to exercise substantial control over the governmental activities that most affected their daily lives and welfare. Such “co-management” soon became a model for all government agencies, and even the National Park Service has begun to promote active participation in policy formation and management by Indians within its purview.

From the 1970s to the present, American Indians have engaged in a variety of natural resource development and co-management projects. Both Indian and non-Indian development on reservation lands is subject to the environmental protection regulations of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977. The 310 Indian reservations include 6.3 million acres of commercial forests, 43 million acres of rangeland, and 3 million acres of farmland. They contain 20 percent of U.S. oil and natural gas reserves, one-third of the western states’ low-sulfur coal reserves, and one-half of all uranium reserves. Tribes have gathering, hunting, and fishing rights on their own lands and certain off-reservation rights on lands ceded to the United States. Tribal councils have the power to lease land to non-Indians for farming, ranching, logging, and mining.

Indian tribes are adversely affected by environmental pollution and degradation from adjacent lands. Shoshone-Bannock tribal lawyer Jeanette Wolfley states: “Due to the unique nature of tribal land tenure and tribal culture, tribes cannot simply relocate to new areas when their lands become contaminated, their water polluted, or their wildlife resources decimated.…”²⁴ Rivers and airsheds that abut or cross reservations may be contaminated from industrial pollution, logging debris, nuclear wastes, and weapons testing, while dams may impede fish runs and affect water levels and water quality. Off-reservation effects on wild animal and plant habitats can decrease the availability of foods and medicines necessary for cultural survival, affecting long-term tribal health. Both private corporations and federal agencies that regulate adjacent public lands are responsible for such impacts. In 1994, President Clinton instructed all federal agencies to implement programs in a manner that respected tribal sovereignty. They were directed to operate in a government to government relationship with the tribes, engage in the best practicable consultation with them, assess the impacts of federal decisions and programs on tribal lands, and review and remove procedural impediments to dealing effectively with tribes.

The tribes have the authority to regulate, manage, and protect resources on their own homelands. Many tribes have developed resource management programs to conserve and restore fisheries, forests, and waters on reservation lands. While some tribes have used their lands to increase profits through forestry and fishing, others, such as the Colville Confederated tribes of Washington, have engaged in sustainable forestry practices that harvest trees only as they are replaced in the growth cycle and have enacted fishing and hunting practices that conserve wildlife. Some tribes, such as the Blackfeet, Sioux, and Assiniboine, have enacted water quality management programs and others, such as the Cheyenne of Montana, have set stricter air pollution regulations than federal or state standards require.

Mineral resources constitute an important component in tribal land use and regulation. In 1975, tribal leaders formed the Council of Energy Resources Tribes (CERT) to coordinate leasing policies for oil, gas, uranium, geothermal, and mineral resources on Indian lands. In 1982, the Indian Mineral Development Act was passed, allowing tribes to enter into joint ventures with non-Indians. The tribes receive royalties on the leaseholder’s income. Uranium mining on Indian lands, begun in the 1940s and 1950s, resulted in deadly consequences to Native Americans who worked in the mines, owing to continued exposure to radioactivity. Although too late to benefit those who died from radiation-induced cancers in those years, in 1990 Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, entitling survivors and their beneficiaries to receive $100,000 in compensation if they worked in the mines between 1947 and 1971 and received doses of radiation higher than federally specified limits or contracted cancer. The act, however, did not compensate for the long-term effects of uranium mining on reservation lands and waters and their cumulative effects on human lives.

Coal and oil extraction is a controversial dimension of energy resources development on Indian lands. In 1969, the Peabody Coal Company began mining coal in accordance with leases on Hopi and Navajo reservation lands. While some Indians benefited from the profits in the form of jobs, homes, and schools, others complained that their sacred lands were being desecrated in pursuit of power for white society’s cities and lifestyles. Similarly, in Alaska, native peoples, conservationists, and developers disagree frequently over such issues as drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, clear-cutting of timber in the Tongass National Forest, and development in the Copper River delta. Such issues illustrate ongoing environmental and natural resource conflicts among private industry, the federal government, the states, and Indian sovereignty. Anishinabe Indian advocate Winona LaDuke concludes: “People of color and indigenous people who have been marginalized historically … may offer leadership for the kind of structural change that we need to make. We need to expand the vision of the social movements in this country to allow for that voice to come forth.”²⁵

The native peoples of the United States resisted and survived a series of destructive American policies—military subjugation, removal to reservations, dependency on government bureaucracies, assimilation to majority norms, and termination of tribal organization and government support. Gradually, in the twentieth century, shifting government policies permitted a reassertion of Indian identity and interests, both cultural and political, a regeneration of tribal organization and activity, and growing autonomy in co-managing and managing their daily life and natural resources. In recent years, Indians have worked toward a balance between tribal welfare and environmental conservation. Their expulsion in the creation of national parks dramatized an ambiguous relation to mainstream conservationism that still persists. When the Wilderness Act of 1964 brought Thoreau’s dream of preserving wildness to its greatest triumph since creation of the national parks, the act’s authors defined wilderness as an area “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Once again Indians were erased from the wilderness.