The Relocation of Native Peoples of North America by Judith Edwards

Author:Judith Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Enslow Publishing, LLC

A Lakota Sioux camp near the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.

This political cartoon shows the corrupt agent profiting while the Sioux Indian starves.

Pursued relentlessly after their victory at Little Big Horn, the Sioux ended up by losing a full third of their reservation and all their hunting rights in Montana and Wyoming. The next reduction came when settlers complained to the government about the Sioux reservation being in the way of their emigration to eastern Dakota. The Sioux were then forced to create a sixty-mile-wide corridor right through the middle and the farthest western portion of their reservation. The remainder was divided up into the five small reservations they occupy today. And that was not all—the Dawes Act was enacted and the remaining reservation was divided into 160-acre parcels and what was left over was sold to whites.5

On the Sioux and almost all other reservations, Indians had no way to work or hunt for their own food. Many reservations had rules that would not allow American Indians to leave the boundaries. The reservation Indians became totally dependent on government rations. They lost a sense of purpose, hope, and self-esteem and were reduced often to begging and petty stealing just to fill their stomachs. They suffered tuberculosis and other diseases, malnutrition, and alcoholism. The government rations were often cut in half or replaced with spoiled food and shoddy goods because of widespread corruption among officials and agents employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Though there were a few good and honest agents, they were often removed because the middlemen who supplied the reservations wanted to continue to put the money in their own pockets.

Economic Difficulties

Reservations became places of chronic poverty, with no work available. “In the decade after the Civil War, behind-the-scenes corruption in the Indian Bureau went from bad to worse,” says Peter Nabokov.6 Members of Congress, dishonest suppliers of the food and other goods, and Indian agents often came up with schemes to divert the money owed to the reservations.

In 1867 a group of citizens from the Eastern states formed the Indian Peace Commission, to find out if the shocking rumors of poverty and poor health on the reservations were true. In 1871 President Grant launched a similar investigation through the Board of Indian Commissioners, which would oversee the Bureau of Indian Affairs. These civilian groups discovered that many of the Indians were near starvation because corrupt agents had stolen the money allocated for buying supplies for the reservation.

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