Indian Appropriation Act Of 1871 Significance
Argelia Long
Negotiations at the Fort Laramie Peace Treaty, ending Red Cloud's War, 1868, one of the last major treaties signed before Congress voted to end U.S. treaty-making with the Indian tribal Nations. Photo by Alexander Gardner. 1868. Photo Archives, National Museum of the American Indian P10112
These discussions occurred late in the Congressional session, when lawmakers were working feverishly to pass appropriations bills and conclude business. Without taking the yeas and nays, lawmakers adopted a resolution to prohibit further treaties with Indian tribes, tacking the measure on to the Indian Appropriations Bill of 1871, which President Grant signed into law.
Section 1. Policy. The United States has a unique political and legal relationship with federally recognized Tribal Nations, as set forth in the Constitution of the United States, statutes, treaties, Executive Orders, and court decisions. The Federal Government is committed to protecting the rights and ensuring the well-being of Tribal Nations while respecting Tribal sovereignty and inherent rights of self-determination. In recognition of that commitment and to fulfill the solemn obligations it entails, executive departments and agencies (agencies) must help advance educational equity, excellence, and economic opportunity for Native American students, whether they attend public schools in urban, suburban, or rural communities; are homeschooled; attend primary and secondary schools operated or funded by the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) of the Department of the Interior; or attend postsecondary educational institutions, including Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs).
For more than a century, the United States imposed educational policies designed to assimilate Native peoples into predominant United States culture that devastated Native American students and their families. Beginning with the Indian Civilization Act of 1819, the United States enacted laws and implemented policies establishing and supporting Indian boarding schools across the Nation. From 1871 onward, federally run Indian boarding schools were used to culturally assimilate Native American children who were forcibly removed from their families and communities and relocated to distant residential facilities where their Native identities, languages, traditions, and beliefs were forcibly suppressed. The conditions in these schools were usually harsh, and sometimes abusive and deadly. Although these policies have ended, their effects and resulting trauma reverberate in Native American communities even today, creating specific challenges that merit Federal attention and response.
During the global COVID-19 pandemic, Tribal Nations raced to protect Tribal members and their way of life. Tribal elders are often the keepers of Tribal culture and are critical for the preservation of Native languages, as the vitality of Native culture is inseparably tied to Native languages. Accordingly, my Administration is committed to supporting preservation and revitalization of Native languages. This includes honoring the vibrancy, importance, and strength of Native languages and the traditions, values, and cultural practices that accompany them.
In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified long-standing educational inequities that disproportionally affect Native American communities and burden Native American students. In particular, Native American children face significant learning disruption as the digital divide and lack of educational resources put remote learning out of reach for too many. Native American students experienced the greatest decline in undergraduate enrollment in higher education from 2020 to 2021 compared to other student groups. These inequities compound the effects of other disparities faced by Native American women and girls in particular. The spike in gender-based violence during the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified safety concerns for Native American women and girls, who were already victimized at higher rates than other women in the United States.
The Federal Government must put strong focus on early childhood and K-12 educational opportunities. These are important to developing and strengthening Native American communities, and they set the stage for educational advancement and career development, including opportunities to attend TCUs.
Sec. 6. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
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The treaties marked a significant shift in the uneasy balance between whites and the Natives of the Olympic Peninsula, requiring that the Indians concentrate in two widely separated and very remote communities (the first road to Neah Bay was not completed until the 1930s) andopening the land tosettlement and exploitation by white immigrants who envisioned themselves as pioneers in a virgin wilderness. (For more on white settlement see the Northwest Homesteader curriculum packet about settlers on the Olympic Peninsula. To get an understanding of how one industry exploited the resources see Evergreen State: Exploring the History of Washington's Forests. Both packets are on the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest's website.) The treaties also highlighted some of the inherent paradoxes and contradictions within federal policies toward Native Americans and demonstrated how well-intentioned policies dictated from Washington, D.C., were often implemented in ways that did little to protect Indians. At the same time, the experiences of the Makah, Quileute, and Hoh demonstrate how the resiliency of Native cultures sometimes forced the government to make qualified amends for the actions of aggressive treaty negotiators: Within 50 years executive orders issued by the presidents of the United States expanded the Makah Reservation and recognized the integrity and independence of the Quileute and Hoh tribes by providing them with reservations in their traditional homelands (albeit tiny fragments of what had been surrendered under Steven's treaties). And, perhaps remarkably, in the case of the Makah and the Quileute, these reservation expansions came at the expense of whites who had settled on Indian lands.
Steven's treaty negotiations should be understood in the context of the times and with an awareness of the circumstances-some unique to the region-that complicated Indian-white relations in Oregon and Washington. First, as noted above, federal policy toward Indians was undergoing a significant shift away from a policy of removal and toward a reservation policy. Just what that would look like, however, was not clear. Under the U.S. Constitution, Indian treaties had to be approved by Congress, and Stevens was aware that Congress was interested in limiting the number of reservations and had recently rejected treaties that had set up a series of small reservations in Western Oregon. Despite this, Stevens and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, George Manypenny, had agreed that some kind of reservation system would be appropriate for the territory but Manypenny left the final formulation of that up to Stevens, urging him to keep costs down and create as few reservations as possible. To help the governor draft acceptable treaties, Manypenny sent him copies of treaties that had recently been negotiated with several Plains Indian tribes, including one with the Omaha. (See Treaty with the Omaha, 1854.) Initially, Stevens envisioned two reservations in Washington, one east of the Cascades and one on Puget Sound. He planned to negotiate first with the Puget Sound Indians in the winter of 1854-55 and then move east of the Cascades in the spring, with negotiations on the remote Olympic Peninsula wedged between the two.
Stevens was also dealing with increasing demands from white American settlers to resolve growing conflicts with the Indians in the territory. Those conflicts ranged from personal and sometimes violent disputes between individual settlers and Native Americans to more administrative problems such as resolving questions of Indian land title. As Steven's noted in his first address to the territorial legislature on February 28, 1854:
The Indian title has not been extinguished, nor even a law passed to provide for its extinguishment east of the Cascade Mountains. Under the land law of Congress it is impossible to secure titles to the land, and thus the growth of towns and villages is obstructed, as well as the development of the resources of the Territory.
In the same address he categorized the Washington Indians as "for the most part a docile, harmless race, disposed to obey the laws and be good members of the State," but recommended "ample appropriations to actually extinguish their title throughout the Territory, reserving to them such portions as are indispensable to their comfort and subsistence." The demands to push the Indians off their lands to make way for whites were often tempered by the recognition that white settlers relied on inexpensive Indian labor. As historian Alexandra Harmon has noted, "None of the American [treaty] negotiators intended to cut off relations between white and red people; they simply wanted to limit and regulate relations." In fact, although the federal government sought to concentrate Indians in a few large reservations, many of the white settlers sought the opposite: more small reservations nearer their communities.
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