The New Deal and Alaskan Natives, 1936-1945

Abstract

ON APRIL 21, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed John Collier as commissioner of Indian affairs. During the previous decade Collier had been executive secretary of the American Indian Defense Association, an organization that opposed the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887.' This legislation had destroyed much of the reservation system in the United States by abolishing tribal governments and providing the Indians with 160-acre, or smaller, homesteads. The Dawes Act was part of a broader effort by nineteenth-century Indian reformers to promote the objective of assimilation. Collier believed that the Dawes Act and similar efforts had led to poverty, landlessness, and the general social disorientation of native Americans. Shortly after taking office, he met with officials in the Department of the Interior and formulated a new federal Indian policy based on the concept of cultural pluralism. The centerpiece of this policy-the Indian New Deal-was the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which encouraged the use of reservations as homelands where tribes could engage in self-government and cooperative economic activity.2 Historians have recently provided new insights concerning the Indian New Deal, but they have neglected to analyze carefully how it effected the Eskimos, Aleuts, and Indians who resided in the territory