The many congressional acts and plans for the administration of Indian affairs in the West often resulted in confusion and misapplication. Only rarely were the ideals of those who sincerely wished to help American Indians realized. This book, first printed as a part of the hearings before the House of Representatives Committee on Indian Affairs in 1934, is a detailed and fully documented account of the Dawes Act of 1887 and its consequences up to 1900. D. S. Otis's investigation of the motives of the reformers who supported the Dawes Act indicates that it failed to fulfill many of the hopes of its sponsors. The reasons for the act's failure were complex but predictable. Many Indians were not culturally prepared for severalty. Provisions in the act for leasing or selling their land enabled many to circumvent the responsibilities of private ownership, which reformers and bureaucrats alike had thought would provide a “civilizing” influence. The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Land is the only full-scale study of the Dawes Act and its impact upon American Indian society and culture. With the addition of an introduction, revised footnotes, and an index by Francis Paul Prucha, S. J., it is essential to any understanding of the present circumstances and problems of American Indians today.

From the prehistoric peoples who inhabited the Americas at the end of the last Ice Age to the American Indian of the 20th century, this book encompasses the whole historical and cultural range of Indian life in Corth, Central, and South America. 32 pages of black-and-white photographs.

If you want to know why American Indians have the highest rates of poverty of any racial group, why suicide is the leading cause of death among Indian men, why native women are two and a half times more likely to be raped than the national average and why gang violence affects American Indian youth more than any other group, do not look to history. There is no doubt that white settlers devastated Indian communities in the 19th, and early 20th centuries. But it is our policies today—denying Indians ownership of their land, refusing them access to the free market and failing to provide the police and legal protections due to them as American citizens—that have turned reservations into small third-world countries in the middle of the richest and freest nation on earth. The tragedy of our Indian policies demands reexamination immediately—not only because they make the lives of millions of American citizens harder and more dangerous—but also because they represent a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong with modern liberalism. They are the result of decades of politicians and bureaucrats showering a victimized people with money and cultural sensitivity instead of what they truly need—the education, the legal protections and the autonomy to improve their own situation. If we are really ready to have a conversation about American Indians, it is time to stop bickering about the names of football teams and institute real reforms that will bring to an end this ongoing national shame.

History of the relationship between the US Government--and Indians of the US.

This first book-length study of "Indian country" explains why the federal government failed to protect the congressionally-designated refuge (west of Missouri and Arkansas) for displaced Native Americans. Argues that the federal policy was flawed from the start and that the supposed refuge endured only until the needs of westward expansion made those promises inconvenient.

Winner of the 2021 Bancroft Prize and the 2021 Ridenhour Book Prize Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction Named a Top Ten Best Book of 2020 by the Washington Post and Publishers Weekly and a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2020 A masterful and unsettling history of “Indian Removal,” the forced migration of Native Americans across the Mississippi River in the 1830s and the state-sponsored theft of their lands. In May 1830, the United States launched an unprecedented campaign to expel 80,000 Native Americans from their eastern homelands to territories west of the Mississippi River. In a firestorm of fraud and violence, thousands of Native Americans lost their lives, and thousands more lost their farms and possessions. The operation soon devolved into an unofficial policy of extermination, enabled by US officials, southern planters, and northern speculators. Hailed for its searing insight, Unworthy Republic transforms our understanding of this pivotal period in American history.