Ojibwe in Minnesota

The Indian New Deal

40  pe Ople Of minnes Ot a land, and watched the dismantling of their long-standing warrior and political culture. At the same time, the U.S. government, religious missionaries, and educators sought to assimilate native peoples, attacking the very fabric of Ojibwe society, language, and culture. Change eventually came to the Ojibwe in the 1930s, as part of the Indian New Deal. The Indian New Deal When John Collier assumed control of the Bureau of Indian Affairs during the Great Depression, he engineered the most substantial change in U.S. Indian policy to date. The bia went from being the supervisory agency that oversaw all Indian matters in the country to being an advisory agency that empowered and assisted tribes in their dealings with the U.S. government. It was a profound change. The biggest part of Collier’s policy shift came in 1934 ojibwefamilyat GrandMarais, 1900 the Ojib we  41 with passage of the Indian ReorganizationAct,also known as the Wheeler-Howard Bill. It was part of a series of reforms sometimes called the Indian New Deal. The Indian ReorganizationAct (ira) ended the policy of allotment and enabled tribes to establish modern tribal governments with their own representatives.The courts of Indian offenses,Indian police, and Indian agents were no longer needed. Indians would manage their own internal affairs, governing themselves and managing their own land.All of the Ojibwe tribes in Minnesota voted to accept reorganization under the act and created modern constitution-based democratic tribal governments,much as they remain today.29 One entity formed under the ir a in 1934 was the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe (mct ),which represented all of the Ojibwe reservations in Minnesota except Red Lake. The driving concept behind the mct was that each member reservation had thesamelanguageand cultureand that acombined tribal government operation would reduce waste and bureaucratic duplications. The result was almost the opposite , however: all of the member tribes had their own reservation business committees to manage local affairs, but those local reservation governments needed approval from indian policeforce, Whiteearth Reservation, 1908 42  pe Ople Of minnes Ot a the mct and the bia for all major actions,from funding initiatives to tribal enrollment.Hampered by the bureaucracy at the mct , some tribes have sought to disband the organization or withdraw from it. But without approval from the bia and all member tribes in the mct ,constitutional reform and withdrawal have been stopped every time.30 While the Indian Reorganization Act was largely positive , it created some new tensions in Minnesota’s Ojibwe communities. In 1934, the Mille Lacs Ojibwe were recognized and organized as a sovereign native nation in the eyes of the federal government, along with the other Ojibwe reservations in Minnesota. However, the separate and autonomous Ojibwe communities at Sandy Lake,East Lake, Lake Lena, and Isle were not recognized as independent under the act.They were simply lumped together with Mille Lacs as communities within the same reservation. Sandy Lake,which had always been a sovereign group with its own leadership tradition and reservation, now found itself a smaller and less integral part of a larger Indian political structure. Its traditional leaders no longer made primary decisions about their community. Within the Mille Lacs government, Sandy Lake had a district representative but not autonomous control. The ir a thus created intratribal tensions at the same time that it reaffirmed the land tenure and sovereignty of Mille Lacs and the surrounding Ojibwe communities.The issue of independence for various Indian communities in the Mille Lacs Reservation is still unresolved for many Indians enrolled there, although changes in the current political configuration of the reservation now seem unlikely. The work of crafting native governments under the Indian Reorganization Act is ongoing.In Minnesota,Ojibwe tribal governments remain modeled on the American corporate governance system. Generally, they do not contain attributes of traditional Ojibwe leadership structure and procedure. However, there are some notable exceptions. ...