Indian Reorganization Act of 1934: History, Provisions and Legacy

In the spring of 1934, Congress did something it had almost never done. It handed Native nations a ballot and asked whether they wanted a law written about them.

On June 18, 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Indian Reorganization Act, also called the Wheeler-Howard Act. It was the centerpiece of what became known as the Indian New Deal.

It was a sincere attempt to reverse a catastrophe. It was also written in Washington, and plenty of Indigenous people said so at the time.

The Wreckage It Was Meant to Repair

For decades before 1934, federal policy aimed at breaking up tribal land and breaking down tribal life. The General Allotment Act of 1887, known as the Dawes Act, carved reservations into individual parcels and opened the leftover acreage to non-Native settlers.

Wagons and horses crowd the grounds at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, during the July 1901 land lottery registration — Homesteaders crowd Fort Sill in July 1901 to register for a lottery. Congress had allotted Kiowa, Comanche and Apache families their individual parcels, then opened the roughly two million acres left over to settlers. That is the allotment system the Indian Reorganization Act was written to stop. (Photo Credit: George A. Addison, photographer. Missouri History Museum, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.)

Native nations lost more than 90 million acres, over two-thirds of their land base, according to testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. The 1928 Meriam Report then documented the result on reservations: deep poverty, poor health and failing schools.

For the longer story of how reservations came to be, read Indian Reservations: A Look Back.

John Collier and the Indian New Deal

Roosevelt appointed John Collier as Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1933. Collier had spent years campaigning against allotment and admired Native cultures, which set him apart from most of his predecessors.

The agency he ran was then called the Office of Indian Affairs, part of the Interior Department. It wasn’t renamed the Bureau of Indian Affairs until 1947.

Collier’s first draft was ambitious. The version Congress passed, named for Senator Burton K. Wheeler and Representative Edgar Howard, was heavily revised.

What the Act Actually Did

The law was a package of land, government and credit provisions. Its main pieces were these:

It ended allotment. Section 1 stopped the division of reservation land into individual parcels, and the act preserved the trust status of Indian lands.
It let tribes rebuild their land base. Section 5 authorized the Secretary of the Interior to take land into trust for tribes and individual Native people, and that land became exempt from state and local taxation.
It created a credit fund. Congress authorized $10 million for a revolving fund of loans to tribal corporations for economic development.
It gave Native people hiring preference. Qualified Indians received preference for jobs in the Indian Service.
It offered tribes constitutions and charters. A tribe that accepted the act could write a constitution, subject to federal approval, and request a corporate charter.

You’ll often read that the act built fences, dug wells and cut roads. That work came mostly through separate New Deal relief programs, including the Indian Emergency Conservation Work program, often called the Indian CCC.

Civilian Conservation Corps workers build a stone wall and dig a trench on the Lake Traverse Reservation, circa 1935 — A Civilian Conservation Corps crew builds a stone wall on the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota, around 1935. Collier's Indian Division of the CCC put thousands of Native men to work on reservation roads, dams and fences, and it paid wages when few jobs existed. (Photo Credit: Sisseton Indian Agency, Bureau of Indian Affairs. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 75 (ARC 285787). Public domain.)

Alaska and Oklahoma were handled separately. Congress extended similar provisions through the Alaska Reorganization Act of 1936 and the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act of 1936.

The Vote: One Ballot Per Reservation

Here’s the part that sets this law apart. It would apply to a reservation only if its members didn’t vote it down.

The Interior Department’s own count lists 258 elections between 1934 and 1936. In that tally, 181 tribes, representing about 129,750 people, accepted the act, and 77 tribes, representing about 86,365 people, rejected it.

Other historians give slightly different totals, but the rough proportion holds. Close to a third of the nations that voted said no.

Women voted alongside men, with at least one exception. Isleta Pueblo argued that its custom didn’t allow women to vote.

A tribe got only one vote. A no meant the nation kept its treaty and legal rights but forfeited the act’s new benefits, and it couldn’t vote again without a special act of Congress.

The first constitution written under the act belonged to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation in Montana. Members adopted it on October 4, 1935, by a vote of 549 to 123.

The Jicarilla Apache Nation ratified its constitution on July 5, 1937. The vote came after the Tribal Council asked Commissioner Collier to schedule it.

Why Some Nations Said No

The opposition wasn’t ignorance. Plenty of tribal leaders read the bill closely and didn’t like what they saw.

Collier held ten regional meetings across the country in early 1934 to discuss the bill. Even so, many tribal leaders felt shut out of the drafting, and as Oglala Lakota journalist Tim Giago has written, skeptics called it “the Indian Raw Deal.”

Portrait of Henry Chee Dodge, chairman of the Navajo Tribal Council, in 1946 — Henry Chee Dodge, chairman of the Navajo Tribal Council, photographed at Window Rock in 1946. (Photo Credit: Bureau of Indian Affairs, May 10, 1946. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (catalog.archives.gov/id/290020621). Public domain.)

The constitutions the act offered followed a federal template. They put elected councils at the center and left key decisions under the Secretary of the Interior’s review, which didn’t sit well with nations that already had their own ways of governing.

The Navajo Nation, the largest tribe in the country, rejected the act by a narrow margin. Federal officials had just pushed Navajo families to cut their sheep and goat herds sharply over erosion concerns.

The families who depended on those animals didn’t trust the man running the program. Many feared the act would give him more control over stock reduction.

The Navajo tribal council reorganized itself on its own terms in 1937. It never adopted a constitution under the act.

Standing Rock members also voted the act down, along with Turtle Mountain and Spirit Lake in North Dakota. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe didn’t approve its modern constitution until 1959, and that document states in its own text that it isn’t an IRA constitution.

Pick-Sloan and Oahe: The Next Federal Project

The Indian New Deal didn’t shield tribes from the next big federal project. The Oahe Dam is the clearest example.

Oahe wasn’t a product of the Indian Reorganization Act. Congress authorized it in the Flood Control Act of 1944 as part of the Pick-Sloan plan, and construction began in 1948.

President Kennedy dedicated the dam in 1962. By then the reservoir stretched about 231 miles up the Missouri River.

President John F. Kennedy studies a model of Oahe Dam at the August 1962 dedication near Pierre, South Dakota — President John F. Kennedy studies an Army Corps of Engineers model at the Oahe Dam dedication near Pierre, South Dakota, on August 17, 1962. Interior Secretary Stewart Udall stood beside him. The reservoir behind the dam flooded bottomland on the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River reservations. (Photo Credit: Robert Knudsen, White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Public domain.)

The cost fell hard on Native nations. Oahe flooded roughly 56,000 acres at Standing Rock and forced about 190 families off the reservation’s best bottomland.

At Cheyenne River the dam flooded more than 100,000 acres. Congressional findings later noted the tribe got none of the flood-control or irrigation benefits the project was built to deliver.

Historian Michael Lawson, author of the best-known study of the plan, found that the Missouri River dams shrank the land base of five Sioux reservations by about 6 percent and forced roughly a third of their people to move. Standing Rock Sioux scholar Vine Deloria Jr. called Pick-Sloan the most destructive single act the United States ever committed against a tribe.

Congress eventually passed compensation laws. The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe received more than $290 million in 2000, and the Santee Sioux Tribe received about $4.7 million in 2002.

Lawson also ties this history to the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests. He argues you can’t understand Standing Rock’s wariness of the Army Corps of Engineers without it.

For more on the nation itself, visit our Sioux Nation page.

A Mixed Legacy

Historians still argue about the act. The honest summary is that it did real good and fell short of its own promises.

On the plus side, it stopped allotment and let the tribal land base begin to grow again. It also gave many nations formal governing structures the federal government recognized, plus a source of credit.

On the minus side, it promised self-government and delivered something closer to supervised self-government. Federal officials kept a heavy hand over constitutions, budgets and decisions.

The councils it created also didn’t always match how a community had traditionally made choices. Collier himself drew sharp reactions, with some Native people seeing an ally and others, especially in the Southwest, unable to forgive the livestock reductions.

From Reorganization to Self-Determination

The next big shift came decades later. President Gerald Ford signed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act on January 4, 1975, and it’s the same law people call Public Law 93-638.

It let tribes contract to run programs the Bureau of Indian Affairs had operated, known today as 638 contracts. The BIA didn’t disappear, but its role changed as tribal governments took over more of the work.

The Act Today: Carcieri v. Salazar

The 1934 law still shapes Native land rights, and Section 5 is the reason. In Carcieri v. Salazar in 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Interior Secretary could take land into trust only for tribes that were under federal jurisdiction in 1934.

The decision created two classes of nations. Tribes recognized or restored after 1934 faced new legal hurdles when they sought trust land for housing, schools and economic development.

Bills to fix the ruling have been introduced in Congress for years. The most recent, the Tribal Trust Land Reaffirmation Act (H.R. 5257), was introduced in September 2025 and would protect lands already in trust.

Frequently Asked Questions

It ended the allotment of reservation land, preserved the trust status of Indian lands, and let the Interior Secretary acquire new land in trust for tribes. It also created a $10 million credit fund, gave Native people hiring preference in the Indian Service, and offered tribes a path to written constitutions and corporate charters.

The bill was introduced by Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana and Representative Edgar Howard of Nebraska, so Congress first knew it as the Wheeler-Howard Act. Historians often call it the Indian New Deal because it came from John Collier and the Roosevelt administration’s reform agenda. Today most people simply say Indian Reorganization Act, or IRA.

Interior Department figures show 258 tribal elections held between 1934 and 1936. Of those, 181 tribes accepted the act and 77 rejected it, including the Navajo Nation, the country’s largest tribe. Other historians report slightly different totals, but roughly one in three of the nations that voted said no.

Navajo families distrusted John Collier and the Indian Service after federal officials pushed deep cuts to their sheep and goat herds in 1933 and 1934. Many feared the act would give the government more control over stock reduction. The vote was close, and the Navajo never adopted a constitution under the act.

No. Congress authorized Oahe in the Flood Control Act of 1944 as part of the Pick-Sloan plan, and construction began in 1948. The dam flooded about 56,000 acres at Standing Rock and more than 100,000 acres at Cheyenne River. It fell on some of the same nations the Indian New Deal was meant to help.

Historians describe it as mixed. It stopped allotment, let tribes rebuild their land base, and created new governing structures and credit. But it was drafted in Washington, federal officials kept heavy oversight, and its constitutions often fit a federal template instead of tribal tradition. Many nations still debate whether it strengthened or constrained self-government.

Yes. Section 5, the land-into-trust provision, still governs how tribes add to their homelands. In Carcieri v. Salazar in 2009, the Supreme Court limited it to tribes under federal jurisdiction in 1934, and bills to reverse that ruling have been introduced in Congress ever since, including H.R. 5257 in September 2025.

Sources and Further Reading

For the larger sweep of this history, start with our review of Indigenous Continent.