Reservation Policy Quotes
Standing Bear and some other Indians left the Indian territory where the government had assigned their tribe and with an invitation went to live on another Indian reservation designated for another tribe. The Government sent the military police to take the Indians back to the Indian Territory. The Indians claimed that they had the right to live wherever they wanted and did not have to live in the place the government had assigned them. The Indians won and since then, Indians like all other Americans were free to go wherever in the country that they wanted so long s they were not trespassing or violating other laws.
By 1887 the government behavior towards Indians had come far from the Andrew Jackson days of Indian Removal and the government and reformers were trying to do better with Indian policy. This law was very well intended, and yet angered some Indians and tribes Where there was good agricultural or grazing land, the law required that the land be divided amongst the individual Indians who would thereafter own the deed and control the land. The problem had been that there was no concept of individual land ownership in most tribes. There were no deeds and whites would buy land unknowingly (and sometime knowingly who claimed to (or did) speak for the tribe. With this law, farm and grazing land would pass to the ownership of individual Indians. There are over 500 different Indian tribes—nations in America and they are very diverse. This law was good for some tribes and negative for others. With no communal say in the use of the land, the reservation was like a white farming community where the individual was dominant and not the town, group or culture. It minimized the dependency that Indians had on each other and the group. Within individual tribes there were often those Indians who preferred collective ownership and those who preferred individual ownership as provided in this legislation.
