A New Deal for the American Indian

In the final paragraph of the address he delivered at the Democratic National Convention on July 2, 1932, Democratic presidential candidate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt concluded his speech with the words: “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.” That promise of a “new deal” was taken up by his campaign, the press, the public, and later historians of the era to describe the wide scope of economic experiments, reforms, and alphabet-soup programs prescribed by FDR as remedies for the Great Depression. The federal government’s relations with Indian tribes would also undergo a radical departure from policies and practices that could be traced back to the earliest years of European colonization and the foundation of the American Republic. Although far from perfect and predictably paternalistic, the Roosevelt Administration’s dealings with the aboriginal peoples living on reservations in the United States most definitively constituted a “New…