Reserves

The creation of reserves in the era of white expansion was initially intended to keep Indians completely separated from white society. Later it was believed that the marginalization of the native culture would accelerate the incorporation of Indians into the dominant society.

The idea of establishing exclusive areas for indigenous peoples originated in the “cities of prayer” in the 17th century. In the decades immediately following American independence, the first reserves were established in the northeast in the modern sense. As the demand for land by the whites increased, the authorities renounced the appearance ofining tribal integrity, despite the fact that they used to be part of the homeland of each group. In a few decades, native peoples of farmers and foresters settled in unknown territories, overturning thousands of years of cultural adaptation to specific environments.

In 1825, the United States government proposed a definitive solution to the "Indian question": establishing a large Indian country west of Mississippi. The proposal, which was officially known as Indian territory in 1834, included the present-day Kansas, Oklahoma and parts of Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming. The five south-eastern villages that were displaced received the first reserves. Over a period of time, they achieved a higher level of economic prosperity and literacy than some nearby states. In any case, the changes caused by the war of secession in the sixties of the 19th century led to the economic crisis. At the end of the war, the tribes had to sign new agreements and ced land to the Comanches, Kiowas, and Cheyen, as well as to remote communities in the north. More than 65 different tribes and bands lived in the future Oklahoma, along with farmers, hunters, friends, enemies and strangers.

Even before the Civil War, white colonization occupied Indian territory. The Indian lands considered “inviolable” were gradually converted into states, and in 1907, when Oklahoma obtained this status, the Indian territory disappeared. The 29 tribes of Oklahoma controlled only 26,000 hectares in 1975.

To accelerate the assimilation of the Indians, tribal lands were allocated to individual owners, which increased the loss of territory. The Dawes General Distribution Act of 1887 aimed to divide tribal land into plots of no more than 64 hectares, a policy that departed from Indian decentralization customs. The result was the loss of 38 million acres of reserve land. The last attempt to dismantle these lands was in 1953, when the U.S. Congress decided to re-buy the land from the reserves. Prior to the failure of this policy, 19 tribes lost more than one million hectares of land.

Over the past decades, this trend has been fostered through the resolution of certain territorial conflicts. Historically, Canada has followed a similar process of confining Indians in reserves, although with less severity than in the United States. According to the pact established in the early 1990s, the Northwest Territories should be divided between the West Indians (Denes and Métis) and the East Inuit.