Over the course of the creation of the Indian Reorganization Act, its eventual adoption and usage by Native Americans, a few critical consistently influenced how events unfolded. A few of the most notable of these themes are listed below.
The previous policy of assimilation was disastrous for Native American communities over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries. As a central piece of this overall goal, allotment was the practice of dividing tribal and reservation lands and allotting them to individual Native Americans and their family, with the intention of converting these individuals into model homesteaders. By breaking up communal land ownership, many Native Americans lost the support system that the tribe provided. Alongside this, excess lands that were not converted into private allotments were sold by the federal government to settlers and companies seeking to work the lands for themselves. The final result was a massive decrease in Native American land ownership by the time the Indian Reorganization Act was established. Traditional Native American cultural systems were similarly disrupted. Allotment policies were also paired with other assimilationist strategies, most notably Indian boarding schools, which attempted to replace Native American culture with Anglo-American customs. Assimilationist methods were standard by the 1930's, informing how key legislators shaped the finalized Indian Reorganization Act.
Throughout the entire process of making federal legislation into a reality, policymakers time and time again failed to utilize the perspectives of Native Americans, despite the fact that the Indian Reorganization Act would chiefly concern them. The Meriam Report was an obvious example of this, with only a single Native American individual on the staff that created it, with no part on the perspectives on those interviewed being present in the final report as well. Alongside this, Native Americans were categorized based on how much “Indian blood” they had in them, with people with more white blood being deemed more competent. Competency was tied to “mixed-blood” status, and the final draft of the Indian Reorganization Act claimed that Native Americans included “all other persons of one-half or more Indian blood.” Blood status became the federal standard for who was a Native American and therefore, a metric of who was capable of successfully navigating American legislation and who wasn’t. While this was something that was present in earlier American society, the Indian Reorganization Act reinforced this via its specific inclusion of equating blood status to competency.
This legalistic language became a tangible barrier to the progress of Native American societies when legislation attempting to secure rights and funding for individual tribes met resistance by legislators who didn’t trust Native Americans to handle their own affairs. Alongside this, legislators were often skeptical of the usefulness of traditional Native American governing structures, usually considering them to be backwards and only good for promoting negative “tribalism.” Time and time again throughout the process of crafting and passing the Indian Reorganization Act, various legislators and critics consistently referred to competency or the lack thereof on the part of Native Americans as an indication of whether or not proactive legislation would be of any help.
Paternalism stands out as a major obstacle to creating effective and beneficial federal policy with regards to Native Americans. Throughout the entire process of crafting legislation, the officials in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and both chambers of Congress made their decisions and drafted the specific policies of the Indian Reorganization Act with the belief that they had a complete understanding of what life was like for Native Americans, despite the fact that they often did not. As a result, very few Native Americans were consulted for this process, ultimately leading to difficulties when actually involving them during congresses to inform them of the contents of the IRA. This is incredibly important, as it ties to legislative distrust over Native Americans and their "competency" in navigating the American legal and economic system.