The Indian Reorganization Act was a piece of legislation that effected many different facets of Native American life and heavily influenced the relationship between the federal government and Native American societies, making it difficult to easily label it as a net positive or net negative.
One of the few easy conclusions to be made about the Indian Reorganization Act was that the end of the policy of allotment was an overall beneficial effect for Native American communities across the United States. The halting of land lost by these communities, alongside an open attempt to preserve tribal entities represented a crucial shift in American policy and deserves to be viewed as a net positive when considering the earlier effects of allotment and the later effects of termination policy.
Despite the positive outcome of ending allotment, critical issues raised by Native Americans at the various congresses during the legislation making process went unanswered by the final Indian Reorganization Act. Requests for stronger land and water rights, greater access to education opportunities, and a resolution to the "checkerboarding" issue on reservations often were ignored by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the federal government following the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act. As a result, many Native American communities continued to exist in a state of economic disrepair.
Federal paternalism continued to play a prominent role in shaping the outcome of the Indian Reorganization Act. Despite the good intentions of individuals such as Collier, the purposeful lack of including Native Americans in crafting the IRA contributed to an inability to cooperate with Native American societies. These viewpoints persisted well afterwards as well, and assimilationist beliefs by Bureau of Indian Affairs staff and key individuals in Congress and American society at large also went unchallenged as time went on, making a wholesale commitment to the "tribal alternative" that the IRA advocated for less potent.
Despite these drawbacks, one important positive benefit of the process of crafting the IRA originated from the congresses held to rally Native American support. These congresses served as what historian Ronald Satz called a "foot-in-the-door for later claims to Indian sovereignty and self-determination," helping to legitimize the process of consulting Native Americans even though the ultimate goal of these congresses were more to acquire approval from Native Americans rather than gather useful criticism and insight. As a result, consultations involving Native Americans continued as a more regular practice following the congresses held by Collier's administration, giving Native Americans a more active role in policy-making as time went on.
Attempts at providing Native Americans self-government mechanisms were central to the Indian Reorganization Act, with a heavy emphasis being placed on allowing individual communities and societies to choose how they wanted to organize. As a key motivator for Collier and others who supported the passage of the IRA, this notion oftentimes clashed with attempts to expand the role of the BIA in order to adequately provide other services and oversight in Native American communities. These movements for greater oversight stemmed from the federal government's method of ending allotment policy, in which lands reserved for allotment were to be held in trust by the government until Native Americans could utilize them effectively. As a result, a paradoxical situation has arisen where the federal government's aims are to simultaneously provide self-governance for Native Americans while also maintaining oversight.
The Indian Reorganization Act continues to be a difficult to assess part of Native American history within the United States for a multitude of factors. The fact that many mixed results were produced from it makes it impossible to judge it as either universally a success or a failure, and the fact that many of its key achievements (namely the slowing of assimilationist policies) were reversed within fifteen years by termination policies leaves a portion of this Act seemingly unconnected to modern history when trying to ascertain cause-and-effect. Ultimately, the Act itself was flawed from its inception, with many of the principle actors involved in creating it having an incorrect view of how to handle the "Indian Problem" despite their well-meaning intentions. Moving forward, it is clear to see that continuing to involve Native Americans in the decision-making process is critical in constructing effective solutions. Similar importance should be ascribed towards remembering that Native Americans are not a homogeneous group in any sense of the term as well, with the varying levels of success for different Native American groups indicating that different approaches are required for different societies.