Although treaties were now forbidden, tribes did not feel that they should give up their rights as sovereign nations, rights which in their eyes had not diminished in the slightest. So a form of contractual relationship known as the “agreement” was instituted. Congress would authorize a commission to go to a certain tribe to negotiate for cession of lands. When the agreement was reached and ready for ratification by the appropriate congressional committees, then Interior officials, land-hungry citizens, and Senators and Congressmen would conspire to change the agreement before it was approved by the two houses of the legislative branch.
Through this method of legislative-administrative conspiracy, millions of acres were taken from the tribes in the West. In the first decade of this century Congress gave up all pretensions of bargaining with the tribes and simply began to pass laws regulating all aspects of Indian life. The final breakthrough came as a result of a Supreme Court decision in which the allotment of the Kiowa tribe of Oklahoma, under the provision of the 1887 General Allotment Act, was upheld as illustrating a plenary power of Congress over Indian tribes and property. The court suggested that Congress had always such power, but this was plainly contradicted by the historical facts.
With allotment, however, the Bureau regarded its role as having radically changed. Social reformers considered the introduction of individual tenure of lands a magical potion which would convert individual Indians to the white man’s society in an acceptable manner. If the Indians are made greedy, as one stalwart Christian remarked, they will come to see the reality of the Christian faith where every man is responsible for his own soul. And greed had to be inculcated by means of private property—hence allotments of tribal lands into individual holdings.
In order to ensure that this magic worked, the Bureau of Indian Affairs had to check the operation of private land on the psyche of each Indian. It abandoned its role as arbiter between red and white legal structures and took up a new role as innovator and motivator of cultural change. Indian people came to be regarded as the individual wards of each agency headquarters and by definition legally incompetent. Bureau policies for each Indian became a projection of white cultural values, and decisions made in the administrative field were guided not by legal criteria but by what each bureaucrat would do with the Indian’s property if given a chance.
