Federal Water Projects and Indian Lands: The Pick-Sloan Plan, A Case Study

The history of the application of the European doctrines of discovery and conquest to American Indian tribes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--and the evolution of policies which defined tribes as "domestic dependent nations"--is well known. The subsequent saga of massacres, depredations and broken treaties which resulted from the exercise of territorial imperatives on both sides has likewise occupied the pens of many historians. What is less familiar is that the struggle for land and sovereignty did not end in the bloody snows of Wounded Knee in 1890 but has continued, for even greater stakes, into the present century. Preoccupied until recently with the dramatic military confrontations of the nineteenth century, historians of federal Indian policy have paid too little attention to the erosion of Native land and water rights persisting to the present day. Because of the marginal nature of much of the Indians' remaining land and resources, this neglectful situation has become even more detrimental to tribal interests. Since land has long been essential to tribal existence, and since so many of today's tribes depend on their ability to utilize and control their own resources, these issues are far too grave to ignore. Increasingly in the twentieth century, the United States has used its power of eminent domain to seize large parcels of Indian land for the construction of flood control and reclamation projects. While federal water agencies claim these dams provide multiple benefits for the general public, Native Americans seem always to be the last to receive these advantages. In the Missouri River Basin the Pick-Sloan Plan--the joint water development program the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation designed in 1944--caused more damage to Indian land than any other public works project in America. Whether or not these Federal agencies deliberately chose Indian over non-Indian land for their project sites, as some tribal leaders have charged, their plans ultimately affected twenty-three different reservations