NEW DEAL EXPERIMENTATION AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE YANKTON SIOUX, 1930-1934

Franklin Delano Roosevelt\u27s election to the presidency in 1932 signaled a mandate for sweeping reform at the federal level to lift the nation out of the economic turbulence of the Great Depression. Under Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) joined other agencies in launching policies to rebuild economic stability. Much of the scholarship on the Indian New Deal to date necessarily focuses on the centerpiece of Collier\u27s reform efforts: the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). But prior to tribal consideration of the IRA, the Roosevelt administration undertook a series of steps in an attempt to mitigate the most dramatic losses experienced by individuals in rural America. These early short-term relief measures played an important role in Native American perception of Collier\u27s larger efforts. Study of these measures also provides important lessons for scholars to use in evaluating the positive and negative effects of the Indian New Deal in its entirety