History Commons^™

New Deal Experimentation And The Political Economy Of The Yankton Sioux, 1930-1934, Teresa M. Houser

Great Plains Quarterly

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 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's 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 …