Reorganization: The Key to Security?
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency ushered in a more concerted effort by the United States to re-characterize Native American government in the 1930s and 1940s. This included the enactment of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which preserved Native American rights to reservation lands and their political structures, but encouraged Indian groups to adopt constitutions to manage their internal affairs. While Florida’s Native people were skeptical of potential interference by the government, reorganization provided a forum for expressing their interests to the United States. Those Indians who moved onto the reservations in the 1930s established business associations with the help of the BIA to manage their cattle investments, and they began forming tribal councils. Although the federal programs brought about some economic improvements for the community during the 1940s, reservation residents had difficulty accepting a new type of leadership structure. Each reservation generally worked independently from the others.
Many of the off-reservation Indians living in small camps and villages chose not to participate in the implementation of the act. They resisted terms that would reorganize their political structure. By the early 1950s, however, new U.S. governmental initiatives motivated the Florida Indians to take more vocal stances in asserting their political interests to the world.