housed at the Library of Congress." width="1024" height="600" />An Indian reservation is land reserved for and managed by a Native American tribe, its sovereignty limited by federal and state or local law. Today, there are approximately 326 reservations in the United States. But how and why did Indian reservations come to be?
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Originally published on: May 25, 2015
Treaties signed between American Indians and Colonial powers in the 17th and 18th centuries, and then between tribes and American officials in the late 18th and 19th centuries, resulted time and again in either the reduction of Native lands or the relocation of Native Americans from their ancestral homes to designated areas where they lived and governed with limited independence.
The Indian Removal Act, signed by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830, was an unprecedented legal maneuver that gave the president the power to make treaties with every tribe east of the Mississippi, ultimately forcing them to surrender their lands in exchange for territory in the West.
