Abstract

"Historical Memory and Economic Sovereignty: How the IRA Reoriented Native Economic Traditions"

Joseph Gladstone, Washington State University (joseph.gladstone@wsu.edu)

Tribes began losing their inherent sovereignty after Spain and the United States claimed tribal lands for themselves. These governments did not see tribes as equal partners in trade, but rather, in the case of Spain, as subjects to be exploited, and, in the case of the United States, as primitive people dependent on federal paternalism. Amid this loss were tribal identities as savvy traders—a loss that became more pronounced after Western tribes were confined to reservations and, through the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (IRA), were prescribed government systems made solely responsible for economic development. The IRA was intended to restore tribal sovereignty by allowing tribes to govern themselves. It created tribal councils that served as conduits for economic planning and enterprise. However, the IRA also concentrated the responsibility for tribal economic development in the hands of business councils who often lacked the knowledge or experience to manage such enterprises profitably. Many IRA-style systems persist today; although some have flourished, many have not.
History shows that while tribes once practiced trade at both collective and individual levels, the IRA shifted this paradigm by centralizing the authority for commerce within tribal governments. After ninety-one years under this structure, many communities have come to regard this arrangement as the natural order of things—a product of what psychologists term presentism, the tendency to perceive current norms as historically proper and universal. In this sense, tribal members’ assumptions about who is “supposed” to engage in business reflect a cultural myopia, shaped by generations of exposure to IRA institutions. What was once a dynamic and distributed trading culture has, through this lens, been reinterpreted as government-centered economic practice. This helps explain why some tribal entrepreneurs encounter community resistance: the IRA model has become the only economic system many reservation residents have ever known. The extent to which this institutional presentism obscures the deeper history of Indigenous trade and private enterprise remains an open question.