Abstract

"“Indians and Industry for Profits and Progress”: The Decline of Settler Investment in Reservations and Rising Calls for Tribal Ownership, 1967-1972"

Sam Schirvar, University of Pennsylvania (schirvar@sas.upenn.edu)

During the 1960s, over 200 manufacturing enterprises opened on or near Indian reservations throughout the United States. Federal officials in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) initially hoped that Native workers’ wages from factories owned by non-Native corporations could replace welfare payments. However, as this paper argues, the BIA’s expansion of reservation industrial development resulted in an outcome that Bureau officials did not originally anticipate: a call for tribal ownership. To analyze this change, this paper focuses on the National Congress of American Indians’ (NCAI) involvement in tribal economic development programs after 1967. While it was primarily a political organization, the NCAI became an important conduit for technical knowledge about industrial development and facilitated business relationships between tribal leaders and large settler corporations. As the 1960s ended and non-Native firms sought even cheaper supplies of labor overseas, tribal leaders and federal officials came to realize that settler enterprises could not provide economic security. Instead, tribal leaders retooled the skills they had acquired to attract tribal industry to their reservations in order to run their own programs. NCAI’s industrial development activities failed to attract enough settler capital and increasingly led to calls for tribally owned enterprises. Drawing on the archives of Native political organizations, including the NCAI, this paper explains how owning and operating profitable enterprises became part of the political program of Indigenous self-determination and emphasizes the importance of business ownership in Indigenous politics during the 1970s.