Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) Term Analysis

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) into law in 1934. The IRA ended allotment as the government’s official policy and returned to tribes the surplus land they lost during the allotment years. The act also afforded more protections for Indian land, since it extended trust protection indefinitely and established a fund to be put toward the purchase of Indian land that had been lost during allotment. King sees the IRA as a positive shift in national policy regarding the country’s Native population; however, because of the onset of World War II not many years after the act became law, the government lacked the attention and resources necessary to put the act into practice adequately, and Native peoples were unable to benefit from many of the protective measures the law was supposed to afford them.