Living conditions on American Indian reservations nationwide entered a downward spiral in the 20th century. The absence of real sovereignty among Indian people hampered the growth and prosperity of their communities. Federal policies treated American Indians either as "red children" or "savages," excluding them from the planning and decision-making process.

In the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Indian New Deal" briefly offered hope that American Indians would once again be the rulers of their own destinies. However, the Great Depression and then World War II mobilized the country's resources elsewhere, and legislative victories failed to translate into practical relief from poverty, or freedom from supervision by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Facing dire conditions, the American Indian Chicago Conference in June 1961 ushered in a new era of reform. In a decade marked by sweeping changes in American society, a new generation of American Indian leaders emerged, able and willing to confront the non-Indian population on their own terms. Although serious socio-economic maladies remained (and persist into the 1990s), the next thirty years witnessed a real empowerment of Indian people, a striking contrast from the first half of the century.

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