The federal public lands that are so celebrated today came about in parallel with the Indian reservation system to cement the legal and physical separation of Indigenous peoples from their homelands. The Department of Interior was founded in 1849 to manage issues of domestic concern by the government, but now houses a number of agencies that oversee and manage the millions of acres of public lands violently disposed from Indigenous peoples centuries earlier. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is now a part of the DOI, manages a significant portion of the federal relationship with and the treaty obligations to Native Nations. Consequently, this relationship and who heads this agency directly impacts the millions of American Indians and Alaskan Natives, who are the descendants of this dispossession.