An economic relief program aimed specifically at helping Native American communities during the Great Depression, the legislation marked a sharp U-turn in federal policy toward Indigenous peoples.
A new account by the Yale historian Ned Blackhawk argues that Native peoples shaped the development of American democracy while being dispossessed of their land.
The American Institute for Economic Research was formed 90 years ago to combat the New Deal, a series of vast socioeconomic experiments perpetrated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Dr. Jekyll of Hyde Park, New York. All of those experiments failed to extricate Americans from the Great Depression, and severely injured members of minority groups, including blacks.