ABSTRACT
In 1871 Congress, in an obscure rider attached to the Indian Appropriations Act, unilaterally brought to an end the practice of treating any group of indigenous peoples "as an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty." The significance of the Indian Appropriations Act can be measured by the fact that by 1868, the US government had made some 370 treaties with American Indians, all in accordance with Article I, Section 8, and Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution. American Indians have always had an ambiguous and tenuous status in US constitutional law. Some forty years after the General Allotment Act, The Merriam Report of 1928, an exhaustive study of American Indian social and economic conditions requested by the secretary of the Interior Department, cited the legislation as the principle cause of the failure of US Indian policy.
