The Impact Of The Great Depression On Native Americans

The problems of the Great Depression affected every group of Americans. As much as the Great Depression caused suffering for white Americans, the hardships shyrocketed for racial minorities, including African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. In 1933 the general unemployment rate in the United States was over 25 percent. At the same time, unemployment rates for various American minorities ranged up to 50 percent or more.
No group was harder hit than African Americans. By 1932, approximately half of black Americans experienced unemployment. African Americans were the first to be fired from jobs when the economy slowed and were the last to be hired. This description is accurate not only for black Americans,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's new commissioner of Indian affairs, John Collier, instituted a policy to restore the vitality of Native-American governments through the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934. The IRA renounced the old allotment policies and encouraged tribes to promulgate their own constitutions. In addition, Native-American governments were recognized as the basic way to foster federal Native-American policies. New Deal reforms also sought to create nondenominational day schools on reservations, rather than continue to fund religious boarding schools that destroyed Native-American traditional family values. In these ways, the right of Native Americans to maintain distinct tribal communities sustained. The idea that tribes and tribal values would disappear was no longer the underlying assumption behind United States Native-American policy during the 1930s.The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), founded in 1929, is the oldest and most respected Hispanic civil rights organization in the United States of America. LULAC was created at a time in our country’s history when Hispanics were denied basic civil and human rights, despite contributions to American society. The founders of LULAC created
The law was not widely used; only about 2,200 people were granted money under its provisions during the five years the law was in effect..The Filipino Repatriation Act was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1940, after 2,190 Filipinos had been returned to the Philippines. Filipino immigration to the United States continued, with a resurgence in the late 1960’s. The large number of Filipino workers outside the country has even helped to spawn an acronym, OFWs (overseas Filipino workers), and a political movement, Gawad Kalinga, which has provided a sense of community and basic services to millions of expatriate Filipinos worldwide. Many Filipino immigrants have worked with the U.S. military in war zones, from World War II to the Iraq War of 2003, earning broad-based support for their continued immigration to the United States. Some improvements did occur in the mid-1930s. For American Indians, John Collier (1884–1968) of the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs introduced the Indian New Deal in June 1934, a program that dramatically changed the course of U.S. Indian policy. Instead of forcing Indians to blend into U.S. society, the new policy provided increased funding for economic development of tribes, promoted continued Indian