Theodore Roosevelt & Native Americans: Conservation, Conquest, and Complicated History

The Frontier and the Indian Question: Young Roosevelt's Assumptions

When Roosevelt traveled to Dakota Territory in the 1880s, the Indian Wars were recent history. The last major resistance had been broken only a few years earlier. Sitting Bull and the Lakota had defeated Custer at the Little Bighorn in 1876, only a decade before Roosevelt arrived to ranch in the badlands, and in the years that followed they had been defeated and confined to reservations. Roosevelt encountered frontier culture that viewed Native Americans as a vanishing people, and he largely accepted that framing. In his writings about the West, he portrayed Native American resistance as futile opposition to inevitable white expansion. He celebrated the “winning of the West” as an achievement of American civilization, a narrative that treated Native dispossession as sad but necessary progress.

His early writings reveal the depth of his assimilationist thinking. In The Winning of the West, his multi-volume history of frontier expansion, Roosevelt described the conquest of Indian lands as the inevitable triumph of a superior civilization over a vanishing race. He wrote of Native Americans not as peoples defending their ancestral territories but as obstacles to civilization itself. In his view, the expansion was not theft but progress—the natural result of superior peoples subduing inferior ones. The violence involved in that conquest, Roosevelt suggested, was regrettable but justified and ultimately beneficial for humanity.

Roosevelt did not invent this narrative—it was the dominant story told about American expansion in his era. But he embraced it fully and expressed it with characteristic vigor and rhetorical power. Native Americans appeared in his writings as obstacles to be overcome, not as peoples with legitimate claims to their ancestral lands. The assumption underlying his frontier enthusiasm was that white settlement and civilization represented progress, and that Native peoples would inevitably—and appropriately—recede before it. When he was not a man of the frontier, Roosevelt was a man of books and ideas, and these ideas reinforced his conviction that the conquest of the West was one of the greatest achievements in human history.

Conservation at the Cost of Indigenous Lands

Roosevelt protected roughly 230 million acres of public land—nearly 5 percent of all U.S. territory. He created 18 national monuments (using the Antiquities Act), 51 federal bird reservations, 4 national game preserves, 5 national parks, and 150 national forests. Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, the Grand Teton—these landscapes that we regard as America's natural heritage were protected under Roosevelt's authority.

But these lands were not empty wilderness waiting for protection. They were territories that Native peoples had lived on, hunted on, and held sacred for centuries. The creation of national parks and forests sometimes involved the forced removal of Native peoples from lands they had inhabited. The conservation of wildlife in these areas—the protection of buffalo, elk, and other game—meant that Native peoples lost hunting rights they had exercised since time immemorial. The boundaries of these protected areas, drawn by white conservationists according to white aesthetic and scientific values, cut across territories that tribes understood and used in ways whites did not recognize or respect.

Roosevelt's conservation policy did not intend cruelty to Native peoples, but it did not make space for their ongoing presence either. It treated the West as a landscape to be preserved and managed according to white scientific principles, not as a place where Native peoples had legitimate ongoing claims and rights.

Assimilation, Boarding Schools, and the Allotment Ideology

Like most progressives of his era, Roosevelt believed that Native Americans needed to be assimilated into white American society. This belief was not unique to him—it was the dominant policy of the federal government and commanded support across the political spectrum. The assimilation ideology had many expressions, some more coercive than others. Roosevelt supported the Indian boarding school system, institutions designed to remove Native children from their families and tribes, strip them of their languages and cultures, and train them for subordinate positions in white society. Progressive reformers who supported these schools saw them as enlightened, humanitarian alternatives to the violence of reservation warfare and the poverty they associated with tribal life. From their perspective, they were saving Native children by erasing their Indianness.

The boarding schools operated on the philosophy Carlisle founder Richard Henry Pratt summarized in 1892: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Children were punished for speaking Native languages, forbidden from practicing traditional religions, forbidden from wearing traditional clothing, and trained in domestic or manual labor skills. The Carlisle Indian Industrial Training School, the most famous of these institutions, became a model for the boarding school system that expanded across the country. Roosevelt and other progressives praised these schools as expressions of the “civilizing mission” they believed white Americans had an obligation to undertake. In Roosevelt's worldview, if Native Americans could be transformed into white farmers and laborers, shorn of their languages and traditions, then they could be absorbed into white society. What they could not be was themselves.

The schools caused profound damage. Children lost connection to their families, languages, and cultural identity, and children died at the schools — the federal government’s own reviews, from the Meriam Report of 1928 to the Interior Department’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative report of 2022, documented deaths from disease as well as abuse and neglect throughout the system. Roosevelt praised the schools publicly as progress: the transformation of Native peoples according to his vision of American civilization.

Roosevelt also supported the allotment policy, which broke up tribal lands into individual parcels assigned to individual Native Americans. The Dawes Act of 1887 (predating Roosevelt’s presidency) authorized this process. It had contemporary critics: Senator Henry Teller of Colorado had opposed allotment in the 1880s, warning that its practical effect would be to strip Native peoples of their land. The theory was elegant in its assimilationist logic: if Native Americans owned land as individuals rather than as tribes, they would adopt white farming practices, abandon tribal governance, and gradually become indistinguishable from white settlers. The practical result was catastrophic: vast amounts of Native land passed out of tribal control into the hands of white settlers and speculators. Land that could not be allotted to individual Native Americans because the remaining land exceeded tribal needs (the “surplus”) was opened to white settlement.

Roosevelt continued to support allotment during his presidency and worked with the U.S. Indian Service to facilitate the process. Between 1887 and 1934, when the allotment policy finally ended, tribal lands declined from 138 million acres to 48 million acres. Roosevelt stated the policy’s purpose in his own words. In his First Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1901, he called allotment “a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.” He believed he was helping Native Americans by transforming them. The fact that this transformation dispossessed them of their lands, severed their cultural continuity, and rendered them impoverished never altered his conviction that it was the right course.

Executive Orders Opening Reservation Lands to White Settlement

Roosevelt used his executive authority to open reservation lands to white exploitation and settlement. The theory justified this as consistent with assimilation: if Native Americans were being transformed into individual landowners and farmers, then the “surplus” reservation land (land in excess of what was being allotted to individual Indians) could be made available for white settlement. The practice meant that as tribal lands shrank and fragmented, white settlers gained access to valuable timber, mineral, and grazing resources that had sustained Native peoples for generations.

Roosevelt signed executive orders that facilitated this process with the same vigor he applied to conservation. He authorized the opening of coal lands on Crow and Cheyenne reservations. He permitted white settlers to exploit timber resources in ways that damaged the ecological integrity of reservation lands and removed resources that Native peoples depended on. These orders were consistent with Roosevelt's broader philosophy: white settlement represented progress, and obstacles to it (including Native peoples' claims to their own lands) had to yield.

Paradoxically, Roosevelt believed he was being fair to Native Americans. He worked with James McLaughlin of the U.S. Indian Service to negotiate more than forty tribal agreements and to prevent fraud in the allotment process. From Roosevelt's perspective, he was protecting Native peoples from corrupt agents and speculators while facilitating their transformation into individual property owners. The outcome, catalogued by the federal government’s own Meriam Report in 1928, was not the prosperous class of Native farmers the policy’s advocates predicted, but the loss of land and deepening poverty.

The reservation lands that Roosevelt opened to white settlement represented the last surviving economic base for Native peoples—lands where they could hunt, gather, and maintain some degree of autonomy from white society. By opening these lands to exploitation, Roosevelt and the assimilationist policy he supported were not just transforming Native cultures. They were systematically destroying the material foundation that allowed Native peoples to survive as distinct peoples.