From “Undoing Manifest Destiny: Settler America, Christian Colonists, and the Pursuit of Justice” by L. Daniel Hawk
The practice of taking land for development continued into the twentieth century, mainly through the confiscation of Indigenous land for public works and infrastructure projects. I have already cited President Theodore Roosevelt’s confiscation of eighty-six million acres of Indigenous land for the National Park system. Federal projects that dammed rivers for flood control, water storage, or generating hydroelectric power also brought about a loss of significant land, not to mention the relocation of hundreds of families.
One such project, the Kinzua Dam in Pennsylvania, was completed 1965. The dam created a reservoir that submerged almost ten thousand acres of Seneca land. Nine communities were flooded, and six hundred people were relocated. The project directly violated the Treaty of Canandaigua, between the Haudenosaunee and the Washington administration in 1794. Article 3 of that treaty defined the boundaries of the Seneca reservation, acknowledged the land to be Seneca property, and promised that the United States would “never claim the same, nor disturb the Seneka nation…in the free use and enjoyment thereof.” Despite vigorous opposition from the Seneca nation, a federal judge affirmed the government’s authority to take the land by eminent domain, ruling that a treaty “cannot rise above the power to legislate.”
The most devastating project of this land, however, was the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program, which was authorized by the Flood Control Act of 1944. The program resulted in the construction of twelve dams, in two phases, along the Missouri River Valley. By the time it was completed, the project had forced the abandonment of twelve towns and displaced more than thirty-five hundred people on twenty-three reservations. The dams flooded more than five hundred thousand acres of Sioux land in seven reservations, destroying 90 percent of the timber and arable farmland on the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River reservations.