What changed was the relative political strength of agricultural and mining interests. As mining expanded, so did the political power of mining corporations, whose labor needs differed from those of farmers. Settler farmers wanted to break up tribes so as to release labor that could be housed, absorbed, and controlled on the farms. Mining companies, by contrast, wanted to maintain tribal reserves, which housed laborers when they weren’t needed and released them for the seasonal work on which the mining industry relied.7 The miners’ demands won out over the course of the twentieth century and
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