The Texas Politics Project

Unlike most western states, Texas today has almost no Indian lands, the result of systematic warfare by Texas and the United States against indigenious groups in the nineteenth century that decimated tribes or drove them onto reservations in other states.

While the limited number and size of Indian reservations in Texas today reveal much about relations between European-descended settlers and Indians at the turn of the 19th century, these reservations account for only a small percentage of the native Americans in the state. Though only about 2,624 people have formally enrolled as members of Texas tribes, the 2000 census counted 118,362 people in Texas who identified themselves as exclusively American Indian or Alaska Native (AIAN).