Dawes Act

6 Key excerpts on "Dawes Act"

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  eBook - ePub

  American Environmental History

  An Introduction

  • Carolyn Merchant(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  In order to “civilize” Indians and turn them into settled farmers, Euro-Americans believed that private property should replace the communal property Indians held on reservations. In 1887, the General Allotment (or Dawes) Act, sponsored by Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes, authorized the allotment of reservation lands to individual Indians in 160-acre parcels, the official homestead unit. The objective was to create independent Indian farmers and to dissolve the tribes. The Secretary of the Interior could negotiate sale of the remaining tribal lands, and after an initial period of federal trusteeship, Indians could sell their 160-acre allotments. So much land passed to non-Indians through both processes that Indian landholdings of 155 million acres in 1881 had shrunk to 56.6 million acres by the 1990s. Only five percent of the lands distributed by the Dawes commission remain in Indian hands.

  “[T]he… most effective means of encouraging the tribes to meld into white society,” as legal historian Lloyd Burton explains the Dawes Act, “was simply to relieve them of much of their well-watered, arable land.”7 In the process, Indian population declined steadily to 237,196 individuals by 1900. Western travel writer Samuel Bowles stated bluntly the underlying rationale for this drastic change in Indian policy. Arguing for dispossessing Indians of their lands, he wrote, “We know they are not our equals; we know that our right to the soil, as a race capable of its superior improvement, is above theirs.” The Indian did not belong in the West, Bowles maintained. “Let us say to him, you are our ward, our child,… ours to displace, ours to protect…. We want your hunting grounds to dig gold from, to raise grain on, and you must ‘move on.’”8

  The Dawes Act meshed strategically with the conversion of Indian lands into national parks during the late nineteenth century. For white settlers and exploiters, as historians Robert Keller and Michael Turek explain, the “opening of reservations for settlement compensated for millions of acres withdrawn from the public domain by national forests and parks.”9

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  Housing and Economic Development in Indian Country

  Challenge and Opportunity

  • Robin Leichenko(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  break up this large reservation, to individualize the Indians upon allotments of the land; to break up their tribal relations and pass them under the jurisdiction of the Constitution and laws of the United States and Territories in which the lands are situated, to aid them with stock and with agricultural implements, and by building houses upon their allotments of land to become self-supporting, to be cultivators of the soil; in a word, to place them on the highway to American citizenship, and to aid them in arriving at that conclusion as rapidly as can be done. (Senator Coke quoted in Prucha 1984, 661)

  Under the General Allotment Act (also referred to as the Dawes Act), reservation lands were to be distributed to all Indians, with 160 acres allocated to heads of families, 80 acres to orphans and single people over age 18, and 40 acres to single people under age 18. Individual allotments were placed under federal trust for 25 years (or less if the owners were deemed competent) to guard against land speculators and swindlers who had preyed upon earlier allottees. The land allotments could not be taxed until the trust restrictions were removed and the land reverted to fee-simple status. Any land remaining after allotment (the “surplus”) could be sold to non-Indian homesteaders.

  Later amendments to the Dawes Act made acquisition of Indian land by non-Indians easier. The Indian Appropriation Act of 1902 empowered the Secretary of the Interior to remove the trust restrictions on lands when an allottee died and to sell it on behalf of adult heirs or allow a court to appoint a guardian to provide such consent for minors. The Indian Appropriation Act of 1907 allowed allottees to sell portions of their “restricted” lands, with the intent of allowing the owners to gain capital for investment in farming necessities.

  The most immediate consequence of the Dawes Act was the further erosion of Indian lands. In 1881, there were 156 million acres of Indian land in the United States. These holdings were dominated by tribally owned acreage (139 million acres, or 89 percent of the total Indian holdings). Allotted or individual trust land accounted for 17 million acres, or 11 percent of the total Indian holdings. By 1933, the total Indian landholdings had decreased to 70 million acres— a loss of 86 million acres, or 55 percent. In addition, individually owned allotments accounted for the greatest share of the 70 million acres (Anderson 1995).

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  Religion, Race, Rights

  Landmarks in the History of Modern Anglo-American Law

  • Eve Darian-Smith(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Publishing

    (Publisher)

  The real purpose of this bill is to get at the Indian lands and open them up to settlement. The provisions for the apparent benefit of the Indians are but the pretext to get at his lands and occupy them … If this were done in the name of greed, it would be bad enough; but to do it in the name of humanity, and under the cloak of an ardent desire to promote the Indian’s welfare by making him like ourselves where he will or not, is infinitely worse. (cited in O’Brien 1989: 78)

  Despite some resistance to the Dawes Act at the time of its passing, it quickly came to represent prevailing attitudes toward native peoples. A few years later, in 1890, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Thomas J Morgan, noted that ‘It has become the settled policy of the Government to break up reservations, destroy tribal relations, settle Indians upon their own homesteads, incorporate them into the national life, and deal with them not as nations or tribes or bands, but as individual citizens’ (Morgan 1890). Under the Dawes Act reservation land held ‘in the entirety’ by a tribe was broken up into separate plots to be held ‘in severalty’ by individuals. Furthermore, the Act held that the President of the United States was authorized to take any reservation or part of a reservation deemed ‘advantageous for agricultural and grazing purposes’ and allocate that land to individual Indians. This meant that a maximum plot of 160 acres could be allotted to heads of families, with single adults over 18 receiving a maximum plot of 80 acres and children receiving 40 acres. The land was held in trust for Indians for 25 years. This meant that native peoples could not sell or give away their lands away until that period had passed, though this time constraint was reduced in subsequent amendments.

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  Trauma and Resilience in the Lives of Contemporary Native Americans

  Reclaiming our Balance, Restoring our Wellbeing

  • Hilary N. Weaver(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Although tribal governments are free to determine the criteria for citizenship in Native Nations, they have often adopted criteria based on blood quantum, mirroring the federal government’s use of measures of presumed biological heritage. Under federal policies like the Dawes Act, external definitions of Native American heritage were often substituted for Indigenous measures. Indeed, for allotment purposes, federal commissions were sometimes established to determine who was legally a Native American (Ellinghaus, 2008). Strict blood quantum requirements limited the number of Native people, and fewer American Indians meant settlers faced fewer barriers to claiming land (Cavalieri, 2013). For instance, a large percentage of tribal members from the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma were removed from census rolls at this time, affecting them as well as their descendants. Additionally, European and other Americans with no prior tribal connections were added to tribal rolls, making them eligible for treaty payments and allotted land (Turner & Pope, 2009).

  By 1934, 118 reservations had undergone the allotment process (Schmidt, 2011). Proponents of the Dawes Act believed it would decrease poverty by encouraging farming and the development of a wage economy on reservations, but Native Americans receiving land distributions rarely achieved the predicted economic self-sufficiency (Turner & Pope, 2009). Desperate Native Americans sold their land allotments to buy food and supplies and were often swindled by land speculators. By the early 1920s, 80 percent of Oklahoma (a.k.a. Indian Territory) was in non-Native hands (Turner & Pope, 2009). Prior to allotment, Indigenous territories had already plummeted to 156 million acres, a small fraction of Turtle Island. When the Dawes Act was repealed in 1934, only about 50 million acres remained in Indigenous hands (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014).

  The economic status of Indigenous Peoples had become dire and heavily dependent on payments and services guaranteed by treaties. Colonial powers fostered economic dependency and developed ways to control Native Americans through Christian missionaries and alcohol (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014). Throughout its history, the federal government reneged on treaty payments and continued to take land and undermine traditional methods of Indigenous self-sufficiency. The Supreme Court has held that Congress can abrogate a treaty unilaterally. This, however, is at odds with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ emphasis on establishing a contemporary political relationship between Native Peoples and surrounding nation-states based on respect, trust, and political equality (Tsosie, 2012).

  The taking of the sacred Black Hills is a particularly notorious example of unilateral action by the United States. This territory was reserved under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, then appropriated by the United States a few years later. The Lakota and Dakota Peoples have consistently asserted their claim to this land. Such land-grabs are human rights violations that can be remedied only with the return of the land to its original owners. Although the United States eventually recognized its wrongdoing and awarded monetary damages, this was done unilaterally and the financial reparations have never been accepted (Tsosie, 2012).

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  The World of Indigenous North America

  • Robert Warrior(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6). Allotment policies were directed at dissolving the tribes and the extinguishment of tribal land. After the U.S. Civil War, it was evident that the national government was not accomplishing its goal of cultural transformation. Critics claimed that the Indian reservation system was cursed (Gibson, 1984, p. 29). 15 Advocates of the allotment policies argued that individual property ownership was a necessity if Indians were to be converted from a savage and primitive way of life toward a settled, agrarian, and civilized one (Royster, 1995, p. 9). By the time the General Allotment Act (Dawes Act) was passed in 1887, most of the tribes in the US had been relocated to Indian reservations, warfare victims of ill-begotten Indian treaties. Federal officials clamored that the failure of the detribalization process was on account of the Indian reservation system that allowed Indian governments to hold their reservation lands in common. This nourished a belief that a tribal government’s resolve could not be broken until the reservation system was abolished. They advocated that it would be the private ownership of land, allotment in severalty that would accomplish what two decades of reservation oversight could not. When Congress authorized the Dawes Act, “Indians were to receive allotments of land in severalty, and the remaining surplus lands were to be opened to settlement” (Royster, 1995, p. 9). Moreover, advocates of assimilation believed that “non-Indian settlement interspersed with Indian allotments, would promote interaction between citizens and Indians and thus encourage the allottees to adopt White ways” (Gibson, 1984, pp. 29–30). It was believed that allotment would do away with tribal communal lands that prevented Indians from participating in fully American citizenship. Charles C

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  Building an American Empire

  The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion

  • Paul Frymer(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  133

  In 1885, Congress passed the Major Crimes Act in response to Ex Parte Crow Dog, in which the Supreme Court had held Native Americans maintained jurisdiction on reservations. The Supreme Court upheld the Major Crimes Act later that year in United States v. Kagama.134 There, the Court reaffirmed principles of M’Intosh that Indians were “semi-Independent,” with the United States maintaining the “ultimate title in the land itself, by which the Indian tribes were forbidden to sell or transfer it to other nations or peoples without the consent of this paramount authority.” Indian tribes, the Court held, “are the wards of the nation. They are communities dependent on the United States.”135

  Two years later, Congress passed the Dawes General Allotment Act that divided up Indian reservations (though at the time, exempting the Five Nations) into private land parcels. This further opened up land for white settlers, since the provisions of the Act—providing 160 acres per household—amounted to far less than the size of the overall land. The immediate result of the Act was the loss of two-thirds of Indian land.136 It was followed six years later by the Dawes Commission, which was created to negotiate agreements with those previously excluded from the original Dawes Act, the Five Civilized Tribes, in order to certify them as official members of the nations so as to authorize them ownership over specific allotments of land. The goal was to place individuals within a single tribe, even those of mixed heritage, and provide them a piece of the land allotted to their tribe.137 As the commissioner of Indian Affairs D. M. Browning wrote to Senator Henry Dawes at the time, the goal of the commission was clearly designed to remove Indian Territory from its existence: “success in your negotiations will mean the total abolition of the tribal autonomy of the Five Civilized Tribes and the wiping out of the quasi-independent governments within our territorial limits. It means, also, ultimately, the organization of another territory in the United States and the admission of another state or states into the United States.”138 A report of the Board of Indian Commissioners argued two years later that Indian Territory needed new governance to free the Five Civilized Tribes from “a few shrewd and selfish leading men” who were opposing reforms the majority both desired and lacked restitution because of their lack of rights.139 With further rights, and with the new allotments of land, Indians in the territory will be able to “safely pass the period of trial and grow up into sturdy Christian manhood and enlightened American citizenship.”140

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