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The General Allotment Act of 1887 ((Dawes Act), Ch. 119, Laws 1887, 24 Stat. 388, et seq. (2000)) authorized the President of the United States to survey Native American tribal land and divide the area into allotments for the individual Native American. It was enacted February 8, 1887, and named for its sponsor, U.S. Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts. The Act was amended in 1891 and again in 1906, by the Burke Act. (Pub. L. 106–462, title I, § 106(a)(1), Nov. 7, 2000, 114 Stat. 2007) The act remained in effect until 1934. The Dawes Commission, set up under a Native American Office appropriation bill in 1893, was created, not to administer the Dawes Act, but to attempt to persuade the tribes not covered by the Act to agree to the allotment plan established under the Dawes Act. It was this commission that registered the members of the Five Civilized Tribes and many Native American names appear on the rolls.
Background From the Civil War until 1885, the population of the United States nearly doubled--from thirty million people to nearly sixty million. In an agrarian economy, that, along with four million slaves freed by the war, created a tremendous need for more land. The only large areas of arable land still unsettled were the government lands in Indian Territory and the sparsely populated Native American reservations. These forces, funded by railroad money, continually pressured the government for action, particularly on opening the government land. Allied with them, and, in particular, supporting the dissolution of the Native American reservations, were the various humanitarian organizations (Indian Rights Association, IIndian Protection Committee, Friends of the Indians, etc.) and several well-known Native American speakers, Sarah Winnemucca and Zitkala Sa among them. They believed that the reservation system was wrong and that Native Americans interred under it would never be self-sufficient. Against the Act were the meat-packing industry, the huge ranching associations leasing the Native American land and the Five Civilized Tribes — all well-funded and having great influence in Washington. American policy toward Native Americans has always had tension between attempts to assimilate and attempts to remove. The Dawes Act, in some ways, represents both desires. Finally,U.S. Congress, after years of trying to satisfy pro-settlement forces and protect Native American interests, wrote and passed the Dawes Act in 1887. Summary of the Sections Here is a brief summary of the Act, which mentions the most pertinent points--
Operation of the Act The practical results of the Act were that some sixty million acres (240,000 km²) of treaty land (almost half) were opened to settlement by non-Native Americans. The plan proved disastrous for the Native Americans, however. Few attained the self-sufficiency envisioned by the humanitarian groups. The congressionally commissioned Meriam Report of 1928 documented fraud and misappropriation by government agents. In particular, the act was used to illegally deprive Native Americans of their land rights. After considerable debate, Congress terminated the allotment process by enacting the Wheeler-Howard Act (Indian Reorganization Act) of 1934. The Act had one of the most substantial impacts on Natives, most significantly affecting Native gender roles. This Act broke up the reservation lands into privately owned parcels of property. In this way, the legislators hoped to complete the assimilation process by forcing the deterioration of the communal life-style of the Native societies and imposing values of strengthening the nuclear family and values of economic dependency strictly within this small household unit. Legislators' opinions of communal living saw the extended family as "needy" since the Indigenous ideas of wealth contrasted and disagreed with Western ideas of wealth (Stremlau 277). Indigenous people valued generosity and received status by being generous. Western values form around individual wealth and surplus and status is gained from these same values. The kin-network, which was the base of economic and social reproduction in Indigenous societies, split and the reservation became a checkerboard pattern. Each "head of the family," which, in contrast most Indigenous traditional structures, became the male, received a 160-acre allotment and each single person over 18 and every orphan received an 80-acre allotment. The United States government opened the surplus land to non-Native American settlement, creating the checkerboard pattern (Stremlau 276). The allotment policy abolished Native society leaving Native people as simply Americans, and impoverished Americans at that. The Act forced Native people onto small tracts of land distant from their kin relations. Traditionally, in most Indigenous societies, women were the agriculturists while the men were the hunters and warriors. The allotment policy depleted the land base, ending hunting as a means of subsistence. According to Victorian ideals, the men were forced into the fields to take on the woman's role and the women were domesticated. This Act imposed a patrilineal nuclear household onto many traditional matrilineal Native societies. Native gender roles and relations quickly changed with this policy since communal living shaped the social order of Native communities. Women were no longer the caretakers of the land and they were no longer valued in the public political sphere. Even in the home, the Native woman was dependent on her husband. Before allotment, women divorced easily and had important political and social status for they were usually the center of their kin network (Olund 157). With this act, women were deprived title to land and the distribution of allotments proved this point. To receive the full 160 acres, women had to be married and even then, her husband received title to the land. Legacy of the Act Dawes was convinced that the white man's ways were superior to the historical ways of the Native Americans and he gainsayed the idea of communal property, although he did express sympathy for the Natives themselves. "The common field is the seat of barbarism, while the separate farm is the door to civilization," he said. Dawes explained that selfishness was the root of advanced civilization and he could not understand why the Native AMericans were not motivated to possess and achieve more than their neighbors. While the Dawes Act was hailed as the Native Americans' "Emancipation Proclamation," a tiny minority protested the danger they saw in the legislation. One congressional report candidly stated: "The real aim…is to get at the Indian lands and open them up to settlement…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 Native American's welfare by making him like ourselves, whether he will or not, is infinitely worse." Senator Henry Teller said during debate on the bill, "You might as well title the bill: A bill to despoil the Indians of their lands and to make them vagabonds on the face of the earth." Even the dire warnings could not have predicted just how disastrous the Dawes Act was for most Native Americans. Far from making them self-reliant farmers, it shattered one of the main pillars of their culture--community property. Besides the loss of identity, most lost their livelihoods when they could not make the transition to individualized, self-sufficient agricultural farming. The government had failed to provide training, equipment, seeds, hoes or ploughs. Likewise, companies swiftly moved in to claim whatever land they could. As a result of the Dawes Act, Native Americans lost almost half of their lands by 1900, from 140 million acres to 78 million. Some Native Americans, such as the Hopi and Cherokee, defied the government by refusing to take part in the allotment plan. By 1921, more than half the people within tribes affected by the Dawes Act were landless and economically devastated. Polemics "...the real aim of the Act is to get at the Indians land and open it up for resettlement." — Senator Henry M. Teller, 1881. "We must throw some protection" & We really must fight until every Indian "shall stand...panopolied in the armor of a self-supporting citizen of the United States"- Senator Henry L. Dawes 1897 Sources Cited | ||||||||
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