The Dawes Act of 1887
On February 8th, 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Act, which gave the President the ability to break up reservation land and parcel it out to individuals. On the surface, the goal of this act was to protect the Native Americans from the encroaching white settlers and move them to reservations and teach them farming methods to help them survive economically. However, the real goal was really to weaken the tribes and free up land to sell to white settlers.
Only Native American tribes who registered on a “roll” had the ability to get small parcels of land. These land allocations were extremely small: each head of a family got 160 acres and every adult got 80 acres.
This act opened up many opportunities for appropriation, as the U.S. government had to determine who could receive land. The government didn’t have a good way of determining their bloodline, as that was something hard to track, so they usually assigned “full-blood” status to the Native Americans who were “poorly assimilated” and the “mixed-blood” status to those who “most resembled whites.” However, the appropriation doesn’t stop there. Native Americans who didn’t fit into either category were displaced from their homeland and integrated into white society.
The Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole) were the only tribes initially exempt from the Dawes Act. However, Congress later passed laws such as the Curtis Act of 1898 and the Burke act to add and reaffirm provisions of the Dawes Act onto them.
By 1932, the Government had acquired around 100 million acres, or 2/3rds of former Native American land they had once held in 1887. This land was sold to white migrants, and the government made a huge profit off of these transactions. However, as a result of this, many tribes—especially nomadic ones—were unable to handle the agricultural practices, and the social structures of their tribes slowly deteriorated. Dawes’s goal of teaching Native Americans the skill of independent farming ultimately failed, as many were too poor to buy tools and seeds to start. Moreover, most of the land allocated for them wasn’t fit for farming in the first place, which only harmed the natives more. In the end, the reservations were filled with filth, poverty, and diseases.
Although the Dawes Act was abolished in 1934 under the terms of the Indian Reorganization Act, in these 53 years, this act managed to end the autonomy of the tribes, force a more Eurocentric style of living onto them, and change their social dynamic.
Sources:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawes_Act
- https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=50
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/Dawes-General-Allotment-Act
I really enjoyed this post because it gave me a better understanding of the Dawes Act of 1887 and really how it had a duel purpose. The original purpose was to give Native Americans land to learn agricultural farming techniques, but the Dawes Act ended up disbanding many tribes and displacing many people. The Dawes Act also ended up giving a majority of Indian Land to Americans as the Indians did not take up all the land that the US government had to offer. Something I was wondering was if any Native Americans actually thrived and learned new farming techniques under the Dawes Act. I was wondering this because if some Native American did thrive then would't the Act have done some good.
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