The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands
The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands

Author: D. S. Otis

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2014-04-03

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0806146362

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The many congressional acts and plans for the administration of Indian affairs in the West often resulted in confusion and misapplication. Only rarely were the ideals of those who sincerely wished to help American Indians realized. This book, first printed as a part of the hearings before the House of Representatives Committee on Indian Affairs in 1934, is a detailed and fully documented account of the Dawes Act of 1887 and its consequences up to 1900. D. S. Otis's investigation of the motives of the reformers who supported the Dawes Act indicates that it failed to fulfill many of the hopes of its sponsors. The reasons for the act's failure were complex but predictable. Many Indians were not culturally prepared for severalty. Provisions in the act for leasing or selling their land enabled many to circumvent the responsibilities of private ownership, which reformers and bureaucrats alike had thought would provide a “civilizing” influence. The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Land is the only full-scale study of the Dawes Act and its impact upon American Indian society and culture. With the addition of an introduction, revised footnotes, and an index by Francis Paul Prucha, S. J., it is essential to any understanding of the present circumstances and problems of American Indians today.

Unearthing Indian Land
Unearthing Indian Land

Author: Kristin T. Ruppel

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2008-12-15

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9780816527113

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Unearthing Indian Land offers a comprehensive examination of the consequencesof more than a century of questionable public policies. In this book,Kristin Ruppel considers the complicated issues surrounding American Indianland ownership in the United States. Under the General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act,individual Indians were issued title to land allotments while so-called ÒsurplusÓIndian lands were opened to non-Indian settlement. During the forty-seven yearsthat the act remained in effect, American Indians lost an estimated 90 millionacres of landÑabout two-thirds of the land they had held in 1887. Worse, theloss of control over the land left to them has remained an ongoing and insidiousresult. Unearthing Indian Land traces the complex legacies of allotment, includingnumerous instructive examples of a policy gone wrong. Aside from the initialcatastrophic land loss, the fractionated land ownership that resulted from theactÕs provisions has disrupted native families and their descendants for morethan a century. With each new generation, the owners of tribal lands grow innumber and therefore own ever smaller interests in parcels of land. It is not uncommonnow to find reservation allotments co-owned by hundreds of individuals.Coupled with the federal governmentÕs troubled trusteeship of Indian assets,this means that Indian landowners have very little control over their own lands. Illuminated by interviews with Native American landholders, this book isessential reading for anyone who is interested in what happened as a result of thefederal governmentÕs quasi-privatization of native lands.

Dividing the Reservation
Dividing the Reservation

Author: Nicole Tonkovich

Publisher: Washington State University Press

Published: 2021-06-18

Total Pages: 592

ISBN-13: 1636820484

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Alice Cunningham Fletcher was both formidable and remarkable. A pioneering ethnologist who penetrated occupations dominated by men, she was the first woman to hold an endowed chair at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology--during a time the institution did not admit female students. She helped write the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 that reshaped American Indian policy, and became one of the first women to serve as a federal Indian agent, working with the Omahas, the Winnebagos, and finally the Nez Perces. Charged with supervising the daunting task of resurveying, verifying, and assigning nearly 757,000 acres of the Nez Perce Reservation, Fletcher also had to preserve land for transportation routes and restrain white farmers and stockmen who were claiming prime properties. She sought to “give the best lands to the best Indians,” but was challenged by the Idaho terrain, the complex ancestries of the Nez Perces, and her own misperceptions about Native life. A commanding presence, Fletcher worked from a specialized tent that served as home and office, traveling with copies of laws, rolls of maps, and blank plats. She spent four summers on the project, completing close to 2,000 allotments. This book is a collection of letters and diaries Fletcher wrote during this work. Her writing illuminates her relations with the key players in the allotment, as well as her internal conflicts over dividing the reservation. Taken together, these documents offer insight into how federal policy was applied, resisted, and amended in this early application of the Dawes General Allotment Act.

The Assault on Indian Tribalism
The Assault on Indian Tribalism

Author: Wilcomb E. Washburn

Publisher: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

Published: 1975

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13:

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The General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Severalty Act, became law in 1887. It was the culmination of a decade of intense concern on the part of an increasingly dominant white majority over the future status of the increasingly helpless Indian minority within the United States. The act did not simply rearrange the landholding system of the Indians. It dealt, sometimes only in a tentative or partial way, with all aspects of the relationship between white men and red: it determined how much land the red man would retain and how much the white man would acquire; it determined whether past treaties would be honored or violated; it determined how much authority the tribe would retain and how much the Indian individual would acquire; it determined what type of law the Indian would be subjected to; and it determined whether or not he would become an American citizen or remain an alien in his own country. The act did not determine all these questions fully and finally; but it did confront them directly, even if it answered them only partially. This volume treats the various-alternatives faced by legislators on the road to the compromise legislation that finally emerged.