The Dawes Act The Next Step in the Evolutions of Our Nations Policies on Fulfilling the Promise to Our Native People

An American Indian reservation is an area of land managed by a Native American tribe under the United States Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs.

There are about 310 Indian reservations in the United States, meaning not all of the country's 550-plus recognized tribes have a reservation— some tribes have more than one reservation, some share reservations, while others have none.

In addition, because of past land allotments, leading to some sales to non-Indians, some reservations are severely fragmented, with each piece of tribal, individual, and privately held land being a separate enclave. This jumble of private and public real estate creates significant administrative, political, and legal difficulties.

In 1851, the United States Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act which authorized the creation of Indian reservations in modern day Oklahoma. Relations between settlers and natives had grown increasingly worse as the settlers encroached on territory and natural resources in the West.

The 1851 Indian Appropriations Act allocated funds to move western tribes onto reservations. Reservations were protected and enclosed by the US government. According to the federal government at that time, reservations were to be created in order to protect the Native Americans from the growing encroachment of whites moving westward. This act set the precedent for modern-day Native American reservations.

Modern day American Indian Reservation

Dawes Severalty Act On February 8, 1887, President Grover Cleveland signed the Dawes Severalty Act into law. The Dawes Act created a process to split up Indian reservations in order to create individual parcels of land and then sell the remainder off to white settlers. The Dawes Act destroyed traditions of Native American labor and attempted to replace it with European notions of rural work.

Dawes Severalty Act The Dawes Act was largely directed at Native American populations that had developed their cultures and work systems around horses and nomadism. Acquiring horses by the early 18 th century, some peoples such as the Crow, Comanche, Utes, Blackfeet, and others made the conscious decision to convert to horse-bound hunting cultures, which create new ideas or work that included men on long hunts, women treating bison hides, horse pastoralism, and other labors to create a bison economy.

Homestead Act of 1862 Beginning with the Northwest Ordinance, white Americans had gridded the land to sell it off in 160 acre parcels. This led to the relatively orderly population of the West as Native Americans had been pushed off. The Homestead Act encouraged this process across the Great Plains. After the Civil War, beginning in the late 1860’s, white Americans began pouring into the Plains.

White View of Land and Labor Whites saw land as something to be “worked” in very specific ways. Work meant the individual ownership of land or resources that create capital accumulations as part of a larger market economy. Proper labor “improved” upon the land.

Native Americans view of Land and Labor The land fed the bison upon which they had based their economy since they acquired horses in the early 18 th century. It provided the materials for their homes and space for their camps. It also provided fodder for their horses. The men hunted; the women farmed. To whites, this was not work. It was waste typical of a lesser people. It did not demonstrate ownership of the land.

Dawes Severalty Act The Dawes Act split up the reservation lands so that each person received 160 acres of land, the amount a white settler would receive under the Homestead Act. After allotment, the remainder of the reservations could be divided under the normal methods of the Homestead Act. Native Americans could not sell their land for 25 years. At the end of that time, they had to prove their competency at farming, otherwise the land reverted back to the federal government for sale to whites.

Dawes Severalty Act By trying to turn Native Americans into good Euro-American farmers, the Dawes Act also upset the relationship between gender roles and work among many tribes. To generalize, men hunted and women farmed. But with the single-family breadwinner ideology of whites thrust upon them, it turned farming into men’s work, which many Native Americans resisted and resented.

The Dawes Act devastated Native American landholdings. In 1887, they held 138 million acres. By 1900, that had already fallen to 78 million acres and by 1934 to 48 million acres. About 90,000 people lost all title to land. Even if Native Americans did try to adapt to Euro-American notions of labor on the land, the land itself was mostly too poor, desolate, and dry to farm successful crops.

The Dawes Act finally ended in 1934 with the U.S. Indian Reorganization Act