This year—February, to be exact—marked the 132nd anniversary of President Grover Cleveland's signing of the Dawes Act. You didn't get to read about that in the newspapers or hear about it on Fox News the way that, say, the anniversary of Custer's "Last Stand" always gets a mention. But that single piece of legislation in 1887 had a more devastating impact on indigenous Americans than anything other than the century-long Indian wars themselves and the germs Europeans brought with them to the “New World.” It was initiated by people who told everyone and perhaps actually believed that they had Indians' best interests at heart. In fact, the Dawes Act underpinned a massive land grab from Indians, the kind accomplished with a pen rather than an Army regiment.
In 2010, the Obama administration made a move to repair some of the devastation caused by the Dawes Act, only the second such move in 85 years. Despite this belated remedial action (forced by the courts), much of the damage can never be fixed. No compensation can ever make up for the destruction of culture, language, kinship ties, and connections of place. Modern American Indian society was shaped in great part by what Cleveland signed into law that day five generations ago. Does what happened so long ago matter today? It definitely matters to Indians.
Before the Dawes Act and a few additional laws were effectively repealed by the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, 90 million acres had been wrenched from communally held Indian land, leaving just a third of what the tribes had held in 1886. That was the year Geronimo, the last organized warrior, surrendered and was shipped off to prison, never to return to the land the generals promised he would see again in a couple of years.
What tribal land wasn't directly taken under the Dawes Act was "allotted" to individuals. Snatching up the “surplus” land, as it was so deceptively labeled, and putting the rest into private ownership coincided with a stepped-up effort to destroy Native American culture, religion, and governance—in effect, "Indianness." Today, many reservations are peppered with non-Indian enclaves as a consequence.
Named after Massachusetts Sen. Henry L. Dawes, who headed the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, the law was the culmination of practices toward Indians that had begun within a decade of the Pilgrim landing at what is now Plymouth. Boiled down to their essence, those policies said to Indians: Get out of our way, or else. Even getting out of the way often wasn't enough to prevent the "or else."
The Dawes Act itself arose at least partly out of the influence of a book written by Helen Hunt Jackson in 1881, A Century of Dishonor. It was the Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee of the 19th century, documenting the bloodthirsty avarice and corruption that had suffused Indian-U.S. relations all those decades since the first war in 1788. Originally, the book was to be only about the brutal removal of the Ponca tribe to Oklahoma. But Jackson later expanded her coverage to other atrocities. She didn't live to see the Dawes Act passed, but she would no doubt have approved.
Beyond land theft, the intent was assimilation—"killing the Indian to save the man," in the words of the man who founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The objective? Turn Indians into farmers of acreage they held individually, alter gender roles, shatter kinship connections, break up communal land and tribal government, and, ultimately, wipe out reservations and tribes altogether. Officials thought this would be better for everyone as Indians adopted norms of the dominant culture. It was certainly good for transferring some prime real estate into non-Indian hands.
What the new law did was allot 160 acres to each head of household and 80 acres to each single adult over 18. Sometimes, if the land was desert or nearly so, the acreage was doubled. The allotted land was to be held in federal trust for 25 years, after which ownership and citizenship would go to Indians still working their allotment.
To take full possession of any land, a woman had to be officially married. All inherited land passed through the male head of household. This broke the tradition of the many tribes with matrilineal heritages.
"Surplus" land, the clever euphemism for what was left after allotments were made, was flung open to white settlement and ownership. That was the provision's most likable quality for congressmen and businessmen who would just as soon have slaughtered or starved every Indian still then alive. Half the Great Sioux Reservation was thus sold to outsiders after Indian allotments were distributed.
As Youngstown University assistant professor G. Mehera Gerardo has noted, even before the ink was dry on the act, speculators were making deals to trade or buy Indian lands. But they mostly postponed development for fear the government would confiscate what they had shadily acquired before the trust period expired. Thus were many Indians able to keep to their traditional ways of life for another decade, treating the land as if it were still held communally, even though they'd already bargained their allotments away. State and local governments soon found ways around the law to permit outsiders to buy allotments. Hemmed in by fences, cut off by private ownership of forests and riverine areas, Indians now found themselves no longer able to subsist on hunting and fishing.
Meanwhile, funds from the sale of reservation land, which were supposed to benefit the tribes, were mismanaged, often not paid for decades, sometimes outright embezzled. Much of it simply "went missing." Money that did make it to the proper federal accounts was often used for things Indians did not find worthwhile. In her study of the effects of the Dawes Act on the American Indians of Minnesota, the late historian Melissa L. Meyer wrote, “Facile generalizations about Anishinaabe dependence on welfare gratuities mask the fact that they essentially financed their own ‘assimilation.'”
Thanks to the lobbying of those for whom no amount of freed-up Indian land was enough, new federal legislation was passed in 1906 to allow Indians to sell their allotments well before the end of the trust period. Many, hating farming or broke from trying, sold at rock-bottom prices. Those who had actually received land suitable for farming, and much of it was not, couldn't afford the tools, seeds, animals, and other supplies required. Small government grants were insufficient, and most could obtain no credit. They had received no training. Even if parents knew how to farm, children coerced into boarding schools came home years later without the necessary skills.
The dispossession was wildly successful. Partly as a consequence of the act, by 1900 the American Indian population had fallen to its lowest point in U.S. history, about 237,000.
The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 stopped the allotment process. Once again tribes were able to own land communally. New governance structures were established. These presented some problems for traditional leadership, but they at least allowed Indians to choose their own leaders who could then engage in government-to-government relationships with Washington, D.C. In the 1950s and '60s, the termination acts sought to overturn the effects of Indian reorganization, obliterating the legal status of 109 tribes and taking another 2.5 million acres out of trust status. Most tribes regained their tribal status in the 1970s and ‘80s after the termination acts were repealed, but some smaller bands never did.
Fast forward to the 21st century. As allotment owners died, their lands were divided among their heirs. Over several generations, those who had inherited these allotments found themselves owning smaller and smaller plots unsuitable for farming or any other commercial uses, and unsalable because of the logistics of getting all owners to agree. Some allotments wound up with as many as 1,000 owners, at least some of whom were unaware they even owned their small piece.
When the Obama Interior Department began planning for the consolidation of allotments, it identified 2.9 million fractionated land tracts owned by nearly 243,000 people. A plan was made to spend $1.9 billion to buy fractionated lands and restore them to the tribes, meaning holding them in trust along with other communal tribal lands. The program stems from the historic $3.4 billion settlement in Cobell v. Salazar, a 2009 class-action lawsuit filed over a century's worth of gross government mismanagement of royalties on trust lands. The suit was brought by the late Elouise Cobell (Niitsítapi/Blackfoot), also known as Yellow Bird Woman.
Over 10 years, ending in November 2022, the program worked first on tracts with the most owners, targeting land that took the least preparatory effort to gain a controlling interest. No individuals have been forced to sell their allotments. Once a buy was completed, the land was returned to communal tribal ownership, the very thing the Dawes Act tried to destroy.
So far, the government has bought fractionated allotments adding up to 2.56 million acres from more than 70,000 individuals for $1.46 billion.
First Nation News & Views is an ongoing project of Neeta Lind (Diné/Navajo) and Meteor Blades (Seminole/yat'siminoli). |