Dawes Act

During the early 1800s, the United States federal government attempted to address what it referred to as the "Indian Problem." Numerous European immigrants were settling on the eastern border of the Indian territories (where most of the Native American tribes had been relocated). Conflicts between the groups increased as they competed for resources and operated according to different cultural systems. Searching for a quick solution to their problem, Commissioner of Indian Affairs William Medill proposed establishing "colonies" or "reservations" that would be exclusively for the natives, similar to those which some native tribes had created for themselves in the east. It was a form of relocation whereby the US government would offer a transfer of the natives from current locations to areas in the region beyond the Mississippi River. This would enable settlement by European Americans in the Southeast, where there was a growing demand for access to new lands. The new policy intended to concentrate Native Americans in areas away from the new settlers. During the later nineteenth century, Native American tribes resisted the imposition of the reservation system and engaged with the United States Army (in what were called the Indian Wars in the West) for decades. Finally defeated by the U.S. military force and continuing waves of new settlers, the tribes negotiated agreements to resettle on reservations. Native Americans ended up with a total of over of land, ranging from arid deserts to prime agricultural land. The Reservation system, while compulsory for Native Americans, allotted each tribe a claim to their new lands, protection over their territories, and the right to govern themselves. With the U.S. Senate to be involved only for negotiation and ratification of treaties, the Native Americans adjusted their ways of life and tried to maintain their traditions. The traditional tribal organization, a defining characteristic of Native Americans as a social unit, became apparent to the non-native communities of the United States. The tribe was viewed as a highly cohesive group, led by a hereditary, chosen chief, who exercised power and influence among the members of the tribe by aging traditions. By the end of the 1880s, some U.S. stakeholders felt that the assimilation of Native Americans into American culture was a top priority and was needed for the peoples' very survival. This was the belief among people who "admired" them, as well as people who thought they needed to leave behind their tribal landholding, reservations, traditions, and, ultimately, their Indian identities. Senator Henry Dawes launched a campaign to "rid the nation of tribalism through the virtues of private property, allotting land parcels to Indian heads of family." On February 8, 1887, President Grover Cleveland signed the Dawes Allotment Act into law. Responsible for enacting the allotment of the tribal reservations into plots of land for individual households, the Dawes Act was intended by reformers to achieve six goals: • breaking up of tribes as a social unit, • encouraging individual initiatives, • furthering the progress of native farmers, • reducing the cost of native administration, • securing parts of the reservations as Indian land, and • opening the remainder of the land to White settlers for profit. The Act facilitated assimilation; they would become more "Americanized" as the government allotted the reservations and the Indians adapted to subsistence farming, the primary model at the time. Native Americans held specific ideologies pertaining to tribal land. Some natives began to adapt to the culture. They adopted the values of the dominant society and saw land as real estate to be bought and developed; they learned how to use their land effectively to become prosperous farmers. As they were inducted as citizens of the country, they would shed those of their discourses and ideologies presumed to be uncivilized and exchange them for ones that allowed them to become industrious, self-supporting citizens, and finally rid themselves of their need for government supervision. ==Provisions of the Dawes Act==

The important provisions of the Dawes Act Every member of the bands or tribes receiving a land allotment is subject to laws of the state or territory in which they reside. Every Native American who receives a land allotment "and has adopted the habits of civilized life" (lived separate and apart from the tribe) is bestowed with United States citizenship "without in any manner impairing or otherwise affecting the right of any such Indian to tribal or other property". The Secretary of the Interior could issue rules to assure equal distribution of water for irrigation among the tribes, and provided that "no other appropriation or grant of water by any riparian proprietor shall be authorized or permitted to the damage of any other riparian proprietor." The Dawes Act did not apply to the territory of the: • Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Miami, and Peoria in Indian Territory • Osage and Sac and Fox in the Oklahoma Territory • any of the reservations of the Seneca Nation of New York, or • a strip of territory in the State of Nebraska adjoining the Sioux Nation • Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation • The Osage Tribe of Oklahoma Provisions were later extended to the Wea, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Piankeshaw, and Western Miami tribes by act of 1889. Allotment of the lands of these tribes was mandated by the Act of 1891, which amplified the provisions of the Dawes Act. Dawes Act 1891 Amendments In 1891 the Dawes Act was amended: • Allowed for pro-rata distribution when the reservation did not have enough land for each individual to receive allotments in original quantities, and provided that when land is only suitable for grazing purposes, such land be allotted in double quantities • Established criteria for inheritance • Does not apply to Cherokee Outlet Provisions of the Curtis Act The Curtis Act of 1898 extended the provisions of the Dawes Act to the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory. It did away with their self-government, including tribal courts. In addition to providing for allotment of lands to tribal members, it authorized the Dawes Commission to make determinations of members when registering tribal members. Provisions of the Burke Act The Burke Act of 1906 amended the sections of the Dawes Act dealing with US Citizenship (Section 6) and the mechanism for issuing allotments. The Secretary of Interior could force the Native American Allottee to accept title for land. U.S. Citizenship was granted unconditionally upon receipt of land allotment (the individual did not need to move off the reservation to receive citizenship). Land allotted to Native Americans was taken out of Trust and subject to taxation. The Burke Act did not apply to any Native Americans in Indian Territory. ==Effects==

Identity and detribalization The effects of the Dawes Act were destructive on Native American sovereignty, culture, and identity since it empowered the U.S. government to: • legally preempt the sovereign right of Indians to define themselves • implement the specious notion of blood-quantum as the legal criteria for defining Indians • institutionalize divisions between "full-bloods" and "mixed-bloods" • "detribalize" a sizeable segment of the Indian population • legally appropriate vast tracts of Indian land The federal government initially viewed the Dawes Act as such a successful democratic experiment that they decided to further explore the use of blood-quantum laws and the notion of federal recognition as the qualifying means for "dispensing other resources and services such as health care and educational funding" to Native Americans long after its passage. Under Dawes, land parcels were dispersed in accordance with perceived blood quanta. Indigenous people labeled "full-blooded" were allocated "relatively small parcels of land deeded with trust patents over which the government retained complete control for a minimum of twenty-five years." Those who were labeled "mixed-blood" were "deeded larger and better tracts of land, with 'patents in fee simple' (complete control), but were also forced to accept U.S. citizenship and relinquish tribal status." Land loss The Dawes Act ended Native American communal holding of property (with cropland often being privately owned by families or clans), by which they had ensured that everyone had a home and a place in the tribe. The act "was the culmination of American attempts to destroy tribes and their governments and to open Indian lands to settlement by non-Indians and to development by railroads." Land owned by Native Americans decreased from in 1887 to in 1934. Senator Henry M. Teller of Colorado was one of the most outspoken opponents of allotment. In 1881, he said that allotment was a policy "to despoil the Indians of their lands and to make them vagabonds on the face of the earth." Teller also said, the real aim [of allotment] was to get at the Indian lands and open them up to settlement. The provisions for the apparent benefit of the Indians are but the pretext to get at his lands and occupy them. ... If this were done in the name of greed, it would be bad enough; but to do it in the name of humanity ... is infinitely worse. In 1890, Dawes himself remarked about the incidence of Native Americans losing their land allotments to settlers: "I never knew a White man to get his foot on an Indian's land who ever took it off." The amount of land in native hands rapidly depleted from some to by 1900. The remainder of the land, once allotted to appointed natives, was declared surplus and sold to non-native settlers as well as railroad and other large corporations; other sections were converted into federal parks and military compounds. Most allottees given land on the Great Plains were not successful at achieving economic viability via farming. Division of land among heirs upon the allottees' deaths quickly led to land fractionalization. Most allotment land, which could be sold after a statutory period of 25 years, was eventually sold to non-Native buyers at bargain prices. Additionally, land deemed to be surplus beyond what was needed for allotment was opened to White settlers, though the profits from the sales of these lands were often invested in programs meant to aid the Native Americans. Over the 47 years of the Act's life, Native Americans lost about of treaty land, or about two-thirds of the 1887 land base. About 90,000 Native Americans, or around two-thirds of their population, were made landless. Culture and gender roles The Dawes Act compelled Native Americans to adopt European American culture by prohibiting Indigenous cultural practices and encouraging settler cultural practices and ideologies into Native American families and children. By transferring communally-owned Native land into private property, the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) "hoped to transform Native Americans into yeoman farmers and farm wives through the assignment of individual land holdings known as allotments." In an attempt to fulfill this objective, the Dawes Act "outlawed Native American culture and established a code of Indian offenses regulating individual behavior according to Euro-American norms of conduct." Any violations of this code were to be "tried in a Court of Indian Offenses on each reservation." Included with the Dawes Act were "funds to instruct Native Americans in Euro-American patterns of thought and behavior through Indian Service schools." By dividing reservation lands into privately owned parcels, legislators hoped to complete the assimilation process by forcing Native Americans to adopt individual households and strengthen the nuclear family and values of economic dependency strictly within this small household unit. The Dawes Act was thus implemented to destroy "native cultural patterns" by drawing "on theories, common to both ethnologists and material feminists, that saw environmental change as a way to effect social change." Although private property ownership was the cornerstone of the act, reformers "believed that civilization could only be effected by concomitant changes to social life" in indigenous communities. As a result, "they promoted Christian marriages among indigenous people, forced families to regroup under male heads (a tactic often enforced by renaming), and trained men in wage-earning occupations while encouraging women to support them at home through domestic activities." The act reads: ... the Secretary of the Interior may, in his discretion, and he is hereby authorized, whenever he shall be satisfied that any Native American allottee is competent and capable of managing his or her affairs at any time to cause to be issued to such allottee a patent in fee simple, and thereafter all restrictions as to sale, encumbrance, or taxation of said land shall be removed. The use of competence opens up the categorization, making it much more subjective and thus increasing the exclusionary power of the Secretary of Interior. Although this act gave power to the allottee to decide whether to keep or sell the land, given the harsh economic reality of the time, and lack of access to credit and markets, liquidation of Indian lands was almost inevitable. It was known by the Department of Interior that virtually 95% of fee-patented land would eventually be sold to whites. In 1926, Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work commissioned a study of the federal administration of Indian policy and the condition of Native American people. Completed in 1928, The Problem of Indian Administrationcommonly known as the Meriam Report after the study's director, Lewis Meriam documented fraud and misappropriation by government agents. In particular, the Meriam Report claimed that the General Allotment Act had been used to illegally deprive Native Americans of their land rights. After considerable debate, Congress terminated the allotment process under the Dawes Act by enacting the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 ("Wheeler-Howard Act"). However, the allotment process in Alaska, under the separate Alaska Native Allotment Act, continued until its revocation in 1971 by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Despite the termination of the allotment process in 1934, the effects of the General Allotment Act continue into the present. For example, one provision of the Act was the establishment of a trust fund, administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, to collect and distribute revenues from oil, mineral, timber, and grazing leases on Native American lands. The BIA's alleged improper management of the trust fund resulted in litigation, in particular the case Cobell v. Kempthorne (settled in 2009 for $3.4 billion), to force a proper accounting of revenues. Fractionation For over one hundred thirty years, the consequences of federal Indian allotments have developed into the problem of fractionation. As original allottees die, their heirs receive equal, undivided interests in the allottees' lands. In successive generations, smaller undivided interests descend to the next generation. Fractionated interests in individual Native American allotted land continue to expand exponentially with each new generation. "Under current regulations, probates need to be conducted for every account with trust assets, even those with balances between one cent and one dollar. While the average cost for a probate process exceeds $3,000, even a streamlined, expedited process...costing as little as $500 would require almost $10,000,000 to probate the $5,700 in these accounts." ==Criticisms==

Angie Debo's And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes (1940) claimed the allotment policy of the Dawes Act (as later extended to apply to the Five Civilized Tribes through the Dawes Commission and the Curtis Act of 1898) was systematically manipulated to deprive the Native Americans of their lands and resources. Ellen Fitzpatrick claimed that Debo's book "advanced a crushing analysis of the corruption, moral depravity, and criminal activity that underlay White administration and execution of the allotment policy." ==See also==