By Daniel M. Cobb, Ph.D., The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
The greatest challenge that American Indians faced during the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the federal government’s deliberate and multifaceted effort to dismantle reservations and obliterate tribal cultures through allotment and assimilation. While assimilation attempted to eradicate the Native culture, allotment conveyed the message that communal land ownership was un-American.
The General Allotment Act
Massachusetts Senator Henry L. Dawes was the architect of the General Allotment Act of 1887, and he—like others before him—expressed the view that private property would serve as a panacea for the so-called Indian problem.
From this point of view, communal values were preventing Indians from becoming productive, acquisitive, and intelligently selfish; and communally owned land sustained these values. Dawes and the advocates of allotment, therefore, concluded that reservations would have to go.
The General Allotment Act, or Dawes Act, featured three major components: defining, dividing, and divesting.
This is a transcript from the video series Native Peoples of North America. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
The Three Components of the Allotment Act
First, the Indian Bureau defined Native communities by taking a census and creating a tribal roll to determine who was eligible for a land allotment. Second, the government conducted a survey of the reservations, subdividing them into parcels of from 40 to 320 acres.
The heads of family typically received 160 or 320 acres; 80 acres went to single persons over 18 and orphans under 18, and single persons under 18 could expect 40 acres. Dawes included no provisions for unborn children. And that gives us a clue into the final component of the allotment act—divesting.
In the wake of defining and dividing, there appeared huge swaths of so-called surplus land—land that Indians supposedly didn’t need. And so, in good conscience, the government conveniently opened this surplus land to non-Indians who, they were convinced, could make better use of it anyway. Allotment promised to make everyone a winner.
From Indian Allottees to Full Citizens of the USA
The Friends of the Indian stated the firm belief that tribal values, life-ways, and communal land ownership were un-American. Private property, however, offered an alternative path.
After a 25-year period of trusteeship, American Indian allottees were to receive fee patents for their land. Fee patents took the land out of trust and made it taxable and available to be sold. Once this happened, Indian allottees became full citizens of the United States of America. That was the idea, seen through the Friends of the Indian’s rose-colored glasses, anyway. The results were, of course, often catastrophic.
Learn more about American Indians and the law.
Effects of Allotment on Native Americans
Allotment unleashed a tidal wave of corruption, collusion, fraud, theft, and even murder throughout Indian Country—especially in oil-rich places such as the present-day state of Oklahoma.
As could be expected, through allotment, Native people lost millions upon millions of acres of land. In 1887, the year of the General Allotment Act’s passage, tribes held 138 million acres of land. By 1911, that number was 78 million acres, a reduction of more than 40%. In 1934—the year allotment was repealed—only 48 million acres of tribal land remained. Nearly 100 million acres had been lost in less than 50 years.
In the meantime, many allotments became fractionalized, or subdivided, among heirs to the point of being useless, so Indians sold those, too. The General Allotment Act served exactly its purpose. In the words of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, it was “a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass”
Learn more about the struggle for lands in the Plains between the 1850s and the 1870s.
Infantilizing Native People
However, allotment wasn’t just about destroying the tribal land base. It was about reconfiguring the way people thought about themselves as individuals and in relation to others. Allotment was about transforming culture, redefining value, and changing the way people lived their lives.
The 25-year trust period, for instance, infantilized Native people. It defined Indians as incompetent and served to perpetuate rather than diminish the dictatorial power of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Native people were defined as children, and the United States government served as their ward. The process of defining Indians in the context of tribal rolls also served to remake Indian identity and culture.
Learn more about Native Americans in the West.
Creation of Tribal Rolls
During census taking, the federal government assigned degrees of Indian blood that served as an imposed definition of identity—a wholly non-Indian way of determining individual identity and tribal citizenship that tribes typically didn’t use prior to allotment.
The so-called ‘blood quantum’ of a person was then correlated with their competence. High degrees of Indian blood made people more Indian and less competent. Lower degrees of Indian blood made people less Indian and more competent. This was racism at its worst.
The creation of tribal rolls also reconfigured people’s identities by literally creating, and at other times changing, surnames and constructing genealogies that defined a person’s family, relations, and inheritance exclusively in the contexts of the father’s line and the nuclear family.
Through allotment, in other words, American Indian kinship systems were being dismantled and reconstituted according to a definition of belonging that was patriarchal, patrilineal, and patronymic.
Common Questions about How the Allotment Act Dismantled American Indian Kinship Systems
Massachusetts Senator Henry L. Dawes was the architect of the General Allotment Act of 1887.
The General Allotment Act, or Dawes Act, featured three major components: defining, dividing, and divesting.
Allotment unleashed a tidal wave of corruption, collusion, fraud, theft, and even murder throughout Indian Country—especially in oil-rich places such as the present-day state of Oklahoma. Moreover, Native people lost millions upon millions of acres of land.
