Analysis: The Dawes Act

Date: February 8, 1887

Author: Henry Dawes

Genre: legislation

Summary Overview

The Dawes Act, officially the General Allotment Act, and sometimes referred to the as the Dawes Severalty Act, instituted the policy of “allotment in severalty.” Under this policy, reservation lands that had been owned collectively by Native American tribes would be broken up into individual allotments or homesteads, with differing amounts of land being given to individuals based on their life situation—such as head of household, single adult, child, or orphan. The reformers who backed the allotment program hoped that individual land ownership would hasten the assimilation of Native peoples. While tribes as a whole generally opposed allotment, some highly-assimilated individual Indians did favor the policy, believing it would allow them to better manage their own affairs. On many reservations, some land would be declared surplus after all tribal citizens had received allotments, so land-hungry settlers and developers near the reservations favored the program.

Defining Moment

In the late 1800s, a group of reformers, mostly white Americans, but including a few highly-assimilated Native Americans, became known as the “Friends of the Indians.” This was not an organized group, but simply a loose collection of men and women with similar interests and goals. Many of the Friends of the Indians did belong to groups promoting reform of government Indian policy, such as the Indian Protective Committee (founded in 1879), the Indian Rights Association (founded 1882), or the National Indian Defense Association (founded 1885). Likewise, many also attended the annual Lake Mohonk Conferences, held from 1883 to 1916 at a resort in upstate New York, where like-minded individuals met to discuss Indian affairs. The Friends of the Indians sought three major goals, all of which aimed at the eventual assimilation of the American Indians and their total absorption into the general American society.

Among the goals sought were the allotment of reservation lands as individually owned parcels, US citizenship for all Native Americans, and education for all Indian children. Passage of the Dawes Act in 1889 was considered one of their most important accomplishments, and Dawes was a prominent part of the Friends of the Indians movement. Allotment was considered a key idea because the reformers thought that individual land ownership would lead Native peoples to embrace the American values of thrift, hard work, and self-reliance. Under the original Dawes Act, an Indian who accepted an allotment became a US citizen, so the goal of citizenship was also obtained. The reformers also promoted the idea of schools where Indian children would learn the basic skills necessary to function in American society.

While the Friends of the Indians had a genuine concern for the Native Americans, they generally held condescending attitudes toward Indian culture and sought to erase the cultural traits of the Native people to facilitate assimilation. Because of the paternalistic, ethnocentric attitudes of the reformers, they promoted ideas that the Indians themselves cared little about, or in some cases—such as allotment—strenuously opposed. Indians generally cared little about the US citizenship issue, although in the long run, citizenship brought the Native Americans the constitutional protections of their civil and political rights. Many Indian families initially had some interest in education for their children, but when they saw that the schools aimed at breaking down their children's attachment to their own culture, this interest often turned to opposition. The allotment program proved to be a disastrous failure: promoted as a way to protect the individual Indian's right to his own land, it created a large class of landless Indians and caused a significant decrease in the total landholdings of the Native tribes.

Author Biography

Henry L. Dawes (1816–1903) was a Republican politician from western Massachusetts. He was born in Cummington, MA and graduated from Yale College in 1839. Before entering politics, he had been a school teacher and newspaper editor. He was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1852 and to the US Senate in 1875. Although he is best known for his sponsorship of the General Allotment Act, he was not extensively involved in Indian affairs until the late 1870s. In 1881, he became chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. He became a leading figure in the loose coalition of reformers known as the “Friends of the Indians,” who promoted highly ethnocentric, assimilationist reforms in government Indian policy. After retiring from the Senate in 1893, he led the Dawes Commission, which dealt with applying the Allotment Act among the Five Civilized Tribes in the Indian Territory. He died in Pittsfield, MA in 1903.

Document Analysis

The Dawes Act provided for distributing Indian reservation lands “in severalty” and to “extend the protection of the laws of the United States and the Territories over the Indians.” The word severalty means the quality of being separate or individual, and the idea behind allotting reservation lands was to give each Indian family or individual their own privately held land. Those who accepted allotments, or those who had moved off of reservations and had “adopted the habits of civilized life,” became US citizens. The bill also specified that US citizenship did not limit or impair the Indian's right to share in tribal property or other tribal benefits.

The act called for a survey of reservation lands, so that the precise acreage would be known before allotment was carried out. A head of a family would receive a quarter section of land—160 acres. This was also the amount of land that settlers could claim under the Homestead Act of 1862. However, a problem with both homesteading and the allotment policy is that while 160 acres was a good-sized farm in the eastern parts of the United States, in the arid West, much more land would be needed. Single people over eighteen years old or orphans under eighteen would receive a one-eighth section (eighty acres). Children living with a family would receive 40 acres. After all eligible tribal members had received their allotments, excess land could be sold to anyone, with the funds from these sales going into a trust fund for the tribe. For twenty-five years, the secretary of the interior would hold the title to each allottee's land in trust, so that the land could not be lost through mismanagement or failure to pay local property taxes (the land would not be taxable during this trust period). Initially, land could not be leased during the trust period, but later changes did allow the leasing of trust land. The Burke Act in 1906 also provided that an individual Indian allottee could petition to have their trust status ended earlier, if they were deemed competent to handle their own affairs. The Burke Act also amended the citizenship provisions, so that Indians would not become citizens until the end of the trust period. This change was made because many believed that citizenship was not consistent with an individual being held in a trustee or wardship status.

Allotment was intended to hasten the assimilation of the Native Americans by making them competent US citizens who farmed their own lands. Because of the sale of excess reservation lands and widespread fraud by whites gaining control of Indian lands, the policy proved a failure and led to many Indians living on greatly reduced reservations with no individual lands to call their own.

Bibliography and Additional Reading

Genetin-Pilawa, C. Joseph. Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy After the Civil War. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2014. Print.

Hoxie, Frederick E. A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920.

Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984. Print.

Prucha, Francis Paul. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indian. 2 vols. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995. Print.