A Novel Approach
American Documents: The Dawes Act
2026 is America’s 250th birthyear. To celebrate, I’m highlighting 50+ significant American documents from our history. So far I have covered The Mayflower Compact, Patrick Henry’s Speech, The Lee Resolution, The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Treaty of Paris, the Virginia Plan, The Northwest Ordinance, The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Louisiana Purchase, the Star-Spangled Banner, the Monroe Doctrine, the Indian Removal Act, the Knickerbocker Baseball Club rules, Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ Speech, the Emancipation Proclamation, Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address, the Appomattox Surrender Letters, the Homestead Act, the Gettysburg Address, the Alaska Purchase, the establishment of Yellowstone National Park, Susan B. Anthony’s Speech on Women’s Suffrage, and the Nez Perce Surrender.
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The 19th century was one of massive expansion for the United States, whether it was in buying Louisiana from France, settling Texas, or defeating Mexico to acquire the Mountain West and the Great Basin. This brought in new settlers, homesteaders, farmers, workers, and States.
To the American Indians, it often meant a new set of landlords, as it had for centuries. First the Spanish, then the French, now the United States. Two incompatible systems couldn’t occupy the same space at the same time, and so something had to give. It tended to be the more numerous or powerful Americans who won the struggle, and the Amerindians had to figure out a new way (and a new place) to live.
I covered Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal policy earlier this year. Contrary to modern revisionism, the goal was to preserve the Amerindian Nations, and on that front it succeeded, as they are still here and are more numerous than they were two hundred years ago. Nevertheless it is an immutable fact of history that many of them suffered and were wronged as a result of the policy. To further complicate matters, the Indian Territory to which they’d been moved was now surrounded by beneficiaries of the Homestead Act, as well as migrating Americans from the Westward Expansion.
Once again, two incompatible systems and cultures were occupying the same space at the same time, or very nearly so. The United States wasn’t going to dissolve itself and ship all the white people to Europe, and pure annihilation was abhorrent and unsavory (though such episodes did occur.) Thus it was incumbent upon lawmakers to figure out a new solution.
The Dawes Act came up in the 1880s during the era of “paternalism” reforms, wherein the government aimed to reduce the number of things it managed and instead encouraged people to take care of their own business (what a NOVEL concept…) Since the American Indians were one such group that was, ostensibly, in the government’s care (or under their protection), the idea was to “modernize” their way of life so that it more closely mirrored that of other Americans.
To each head of a family, one-quarter of a section;
To each single person over eighteen years of age, one-eighth of a section;
To each orphan child under eighteen years of age, one-eighth of a section; and
To each other single person under eighteen years now living, or who may be born prior to the date of the order of the President directing an allotment of the lands embraced in any reservation, one-sixteenth of a section:
The focus was on land holdings. Amerindian tribes held their lands communally, which more closely resembled their pre-colonial way of life; one person didn’t hold the land or stake a claim to it, instead it belonged to The People. (Most Native American tribe names translate to “the people” in their own languages.) The Act allotted 160 acres to a family, with smaller plots going to individuals based on age and circumstance. Any leftover land could be sold, but the land allotted to the Tribal members would go into a trust for a few decades.
This would prevent other settlers from coming in and buying the excess land, driving up the cost of the Tribal lands, buying those lands, and then leaving the Tribes with literally nowhere else to go and nothing to buy. (Hey Blackrock: f.u.) With the land directly assigned to families and cordoned off for farming, the Tribal members could adopt modern agricultural methods and hopefully, in time, assimilate to American modes of living.
“…those Indians who have availed themselves of the provisions of this act and become citizens of the United States shall be preferred.”
This may come as a surprise, but yeah, American Indians weren’t automatically United States citizens. The definitions of an American was a lot more narrow in these years, even if it was expanding in legal terms. Amerindians were effectively foreigners in a nation whose boundaries were in flux from a number of factors. Granting them citizenship was a heck of an olive branch after what so many of them had been through, and if the program were successful, it would have strengthened both peoples as time went on.
The full scope of the Act’s success would have to be a longer article, and exceeds the aim of this project. By and large, I’m not sure it worked as intended. It caused a lot of problems in succession, and inheritors divided the land into plots so small they were basically unworkable. “Checkerboard ownership” became a problem when land holdings eventually did go up for sale, and the Tribes lost a LOT of land in the aggregate anyway.
The Dawes Act was repealed in 1934 and replaced by the Wheeler-Howard Act, or Indian Reorganization Act.
In summary, the Dawes Act wanted to change the reservation system and move into a more direct assimilation model, bringing the Tribes into the United States as full members and citizens. The deeply-embedded cultural differences between the Tribes and the Americans couldn’t be done away with by the stroke of a pen, and while well-intentioned, such things should be judged by their results too.
The government was trying to figure out a peaceful and prosperous solution to a problem that might have worked with one group, but others resisted it, and the relationship between the Fed and the Tribes would continue in its difficulty for a long time.
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