Dawes Act of 1887

Background

Beginning in the early years of the United States, Congress passed special laws for “Indian Country”—Indian-held land west of the frontier. Indian tribes often had a recognized territory either as a result of original (Aboriginal) occupancy or by treaty. By the 19th century, the law said that private parties could not buy Indian land from a person or tribe; tribal land first had to be acquired by the federal government and then sold to others. Allotment offered another way to convert tribally held land into individually owned land with fee-simple title.

The first allotments were granted in the 1830s and 1840s when tribal lands in the Southeast were ceded to the federal government during the removal of the tribes. When the rest of the tribe moved west, some families were issued allotments for their farms, which allowed them to remain and live among the new settlers if they wished. Treaties that created reservations in the 1850s often had a provision that called for the eventual allotment of land to members of the tribe. Some reservations were allotted by treaty or special legislation throughout the 1870s and 1880s.

Formalizing the System

The Dawes or General Allotment Act followed years of this experimentation with allotment of lands to individuals. Several tribes—notably the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole (the Five Civilized Tribes); the Osage in Oklahoma; and the Seneca in New York—were specifically excluded from the Dawes Act. Special treaties between 1897 and 1902 created allotments for most of the tribes in eastern Oklahoma that were exempted from the Dawes Act.

The legislation represented a compromise between those who saw privatization as a key to push forward the assimilation of American Indians into White society and those who wanted to open large amounts of Indian land to settlement. The predominately Protestant reformers who pushed for the passage of the Dawes Act believed that dividing reservations into privately owned farms would break the hold of the chiefs over individual American Indians, encourage them to become farmers, and hasten their assimilation into White Christian culture.

This approach was part of a larger evangelical Protestant movement that had earlier fueled the anti-slavery movement. The theoretical basis of this belief was a largely inaccurate model of Indian societies as hierarchical and communal; the belief was popular among social scientists in the 1880s. Some reformers also saw allotment as a way of protecting Indian lands from further loss to White settlers or arbitrary actions by the federal government. The law passed with little opposition because it satisfied both reformers and the interests of White settlers, who could purchase surplus lands ceded by tribes to the federal government.

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