Dawes Act (1887)

The centerpiece of the Dawes, or General Allotment, Act of 1887 was its provision to allot lands “in severalty”—that is, under individual ownership—to American Indians, and eventually to impose U.S. citizenship on them. The act met with widespread approval among Euro-Americans and widespread disapproval among the indigenous peoples upon whom it was imposed. Named after its author, Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, the act was the culmination of various groups’ efforts to advocate both for and against an Indian rights agenda. What these disparate groups tended to have in common was a set of culturally based assumptions about property—how it should be held, what should be done with it—and about the nature of civilized society. Whether friends of the Indian or foes, the act benefited the non-Indian population by forcing Native individuals into a restricted form of private land ownership, while freeing up millions of acres of once collectively (tribally) controlled lands to non-Indian settlement.

From 1883 to 1916, Indian rights advocates and reformers were invited to meet annually at the Mohonk Mountain House resort hotel of Indian Commissioner Albert Smiley (and his twin brother Alfred) on the shores of Lake Mohonk, New York. The annual proceedings of this multi-day event, Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian and Other Dependent Peoples, provide an inside look into an array of Euro-American concerns over what was widely referred to as “the Indian problem.” With some notable exceptions, white Americans accepted the Eurocentric position that American Indians would be better off if they adopted “white ways,” marked particularly by modes of dress, language (English), religion (Christian), and ownership of private property.

The Dawes Act's underlying purpose—touted by President Theodore Roosevelt some years after its passage—was to destroy tribal governance and the collectivist nature of Native societies. In his first annual message to Congress as president, Roosevelt referred to the act as “a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.” Although for many decades the General Allotment Act was considered a benign but failed form of paternalism, there is now wide consensus among scholars—especially those guided by the 2007 passage of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples—that the act perpetrated cultural genocide among indigenous Americans.

In the decades prior to passage of the Dawes Act, thousands of acres had already been allotted to citizens of indigenous American nations, often under specific treaty provisions. However, between 1887 and 1934 (when the allotting provision of the Dawes Act was repealed under the Indian Reorganization Act), millions of acres of indigenous homelands—lands already identified as such in hundreds of treaties with the United States—were surveyed and allotted in 40-, 80-, and [Page 673]160-acre parcels to individual “allottees,” and the tens of millions of acres of “surplus lands” ceded or sold to make way for white homesteaders.