Summary Overview

Named after the Massachusetts senator Henry L. Dawes, who headed the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Indian Affairs, the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 was the culmination of decades of policy work designed to free up western land for white settlers and acculturate American Indians to American values and practices. The Dawes Severalty Act broke the land of most remaining reservations into parcels to be farmed by individual American Indians or nuclear American Indian families. Partitioning Indian land in this manner, Congress hoped, would force native peoples to give up communal living and to adopt American farming practices. Eventually, policy makers reasoned, American Indians would embrace all American cultural norms and become integrated into U.S. society.

When the Dawes Act passed in 1887, Americans’ views of native peoples varied considerably. Some groups, particularly evangelicals, dedicated themselves to both the religious and the cultural conversion of American Indians. Viewing themselves as benevolent teachers, they believed that they had a duty to acculturate American Indians. Others thought that American Indians were inassimilable, racially inferior savages who were destined for extinction. Few felt that Indian tribes deserved to be treated as sovereign nations as they had been in the past. While the crafters of the Dawes Act believed themselves to have the best interests of American Indians at heart, the act ultimately hurt native peoples, dispossessing them of their lands and further marginalizing them. People unsympathetic to American Indians manipulated the Dawes Act for their own financial gain, resulting in the massive displacement of native peoples. As a consequence, by 1900 the American Indian population had fallen to its lowest point in U.S. history.

Defining Moment

Following the Civil War, Americans had a reinvigorated interest in western migration. Transnational railroads made western migration safer and faster than it had been in the past. Americans were determined to pursue the dream of owning and farming their own land. The federal government aided potential homesteaders by passing the Homestead Act in 1862, providing land grants to hundreds of thousands of Americans.

White American migration into the West did not occur without opposition. Those who posed the greatest obstacle to American homesteaders were the Plains Indians. Primarily semi-sedentary people, the Plains Indians subsisted mainly by hunting buffalo. Homesteaders impeded their ability to survive by breaking land into parcels protected as private property, preventing both the buffalo and the Plains Indians from roaming freely. In many cases Native Americans responded violently in an effort to deter settlers. Homesteaders in turn complained that the government should protect them from Indian attacks. The situation in the West was exacerbated because businessmen, homesteaders, and railroad companies also wanted to remove the American Indians living on reservations in the West. Although the federal government had initially set up reservations in areas considered undesirable for white settlement, as land grew scarcer, the appeal of reservation land increased. In addition, in some cases, such as in the Dakota Territory, valuable natural resources like gold were discovered on Indian lands.

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Native Americans responded to white settlers in a number of ways. Many tribal leaders appealed to U.S. politicians to recognize their equality as men and to appreciate tribal sovereignty. Those who made treaties with the federal government or received promises of land rights lacked recourse when the agreements were ignored or forgotten. Consequently, many Native Americans escalated attacks on American settlers and troops in an effort to protect their way of life. However, even protracted Indian wars, such as that waged by the Apache in the Southwest, eventually resulted in Indian surrender. Indian victories, such as the Sioux and Cheyenne defeat of General George Armstrong Custer and his troops at Little Bighorn, resulted in harsher retribution by American settlers and troops. By the 1880s many Native Americans saw acquiescence to U.S. policies as their best chance for survival.

Author Biography

Crafted by the U.S. Congress, the Dawes Act was based on the contribution of many individuals, although it is primarily credited to Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, who chaired the Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee. Dawes was initially skeptical about attempts to acculturate American Indians through land allotment but was persuaded by advocates to promote the act. Dawes made an exceptional candidate because he both chaired the Indian Affairs Committee and represented the state with the largest contingent of participants in the Indian reform movement.

Henry Laurens Dawes was born in Cummington, Massachusetts, on October 30, 1816. Trained as a lawyer, Dawes entered politics at a young age. As the Republican candidate, he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives at age thirty-two and continued his political career in the Massachusetts state senate followed by the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. During the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s Dawes adamantly supported antislavery and Reconstruction policies. During the 1880s he became an advocate for Indian reform groups in the Senate. The meetings held by groups sympathetic to the plight of American Indians at Lake Mohonk, New York, particularly influenced Dawes. Dawes increasingly advocated allotment of reservation lands to acculturate American Indians and to integrate them into American society. He remained an active advocate for Indian rights until his death on February 5, 1903.

Document Analysis

Section 1 of the Dawes Act states the main purpose of the act. The act provides the president of the United States with the right to survey and divide reservation lands among individual American Indians and American Indian families. It also stipulates the manner in which the land will be divided, providing every head of household with one-quarter section of land, every single person over age eighteen or orphan under age eighteen with one-eighth section of land, and all other unmarried people under the age of eighteen with one-sixteenth section of land. Section 1 does not specify the actual size of a section but suggests that sections will be determined based on government survey of reservations and the size of the Indian population living on each. If an American Indian receives an allotment suitable only for ranching and not for agriculture, the act guarantees that he will get an additional allotment.

Section 2 guarantees the right of each American Indian to choose the area of land that will become his allotment. Heads of household are charged with choosing plots in the name of their minor children, and Bureau of Land Management agents are responsible for choosing land on behalf of orphaned children. If two people entitled to allotments want the same tract of land, the parcel will be divided between them, and they will receive from another area the remainder of land due to them. After Indians make their selections, agents are responsible for drawing preliminary boundaries, which they are to revise after resurveying the land and adding or subtracting from the various plots to standardize their size.

Section 2 also anticipates potential problems arising from the act. It insists that the agents responsible for choosing land on behalf of orphaned children choose land based on the best interests of those children. Suspecting some resistance to land division and allotment, Section 2 states that if an American Indian entitled to a portion of the newly divided reservations does not stake his claim to a partition of land within four years, the secretary of the interior should have a land agent choose a parcel on behalf of that Indian and issue a patent to the Indian in question for the plot of land in his name.

The purpose of Section 3 is to establish the manner in which allotments will be made, who will make them, who will appoint the officers who grant allotments, and how allotments will be documented. It states that the president will assign agents responsible for overseeing the allotment process. Records of allotment will be stored in both the Indian Office and the General Land Office.

Section 4 explains how the system of allotment will apply to American Indians who do not live on reservations. It states that an Indian residing off a reservation has the right to an allotment parcel equal to that of a native living on a reservation and that he can choose a parcel from any area of unsettled land. Although American Indians can choose their allotment from areas of unsurveyed land, the allotments will be adjusted once the land is surveyed. Section 4 also explains that the U.S. Treasury will compensate local land offices for the land settled by Indians.

Section 5 specifies the requirements for American Indians to gain ownership of their allotments. It states that once American Indians choose their plots of lands, those plots will be patented to them but held in trust by the U.S. government for twenty-five years. During those twenty-five years American Indians cannot sell the land. Furthermore, Section 5 nullifies any sale of allotted land prior to the end of the twenty-five-year period. If an allottee dies during the period in which the government holds his land in trust, his heirs will inherit the right to the land.

Additionally, Section 5 discusses options for reservation land not allotted to individuals under the provision of the act. It states that the federal government can negotiate with tribes to purchase unallotted reservation land but that land purchased from tribes can be used only to encourage actual settlers. Settlers will be restricted to land grants no larger than 160 acres per person. Religious organizations engaged in converting or educating native people are also entitled to tracts of land of no more than 160 acres. Like American Indians living on allotments, non-native settlers will have their land held in trust by the federal government, but only for five years.

The fees paid by homesteaders for tracts of former Indian land are relegated to the American Indians who had previously held the rights to the land in question. The money can be used by Congress for educating or otherwise “civilizing” the American Indians from the reservation in question. Section 5 concludes by stating that American Indians who have taken advantage of the allotment policy as well as those who have become U.S. citizens will have preference in the hiring of public employees working in American Indian communities.

Section 6 deals with the legal and citizenship status of American Indians who participate in the allotment program. All American Indians who receive allotments, it states, will become American citizens and have all of the rights of American citizens. It stipulates that no local or state government can pass laws denying equal protection by law to American Indians who have taken part in the allotment program. In addition, Section 6 specifies that all American Indians who take part in the allotment process will become subject to the laws of the state or territory in which they reside.

Section 7 endows the secretary of the interior with the authority to regulate water resources, if they are needed to make reservation land fertile for agricultural use. The secretary is charged with equitably distributing water among the American Indians living on a reservation. Section 7 also forbids giving water rights to one individual if doing so would hurt another.

Section 8 excludes certain tribes (Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Fox, Osage, Miami, Peoria, Sac, and Seminole) and certain regions (Seneca Nation of New York reservations and Sioux Nation territory in Nebraska) from the provisions of the act.

Section 9 states that the cost of surveying lands authorized by the act will be paid out of a $100,000 account in the Treasury. The $100,000 will be repaid to the Treasury from the sale of land acquired from American Indians based on the standards set forth by the act.

Section 10 protects the federal government’s right to exercise eminent domain over land allotted to American Indians.

Section 11 certifies that the act cannot be used to halt the relocation of the Southern Ute Indians from their current reservation in southwestern Colorado to a new reservation.

Essential Themes

Within the dry, legislative language of the Dawes Act is the core of a very old America ideal: that of the independent yeoman farmer. The same ideal that inspired the Homestead Act of 1862 played a role in this law. The language is technical and verbose, but also pointedly specific. The drafters of the act, who saw themselves as friends of the American Indian, attempted to draft an act so specific that those wishing to use the new policy to displace American Indians would not be able to do so. Notably, the initial act was drafted so seamlessly that speculators had difficulty obtaining legal rights to Native allotments until after the Dawes Act was amended in 1891. The Dawes Act was written with the understanding that employees of the General Land Office and the Bureau of Indian Affairs would frequently refer to it. For that reason these employees are specifically addressed throughout the act, and their actions are strictly proscribed. The act frequently warns agents against attempting to use their position for personal gain, stating, for example, that agents choosing plots of land for orphaned children must consider the best interests of the children and that tribes agreeing to sell reservation land to the government must be fairly compensated.

However, these ideals and the precise legal language which sought to implement them would be imperfectly executed. Within the first decade of the Dawes Act’s inception, state and local governments found loopholes allowing outsiders to purchase American Indian allotments. Once speculators and businesses gained ownership of Indian lands, American Indians felt the effects of the Dawes Act swiftly. Fences went up, restricting the movement of Indians as well as the game they hunted. Key resources, such as rivers and forests, were relegated to private, non-Indian owners, often eliminating the subsistence ability of American Indians. Thus one of the key ideals—the promotion of independent farms to supplant communal, “tribal” life did not come to fruition. The continued exploration of the Native Americans and their land would be paired with the “education and civilization” aspects of the law, leading to so-called “Indian Schools” where the cultural and linguistic assimilation of Native American children would be undertaken.

Bibliography and Additional Reading