Handout 3: Notes on The Dawes Act of 1887*
The Plan /Additional Notes
1-The Act: 160 acres of land would be allotted to each family. It would be held in trust by the government for 25 years while the family learned how to use the land to support himself and his family. After 25 years they would officially own the land. / 1-The Act: Many plots of land were unsuitable for farming or stock-raising.-Some timber-rich and mineral-rich land given to the Indians despite pressure to not award them such rich lands but lands were unsuitable for farming yet a wealthy commodity.
2- Restrictions: The Indian land could not be leased or sold during the 25 year period. / 2- Restrictions: Congress passes lenient legislation that allows Indians to lease or sell their allotments before the 25 year period is over thus opening access to timber, minerals, and farm land. It opened more land up to white farmers.
-Making the land more productive won out over self-sufficiency goals.
3-The Goal: To end government control over the Indians and eliminate the need for the BIA (the Bureau of Indian Affairs). / 3- The Goal: If the land is unsuitable for farming then it defeats the goal of the act. If allowed to lease or sell before the 25 year period then defeat the goal of the act.
4- Farming Land: The land to be allotted was supposed to be productive land for farming or stock-raising. / 4- Farming Land: Not understanding legal technicalities of land ownership led to loss of land
-Lack of farm training and equipment hampered farming
-Climate on some reservation lands hampered farming.
-Inadequate soils hampered farming
-The war created added pressure to access lands that had timber and minerals from Indians
-The Depression hit hard.
5- Surplus Land: After all the land was allotted, the leftover parcels would be sold to white settlers. / 5- Surplus Land: Due to increasing pressure better farming plots were kept as surplus to sell to while farmers.
6- Result: To become assimilated into popular American culture. / 6- Result: Between 1887 and 1943, Native Americans lost an estimated 86 million acres of the 138 million acres set aside for them in the older reservation system. From the onset, they lost 60 million acres after allotments were finished that were ceded to the government or sold to while settlers.
-by 1943 an additional 26 million acres were lost
7- Cultural Pressures: To become individual land owners that were self-sufficient. To become American not stay Indian. / 7- Cultural Pressures: Some Indian nations were nomadic in outlook or were communal agriculturalists so the idea of individual land cultivation was divisive and anti-community. --broke up Native American nations by assigning plots of land to individual nation members that could eventually be sold and leave the community.
* Notes derived from Janet A. McDonnell, 1991. The Dispossession of the American Indian, 1887-1934. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Education reinforced this idea. Children were sent to boarding schools to learn American ways and language. It was an English-only approach with American cultural values taught at the expense of their home cultures.
Removal act: moving the Native Americans in the East to lands West of the Mississippi.
Acculturated Cherokees resisted. President Andrew Jackson forces them to move with army escort to present-day Arkansas and Oklahoma. It is estimated that 4000 died of starvation, disease, or exposure on this “Trail of Tears.”