The Dawes Act

The Dawes Act (1887), also known as the General Allotment Act, divided the tribal communal lands of Native American tribes into plots for individual households, opening up much of the land for non-Native settlement. In many cases, Native Americans were paid a per capita share of these lands' sales price. Allotment worked hand in glove with the practice of "homesteading," the granting of land to immigrating European Americans.  Allotments were fixed at 160 acres per family, or 80 acres for a single person over 18 years of age. 

The Dawes Act was created by reformers to achieve six goals:

• break up tribes as a social unit
• encourage individual land ownership
• encourage farming among Native Americans
• reduce the cost of native administration,
• secure parts of the reservations as Indian land
• open some of the land to white settlers for profit

Reformers, calling themselves “friends of the Indian,” advocated allotment as an alternative to extermination for Native Americans as the frontier closed around them.  As a result of allotment, Indian-owned landholdings shrank from 138 million acres in 1887 to about 50 million in 1934. Sixty million acres were lost through the release of “surplus” lands to federal government ownership or sale to homesteaders.
Extended families were devastated by the allotment system, in which close relatives who had lived together often were given distant parcels of land.  Native American men who were married to more than one wife were told to divest their extra relatives.

The Dawes Act also authorized the secretary of the Interior Department to sell timber from allotted land and increased existing powers authorizing the government to lease land for the supposed “benefit” of the allottees. Income from such activities was deposited in a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) account to be paid to allottees only if the bureau deemed them “worthy.”  The BIA also diverted income to pay for construction of schools and churches.

If the goal of allotment was to turn Native people into farmers, the experiment was an unmitigated failure. Most Native Americans preferred their own farming methods, especially in the West, where lands that often were racked by drought were simply unsuited for agricultural methods developed in Europe and refined in humid eastern North America.  The Dawes Act had the effect of minimizing the influence of tribal leaders and tribal institutions.  It strengthened the position of the federal government and broke down traditional patterns within the Indian communities.”