Dawe's Act
The General Allotment Act of 1887 , also known as the Dawes Act , was a United States federal law that subdivided Indian reservation land.
emergence
As early as 1871, the federal government had used force and deceit to force the Native American tribes into those areas (" reservations ") that were initially of little importance to the white settlers. After the last Native victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn against parts of the 7th US Cavalry Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer on June 25, 1876, the high point of the resistance was passed. The Native Americans could not survive with their way of life on the reservations that were imposed on them and became dependent on food supplies from the US government. But most of the areas left to them should also be taken from them.
On February 8, 1887, the US Congress passed the General Allotment Act. It later became commonly known as the Dawes Act, after Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts , who drafted it.
The most important provisions were:
- The reserve land was divided into 64 hectares and allocated to each head of family for their exclusive use. All unmarried reservation residents over the age of 18 and minor orphans received 32 acres in fiefdom, children under 18 received 16 acres and wives nothing. (In 1891 the Dawes Act was amended by requiring these parcels to be agricultural land; if they were for grazing only then the size was doubled.)
- The US government acted as trustee for the first 25 years, after which time the parcels became indigenous property.
- Eligible individuals had four years to choose their country, after which land was allocated to them by the Secretary of the Interior .
- Any Indigenous who receives a land grant "and has accepted the habits of civilized life" (that is, living apart from the tribe, among other things, and having separated from the tribe) is granted citizenship of the United States "without the right to of such aborigine is in any way impaired or otherwise restricted on tribal or other property."
It was not until 1924 that all Native Americans received U.S. citizenship with the Indian Citizenship Act .
Many natives had no private ownership of land and often sold their land to white settlers or speculators out of ignorance or economic hardship. The undivided areas and the parcels that became state property after the death of the owners were sold to white buyers at bargain prices.
Several groups of indigenous people have been exempted from the provisions of the law. The area of Indian Territory inhabited by the Cherokee , Muskogee , Choctaw , Chickasaw , Seminoles , Osage , Miami , Peoria , Sauk , and Fox were excluded from the Land Allocation Act. The areas of the Seneca in the state of New York and the region of Nebraska bordering the Sioux territory were also exempted.
In 1893, negotiations with the Five Civilized Tribes , the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee, and Seminole, resulted in an expansion of the Land Allocation Act. The five Indigenous Nations pledged to abolish their tribal government and recognize state and federal laws. In return, the state allotted a portion of common Indian territory to members of the five tribes.
aim
The law primarily pursued two goals: On the one hand, the community structure of the Indians was to be broken and the Indians thus integrated into American society. The Indians should become farmers . As such, according to official opinion, they would need much less land than they claimed for their traditional itinerant hunter-gatherer way of life. The Indians themselves were mostly opposed to farming, especially those on the northern plains. They saw farm work as undignified and restrictive. The government saw another advantage of subdivision in the surplus land thus freed up, which it could sell to white people at a profit. Overall, the Indians lost 36 million hectares from a total of 55 million hectares in 1887, i.e. a good two thirds.
The parceled land was to be administered in trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) until the Indians had learned to keep it like whites, that is, until the Indians had become farmers. To make matters worse for the Indians, the best land was sold to whites and they had to make do with second-rate land. In addition to the land parcelling, further measures should allow the Indians to merge into the melting pot of the USA. Everything wild should be driven out of the Indians and they should be made white.
Probably the most devastating measure, along with the parcelling out, was the establishment of boarding schools . Native American children were snatched from their parents' homes and thus from reservation life at a very early age and placed in boarding schools outside the reservations. There they were forbidden to speak their traditional language or hold traditional ceremonies. Those in charge of the boarding schools, often missionaries , berated all the values that the children had been taught in their traditional upbringing. The Indian children fell into a cultural depression that was to determine their whole future life. The ban on the traditional language and the practice of their tribal religion and ceremonies applied not only to the students of the boarding schools, but to all Native Americans living in the United States.
Follow
As a result of the Dawes Act, the area of reservations decreased from 138 to 48 million acres between 1887 and 1932. This led to an indescribable impoverishment of the Indians. Later, the Indians got back part of the lost land. A total of 1.26 million acres were given to Native Americans who did not live on the reservations at the time of subdivision through 1920.
The General Allotment Act resulted in part in a fragmentation of reservations due to the massive reduction in reservation land. For example, the large Lakota reservation was divided into six smaller ones. Not all tribes were affected by the parcelling. Those in Oklahoma and Nebraska were spared, as were a few others, such as the Seneca and Menominee .
The main charge is that the General Allotment Act failed to take account of the consequential effect of inheritance. In 1906, the Burke Act was intended to put a stop to the arbitrariness of the states, which often only took the interests of white people into account. As a result, the subdivisions were made by the federal government and no longer by the individual states.
Recent Impact
Land leases by Indians to whites have led to explosive consequences in the present. The BIA holds the rental income in trust for the Indians. In 1996, 500,000 Native Americans filed a class action lawsuit against the US government, claiming that most of them received only a few cents in rental income from the BIA. As a result, the Ministry of the Interior and the Treasury admitted that they had not kept accounts of the land and accounts of the Indians for decades. The legal battle ended on December 8, 2009 with a settlement totaling $3.4 billion. 1.4 billion dollars were awarded directly to the plaintiffs, up to 2 billion dollars are earmarked for the repurchase of land distributed under the Dawes Act. Legislation allowing government funding for the grand total was signed into law by President Barack Obama in December 2010.
See also
- United States Indian Policy , Indian Reorganization Act
- Termination , Indian Self-Determination Act
- expulsion of the Indians
literature
- Frantz, Klaus: The Indian Reservations in the USA - Aspects of Territorial Development and Socio-Economic Change . Geographical Knowledge, Issue 109. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart: 1993
- Otis, DS; Prucha, Francis Paul: The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands (The Civilization of the American Indian Series. No. 123) . 2nd revised edition. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK: 1973, ISBN 978-0-8061-4627-0 (English, first edition: 1934).
- Washburn, Wilcomb: Handbook of North American Indians . Volume 4: History of Indian-White Relations . Smithsonian Institution (ed.). Washington: 1988.
web links
sources
- ↑ 160 acres
- ↑ 80 acres
- ↑ 40 acres
- ↑ Otis, DS; Prucha, Francis Paul: The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands. (The Civilization of the American Indian Series, #123) . 2nd revised edition. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK: 1973, ISBN 978-0-8061-4627-0 (English, first edition: 1934).
- ↑ Teaching With Documents: Maps of Indian Territory, the Dawes Act, and Will Rogers' Enrollment Case File . In: National Archives and Records Administration .
- ↑ 90 million acres from originally 138 million acres
- ↑ Patrick Reis: Obama Admin Strikes $3.4B Deal in Indian Trust Lawsuit. In: New York Times. December 8, 2009. Retrieved December 8, 2009 (English).