THE DAWES SEVERALTY ACT OF 1877

Conquering the Indians was a grueling task; the Commissioner of Indian Affairs figured that it cost $1 million and the lives of twenty-five soldiers for each Native American killed. The Dawes Severalty Act was an attempt to deal with the "Indian problem" in a new way. Instead of fighting the Indians, confining them to ever-smaller reservations, the act offered 160 acres of land to each Indian head of household who would forsake the tribal ways and take up farming (320 acres if he chose ranching).

This was an effort to remake the Indian into a white man. Many people believed that this was a good way to lift Native Americans out of poverty and to have him join the ranks of civilized society. If successful, the government would be relieved of the burden of providing for them—after they had done so much to deprive them.

Of course, the motives of the White Man were mixed—as illustrated in this quote from the president of Amherst College, addressing the "Friends of the Indians:"

To bring him out of savagery into citizenship we must make the Indian more intelligently selfish before we can make him unselfishly intelligent. We need to awaken in him wants...Discontent with the teepee and the starving rations of the Indian camp in winter is needed to get the Indian out of the blanket and into trousers,--and trousers with a pocket in them, and with a pocket that aches to be filled with dollars.¹

"The purpose of the Dawes Act...was purportedly to protect Indian property rights, particularly during the land rushes of the 1890s, but in many instances the results were vastly different. The land allotted to the Indians included desert or near-desert lands unsuitable for farming. In addition, the techniques of self-sufficient farming were much different from their tribal way of life. Many Indians did not want to take up agriculture, and those who did want to farm could not afford the tools, animals, seed, and other supplies necessary to get started. There were also problems with inheritance. Often young children inherited allotments that they could not farm because they had been sent away to boarding schools. Multiple heirs also caused a problem; when several people inherited an allotment, the size of the holdings became too small for efficient farming." ²

The Indians who were allotted land could not sell it for 25 years (a reasonable stipulation), but surplus land not given to Indians was opened to white settlers. The result of this was that in less than two dozen years, these tribes lost 60 million acres of their land—over a third of what they owned was taken from them.

A generation or two later, in 1934, the United States government officially recognized the importance of Indian culture and also returned unsold lands to the tribes.

¹Merrill E. Gates, addressing the Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indians, as quoted in The Great Republic: A History of the American People, Second Ed. (Lexington; D.C. Heath & Co., 1981), p. 565.

² source: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=50

See also: http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/ah_023300_dawesseveral.htm