by David Treuer
Two years later, John Oberly, then commissioner of Indian affairs, echoed the 1886 report in a report of his own, in which he concluded that the Indian “must be imbued with the exalting egotism of American civilization so that he will say ‘I’ instead of ‘We,’ and ‘This is mine’ instead of ‘This is ours.’” And in 1896, Merrill Gates, who would later head the Board of Indian Commissioners, stated: “We must make the Indian more intelligently selfish. . . . By acquiring property, man puts forth his personality and lays hold of matter by his own thought and will.”
Senator Henry Dawes, a regular attendee of the Lake Mohonk conferences and a member of the Friends of the Indian, with the help of paid lobbyists in Washington, helped push forward the General Allotment Act, otherwise known as the Indian Severalty Act, otherwise known as the Dawes Act. Passed in 1887, it transformed the landscape of America and forever altered the ways in which most tribes lived on their homelands. Its key provision read:
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That in all cases where any tribe or band of Indians has been, or shall hereafter be, located upon any reservation created for their use, either by treaty stipulation or by virtue of an act of Congress or executive order setting apart the same for their use, the President of the United States be, and he hereby is, authorized, whenever in his opinion any reservation or any part thereof of such Indians is advantageous for agricultural and grazing purposes, to cause said reservation, or any part thereof, to be surveyed, or resurveyed if necessary, and to allot the lands in said reservation in severalty to any Indian located thereon in quantities as follows:
To each head of a family, one-quarter of a section;
To each single person over eighteen years of age, one-eighth of a section;
To each orphan child under eighteen years of age, one-eighth of a section; and
To each other single person under eighteen years now living, or who may be born prior to the date of the order of the President directing an allotment of the lands embraced in any reservation, one-sixteenth of a section.
The bill was drafted and passed the Senate without consent or even input from Indian tribes or Indian leaders. To the reformers of the Friends of the Indian and the Indian Rights Association, its strengths were that it promised to break up the tribe as a social unit, encourage private enterprise and farming, reduce the cost of Indian administration, fund the emerging boarding school system (with the sale of “surplus land”), and provide a land base for white settlement. If we look back at the period now, it is impossible not to feel a kind of sickness at the thought that the government stole Indian land in order to fund the theft of Indian children.
By the time of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, allotment was in full swing. Indian agents were busy hiring surveyors, recording deeds, and registering heads of household. Armies of surveyors platted Indian homelands and marked them off. Clerks worked nonstop copying and recording deeds (although even under this new system, Indians could not buy or sell land—the allotments “owned” by Indians were in fact owned by the government in trust). Censuses were taken on reservations across the country.
Along with allotment, another program arose: enrollment. Until this point, there had been no official method of determining tribal membership, much less recording it. Tribes recognized their members in a variety of ways, including residence, descent, marriage, language, and who fought for, and with, whom; they determined for themselves who belonged in the tribe. Indian agents had, here and there, made lists of people they considered Indians for the purpose of distributing annuities and rations. But now there was pressure to come up with some system to determine tribal enrollment. It wouldn’t do to distribute land—a pretty big gift in American thinking—without making sure the recipient deserved it.
The method the government arrived at was as flawed as the policy it was meant to facilitate. In most cases, the government used “blood quantum” as the way to figure out who was Indian and who was not, and therefore whom to include and (more often) exclude from receiving allotments. Blood quantum was simply a measure of how much Indian blood (full blood, half, quarter, eighth) a person had. It was often wildly inaccurate, culturally incongruous, and socially divisive. It is still used to determine who can be an enrolled member of some federally recognized tribes, and it is just as divisive now as it was then.
Compounding the problem, censuses and subsequent enrollment were conducted by white federal employees on the basis of European kinship terms that might have no analog in the cultures in question; the rolls were compiled by outsiders and kept by them; Indians were not in any way in charge of determining who was in their own tribe or not. And from the outset the process was marked by graft, greed, nepotism, favoritism, and fraud. Indian agents consolidated power by giving good allotments to Indians who supported their policies and even, in some cases, made sure that especially good allotments were excluded from the process so that white people (often business interests who had agents in their pockets) ended up owning vast tracts of the very best land within the boundaries of the reservation. It is no accident that non-Natives own the majority of the lakeshore on all the best lakes in Minnesota, or the richest farmland with access to water in Nebraska, Montana, and South Dakota.
In many contexts, the sheer size of the allotments didn’t make much sense. It is one thing to have 160 acres (a quarter section) to farm in the Red River valley or along the Arkansas River. It’s another to have 160 acres in the semiarid grasslands and scrub of South Dakota where no crops will grow at all. On much of the land where cultivation of crops was impossible, even grazing would require numerous acres per animal because the land was so poor. And control over the allotments themselves—whether and how they could be transferred between people, even family members—was always subject to the whims of the government as represented by the Indian agent, yet another way for the government to force Indians to do what they wanted. Allotment was as cruel a kind of coercion as the withholding of rations. Sometimes the two were used together—rations for Indians who were reluctant to adopt the allotment system were delivered late, were of even poorer quality, and were sometimes withheld altogether until the requisite signatures were put to paper. Starvation is a powerful motivator.
While the first wave of allotments was crashing on Indian shores in the 1890s, the General Allotment Act was amended and supplemented by further acts of Congress. The Nelson Act, affecting only tribes in Minnesota, went a step further than the General Allotment Act: rather than allot land within the boundaries of existing reservations, it sought to “disappear” all the existing reservations in Minnesota and remove all the Ojibwe Indians there and in parts of North Dakota to the newly established White Earth Reservation in west-central Minnesota, thereby freeing up a fortune in timber found in the northern part of the state. Many Ojibwe managed to hang on to their reservations, but so deep was the disgust and distrust at the government’s maneuver that it spurred some Ojibwe to burn down the old-growth pine on their homelands. When asked what they were doing, the men responded by saying they were simply doing to the whites what the whites had done to them: destroying what they loved the most.
The Curtis Act, passed in 1898, brought the provisions of allotment to the so-called Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory (they had been excluded from the Dawes Act by the substance of their treaties). The act was officially and unironically titled “An act for the Protection of the People of the Indian Territory, and for other purposes.” The sad truth behind it is that Charles Curtis, the legislator from Kansas who authored the bill, was Indian on his mother’s side (Kaw, Osage, and Potawatomi) and had been raised for much of his childhood by his grandparents on the Kaw reservation near Garden Grove, Kansas. Once, when he was a child, a Cheyenne war party had attacked the Kaw, who had donned war paint and armed themselves and advanced to confront the Cheyenne. The Cheyenne literally rode circles around the Kaw, a
nd they exchanged bow and arrow shot for the better part of the day while one of the Kaw rode hard for sixty miles to summon help. Charles Curtis, at eight, was along for that mission. His mother left him land upon her death; the Kaw are matrilineal. That didn’t stop his non-Indian father from trying to steal it. As an adult, Curtis understood himself as both American and Indian, and the double strands of his cultural identity informed the reasoning behind the Curtis Act. He wanted to create legislation for the tribes of his homeland that respected their tribal ways but further encouraged the process of becoming American. But by the time the bill got through the Senate and the House it had been rewritten and amended five times and bore little resemblance to what Curtis had originally proposed. In its final form, the Curtis Act abolished tribal government, treaty lands, and communal landholdings. It brought allotment to the Five Civilized Tribes with the provision that lots could be held in “fee simple”—actually owned by Indians rather than held in trust by the government. It allowed for public schools and for the incorporation of towns. These provisions have forever marked the Indian communities in Oklahoma as different. Most Oklahoma Indians live in settlements, incorporated towns; they were able to levy taxes and establish public services like fire departments and hospitals; they have held public office at municipal and state levels for more than a century; the whole fabric of Oklahoma is marked by the Indian presence there. Whether this strategy was better for Indian communities than fixing the more traditional reservation system is open to debate. There was much to be gained and much to be lost no matter the course a tribe chose. As for Curtis, he regretted the legislation for the rest of his life even though his own trajectory was meteoric: he was chosen as Herbert Hoover’s running mate in 1928 and served as vice president of the United States from 1929 to 1933. He remains the only Indian to date elected to serve in the executive branch of the U.S. government.
Meanwhile, allotment rolled on. In 1906, the Dawes Act was further amended by the Burke Act, an attempt to simplify the process of ownership by introducing fee-simple patents into the allotment process that would, as in Oklahoma, allow “competent” Indians to own their land outright. The fee-simple patent also, however, meant that taxes began accruing on the owned properties immediately. There were no programs in place to educate Indians on what taxes were, much less how to deal with them. Without small businesses, much steady employment, or the reasonable expectation that their allotment would magically begin turning a profit (assuming that crops, much less cash crops, could be grown there in the first place, and that there was transportation to markets and access to those markets), thousands of Indians owed back taxes almost immediately. Local and state governments (as usual directed by the heavy hand of the Indian agent) could collect by foreclosing on the land. It did not help that the allotment of so many Indian lands occurred shortly before the Great Depression and the ecological disaster of the Dust Bowl, when so many small farms and farmers were ruined. It was estimated that within a couple of decades, as much as 95 percent of allotted Indian land would pass into white ownership. The agent at Pine Ridge nevertheless insisted that allotment was a kind of governmental tough love: “It is still the conviction of this office that the issue of a patent in fee for a portion of an Indian’s land who is judged as being competent or near-competent, is the proper procedure in dealing with the land question among the Indians. . . . Even if the proceeds derived from the dispossession of the land are squandered he still has plenty of land left and he may have learned a few lessons that will prove of value in the future.”
And then there was the matter of assessing competence. How to measure the competence of people who had never owned land, at least not in that specific way? As landowners? As citizens? As racial “others”? Policy was that Indians who possessed European blood had enough competence (based on the degree of “whiteness”) to buy and sell and pay taxes on land. For the purposes of determining who had European blood, teams of phrenologists were sent to Indian country. Using the theory and practice of craniometry developed by Samuel George Morton (which determined “scientifically” that Caucasians had the largest brain capacity—1,426 cubic centimeters versus a paltry 1,344 for American Indians and 1,278 for blacks), the phrenologists set about measuring skulls, and on this basis thousands of Indians were, surprisingly, deemed competent to own land: the better to steal it from them.
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AT THE END of the allotment period—which stretched from 1887 to 1934—Indian landholdings had dropped from 138 million to 48 million acres. Without strong Indian governments in place and lacking conscientious advocacy within the American government, and with the passing of law after law in the absence of input from the constituencies (who had no standing as citizens in any event), Indian homelands had been reduced by two-thirds in about thirty years. What the great process of “civilization” had brought to Indian country was poverty, disenfranchisement, and the breakdown of Indian families. It had ground most of them down. One Ojibwe father wrote to the superintendent of the Flandreau boarding school: “I have lost my wife and left me with six children. . . . I would like to ask you to send these little folks over to you two or three years so I can get along. It is hard for me [to] stay here alone home because children not used to home alone when mother gone. When I am going working out it hard for them.”
Without steady employment, often homeless on their own reservations, chronically malnourished, Indians across the country were vulnerable to disease. At Grand Portage Reservation in far northern Minnesota, tuberculosis struck more than 30 percent of the population. Poverty took the children, and it also took the parents. Boarding schools gradually filled with orphans. A six-year-old boy from White Earth Reservation “was first sent away to boarding school when his widowed mother was not able to care for him or his five siblings, aged three to seventeen.” He spent his entire childhood in boarding schools and then joined the army. He was thrilled to be stationed at Fort Snelling and wrote enthusiastic letters back to the school, which he referred to as his “Shangri-La.” For some families boarding schools were the sole option, because to keep their children with them was to starve them to death. But the assault wasn’t only on land and family. There were other challenges in store for Indians during these days.
Indian Offenses
In 1878, legislation was passed empowering Indian agents to hire police to keep “law and order” on reservations around the country. That there was an absence of it should come as no surprise. Traditional warrior societies, such as the Dog Soldiers among the Lakota and the Bear Clan among the Ojibwe, which enforced tribal law and kept the peace, were in shambles or underground or suppressed. Many tribes who had been traditional enemies were now clustered cheek by jowl on reservations that were entirely too small to contain them. There were shortages of food, clothing, blankets, and shelter. And the very structure of many reservations was a cancer on a people’s sense of self. Who are we, a tribe might ask, when we can no longer hunt or fish or gather or travel? As the living conditions on reservations grew worse, the rhetoric of reformers rose to a higher pitch. In 1877, Episcopal bishop William Hobart Hare wrote:
Civilization has loosened, in some places broken, the bonds which regulate and hold together Indian society in its wild state and has failed to give people law and officers of justice in their place. This evil continues unabated. Women are beaten and outraged; men are murdered in cold blood; the Indians who are friendly to schools and churches are intimidated and preyed upon by the evil disposed; children are molested on their way to school and schools are dispersed by bands of vagabonds; but there is no redress. The accursed condition of things is an outrage upon the One Lawgiver. It is a disgrace to our land. It should make every man who sits in the national halls of legislation blush. And wish well to the Indians as we may and do for them what we will, the effect of civil agents, teachers and missionaries are like the struggle of drowning men weighted with lead, as long as by the absence of law Indian society is
left without a base.
Apart from the likely alarmist exaggeration, it seemed to escape Hare’s notice that the imposition of a foreign legal, educational, religious, and administrative system had led to a sorry state of affairs on many reservations. The abject poverty of reservation life was caused by the coercive and exploitive policies and presence of the dominant culture rather than caused by tribes or tribal society, but policy makers were willfully blind to their complicity. Instead of taking stock they doubled down and decided that an increased law-enforcement presence was necessary. And surely it was better to have Indian police rather than white military personnel attending to the needs of Indian communities. So the legislation of 1878 included provisions for a police force, though it wasn’t fully funded until three years later. As of 1882 (again cart before the horse), there were police on reservations but no codes or laws or policies for them to follow, even as a guide, much less courts in which to try Indians accused of crimes. In 1883 a Court of Indian Offenses was created and funded by Congress. But it was clear that the agents who pushed for the bill and the legislators who drafted it had more than law and order in mind. Here was another assault on Indian cultural selfhood and autonomy.