Sunshine Skyways

This post is about historical arguments for and against the General Allotment Act of 1887, which is also known as the Dawes Act after its Senate sponsor, Henry A. Dawes. Under the Dawes Act (Act), American Indian tribes lost legal standing and their communal lands were divided among individual members. The Act was intended to facilitate Indian assimilation into the broader society, however, as it undermined tribal life, it did not increase Indian acceptance by Euro-American society (Senier, 2000). The Act cost American Indians two-thirds of their land, and much of what remained was rendered effectively useless as it was inherited by successive generations (Bobroff, 2001).

There are more historical documents from people who supported the passage of the Act than from those who opposed it. Among its proponents were common beliefs that communal land ownership was a primitive system, which stunted socioeconomic development, and Indians needed a system of private property ownership to become civilized (Steel, 2000). Speaking at the Lake Mohonk Conference in 1883, apparently about the Cherokees, Dawes said (Debo, 1968, pp. 22, 23):

The head chief told us that there was not a family in that whole nation that had not a home of its own. There was not a pauper in that nation, and the nation did not own adollar. It built its own capitol … and it built its schools
and its hospitals. Yet the defect of the system was apparent. They have got as far as they can go, because they own their land in common. It is Henry George’s system, and under that there is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbors. Till this people will consent to give up their lands, and divide them among their citizens so that each can
own the land he cultivates, they will not make much more progress.[1]

Implicit in Dawes’ argument are the beliefs that private ownership of land increases individual (and national) wealth because it rewards an individual’s hard work, and communal ownership encourages laziness because a good worker subsidizes the indolent.[2] The conservative economic faithful sermonized that communal land ownership stifled competition and individualism, which were necessary for economic growth. According to Ezra A. Hayt, in 1879, then Commissioner of Indian Affairs, common ownership of land “prevented individual advancement,…spirit of rivalry, and the desire to accumulate property for personal use of comfort which is the success and advancement in all white communities (Prucha, 1973, p. 80).[3]

Images of lazy Indians were produced and circulated as evidence of a system of property rights that had to be changed. One of these images appears in the recently rediscovered and republished novel, Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1891), by Muscogee writer, S. Alice Callahan. The main character, Wynema, argues that allotment would be a good cure for the lazy Indian. She says:

We should have our own homes, and contrary to ruining our fortunes I think it would mend them …There are so many idle, shiftless Indians who do nothing but hunt and fish; then there are others who are industrious and enterprising; so long as our land remains as a whole, in common, these lazy Indians will never make a move toward cultivating it; and the industrious Indians and ‘squaw men’ will inclose as much as they can for their own use. Thus the land will be unequally divided, the lazy Indians getting nothing because they will not exert themselves to do so; while if the land were allotted, do you not think that these idle Indians, knowing the land to be their own, would have pride enough to cultivate their land and build up their homes?

Wynema’s position on allotment mirrors the argument given by “pro-allotment reformers and so-called Red Progressives,” who contended that lazy Indians, not U.S. government policy, were to blame for Indian poverty (Senier, 2000, p. 426).[4] The attack on “lazy Indians” was an attack on Indian men and the traditional sexual division of labor in Indian societies. Indian societies were noted for divisions of labor in which women were the farmers and male economic production was mostly limited to hunting, fishing, and trading (Hoebel, 1978; Trigger, 1990; lecture notes).[5] The Act’s proponents accepted the Euro-American belief that farmers are and should be men, not women, and Indian men should be yeoman farmers on allotted land.

Allotments of land were not a new idea. The Pilgrim Fathers of Massachusetts “had insisted that the praying Indians each take up a plot of ground and become farmers like their white neighbors” (Deloria and Lytle, 1983, p. 8). Farming was considered to be a good Christian occupation, as it required long hours of work.[5] As whites contended that Indians needed to be Christianized, allotment and farming were promoted as tools to obtain their conversion and salvation.[6]

Pro-allotment groups were largely composed of eastern educators and politicians, who, without question, accepted the Euro-American patriarchal model of agrarian civilization and possessive individualism (Champagne, 1994; Senier, 2001). They argued that Indians, particularly Indian men, had to change. Hiram Price, Commissioner of Indian Affairs in President Cleveland’s first administration, said (Prucha, 1973, p. 94):

Give the Indian his land in severalty. Let him feel his individuality and responsibility, and a sense of proprietorship. Encourage him to go to work and earn his living and provide for the future wants and necessities of himself and family, and abandon his shiftless, do-nothing, dependent life.

Allotment supporters also offered another reason: it was necessary to protect the Indians. Two books by Helen Hunt Jackson promoted this argument. The first, A Century for Dishonor, chronicled the U.S. government’s unfair treatment of American Indians, and is associated with the creation of Indian Rights associations (Seiner, 2001). Jackson and Indian Rights groups argued that allotment and citizenship would give Indians the land and other rights they needed to survive. The second, the 1884 bestseller, Romona, used a romance plot — between a mixed-blood heroine, Romona, and a full-blood Indian hero, Allesandro — to advance a protest against white encroachment and brutality. The two young lovers elope; then as they strive to live peacefully and self-sufficiently, they are continuously forced by white settlers to leave and rebuild their home and lives somewhere else. Finally, the book ends tragically when a racist white settler murders Allesandro. Allotment supporters used Romona to generate sympathy for Indians, who had adopted the Euro-American lifestyle, but were tormented by whites that continuously threatened to and did take their lands (Senier, 2001). Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Haut, suggested the Act would save Indians (like Romona and Allesandro) by giving them the protection they needed from land-hungry whites (Prucha, 1973, p. 80):

The experience of the Indian Department for the past fifty years goes to show that the government is impotent to protect the Indians on their reservations, especially when held in common, from the encroachment of its own people, whenever a discovery has been made rendering the possession of their lands desirable by whites.

Critics rejected Haut’s contention that the government could protect individual rights, but not collective rights. The government could have upheld and enforced the legal rights of Indians, collectively, to their lands (Washburn, 1971; Senier, 2001). The government did not respect nor understand Indian collective rights, particularly ownership of communal lands, and had no incentive to protect these rights.

The government and white settlers’ notions of property were based on John Locke’s notion that land ownership resulted from improvements made to the land (Wright and Gitelman, 1991). Although Indians made ecological changes to the land, such as by hunting and burning the underbrush, these improvements were judged as illegitimate and subsequently rejected (Cronon, 1983). Indians did not own the land because they were not situated on a fixed plot of land — farming it and using it to produce; or in other words, they did not own it because they did not inhabit the land like Europeans (Senier, 2001; Cronon, 1983).

The prospect of “freeing up” surplus lands after the Indians had received their allotments was promoted unabashedly in 1881 by then Secretary of the Interior, Carl Schurz. Schurz said the surplus lands would be a way to “open to settlement by white men large tracts of land now belonging to the reservations, but not used by the Indians” (Senier, 2001, p. 42). Alice Cunningham Fletcher, a strong supporter of speedy and forced allotment and an Indian agent, argued that Indians had far more land than they needed and whites had far less land than they needed (Senier, 2001). Of course, white settlers favored the Act because it would offer them land.

Alexander Lawrence Posey, a Creek Nation member, supported allotment under the prevailing circumstances of the time; however, he argued that all Creek land should be allotted to Creeks and none sold to outsiders (Littlefield and Hunter, 1993). Critics of the Act predicted that it would make it easy for a government with a history of stealing Indian land to take prime land and give it to whites, while allotting marginal lands, less suited for agriculture, to Indians.

In its initial form, allotment was supposed to require the approval of at least two-thirds of a given tribe, but that proposal changed once pro-allotment groups determined that tribal acceptance was a threat to U.S. sovereignty (Senier, 2001). Allotment would be forced with no consideration for treaties that identified tribes as sovereign nations with fixed land boundaries.

Critics of allotment contended that allotment would reduce, not improve, economic conditions for Indians. Statements by two characters in Wynema: A Child of the Forest illustrate the argument that allotment would be devastating. First, Genevieve, one of the main characters, says (Callahan, p. 52):

This sounds like the lands will be allotted whether the Indians like or no. I cannot see the matter as it has been presented by you, and as the papers advocate it, my idea is, that it will be the ruin of the poor, ignorant savage… Were the land divided, these poor, ignorant, improvident,
short-sighted Indians would be persuaded and threatened into selling their homes, piece by piece, perhaps, until finally they would be homeless outcasts, and then what would become of ‘Poor Lo!’ None of his white brothers, who so sweetly persuaded away his home would give him a night’s shelter or a morsel of food.

Second, Gerald Keithly states that allotment would be disastrous for those tricked by white men into selling their land, and many would be tricked.

Gerald Keithly was right. Millions of acres of tribal lands were lost through fraud (Champagne, 1994). In a 1903 letter, Posey writes (Littlefield and Hunter, 1993, p. 119):

For more than a year, Creeks had made accusations that large land-trust companies were at work in the Creek Nation, acquiring options on large numbers of Creek allotments by fraudulent means. By the summer of 1903, rumors were rife that corruption was wide-spread among officials of the Justice and Interior departments in Indian Territory. The growing scandel indicated that those officials, including members of the
Dawes Commission, were engaged in large-scale land speculation, particularly in the Creek Nation. The process of allotment provided opportunities for the materially ambitious to make money in real estate ventures.

Despite supporters’ predictions that the Act would benefit Indians, it didn’t. Land reserved for Indians was often the harshest and least productive. When, by chance, Indians received better land, it was “often seized by force, trickery, or dubious foreclosure” (Shaw, 2000). When Indians tried to pool their resources and act together to achieve economies of scale, the government stopped them from doing so (Bobroff, 2001).

The policies established by the Dawes Act ended 47 years after its creation with the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Robert Chicks, President, Stockbridge-Munsee Community of Mohican Indians, summarizes the Act’s effects:

During those 47 years, the federal government took away over 90 million acres of tribal lands that were previously guaranteed to tribes by treaties and federal law. This was over two thirds of the land base, and over 80 percent of their value, as the best and most productive lands were the first to be taken. The remaining tribal lands, if any were left, were discontinuous, fractionated, and difficult to use for any economically productive purposes such as grazing or agriculture. The effects of the Allotment Era were devastating to tribal communities economically and socially, and the effects continue to this day.

ENDNOTES:

1. Henry George was a nineteenth century political economist who argued that private ownership of land did not raise the masses out of poverty because the unequal distribution of land created an unequal distribution of wealth. The small numbers that owned much of the land received most of the wealth. George argued for communal ownership of land.
2. In neoclassical economics, this is the so-called "free rider problem".
3. Generosity and economic equality, which were organizing principles for many tribes, were to be replaced by selfishness and inequality.
4. Essentially the same argument can be made today against social welfare. The stereotypical welfare recipient is constructed to be an unmarried black woman with children, who is poor because she does not want to work. This woman and women like her unfairly take money from hard-working and respectable inndividuals. Recipients of corporate welfare, however, are popularly described as deserving.
5. On the other hand, it was believed that Indian men who traditionally hunted and fished had too many leisure hours, which led to consorting with the Devil. The same judgment was not applied to English aristrocrats and other members of the leisure class.
6. Biological, cultural, and religious racisms were combined. Then, as now, the missionaries did not reflect upon the religious racism inherent in the Christian need to convert non-Christians so as to save them.

References:

1. Brobroff, Kenneth H. “Retelling Allotment: Indian Property Rights and the Myth of
   Common Ownership,” Vanderbilt Law Review, Vol.54, No. 4, May 2001, pp. 1557 – 1623.
2. Callahan, S. Alice. Wynema: A Child of the Forest, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1997. Originally published in 1891 by H. J. Smith and Company, Chicago. (This is probably the first novel written by a woman of American Indian descent.)
   
3. Champagne, Duane, Ed. Chronology of Native North American History from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present, Gale Research Inc., Washington, DC, 1994.
4. Chicks, Robert. “Statement of Robert Chicks, President, Stockbridge-Munsee Community (of Mohican Indians)” before the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, June 19, 2001.
5. Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New
   England, Hill and Wang, New York, 1983.
6. Debo, Angie. And Still the Waters Run Deep: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1968.
7. Deloria, Vine Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle. American Indians, American Justice, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1983.
8. George, Henry. Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth, The Remedy,15th Anniversary Edition, Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, New York, 1937.
9. Hoebel, E. Adamson. The Cheyennes: Indians of the Great Plains, 2nd Edition, Harcourt Brace College Publishers, New York, 1978).
10. Littlefield, Daniel F., Jr. and Carol A. Petty Hunter, Eds. The Fus Fixico Letters, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1993.
11. Senier, Siobhan. Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen
    Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2001.
12. 
    -------------------. “Allotment Protest and Tribal Discourse: Reading Wynema’s Successes
    and Shortcomings,” The American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 3, June 22, 2000.
13. Steel, Michael. “Trying to Right a Century of Wrongs,” The National Journal, Vol. 32, No. 36, September 2, 2000, p. 2725.
14. Shaw, Jeff. “Bitter Harvest: Indian Farmers Allege Years of Discrimination at the USDA,” In These Times, October 2, 2000, p. 20.
    
15. Trigger, Bruce G. The Huron: Farmers of the North, 2nd Edition, Harcourt Brace Javonovich College Publishers, New York, 1990.
16. Washburn, Wilcomb E. Red Man’s Land/White Man’s Law, 2nd Edition, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1971.