Happy #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth. Everyday this month I am sharing a lesson. #WeAreStillHere #NativeIn2019
This week's theme is Federal Indian policy and today’s lesson is ALLOTMENT aka how tribes lost ⅔ of our land through a scheme that was supposed to "help" us.
This week's theme is Federal Indian policy and today’s lesson is ALLOTMENT aka how tribes lost ⅔ of our land through a scheme that was supposed to "help" us.
Usually when people think about Native American land loss they think about Indian Wars. But in the late 1800s, Congress created a scheme to transfer the majority of Native land to White ownership--not by sword or gun but by pen and paper.
In the late 1800s a Senator named Henry Dawes theorized that Native Americans were poor because they didn't own private property. He recommended that communally owned tribal lands be divided up, privatized and plots assigned to individual tribal citizens.
The idea was to make Indians into good farmer capitalists and assimilate them to White society. Often, conveniently, the land was later opened up for White Settlement. This process was called allotment.
Rather than delivering Indians from poverty, it plunged once self-sustaining communities into despair. In the 1930s Congress recognized the disastrous results of allotment and reversed the policy. But not before the US got away with a giant land grab that reshaped our country.
Through allotment tribes lost two-thirds of our land.
90 million Acres.
An area the size of the state of Montana.
90 million Acres.
An area the size of the state of Montana.
When Congress passed the Indian reorganization Act in 1934 it gave the Department of the Interior the power to put land back into trust, essentially to restore the land that was lost. In the past 85 years only 10%--about 9 million acres--has been restored.
