134 years ago today, the Dawes Act of 1887 was signed by President Grover Cleveland. This act allotted land from Indigenous communities to individual ownership. Only those who accepted the allotment would be allowed to become US citizens,
after showing themselves to have "adopted the habits of civilized life." [1] After the allotment, surplus land was then eligible for sale, including to settlers. As a consequence, Indigenous nations lost 90 million acres of land from a previously held 150 million acres.
The land that was kept in Indigenous hands post-allotment was often unsuitable for farming or any other way of sustaining oneself. [2] After only a few generations, the lands left after subsequent inheritance was so small that being able to live on, let alone farm on,
the land became impossible. Subsequent amendments further destroyed traditional Indigenous ways of life. The Curtis Act of 1898 extended the Dawes Act to the previously exempt Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muskogee, Cherokee, and Seminole nations, dissolving their tribal governments,
which ultimately allowed the settler State of Oklahoma to join the US. [3] The Burke Act of 1906 amended the Dawes Act such that citizenship would be granted 25 years after the allotment of land rather than at the moment of allotment.
The act also gave the Secretary of the Interior the authority to decide who was "competent enough" to have an allotment, and who the legal heirs of the allotment were. [4]
In this form of primitive accumulation, the US destroyed the communal ownership of land that Indigenous nations had used for generations and imposed a euro-capitalist relationship with property. These acts stripped the sovereign rights of these nations,
their traditional ways of life, and their ability to sustain themselves off the land as they had for thousands of years. The US settler empire was built through the theft of Indigenous nation's land,
and any form of socialism must rectify this by decolonizing the continent and returning the sovereignty of this land back to the Indigenous nations from whom it was stolen. #LandBack
Sources:
[1] ourdocuments.gov/print_friendly…
[2] nps.gov/articles/000/d…(sometimes%20called,to%20break%20up%20tribal%20lands
[3] okhistory.org/publications/e…
[4] okhistory.org/publications/e…
[1] ourdocuments.gov/print_friendly…
[2] nps.gov/articles/000/d…(sometimes%20called,to%20break%20up%20tribal%20lands
[3] okhistory.org/publications/e…
[4] okhistory.org/publications/e…
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