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Doc of the Day: The Dawes Severalty Act
02/08/10
On February 8, 1887, the U.S. Congress passed the landmark Indian legislation known as the Dawes Severalty Act or General Allotment Act. This act gave the federal government authority to divide American Indian reservation lands into small parcels that were allotted to individuals and heads of families. Any Indian who claimed an allotment of land and lived there for twenty-five years was granted U.S. citizenship. The act’s sponsor, Congressman Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, claimed that private ownership of property was an important step in “civilizing” the Indians and encouraging them to assimilate into white society. Many affected Indians, however, argued that dividing the reservations into small private landholdings led to the loss of tribal affiliations and shared culture.
In practice, the Dawes Act had many negative repercussions for Native Americans. After distributing allotments to all eligible tribal members, the federal government sold off “surplus” lands to white homesteaders and railroad developers. This provision of the act resulted in approximately 100 million acres of land being removed from Indian control over the two decades following its passage. Although the money from the sale or lease of reservation land was supposed to be set aside for Indian education and employment programs, many Indian advocates complained that the Department of the Interior mismanaged the allotment program and failed to compensate the tribes.
In December 2009 President Barack Obama announced that the U.S. government had reached a settlement to conclude a longstanding lawsuit over royalty payments owed to American Indians. Elouise Cobell, a banker and member of Blackfeet Tribe of Montana, originally filed the lawsuit against the Interior Department in 1996 on behalf of hundreds of thousands of fellow Indians. The plaintiffs claimed that government officials had used the Dawes Act to cheat them out of billions of dollars in royalties over more than a century. Under the terms of the settlement agreement, the U.S. government agreed to pay $3.4 billion to compensate the tribes for royalties owed from the allotment program. (We are unable to display the text of the document at this time. To view the text of the settlement agreement, please visit this website: http://www.cobellsettlement.com/docs/2009.12.07_Settlement_Agreement.pdf.)