Allotment and Assimilation

What happened

Allotment was the federal policy of breaking up land that tribes held in common into individual parcels. The General Allotment Act, passed February 8, 1887, authorized the President to survey reservations and allot the land in severalty. A head of a family was to receive one-quarter of a section, and single adults one-eighth. Patents would say the United States would hold the land in trust for twenty-five years.

The Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, from the University of Nebraska, explains the larger design. Land left over after allotment was deemed "surplus" and could be sold to non-Indians. It says the act was designed to detribalize Indians and assimilate them, and that by the time the process was stopped in 1934, Indian-held land had dropped from 138 million acres to 48 million acres.

The Supreme Court made it harder to resist. Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (decided January 5, 1903) concerned the 1867 Medicine Lodge treaty with the Kiowa and Comanche, which required the signatures of three fourths of adult men for any cession. The Court held that Congress has always exercised plenary authority over tribal relations and that the three-fourths clause did not limit it.

The encyclopedia names one example: the Devils Lake Sioux Reservation in North Dakota was allotted in 1904, over the objections of many residents, leaving 92,000 surplus acres to be sold to non-Indians.

Good to know. The 138 and 48 million acre figures are given by the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains and the Bureau of Indian Affairs; other totals for acres lost exist.

Summarized with AI assistance from 5 sources and checked against their words; not yet reviewed by historians or by the nations. Report an error