The General Allotment (Dawes) Act of 1887 and the loss of the communal land base

What happened

Many treaties had set aside reservations as shared tribal land. The General Allotment Act of February 8, 1887, often called the Dawes Act, changed that policy. As summarized by Nebraska Studies, each head of a family was to get 160 acres of farmland or 320 acres of grazing land. The Act's own text, quoted on an archives.gov page, said the government would "hold the land thus allotted, for the period of twenty-five years, in trust" for the allottee.

Land left over after allotment was declared "surplus" and opened to white settlement. The archives.gov page says the Act's results included poor allotments, such as desert or near-desert land, inheritance that split plots into parcels too small to farm, and sales to non-Native buyers, "causing American Indian communities to lose vast acreage of their tribal lands." Nebraska Studies reports that Indians held about 150 million acres before the Act and that "within twenty years, two-thirds of their land was gone."

Nebraska Studies says the Act was the major Indian policy until the 1930s and calls the reservation system "nearly destroyed." Other totals for acres held before and after allotment circulate, and only the figures these sources state are given here. This is context about a federal policy, not a finding that a treaty was broken.

Good to know. Sources disagree on how much land tribes held before the Act.

Summarized with AI assistance from 2 sources and checked against their words; not yet reviewed by historians or by the nations. Report an error