Fall 2021
The Dawes Act was passed by the United States Congress in 1887. The act ordered the division of reservations into plots of land, and allotted parcels of these lands back into the individual ownership of Indigenous people. The federal government allotted 160 acres to ‘heads of family’ (men, in the eyes of the settler state) and smaller parcels to others. The Dawes Act further declared that ‘leftover’ land could be purchased by the United States government and distributed to “actual settlers” (General Allotment Act 1887). In effect, the act served two assimilationist purposes. The first purpose was to break up nations as institutions by placing reservation lands in individual hands; Theodore Roosevelt called allotment “a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.” The second purpose of allotment was to force Indigenous communities to live by American norms of the time, adopting individual capitalism over communalism and heteropatriarchy over traditional gender norms. These purposes, however, were not accomplished in all cases. Many Indigenous communities found ways to resist the pressures of allotment against their nation and to continue engaging in communalistic economic activity over individual or nuclear-family capitalism.
One such community was on the Grand Ronde reservation, where a number of different nations formed the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. The nations of this reservation provide a strong counterexample to the societal picture of nations on reservations as being “defeated and despondent” (Leavelle 1998, 434). Far from defeated, the residents of these nations were in the process of massive adaptation, overcoming both the imposition of agrarian capitalism and the ethnolinguistic barriers that divided them. The nations on the reservation found ways to continue communalistic economics and maintain their political identity by investing in community agricultural equipment and forming a legislative body to make decisions in the interest of the community.
Resistance to allotment did not occur only on a local level. On a national level, Indigenous people were aware of allotment’s nefarious intent and resisted vociferously by democratic means. Some, like Sarah Winnemucca (an activist of the Paiute Nation) gave speeches to the settler population. Responding to allotment, she spoke bluntly about the history of US-Indigenous relations: “you rise from your bended knees and seizing the welcoming hands of those who are the owners of this land, which you are not, your carbines rise upon the bleak shore, and your so-called civilization sweeps inland” (Black 2007, 194). Indigenous activists like Winnemucca reminded the United States of their previous thefts of land and appealed to settlers’ idea that they were the ‘civilized’ group. This type of critique was common and played on American religious and republican conceptions of morality to expose the hypocrisy of allotment policy (Black 2007, 193). Speeches to citizens were not the only method of voicing resistance; many Indigenous people appealed directly to Congress. Chitto Harjo, a representative of the Muscogee Creek Nation, told the United States Senate that the allotment act was “cutting up my land and giving it away” and that this “can’t be so, for it is not the treaty” (Cobb 2015, 23). At every level of society, Indigenous people made their opposition to allotment clear through moral arguments against the practice.
Indigenous people were not bystanders to federal policy. They resisted the Dawes Act on the ground by adapting and preserving their ways of life and they resisted it ideologically at a national level with moral criticism. The Dawes Act is one example of the long and continuous history of Indigenous people defending their cultures and treaty rights, a defense which continues to this day.
References
Black, Jason Edward. 2007. “Remembrances of Removal: Native Resistance to Allotment and the Unmasking of Paternal Benevolence.” Southern Communication Journal 72 (2): 185–203.
Cobb, Daniel M., ed. 2015. Say We Are Nations: Documents of Politics and Protest in Indigenous America since 1887. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
General Allotment Act (Dawes Act). 1887. U.S. Statutes at Large 24, 388–91.
Leavelle, Tracy Neal. 1998. “‘We Will Make It Our Own Place’: Agriculture and Adaptation at the Grand Ronde Reservation, 1856–1887.” American Indian Quarterly 22 (4): 433–56.
