Act ending policies that had provided reservations to Indian tribes, instead providing 160-acre tracts of land to individual Native Americans and weakening the cohesiveness of the tribes.
By the late 1880s, a series of wars with Native Americans had convinced many reformers that programs designed to concentrate Indians on reservations had failed. Without access to traditional lands and cultural practices and with the decline of the buffalo, tribes slowly became dangerously dependent on governmental aid for their survival. Moreover, whenever whites wanted access to Indian lands, they often violated treaties with impunity, as railroad companies so often did when they ran tracks across a reservation. Against this backdrop Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887. The act ended the policy of placing tribes on reservations, attempting instead to assimilate Native Americans into the cultural and economic habits of mainstream white Americans by undermining their communal structure, parceling out and privatizing their land, and setting them up as farmers. To prevent whites from swindling Indians out of their land, the Dawes Severalty Act placed the federal government in a position to hold title to the land for 25 years. The stipulation worked poorly, however, as Indians “leased” land to unscrupulous speculators, and any reservation land not given to Indians remained available to non-Indian homesteaders. Native Americans also proved fiercely loyal to their languages, religions, and cultures. Few succeeded as traditional farmers and, by 1933, almost half of the Native Americans living on reservations whose land had been allotted found themselves landless. Many who retained allotments found themselves working mainly desert land. Under the Dawes Severalty Act, Indian poverty only deepened, as assimilation efforts continued apace, culminating in the 1920s with the Bureau of Indian Affairs outlawing Indian religious ceremonies, banning polygamy, and even imposing limits on the length of a man’s hair.
