How Dawes Act Failed

The Dawes Act did not abide by in encouraging Native Americans to become utmostmers, an experiment that had already fai take with the Sioux Nation. Prior to the Dawes Act, the Sioux inhabited the region known as the long Sioux Reservation, which included all of present-day South Dakota and hunting rights to a considerable monumentalr territory. Whites built assimilation into the 1868 peace accord that created the Great Sioux Reservation: "The peace commission had built this optimism into the impairment of the treaty, limiting the food annuity to four years and result the rest of the education program after twenty" (Lazarus, 1991, p. 52).

Whites who drafted the 1868 treaty assumed that the Sioux would become self-sufficient farmers; the Sioux regarded the treaty as an trace that they could resume their former way of life, roaming and hunting. Whites failed to understand the tenacity of the Sioux's heathenish beliefs. Sioux were never meant by the Great Spirit to work for their financial backing by toiling the earth and building cities. Not scarce was farming considered disrespectful to the earth, the practice violated the masculine conceit of the Sioux warriors: "Taking up the plow meant renouncing the culture, as surely as cutting off the ceremonial braid or braggy up the breechclout for pants . . . " (Lazarus, 1991, p. 52).

Hoxie (1984) illuminates the societal mindset that led to the

The Dawes Act provided for the allotment of large tracts of tribal land to all enrolled Indians. Tribal land was to be broken up into small property units of 40-160 acres, and given to single Indians instead of held in common, the traditional Indian way. The legislation move each allotment under federal trust for twenty-five years to prevent the sale of the land to non-Indians. As an added inducing to Indians to farm their individual plots, the federal government bestowed citizenship status on all adult landholders.

federal government's form _or_ system of government of assimilation, a policy that lasted between 1880 and 1920.

In fact, the effects of this policy are cool it felt as a "major theme" in Indian communities today: "The assimilation campaign has produced a legacy of racial distrust and exploitation we have thus far been unable to set aside" (Hoxie, 1984, p. xi). During the nineteenth century, America's attitude toward its nonwhite race changed radically as the pool of newcomers became more ethnically diverse. participation rejected the goal of assimilating all peoples into a like citizenry in favor of a limited meter reading of assimilation in which minorities were relegated to the bottom ranks. This political mentality moved(p) the federal government's response to the "Indian problem."

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) had assumed the role of administrate the use of Indian property: "Indians became an attachment to their lands rather than owners, and . . . the vested pertain of the Interior Department would always work to thwart whatsoever initiatives Congress might take in resolving the Indian problem" (Parman, 1994, p. 248). The result was that the Interior Department lobbied for legislation to accession its control and intrusion into the lives of the Indian commonalty.

Parman, D. (1994). Indians and the American west in the twentieth century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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