History of the United States II / Unit 2 USH2 0183 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Whether Allotment Was Reform
The idea
Whether the Dawes Act was a reform or a dispossession is a question both witnesses answer with both halves. The act allotted a quarter section to each head of a family and held the land in trust for twenty-five years. The Yawp says Americans publicly touted it as an uplifting humanitarian reform, but that it upended Native lifestyles and left Native nations without sovereignty over their lands. Digital History says the act was supposed to encourage Native Americans to become farmers, but most of the allotted land proved unsuitable for farming for lack of rainfall, and many allottees sold their land to White buyers. Its figures show the result: Native-owned land fell from one hundred fifty-five million acres in eighteen eighty-one to seventy-seven million in nineteen hundred, and to forty-eight million by nineteen thirty-four. The anchor counts about eighty million acres of Native land passing to White settlers.
In practice
One map in two colours: reservation land in eighteen eighty-one, and the same land in nineteen hundred, half of it gone.
Where people slip
Two misreadings sit on either side. The first takes the reform language at its word and treats the losses as an accident of bad soil. The second treats the reformers as conscious thieves, a motive the sources do not state. The evidence fits a harder reading than either: a policy that could be sincere in its language and still produce dispossession on a vast scale, because its surplus land was sold by design. The course states the promise and the outcome together and does not pick a motive the sources do not give. Carlisle and allotment pursued one aim, assimilation, by two routes. Unit eleven follows the policy to its reversal in nineteen thirty-four.
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