Part 6
ALLOTMENT AND ASSIMILATION
In her book And Still the Waters Run, Angie Debo characterizes allotment as an “orgy of plunder and exploitation probably unparalleled in American history.”1 The United States government had assured the Cherokees that if they “removed” from the Southeast and their ancestral lands, they would hold the Western lands in perpetuity without white encroachment. But in the aftermath of the Civil War, the government abrogated its treaties in its desire to acquire more Indian land for white settlements and economic development by railroad and mining companies. Eastern philanthropists joined railroad and mining officials to push for allotment of Indian land and to promote the Dawes Act, which was passed on February 8, 1887. The main provisions of the act were to grant “160 acres to each [male] family head, eighty acres to each single person over eighteen years of age and each orphan under eighteen, and forty acres to each other single person under eighteen.” In addition, a “patent in fee would be issued to each allottee,” which would be held in trust by the United States government for twenty-five years. Allottees could receive citizenship if they abandoned their tribes. Indian women in tribes covered by the Dawes Act who married white men received allotments.
Although the Dawes Act did not apply to the Cherokees, the United States government planned the allotment of Cherokee land and the land of all the “Civilized Tribes.” The process began with the passage of the Curtis Act in 1898.2 The legislation codified Indian men as heads of households, which led to profound changes regarding gender identities. Married Indian women eventually were given allotments, but their power was diminished. The policy of designating Indian men as heads of households was a conscious effort to encourage patriarchal family structures and undermine women’s power and matrilineal traditions. Under the amendment, married women received the same allotment as single children over eighteen. Therefore, the allotment policies severely destabilized Indian families.3
Unidentified Cherokee women
COURTESY OF MUSEUM OF THE CHEROKEE INDIAN, CHEROKEE, NC, 2009.002.02561
The Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs on October 1, 1889, presented the federal government’s policy of allotment:
The Indians must conform to “the white man’s way,” peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must. They must adjust themselves to their environment, and conform their mode of living substantially to our civilization. This civilization may not be the best possible but it is the best the Indians can get. They cannot escape it, and must either conform to it or be crushed by it…. The tribal relations should be broken up, socialism destroyed, and the family and the autonomy of the individual substituted. The allotment of lands in severalty, the establishment of local courts and police, the development of a personal sense of independence, and the universal adoption of the English language are the means to this end.4
Powerful interests such as homesteaders, land companies, and railroad companies supported this position, seeing allotment as a means to gain large areas of Indian land by legal means. Much confusion about the Dawes Act existed among the Cherokees. They were not legally required to enroll with the Dawes Commission, and their land was not allotted until after the Curtis Act was passed. However, many believed they had to enroll. Eventually, only those who enrolled or whose descendants could claim a relative on the rolls qualified as members of Indian tribes. The rolls, and not the tribes themselves, came to define who was an Indian.
The allotment policies and the Curtis Act officially abolished tribal governments, disrupted clan and familial relationships and undermined women’s traditional association with the land. The enforcement of these policies met with fierce resistance from many Cherokee women and men. Yet a number of females, especially elite Cherokee women, supported allotment and statehood. They thought the Cherokee Nation did not deal effectively with the problems of violence and alcohol.
Because Cherokee women did not assume public roles in the struggle over allotment, it is necessary to look to oral histories to discover their views and actions during that period. They were not passive victims. Many traditional Cherokee women opposed allotment and joined the Keetoowah Society and the Four Mothers Society, both of which struggled against allotting tribal land and supported a return to matriarchal and matrilineal traditions and ceremonies of the Cherokee Nation.
The Cherokees resisted allotment by a variety of means: by stalling and refusing to negotiate with the Dawes Commission, by refusing to enroll in the program, and by revitalizing their traditional ceremonies. Nevertheless, through the Dawes Act, the United States government eventually took almost two-thirds of the Indians’ land between 1887 and 1930, even requiring the tribes to pay for surveying and allotment.
The rationale for the policy of allotment was to civilize the Indians; the true motive was greed, and the aim was to dispossess them of their land.5 The Civil War and allotment of Cherokee land in Indian Territory undermined tribal sovereignty and led to impoverishment and dispossession. Allotment failed to accomplish its stated goal of assimilating Cherokee people into white society. It also destabilized gender and family relationships. The policy aimed to substitute individualism and autonomy for the Cherokees’ ethic of harmony and communal land ownership. The abolition of the Cherokees’ communal ownership of land and the official termination of tribal government caused profound changes, especially for Cherokee women.
The following selections record the recollections of Cherokee women regarding allotment and their choices to enroll or to oppose the process of allotting their land.
ENDNOTES
1 Angie Debo, And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes (1940; reprint, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 91, 165, 171.
2 D. S. Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indians, edited by Francis Paul Prucha (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973), 6–7.
3 Otis, The Dawes Act, 148. For the text of the Dawes Act, see http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0600/stories/0601_0200_01.html. For the Curtis Act, see http://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/laws/at_June_28_1898_ curtis_act.htm.
4 Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, in Report of the Secretary of the Interior, Oct. 1, 1889, published in 1900, 4; Otis, The Dawes Act, 31.
5 D’Arcy McNickle, “Indian and European: Indian-White Relations from Discovery to 1887,” in The Rape of Indian Lands, edited by Paul Wallace Gates (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 3, 10. See also Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Assault on Indian Tribalism: The General Allotment Law (Dawes Act) of 1887, edited by Harold M. Hyman (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1975), 9; Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), vols. 1 and 2, 179–81.