11 Jun Discussion
Read the excerpt below from Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, by Vine Deloria, Jr., a noted Native American author, theologian, historian, and activist. Compare Deloria’s perspective with that of Schwantes’ regarding the Dawes Act, its intent and consequences for native peoples. (200 words minimum).
The other important law of the last century was the General Allotment Act, or the Dawes Act, passed in 1887 and amended in 1891, 1906, and 1910 until it included nearly every tribe in the country. The basic idea of the Allotment Act was to make the Indian conform to the social and economic structure of rural America by vesting him with private property.
If, it was thought, the Indian had his own piece of land, he would forsake his tribal ways and become just like the white homesteaders who were then flooding the unsettled areas of the western United States. Implicit in the ideology behind the law was the idea of the basic sameness of humanity. Just leaving tribal society was, to the originators of the law, comparable to achieving an equal status with whites.
But there was more behind the act than the simple desire to help the individual Indian. White settlers had been clamoring for Indian land. The Indian tribes controlled nearly 135 million acres. If, the argument went, that land were divided on a per capita basis of 160 acres per Indian, the Indians would have sufficient land to farm and the surplus would be available to white settlement.
So the Allotment Act was passed and the Indians were allowed to sell their land after a period of twenty-five years during which they were to acquire the management skills to handle the land. However, nothing was done to encourage them to acquire these skills and consequently much land was immediately leased to non-Indians who swarmed into the former reservation areas.
By 1934 Indians had lost millions of acres through land sales, many of them fraudulent. The basic device for holding individual lands was the trust, under which an Indian was declared to be incompetent. Indians were encouraged to ask for their papers of competency, after which land was sold for a song by the untutored Indian who had never heard of buying and selling land by means of a paper. Many Indians sold their land for a mere fraction of its value. Others received title to their land and lost it through tax sales. In general the policy was to encourage the sale of Indian lands, as it was believed that this process would hasten the integration of Indians into American society.
The churches strongly supported the Dawes Allotment Act as the best means available of Christianizing the tribes. Religion and private property were equated in the eyes of many churchmen. After all, these were the days when J. P. Morgan used to take entire trainloads to the Episcopal conventions and John D. Rockefeller had his Baptist advisor helping him distribute his wealth. Wealth was an index of sainthood.
Bishop William H. Hare, noted missionary bishop of the Episcopal Church, is said to have remarked that the Allotment Act would show whether the world or the church was more alert to its opportunity. In other words, it was to be a race between the stealers of men’s land and the stealers of men’s souls for two unrelated goals-getting million acres of land and the Christianizing of some of the feathered friends who lived on those lands.
It was, of course, no contest. The church came in a dead last. Indians were not magically turned into white, churchgoing farmers by their little plot of ground. Sharper white men than the missionaries, representing the Christians’ traditional opponent, easily won the contest. And the American Indians were the losers. But at least they had the comfort of hearing the missionaries’ sermons against greed.
Gone apparently was any concern to fulfill the articles of hundreds of treaties guaranteeing the tribes free and undisturbed use of their remaining lands. Some of the treaties had been assured by the missionaries. The Indians had not, however, been given lifetime guarantees.
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