[Embedded tweet described in alt text of above image. Image embedded within the tweet is a section of a book page that reads as follows. Bold text is highlighted in the original image.]
Mollie's family was straddling not only two centuries but two civilizations. Her family's distress increased in the late 1890s as the U.S. government intensified its push for the culmination of the assimilation campaign: allotment. Under the policy, the Osage reservation would be divvied up into 160-acre parcels, into real estate, with each tribal member receiving one allotment, while the rest of the territory would be opened to settlers. The allotment system, which had already been imposed on many tribes, was designed to end the old communal way of life and turn American Indian tribes into private-property owners - a situation that would, not incidentally, make it easier to procure their land.
[End book excerpt.]
More about this here (link). The law (or one of the laws) putting this practice of allotment into motion was called the Dawes Act.
1587 - Mary Queen of Scots is beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle, aged 44, after being convicted of plotting to assassinate Elizabeth I in the Babington Plot
1672 - Isaac Newton reads 1st optics paper in London
1887 - The Dawes Act authorizes the President of the US to survey Native American tribal land and divide it into individual allotments; those who accepted allotments and lived separately from the tribe were granted US citizenship
1910 - The Boy Scouts of America is incorporated by William Boyce (pictured)
1942 - Congress advises FDR that Americans of Japanese descent should be locked up en masse so they wouldn’t oppose the US war effort
Home ownership, natural resource development, and entrepreneurship on Native American lands are substantially hindered by government oversight.
Manny Jules, a former chief of a Canadian tribe, has led the charge in privatizing tribal lands in Canada. The tribes, or bands, face challenges to starting businesses similar to those encountered on US tribal lands. Forbes quotes him pointing out the fundamental change needed in the US as much as it is in Canada, “Markets haven’t been allowed to operate in reserve lands. We’ve been legislated out of the economy. When you don’t have individual property rights, you can’t build, you can’t be bonded, you can’t pass on wealth...businesses never get started because people can’t leverage property...We have to become part of the national and global economies.”
Releasing tribal lands from federal trusts and transferring them into the hands of tribes and individual Native Americans would cut the red tape that blocks economic development, thereby unleashing prosperity on reservations. The limited access to banks, grocery stores, restaurants, utility providers, and other basic needs all would become opportunities for entrepreneurial Natives to improve their lives and those of others with them.
The history of Native American reservations makes clear that the root of the problem is federal involvement in the Indian economy, which also clarifies at least a part of the solution. Allowing greater tribal and individual sovereignty will jumpstart wealth creation by Native Americans.
The first steps towards that future can be taken by allowing owners of fractionalized lands to sell their shares without obtaining permission to do so. Such a policy change would provide those wishing to secure loans for homes or entrepreneurial activities access to capital. Likewise, federal oversight should be reduced to the levels that other US citizens experience so that it does not become a barrier to developments and that tribes can determine what is in their best interest.
The federal government has legislated Native Americans into perpetual poverty. The institutions that federal agencies designed limit opportunities to own homes, develop and invest in their property, and discourage entrepreneurs from starting businesses. Those are all essential tenets of a prosperous society. Now is the time for Native Americans to develop their own policies.
This year—February, to be exact—marked the 132nd anniversary of President Grover Cleveland's signing of the Dawes Act. You didn't get to read about that in the newspapers or hear about it on Fox News the way that, say, the anniversary of Custer's "Last Stand" always gets a mention. But that single piece of legislation in 1887 had a more devastating impact on indigenous Americans than anything other than the century-long Indian wars themselves. It was initiated by people who told everyone and perhaps actually believed that they had Indians' best interests at heart. In fact, the Dawes Act underpinned a massive land grab from Indians, the kind accomplished with a pen rather than an Army regiment.
In 2010, the Obama administration made a move to repair some of the devastation caused by the Dawes Act, only the second such move in 85 years. Despite this belated remedial action (forced by the courts), much of the damage can never be fixed. No compensation can ever make up for the destruction of culture, language, kinship ties, and connections of place. Modern American Indian society was shaped in great part by what Cleveland signed into law that day five generations ago. Does what happened so long ago matter today? It definitely matters to Indians.
Before the Dawes Act and a few additional laws were effectively repealed by the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, 90 million acres had been wrenched from communally held Indian land, leaving just a third of what the tribes had held in 1886. That was the year Geronimo, the last organized warrior, surrendered and was shipped off to prison, never to return to the land the generals promised he would see again in a couple of years.
Uncover the fascinating and mysterious story of Sarah Rector, who was once deemed the richest black girl in America at the age of 11.
Born as the daughter of freedmen in 1902, Sarah Rector rose from humble beginnings to reportedly become the wealthiest black girl in the nation at the age of 11.
Rector and her family where African American members of the Muscogee Creek Nation who lived in a modest cabin in the predominantly black town of Taft, Oklahoma, which, at the time, was considered Indian Territory. Following the Civil War, Rector’s parents, who were formerly enslaved by Creek Tribe members, were entitled to land allotments under the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887. As a result, hundreds of black children, or “Creek Freedmen minors,” were each granted 160 acres of land as Indian Territory integrated with Oklahoma Territory to form the State of Oklahoma in 1907.
While lands granted to former slaves were usually rocky and infertile, Rector’s allotment from the Creek Indian Nation was located in the middle of the Glenn Pool oil field and was initially valued at $556.50. Strapped for cash, Rector’s father leased his daughter’s parcel to a major oil company in February 1911 to help him pay the $30 annual property tax. Two years later, Rector’s fortune took a major turn when independent oil driller B.B. Jones produced a “gusher” on her land that brought in 2,500 barrels or 105,000 gallons per day. According to Tonya Bolden, author of Searching for Sarah Rector: The Richest Black Girl in America (Harry N. Abrams; $21.95), Rector began earning more than $300 a day in 1913. That equates to $7,000 – $8,000 today. She even generated $11,567 in October 1913.
Rector’s notoriety ballooned just as quickly as her wealth. In September 1913, The Kansas City Star local newspaper published the headline, “Millions to a Negro Girl – Sarah Rector, 10-Year Old, Has Income of $300 A Day From Oil,” reports Face 2 Face Africa. In January 1914, the newspaper wrote,
“Oil Made Pickaninny Rich – Oklahoma Girl With $15,000 A Month gets Many Proposals – Four White Men in Germany Want to Marry the Negro Child That They Might Share Her Fortune.”
Meanwhile, the Savannah Tribune wrote, “Oil Well Produces Neat Income – Negro Girl’s $112,000 A Year”. Another newspaper dubbed her “the richest negro in the world.” Her fame became widespread and she received numerous requests for loans, money gifts, and four marriage proposals.
At the time, a law required Native Americans, black adults, and children who were citizens of Indian Territory with significant property and money were to be assigned “well-respected” white guardians. As a result, Rector’s guardianship switched from her parents to a white man named T.J. Porter. Concerned with her wellbeing and her white financial guardian, early NAACP leaders fought to protect her and her fortune. According to a report from BlackPast.org:
In 1914 The Chicago Defender published an article claiming that her estate was being mismanaged by grafters and her “ignorant” parents, and that she was uneducated, dressed in rags, and lived in an unsanitary shanty. National African American leaders such as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois became concerned about her welfare. None of the allegations were true. Rector and her siblings went to school in Taft, an all-black town closer than Twine, they lived in a modern five-room cottage, and they owned an automobile. That same year, Rector enrolled in the Children’s House, a boarding school for teenagers at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
By the time she turned 18, Rector was worth an estimated $1 million, or about $11 million today. She also owned stocks and bonds, a boarding house, a bakery and restaurant in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and 2,000 acres of land. She eventually left Tuskegee with her family and moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where she bought a grand home that still stands today. “There, the Rectors eventually moved into a home that was a far cry from that weather-whipped two-room cabin in which Sarah began life. This home-place was a stately stone house. It became known as the Rector Mansion,” Bolden told the New York Amsterdam News.
In 1922, she married Kenneth Campbell, the second African American to own an auto dealership. The couple had three sons and were recognized as local royalty, driving expensive cars and entertaining elites like Joe Louis, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie at their home. They divorced in 1930 and Rector remarried in 1934.
Rector’s lost most of her wealth during The Great Depression. When she died at age 65 on July 22, 1967, she only had some working oil wells and real estate holdings.
