#mlpp.pressbooks.pub

[blondebrainpowered]

Nez Perce Chief Joseph and his family in Leavenworth, Kansas where they were exiled from 1877 to 1885.

 Photographer: F. M. Sargent

[blondebrainpowered]

United States Department of the Interior advertisement offering “Indian Land for Sale” in 1911.

The Dawes General Allotment Act, passed by Congress in February 1887, splintered Native reservations into individual family homesteads. Each head of an Indian household was allotted 160 acres, the size of a claim that any settler could make on federal lands under the provisions of the Homestead Act. Single people over age eighteen would receive an eighty-acre allotment and orphaned children got forty acres. A four-year time limit was set for Indians to make their allotment selections. If no selection had been made in four years, the Secretary of the Interior would appoint an agent to make selections for the remaining tribe members. To protect Indians from being swindled by unscrupulous land speculators, the Act stated that all allotments would be held in trust and could not be sold by the allottees for twenty-five years. But lands that remained unclaimed by tribal members after allotment would revert to federal control and could be sold to American settlers.