What was the Dawes Severalty Act?

The Dawes Severalty Act was a law passed in 1887.  Its purpose was totry to assimilate Native Americans and to encourage them to live more likewhite people.  It can also be argued that a purpose of the law was to makeit easier to take reservation lands away from the Native Americans.

The Dawes Act took the land that had been given to Indian tribes and splitit up between the individual members of the tribes.  The tribes were nolonger allowed to own the land communally.  This was meant to pushindividual Indians to own their own land and become farmers.  However, allthe land that was not parcelled out to individual Indians (160 acres per headof household) was sold to white settlers and to railroad companies.  Thismeant that much more of what had been Indian land was available for whiteuse.

In this way, the Dawes Act had two goals.  It was meant to "civilize"the Indians, but it was also meant to make it easier for white Americans to getthe Indians' land.

What was the main purpose of the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887?

The Dawes Severalty Act was intended to force Native peoples to assimilateto white society by making them into settled farmers. It was mainly intended toaffect Plains Indians, whose reservation lands were split up into allotmentsthat were given to Natives who agreed to settle as family units and farm theland. In other words, Native Americans, especially those who lived on thePlains, were given lands in return for a promise to live like white settlers.It would have relieved the responsibility of the federal government to takecare of reservations, and it was intended to protect the land rights of Indianpeoples whose reservations were increasingly encroached upon by whites.Overall, the Dawes Severalty Act was part of a broader assimilation effort thatincluded sending Indian children to boarding schools, many of which were faraway, to receive an education in a White American setting. In addition to thenegative repercussions for Indian culture, it had many disastrous unintendedconsequences. The worst was that Indians who agreed to the arrangement oftenreceived very poor lands that were not capable of supporting a family. This,combined with the fact that many Native men were not interested nor experiencedin agriculture meant that many Indian families lived in dreadfulpoverty.