General Allotment Act

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For the past four hundred years the United States government has done everything in its’ power to undermine the rights of Native American people. Until the mid-twentieth century the U.S government gradually stripped away Indigenous peoples’ rights to the land that their ancestors had once lived. Tribal sovereignty is a tribe’s right to govern themselves geographically, economically, and judicially all while in the agreed upon parameters of the dominant government. Throughout history the U.S government has passed laws and policies that had the deliberate purpose of undermining tribal sovereignty. This essay will specifically analyze the General Allotment Act and Marshall Trilogy court cases to examine how America used these laws and rulings …show more content…
This act divided reservation lands into allotments awarded to individual Indian allottees who also received the benefit of U.S citizenship and made Indian surplus land available for Americans to purchase. The General Allotment Act is more commonly known as the Dawes Act, which comes from Congressman Henry Dawes. Congressman Dawes was a strong supporter of Indian assimilation and believed that Indians should “wear civilized clothes...cultivate the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink whiskey [and] own property.”(Henry Dawes). The Dawes act received mixed reviews from Native tribes, certain tribes really liked the law and others lobbied to resisted it. By 1934 more than half of all the reservations in the U.S had been realloted which resulted in Indian lands shrinking from 138 million acres of land to 48 million acres (John Collier). The Dawes act has been described by some historians as “the single most devastating federal policy”(Wilkins 112) enacted between the 1880s and 1920s. The Dawes act did not achieve its’ goal of complete assimilation and was in effect for less that half a century but was effective in weakening tribal sovereignty and freeing up Indian and surplus lands for American …show more content…
Georgia which occurred in 1831. In this case Georgia began to pass laws and regulations with the intentions of forcing Cherokee off their land. The Cherokee nation took Georgia all the way to the Supreme Court to defend their rights as a foreign nation. Chief Justice Marshall ruled that Cherokee nation was in fact not a foreign nation but a “domestic and dependent nation and a ward to the US”. This was a major loss for tribal sovereignty because the Cherokee nation tried to check Georgia’s aggression by legal means only for them to be thrown right back at
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