Federal policy fragmented most reservations into severely divided land parcels

Evidence

As a result of federal land sales, seizures, and allotments, most reservations are severely fragmented. Each parcel of tribal, trust, and privately held land is a separate enclave under multiple laws and jurisdictions. The Diné (Navajo) Nation has the largest contemporary contiguous land base among Native nations: nearly sixteen million acres, or nearly twenty-five thousand square miles, the size of West Virginia. Each of twelve other reservations is larger than Rhode Island, which comprises nearly eight hundred thousand acres, or twelve hundred square miles, and each of nine other reservations is larger than Delaware, which covers nearly a million and a half acres, or two thousand square miles. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 36

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to land-base data in the following paragraph on the shrinking acreage since 1881.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 36

Related

• The 1887 General Allotment Act cut reservation lands by two-thirds (similarity 0.78)