The 1887 General Allotment Act cut reservation lands by two-thirds

Evidence

In 1875, four years after Congress had ended formal treaty-making with Native nations, the total reservation land base stood at 166 million acres, or 12 percent of the continental United States. In 1887, with the passage of the General Allotment Act, that would end. Under the act, 118 reservations were “allotted”—that is, the collective landholdings were dissolved—and of those, 44 were opened to homestead entry under public land laws. Approximately 38 million acres of reservation land were “ceded” outright to the government. Another 22 million acres of so-called surplus lands existed after allotments and were opened up for settlement by non-Indians. Within a few years, Indian landholdings had diminished to less than 137 million acres. By 1934, less than 52 million acres of land were retained by Native people. — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations, 724

Categorization

• XREF: Numbers on allotment frame the same legal machinery behind fractionated heirship (ch10, ch14) and the legal-terrain of land rights in the Legal Systems course. — connects to: Native North America is large and demographically solid despite land loss. — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 51; A quarter of the US heartland has reverted to frontier status — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 781; Land allotment and dam flooding drive current Lakota social pathology — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 747 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The privatized allotments failed within one generation, losing two-thirds of reservation land #expands (0.95) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 74