The Allotment System and Its Devastation
The Dawes Act of 1887 — the allotment legislation that divided reservation lands into individual parcels and offered citizenship to Native people who accepted their allotments — is the specific policy context for some of the most significant harm affecting Native communities in Zitkála-Šá’s era.
Before allotment, the reservation system had reduced Native landholdings substantially from pre-contact territory. But the reservations, however reduced, were held communally by the nations assigned to them. Allotment broke this communal land tenure by assigning individual parcels to individual tribal members, and then designated the remaining “surplus” lands as available for purchase by non-Native settlers.
The results were devastating. Between 1887 and 1934, when the Indian Reorganization Act ended allotment, approximately 90 million acres of Native-held land passed into non-Native ownership. This was roughly two-thirds of the land held by Native nations when the Dawes Act was passed. The combination of direct allotment, the sale of surplus lands, the loss of allotted lands through tax sales and fraud, and the mechanisms of the Oklahoma guardianship system that Zitkála-Šá investigated produced a catastrophic reduction in Native land holdings.
The connection between land and sovereignty — between the material base of the reservation and the political and cultural life it supported — was understood by Zitkála-Šá and by the communities she was connected to. The loss of land was not only an economic loss. It was a loss of the territorial basis for the political autonomy that treaties had promised.
Her advocacy on land questions — in the pages of the American Indian Magazine, in her political work with the National Council of American Indians, in her investigations and reports — was always connected to this larger question of what Native communities needed to survive as communities. Land was foundational.