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Dawes Act Essay

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The Allotment Act The Dawes Act and its supporters sang a very similar tune to southerners who justified slavery as their patriarchal and christian duty. The Dawes Act allowed the President of the United States to survey the reservations Indians lived on and allot its land to heads of households, single persons over eighteen, and to orphans. This meant that the President went into reservations and redistributed the land, upsetting the system Native Americans had previously. Slave owners of the Antebellum South believed that the Black men and women needed to be enslaved, for they could not function without a patriarchal master. Westerners too saw the Native Americans as inferior, and felt that they had to help the tribal people be free of …show more content…

By 1900, Native Americans had lost half of the land that had been originally given to them. Meanwhile, the farming and assimilating of Native Americans was not successful. By many accounts, Indians were not adjusting to neither their new family dynamic nor farming. The Cheyennes had to learn how to plough, plant, and harvest their new aired properties. One Sioux recalled the struggle men especially had of being stripped of his previous purpose, hunting buffalo, and his tribe, with whom he hunted with. The Sioux described how depressed the man came, and how many white men ridiculed him for it. Some Native Americans tried to escape allotment. One Cheyenne man and his family decide to leave the reservation and its new allotment for the mountains to stay away from white people, who could not be trusted. Most however were forced to allow their lands to be cut smaller and smaller, like the Northern Ute, until there was almost nothing left to live on. These particularly tragic tales continue into today, as Native Americans live in overcrowded reservations that have high rates of poverty, alcoholism and drug abuse, and even suicide, as tribes in Canada have recently

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