The Legacy of Allotment on Contemporary Native Agriculture

This interactive story map published by the Native Lands Advocacy Project (NLAP) will take you through critical historical Native agriculture policies and how they have shaped Native lands and economies today. We'll look at the most recent data from the USDA Census of Agriculture for American Indian Reservations to illustrate the devastating and intergenerational impacts of the Dawes Act. Although we trace current disparities back to their roots in oppressive agricultural policies, Native communities across the country have been leading efforts to change the narrative. Scroll down to start the story!

For some, the great disparities between Native and non-Native people in agriculture are easy to explain away. “Native peoples are incompetent farmers,” some might say, or a similar claim: “Farming is incompatible with Native culture.” This myth persists in the American psyche today, built upon disingenuous portrayals of indigenous communities and a false, ahistorical understanding of their agricultural practices. But it is not a harmless myth—it serves to legitimize the gross injustices of land cessions and exclusionary federal policies during the allotment era.

Systems of agriculture existed and successfully served indigenous communities far before colonial imposition. These systems included complex agricultural practices such as irrigation works, terraces, raised fields, prescribed burns, and enhanced soils that date back to at least 9,000 years BP (before the present).

The truth is, early settlers devastated Native food systems as they expanded westward, and the imposition of reservations made traditional ways of life nearly impossible. Despite these drastic changes, Native communities adapted rapidly to European agriculture practices.

The early reports we have of Native agriculture on reservation lands paint a picture of rapid growth in agricultural production.

For example, in a 1981 study included in the BIA Superintendent Reports from 1877 - 1904, Leonard Carlson showed quantitative evidence of growth in reservation agriculture prior to allotment:

• 18 of the 33 reservations had compounded rates of growth in excess of 10% per year, including four that had growth rates in excess of 20% per year.
• Nine reservations had rates of growth between 5% and 10% per annum, while three grew at less than 5% and three declined.

All of this leads us to an important question related to how we understand contemporary Native agriculture:

If Native communities have been stewarding agriculture systems since time immemorial, and Native agriculture reportedly thrived in early reservation days, what has created the inequality we observe today?

Preceding the federal encroachment on the relationships between indigenous communities and their lands, Native lands were held "in common" by the members of the Native community. However, the Dawes Act of 1887 would drastically change this Native land system for years to come.

Formally titled "The General Allotment Act," the Dawes Act of 1887 authorized the President to partition reservation lands to be parceled out (in small allotments) to individual tribal members. The Dawes Act divided Native lands as follows:

• 1/4 of a section to heads of families (160 acres)
• 1/8 of a section to single persons over 18 (80 acres)
• 1/8 of a section to orphans under 18 (80 acres)
• 1/16 of a section to single persons under 18 (40 acres)

The allotment of Native lands ended the mutual sharing of land by members of a Native community. Also, it allowed the US government to steal tens of millions of acres through massive land cessions. The government then considered all lands remaining after the initial allotments as "government surplus" and liquidated 60 million acres:

• 38 million acres of ceded surplus lands (Wilson, 1935)
• 22 million acres of surplus lands opened to settlement by homesteaders (Wilson, 1935)

These lands have been converted into railroads, national forests, parkland, and military facilities and opened to settlement by non-Natives. In many instances, these lands were opened to homesteaders who paid as little as $1.25 per acre. In addition to the 60 million acres lost, an estimated additional 26 million acres were alienated through fee patents and sales of original heirship allotments.

While most Native nations were forced into an allotment, some successfully resisted. The map below shows which reservations were and were not allotted. Use the + and - buttons to zoom in and out, and click on an individual reservation to see its name and allotment status.

Subsequent amendments to the Dawes Act further dispossessed Native Americans of their lands through leasing and unjustified sales of allotted acres. The following sections highlight these amendments.

The discriminatory leasing of Native lands by the federal government began with the Act of February 28, 1891, which amended the original Dawes Act to give the Secretary of Interior the power to lease the lands of allottees for “reason of age or disability” for three years for agriculture purposes, five years for grazing and ten years for mining.

This Act did not provide much guidance about what ages are qualified and how “disability” was to be interpreted. However, the 1893 Annual Report from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs explains how this law was to be interpreted by the Superintendent on each reservation. Page 476 of this report states:

1. The term “age,” as used in said act, is defined to apply to all minors under 18 and all other persons disabled by reason of old age. 
2. The term “other disability” is defined to apply to:
   1. Unmarried women
   2. All married women or widows who have neither husbands nor children in condition to cultivate their land with profit.
   3. All who are disabled by reason of chronic sickness or incurable physical defect.
   4. All those who are disabled by Native defect of mind or permanent incurable mental disease.

This blatantly racist policy designed to alienate lands from Native Americans dramatically increased the number of land leases issued across the country.

Allotted lands were initially held in "trust" by the federal government for Native allottees, and the land was not subject to taxation. The liquidation of allotted lands began with the Burke Act of 1906, which authorized the Secretary of Interior to remove trust protections and issue fee patents to Native Americans considered “competent" to steward their lands. Fee patents subjected the lands to taxation and opened them to leasing or sale by non-Natives. And this title change was often made without the allottee's knowledge, so when they didn't pay the taxes they did not know they'd been charged, they would lose the land.

Additionally, the following Acts further expanded the Secretary's authority to approve the sale of lands of Native allottees considered “non-competent.” Of course, the federal government's criteria for "competency" for Native Americans was unfounded, often ambiguous, and highly discriminatory—echoing the Act of February 28th, 1891.

• Act of March 1, 1907 (Statutes at Large, 34 Stat. 1015-101)
• Act of May 29, 1908 (Statutes at Large, 35 Stat. 444)
• Act of June 25, 1910 (Statutes at Large, 36 Stat. 855-856)
• Act of February 14, 1913 (Statutes at Large, 37 Stat. 678-679)

These amendments to the Burke Act combined account for the sale of over 1,280,526 acres of allotted land between 1908 and 1934. During this same period, trust protections were removed from an additional 19,495,207 acres and were still held by their original allottees  (Wilson 1935) . Most of these lands were alienated from their original Native landowners through tax forfeit or corrupt deals.

The previous government reports served as the impetus for the passing of the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) in 1934, formally ending the allotment era.

However, the legacy of the allotment era is still observable today when we consider key data points in the Census of Agriculture and land ownership data.

By comparing allotted reservations to those that were not allotted, data from the 2017 Census of Agriculture shows a significant disparity between Native and non-Native producers. Examples include:

a) Fractionation: A fractionated land title is one where multiple individuals own a single parcel of land. At the time of allotment, few Natives wrote a will specifying land inheritance. Without a will, lands were transferred per the federal probate system, in which every heir receives an undivided interest in the land. The number of owners can increase exponentially with each generation to the hundreds or thousands. Most of these owners must agree to any land use decision, such as building a home or starting a business. This often prevents any Native landowners from benefitting from their land.

b) Checkerboarding: The pattern of adjoining land parcels with different types of ownership is known as checkerboarding. Reservations often include segments of individual trust land, tribal trust land, non-Native fee land, federal, and municipal land. These fall under different jurisdictions, causing Native Nations difficulty in asserting regulatory and legal control and fostering development. Checkerboarding can also simply physically prevent access to Native lands.