Ninety Million Acres: The Dawes Act and the Theft of Indian Land

The treaty the Lakota signed at Fort Laramie in 1868 set aside a reservation "for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation" of their people. Its twelfth article went further: no part of that land could be given up without the consent of three-fourths of the adult men, not a bare majority and not the signature of one agreeable chief. Red Cloud would not sign at all until the Army's forts on the Bozeman Trail had been abandoned and burned.

Nineteen years later Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, a man who believed himself the Indians' friend, saw his General Allotment Act become law. It carved reservations into individual plots, up to 160 acres for the head of a family, and opened the "surplus" to white settlement.

On the ground the law meant land rushes, guardians who drained the estates of Native minors, blood-quantum rolls that decided who counted as Indian on paper, and oil that made some allotments a target for fraud. Reformers and the Meriam Report of 1928 exposed the damage, and in 1934 the Indian Reorganization Act finally stopped the carving. By then the land held by Native nations had fallen from about 138 million acres to about 48 million.

The three-fourths clause outlived nearly everyone who signed it. In 1980 it stood behind a Supreme Court judgment over the Black Hills, and the Lakota, offered the money, would not take it.