[Yale-forests-reading-group] Week 7: Guardianship, Land Allotments, and the Dawes Act

[Karam Sheban]

Week 7: Guardianship, Land Allotments, and the Dawes Act

Part 1: Guardianship, Land Allotments, and the Nipmuc Nation

This week, we continue our exploration of the long, violent history of
Native land theft and displacement in New England and across North America.
Following last week's focus on Tribal Sovereignty, we want to learn more
about some of the specific mechanisms of theft that colonizers have
employed against Native Nations. In the previous installment about King
Philip's War, we learned about the history of "praying towns," such as
Webquasset (Woodstock, CT), where colonists converted Native people to
English customs and Christianity. Following the war, colonizers turned to
other methods of control and assimilation, and introduced "guardianship" as
a way to regulate how Indigenous people and communities could interact with
the land.

As described in Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine: "Toward the end of
the 18th century, English settlers developed a guardianship system
ostensibly to prevent the abuse of Native Americans during land
negotiations, but in reality only furthering the fraud, abuse, and
corruption. Guardians were paid by the tribes, but often the tribes' only
sources of income were from sales of land or resources." Many of the
guardians – colonists claiming to represent the interests of a tribe or
individual – siphoned off funds for personal use, and Indigenous people
were then forced to sell land to pay debts, taxes, and more. This only
added to the immense land loss they had already experienced.

This article highlights a panel discussion at Suffolk University that
featured tribal leaders from the Nipmuc Nation and Hassanamisco Band of
Nipmuc Indians, the Chappaquiddick Wampanoag Tribe, and the Herring Pond
Wampanoag Tribe. This panel convened to discuss the legal and social
mechanisms of state-sanctioned land theft that left the Indigenous
population landless within a century after King Philip's War. The
discussion points to colonial concepts of land tenure, the abuses of
guardianship policies, and a foreign tax system that all interplayed to
dispossess land from Native people. Despite the loss of land that broke
apart their communities and the abuses of power that forced them to sell
acreage, tribes in the region maintain a cultural connection to their
ancestral lands and continue to rebuild their communities. Of the Nipmuc
Nation, the Cultural Survival Quarterly article states: "Today, only three
acres remain of the original Hassanamesit reservation in Grafton. Although
no Nipmuc people live on their traditional lands, they continue to
congregate for cultural events that serve as an important connection to
their ancestors."

Sanctioned Theft: Tribal Land Loss in Massachusetts - by CS Staff -
Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine, June 2014

https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/sanctioned-theft-tribal-land-loss-massachusetts

Guardians were often employed when the colonizers divided land into
individual allotments, privatizing land that was formerly shared by Native
bands, tribes, and nations. Land was divided into allotments on a large
scale with the passage of the Dawes Act in 1887, but colonial, state, and
federal governments also employed the allotment system much earlier. In her
2012 blog post "Hassanimisco Indians," Cheryll Toney Holley, chief of the
Nipmuc Nation and Hassanamisco Band of Nipmuc Indians, writes that "Native
people throughout Massachusetts could not sell their land or spend even the
interest on their money without asking their guardians to petition the
legislature until 1869." She traces the history of one land allotment (the
Muckamaug Allotment) beginning in 1728, when the Hassanamesit praying town
was divided. Of the 8,000 total acres at Hassanamesit, only 1,200 were
distributed to 7 Nipmuc families. Her 2015 post, "Unraveling Six
Generations of Nipmuc Sarahs," focuses on the same allotment and follows
the lineage of Nipmuc women who passed this land down through generations.

"Hassanamisco Indians" and "Unraveling Six Generations of Nipmuc Sarahs,"
For All My Relations, Cheryll Toney Holley

http://forallmyrelations.blogspot.com/2012/08/hassanamisco-indians.html

http://forallmyrelations.blogspot.com/2014/04/unraveling-six-generations-of-nipmuc.html

For further reading, we recommend the dissertation of Dr. Rae Gould, a
member of the Nipmuc Nation and Associate Director of the Native American
and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University. Dr. Gould's doctoral
research traces how a 3-acre remnant of an allotment of land to Nipmuc
Moses Printer in 1727 eventually became the present day Hassanamisco
Reservation, and highlights the role of women leaders in protecting and
preserving this land. Her work follows the transformation of the Nipmuc
settlement of Hassanamesit, "the place of small stones", to the 17th
century Hassanamesit praying village, to eventually become present day
Grafton, Massachusetts, where the reservation serves as a symbol of
resilience and "of the continued presence of the Nipmuc people in southern
New England."

Contested Places: The history and meaning of Hassanamisco - Dr. Rae Gould

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47869343_Contested_places_The_history_and_meaning_of_Hassanamisco#read

Part 2: The General Allotment Act of 1887 (Dawes Act)

Over the past few weeks, we have explored the many mechanisms by which land
was violently stolen and systematically dispossessed from Native people by
colonizers, and how this land loss is connected to the erasure of Native
people from the landscape. One of the most devastating policies to
Indigenous land ownership as colonizers expanded westward was the General
Allotment Act of 1887 — often referred to as the Dawes Act, after the
Senator and Yale alum, Henry Laurens Dawes, a major proponent of the
legislation — which resulted in the loss of ownership of over 90 million
acres of Native landholdings to colonial settlers. The policy was designed
to partition communal Indigenous lands into individual parcels of 40, 80,
or 160 acres. The most productive lands from reservations were identified
as "surplus to Indian needs" and sold to colonizers to exploit for natural
resources. Under the allotment policies, colonial settlers could purchase
and own land outright, but Natives that were deemed "incompetent" by the
federal government had to wait 25 years to gain the legal title and rights
to sell the land. In addition to the land grab, the act aimed to "civilize"
and assimilate Indigenous people in order to dissolve their connections to
their traditional land, culture, and identity. Today, tribes continue to
address the fractionated ownership and management of land from the original
allottees.

Episode 5 of This Land podcast explores how 90 million acres of land were
lost to "bureaucracy and corruption," and the repercussions that continue
to be seen today. In this conversation, host Rebecca Nagle and John Ross,
David Cornsilk, Marilyn Vann, Elena Kagan, and Sheila Bird reframe the
common story "about how tribes lost land with arrows and guns." Depending
on who tells the story, they say, The Dawes Act was either "a story of good
intentions" to safeguard Native land ownership or "or one of outright
theft."

The Land Grab - This Land Podcast hosted by Rebecca Nagle

https://crooked.com/podcast/this-land-episode-5-the-land-grab/

The first article in a three-part series by Gale Courey Toensing in Indian
Country Today describes the Dawes Act for what it was - legalized warfare -
and a "land-grab on a massive, almost unimaginable scale." This article
describes how the Dawes Act gave the President authority to "dissolve"
reservations and subsequently allot the land to individual Native people,
based on a western understanding of gender and family structures (for
example, married women couldn't receive allotments). Additionally, "The
allotments would be held in 'trust' by the federal government for 25 years,
and then turned over to the individual allotment holder, who would hold the
title free and clear, but would now have to pay taxes on the land." Many
could not afford those taxes and therefore lost the land. Toensing
articulates the devastating impact of this policy on Indigenous communities
across the continent:

"The Dawes Act was one of the most effective implementations of the
colonial and imperialist strategy against Indigenous Peoples of
divide-and-conquer — a strategy that combines political, military and
economic tactics to gain power over another power by breaking it up into
individual units that are powerless to resist domination. It was also an
act of lawfare — a relatively new term for an old phenomenon: warfare by
legal means."

The Dawes Act Started the U.S. Land-Grab of Native Territory by Gale Courey
Toensing in Indian Country Today (Part 1)

https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/the-dawes-act-started-the-u-s-land-grab-of-native-territory-hv3s4QgVpkCrSHO77YvZjg

For additional reading, we recommend the other articles in the series. Part
3 explores the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act — which gave the Secretary of
the Interior authority to "restore and acquire lands for Indian Nations" —
and the 2009 Carcieri ruling, which Mashpee Wampanoag Chairman Cedric
Cromwell calls "the modern-day Dawes Act." In Carcieri v. Salazar, the
Supreme Court ruled that "the Secretary of the Interior does not have the
authority to take land into trust for tribes that were not 'now under
federal jurisdiction' when the IRA was enacted" in 1934. The Mashpee
Wampanoag were some of the first to experience Dawes' theory of private
property ownership, when state legislation in 1842 divided Mashpee
Wampanoag land into 60-acre allotments. The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe only
recently received federal recognition in 2007, and their once-vast lands
throughout New England now comprise just over 300 acres of reservation land
in the Massachusetts towns of Mashpee and Taunton. The Tribe is now in the
midst of a battle to retain their lands, following a 2018 decision by the
Department of the Interior that because the Tribe was not federally
recognized in 1934, it does not qualify for land-in-trust status under
Carcieri. On March 27, 2020, the Department ordered the Mashpee Wampanoag
Reservation to be disbanded and the land taken out of trust, an action that
the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. struck down in June. Interior
is now appealing that ruling. The Mashpee Wampanoag Reservation
Reaffirmation Act/HR312, which would prevent disestablishment of the
reservation, was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in May (it
hasn't yet been taken up by the Senate).

In the Indian Country Today piece (written before the Mashpee Wampanoag
Tribe's current legal battle began), Cromwell articulates the importance of
land to Tribes, and articulates how land is fundamental to sovereignty:

"We have always been, and today continue to be, land based cultures —
communities inextricably connected to the soil, water, and air around us,
to the plants and animals that ensure our survival, and to the places we
call home. In our view, our lands hold much more than mere economic value
but rather have great cultural, religious, and—in the modern era,
especially—political significance. Our lands are where we live, where we
gather together, and where we exercise our inherent sovereign rights as
pre-Constitutional peoples."

The Dawes Act Started the U.S. Land-Grab of Native Territory by Gale Courey
Toensing in Indian Country Today (Part 3)

https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/part-3-the-dawes-act-started-the-u-s-land-grab-of-indian-territory-bKhupD7gEUmwaRcriA_7Mw

To learn more about the ongoing legal battle surrounding Mashpee Wampanoag
lands and tribal sovereignty:

Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe: #StandWithMashpee

https://mashpeewampanoagtribe-nsn.gov/standwithmashpee

https://mashpeewampanoagtribe-nsn.gov/news/2020/6/5/message-from-chairman-cromwell-court-rules-in-favor-of-tribe
and other news pieces on the Tribe's website

"Secretary Of Interior Orders Mashpee Wampanoag Reservation
'Disestablished,' Tribe Says," WBUR, March 28, 2020

https://www.wbur.org/news/2020/03/28/mashpee-wampanoag-reservation-secretary-interior-land-trust

"Interior Department appeals June ruling over Wampanoag land" by Beth
Treffeisen for the Cape Cod Times, August 1, 2020

https://www.capecodtimes.com/news/20200801/interior-department-appeals-june-ruling-over-wampanoag-land

To learn more about organizations that are working to return land to Native
ownership take a look at the work of The Indian Land Tenure Foundation.

The Indian Land Tenure Foundation

https://iltf.org/

Questions

   1.

   How do allotments continue to influence how land is managed today?
   2.

   For those who don't live on reservation land, are you aware of
   reservation land near you? How have you interacted with the land and people
   who live with it? Knowing more about violent land dispossession policies,
   how does this influence how you view and interact with Native land?
   3.

   Were you already familiar with this history of land dispossession? What
   has been new to you in this history?
   4.

   As we have strived to cover some main events and methods of land
   dispossession since European contact to today, what other major events and
   methods have you learned about in New England or other areas that would
   help tell this story?
   5.

   What are other examples of land dispossession and marginalization you
   have noticed?


Acknowledgments

Each week, we are in awe of the Native accounts and stories we are reading
and listening to. We are thankful to the people and platforms we have
explored this week for digging deep into the history of land dispossession
- and their continued efforts to educate and advocate for returning land to
Native ownership. We are exceptionally thankful for and privileged to read
the words of  Cheryll Toney Holley, chief of the Nipmuc Nation and
Hassanamisco Band of Nipmuc Indians, and Dr. Rae Gould, Nipmuc Nation
member and associate director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies
Initiative at Brown University, who have shared stories of the Nipmuc
people that we have learned from and bettered our understanding. As a
continued action from this learning, we encourage you to continue to follow
and support the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe's fight to preserve their
reservation land (#StandWithMashpee), as well as to learn about (and join
in opposition to) other attacks on tribal sovereignty in your area.


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