In yesterday’s blog, I described how the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 broke up Native American tribal lands. It made citizens of those Indians willing to live “separate and apart” while rendering invisible before the law any “commoners” who hoped to preserve traditional patterns of native land tenure.
The idea of breaking up Indian land was not without contemporary critics. The majority of Indians opposed the plan (severalty “plucked the Indian like a bird,” said one tribal leader). Whites who had lived and worked among the Indians opposed the plan, from U.S. government Indian agents, to ethnographers such as Lewis H. Morgan, to the former commissioner of Indian affairs, George W. Manypenny, who had negotiated several previous allotment treaties and come to regret them.
“Had I known then, as I now know,” Manypenny wrote in 1885, “what would result from those treaties, I would be compelled to admit that I had committed a high crime.” There were even a number of U.S. senators who said clearly (in a minority report of the Committee on Indian Affairs) that “the main purpose of this bill is not the help the Indian,” that the “real aim” was to “get at the Indian lands and open them up to settlement,” and that it was a fantasy to suppose that a quarter-section of land would make a farmer out of anyone (“there are hundreds of thousands of white men…who cannot be transformed into cultivators of the land by any such gift”).
The bill, these senators wrote, “is formed solely upon a theory, and it has no practical basis to stand upon.” If one wanted a basis for an Indian policy they suggested looking to history where one might find that “for centuries” the system of holding property in common “has kept bands and tribes together as families…”
As for those who promoted allotment it is hard from this distance not to see them as either naive, self-righteous, cynical, or all three. The Act’s supporters took one way of life — possessive individualism as embodied by Jeffersonian farmers — to be the way of life, and then set out to destroy an alternative way — tribal collectivism. They did so in the name of high ideals: self-improvement, self-reliance, education, citizenship, civilization, and Christianity.
In the voice of one of the Act’s most forceful advocates, the Reverend Lymon Abbott, we hear the odd way in which high ideals can become mixed with grandiosity and bullying. Abbott thought that unallotted land should not be left in Indian hands but simply taken from them by eminent domain. “Barbarism has no rights which civilization is bound to respect,” he wrote. He was happy to see the railroads enabled in their westward push, the steam engine being “a Christianizing power [that] will do more to teach the people punctuality than schoolmaster or preacher can.” He had no time for tribalism or tribal sovereignty: “I would…scatter the Indians among the white people… .”
The Dawes act did not so much convert Indians to possessive individualism as allow the already converted, the white settlers and railroad companies, to increase their wealth and power at the expense of the destroyed collectives. Over a hundred reservations were broken up by allotment and, through the sale of “surplus” lands and other alienable holdings the Indians eventually lost eighty-six million acres, over sixty percent of the land that they had held prior to 1887.
Moreover, in the years that followed, the money held in trust for the tribes has been horribly mishandled by the government. As late as 1999 a Federal judge held both the Secretary of Interior and the Secretary of Treasury in contempt of court for the government’s continued failure to account for the trusts, as much as $10 billion having failed to reach its beneficiaries during the last century.
But let’s turn now from the grain of this event to its implications. I take it to be an example of a legal, economic, and political practice in which the common self disappears, loses its standing, and becomes invisible or inarticulate in the public sphere.
I also take it to be an example from the world of tangible commons that mirrors what we now see in the world of intangible commons. A recent law like the Copyright Term Extension Act is “severalty for the public domain.”
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Lewis Hyde is an essayist and cultural critic, currently a Fellow at the Bermkan Center on Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.