Advantages And Disadvantages Of The Dawes Act

Before the Dawes Act of 1887, the treatment of Native Americans in the United States was brutal. Treatment after the Dawes Act was still awful, but in the many years before the act there were some truly cruel and inhuman things done to Native Americans. There was murder and massacres, like the one at Sand Creek; the idea of Manifest Destiny and pushing Native Americans of their land, like with the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the subsequent Trail of Tears, which led to many deaths; a great decline in the number of buffalos, who were a “grocery store” for Native Americans in the Great Plains, and were killed by white people either for sport or because they were nuisances; there was forced conversion to the white way of doing things, even when completely at odds with …show more content…
This act granted land to the sole use of individual Native Americans, in contrast to when land was taken away from Native Americans by the U.S. government, for the improvement of their lives and even offered citizenship to Native Americans. While seemingly a good thing on the surface, there were many stipulations that in fact made this act very disadvantageous to Native Americans. First of all, the act declares that all Native American tribes must live on a reservation, making it so there were no more free Native Americans. Secondly, the land given to Native Americans was useless for farming, so they could not even make a livelihood off of their land. In addition to this, land would not be granted to a Native American next to a family member’s. This was done to prevent family members joining their land together to do communal farming and do farming in a Native American fashion. Furthermore, it was not as if all the land given to each Native American was surrounded by other land-owning Native Americans; there were white settlers there too, and it is quite well-known that there was hostile relationship between white settlers and Native