Grover cleveland dawes act

Turner closed his speech with a warning: if the frontier had been so important to the development of American culture and democracy, what would happen next? The end of the frontier also marked a new era for Indians.

The allotment program, which opened surplus land to settlers, diminished Indian land holdings from more than million acres in to about 78 million in More than , individuals had accepted allotments, and 23, of the 38, total school-age children were enrolled in nearly government-operated Indian schools.

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Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. When tribes were paid for their land, they were underpaid. In addition to scant payment, Native Americans were not used to spending money and quickly spent most of what they received.

Many were left with little land and little money. Inheritance also became an issue for many Native Americans who enrolled to receive land from the Dawes Act. When young children received allotments, some did not know how to farm because they had spent their youth in boarding schools.

When there were multiple inheritors, the size of the plots was too small to divide among children and still be suitable for farming. Assimilation was a major goal of Native American policies in the late 19th century. Assimilation is the process of taking individuals or social groups and absorbing them into mainstream culture.

These lands were then sold off to non-native settlers. Additional legislation like the Homestead Acts further encouraged white settlement of the West, and with that settlement came calls for assimilation. Many settlers viewed native practices as barbaric and primitive, seeing assimilation as the only option for coexistence.

The US government employed a variety of methods in the attempt to assimilate Native Americans, including the Dawes Act.