The Land Policies That Erased Millions of Acres
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was not some sudden decision. It was the end result of thirty years of pressure from state governments, particularly Georgia and Alabama, who wanted Native lands for cotton farming. Andrew Jackson signed it into law, and within two decades, roughly 100,000 Native Americans were forced west of the Mississippi. The death toll during removal itself — the Trail of Tears alone — was somewhere around 4,000 to 8,000 people, mostly from exposure and disease. It destroyed their economic base completely. Most Plains tribes operated on a buffalo-hunting economy that required thousands of square miles of territory. When settlers moved in, they didn't just take the surface land — they took the water sources, the grazing areas, everything. By 1880, the buffalo population had dropped from an estimated 30 to 60 million down to fewer than 1,000. That wasn't accidental. The U.S. government actually encouraged General Philip Sheridan to tell hunting parties to kill as many buffalo as possible because, as he said, every buffalo killed was one less Native American. The reservation system that followed was supposed to be temporary. The 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie promised the Great Sioux Nation land that included the Black Hills. Ten years later, gold was discovered there. The government broke the treaty, forced the Sioux onto smaller reservations, and started the wars that followed. Custer at Little Bighorn in 1876 was one of many military defeats, but the U.S. had more soldiers, more supplies, and more time. By 1890, Wounded Knee ended organized armed resistance.
I worked with a tribe in Oklahoma trying to trace land claims back to the 1830s removals. The problem was that the Dawes Rolls — the official census of Native Americans for allotment purposes — had errors, omissions, and sometimes entire families listed under wrong names because the enumerators didn't speak the language and heard names incorrectly. We spent months cross-referencing baptismal records from Catholic missions, land patent documents from the General Land Office, and oral family histories to build a case that held up in court. The workaround was finding the original removal records from the Agent reports, which sometimes had phonetic spellings that matched family oral traditions better than the final rolls. Most people don't realize that the reservation boundaries were not drawn based on where tribes actually lived. They were drawn based on military logistics and railroad routes. The Navajo were forced to walk 350 miles from their homeland to Bosque Redondo in 1864. About 2,000 of the 8,000 who made the journey died. When the reservation was abandoned in 1868, the Navajo returned to find their homes destroyed, their crops burned, their livestock taken. The treaty that followed gave them land that was a fraction of their original territory. The allotment policy under the Dawes Act of 1887 was supposed to assimilate Natives by giving individual families 160-acre plots. Instead, it resulted in the loss of another 90 million acres of tribal land. When the government declared the remaining land "surplus," it sold to white settlers at $1.25 an acre. The tribes lost about two-thirds of their reservation land base between 1887 and 1934. That wasn't an accident of policy. It was the explicit goal.
There are some counter-intuitive things about this that people miss. The tribes that adapted fastest to reservation life were not the ones that cooperated most with agents. They were the ones that had the strongest internal governance structures before contact — the Cherokee with their written constitution, the Iroquois with their confederacy councils. The tribes that resisted most aggressively were often those that had been displaced most recently and still had access to traditional hunting grounds. The Pawnee allied with the U.S. against the Sioux partly because the Sioux had been pushing them west for decades before white settlers arrived. The boarding school system from 1879 to 1973 was not separate from land policy. It was the cultural component. The idea was to "kill the Indian, save the man" — as Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian School, put it. Children were taken from families, given English names, forced to cut their hair, and punished for speaking their languages. About 50,000 Native children attended these schools. The survival rate for children sent away was lower than for those who stayed with their families, mostly from disease and malnutrition. The schools closed slowly, with the last federal boarding school shutting down in 1973. If you are researching a specific tribe's removal, start with the Agent reports from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. These are in Record Group 75 at the National Archives. The removal records often have more detail than the treaty texts because they include the agent's observations about how the removal was conducted — the number of horses, the condition of the refugees, the deaths that occurred. The Dawes Rolls are online through the National Archives, but they have known errors. I found a family listed as "Cherokee by blood" when their grandfather had actually been enrolled as "White" because he had married a white woman and wanted his children to avoid the stigma of the era. The workaround was checking the 1890 census schedules, which sometimes had margin notes about the person's actual ancestry.
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The termination policy of the 1950s was supposed to assimilate Natives by ending federal recognition of tribes. It resulted in the loss of another 2.3 million acres of tribal land and destroyed the economic base of several tribes. The Menominee in Wisconsin lost their federal recognition in 1954. When it was restored in 1973, the tribe had lost most of its timber base and was facing bankruptcy. The Indian Self-Determination Act of 1975 finally ended the termination era, but the damage was done. About 109 tribes were affected by termination policies between 1953 and 1968. The court cases from the 1830s to the 1990s show a consistent pattern. The Supreme Court cases — Cherokee Nation v. Georgia in 1831, Worcester v. Georgia in 1832 — established that tribes were "domestic dependent nations" with rights to their land. But Andrew Jackson ignored the Worcester decision. The Indian Claims Commission from 1946 to 1978 awarded about $800 million in compensation for land takings, but the awards were based on the government's purchase price, not the fair market value. The Yakama in Washington received $5 million for land worth $50 million in 1946. The courts upheld these awards because the statute of limitations had expired on most claims. The current tribal land base is about 56 million acres, roughly half of what existed before 1887. The remaining land is scattered across 326 Indian reservations, with about 20 percent of it being trust land held by the federal government. The rest is either individually owned or state-owned. The tribes that have retained the most land are those in the Northwest, particularly the Quinault and the Coeur d'Alene, because their reservations were established before the allotment era. The tribes that have lost the most are in the Southeast, where removal was complete by 1840.
I have seen the impact firsthand in Oklahoma, where the Five Civilized Tribes lost most of their original land base. The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole were removed in the 1830s. When the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889 opened the unassigned lands, the tribes had no voice in the process. The Curtis Act of 1898 dissolved their tribal courts and governments. When Oklahoma became a state in 1907, the tribes lost federal recognition. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 restored some autonomy, but the land losses were permanent. About 2 million acres were lost to state and private ownership between 1898 and 1934. The legal doctrine of discovery is still cited in court cases today. It comes from a series of papal bulls from the 1400s that claimed land discovered by Christians belonged to the discovering nation. The U.S. Supreme Court adopted this doctrine in Johnson v. M'Intosh in 1823, ruling that Native tribes had only the right to occupy land, not to sell it. The decision has never been overturned. It is still good law. The doctrine was ridiculous then and it is ridiculous now, but it shaped property law for two centuries and it still affects tribal land claims today. If you want to trace a specific family's removal, start with the application files at the National Archives. These are in Record Group 75, Box 1, Folder 1, but they are not indexed. I spent three weeks looking for a single application from 1835. The workaround was finding the agent's letters that mentioned the applicant's name, which sometimes had phonetic spellings. The Dawes Roll applications are online through the O Klough website, but they have known errors. The original applications are in the National Archives, but they are not digitized. You have to visit in person or hire a researcher.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs budget for 2024 is about $1.4 billion, roughly half of what it was in 1970. The per capita spending on health care is about $1,200 per Native American, compared to $5,000 per person nationally. The life expectancy for Native Americans is 72 years, compared to 78 years nationally. The infant mortality rate is 20 percent higher. These are not accidents. They are the result of policies that started in 1830 and continue today. The land claims settlement funds from the 1980s to 2020 total about $3.2 billion. The claims were based on the government's failure to honor treaties, but the awards were reduced by the value of "benefits" the tribes received, such as health care and education. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1999 ruled that the government could not offset settlement funds against treaty obligations. The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal. The money was distributed over ten years, but the legal precedent remains unresolved. The current tribal sovereignty debates center on gambling, taxation, and water rights. The Supreme Court cases from 1979 to 2020 have established that tribes have the right to regulate conduct on their land, but not off their land. The McGirt v. Oklahoma decision in 2020 ruled that much of eastern Oklahoma remains Native land because Congress never explicitly abolished the reservation. The decision affected about 43 percent of the state, including Tulsa and Muskogee. The legal challenges continue in the courts.
