In contrast to earlier United States policies of open war, forcible removal, and relocation to address the “Indian Problem,” the Dawes Act of 1887 focused on assimilation and land severalty — making American Indians citizens of the United States with individually-titled plots of land rather than members of collective tribes with communal land. Considerable scholarship shows that the consequences of the policy differed substantially from its stated goals, and by the time of its repeal in 1934, American Indians had lost two-thirds of all native land held in 1887 (86 million acres)—and nearly two-thirds of American Indians had become landless or unable to meet subsistence needs. Complementing rich qualitative history, this paper provides new quantitative evidence on the impact of the Dawes Act on mortality among American Indian children and adults. Using 1900 and 1910 U.S. population census data to study both household and tribe-level variation in allotment timing, we find that assimilation and allotment policy increased various measures of American Indian child and adult mortality from nearly 20% to as much as one third (implying a decline in life expectancy at birth of about 20%) — confirming contemporary critics’ adamant concerns about the Dawes Act.
Grant Miller, Jack Shane & C. Matthew Snipp, "The Impact of United States Assimilation and Allotment Policy on American Indian Mortality" NBER Working Paper #33057 (October 2024).
It turns out that suddenly switching from a communal land ownership regime to an individual land ownership regime is just as deadly as socializing individual land ownership.
4 comments:
Currently reading Scott's "Seeing Like a State", so this is very apropos. Would the negative effects on communal ownership been inevitable due to the philosophical/legal basis of WesternCiv/Modernism? Or does the existence of Indian Reservations show that there was a well-established framework that could have worked? I'd guess that reservations are inherently going to turn into ghettoes (unless blessed with oil). And that the residents of the reservations will wind up unable to partake of the full benefits/maluses of 21st century civ.
And completely OT. Where are you going to catch the buzz of new aDNA studies?
"Scott's "Seeing Like a State", so this is very apropos. Would the negative effects on communal ownership been inevitable due to the philosophical/legal basis of WesternCiv/Modernism? Or does the existence of Indian Reservations show that there was a well-established framework that could have worked?" Good questions. There were Western technologies that did catch on (written language, guns, horses). Latin America's assimilationist approach was partially a product of happening earlier with smaller numbers of gender imbalanced Europeans. Relocations like the Trail of Tears didn't help either. The fate of the Jomon people in Japan, who make up a decent percentage of Japanese genetic ancestry but were culturally obliterated is another way it could have played out. Still, there weren't a lot of good potential outcomes in North America for the Native Americans. In contrast, but for European diseases, the Aztecs and Incas might have had staying power.
"Where are you going to catch the buzz of new aDNA studies?" I've blogged a couple at Dispatches From Turtle Island, and have a backlog of studies that I could blog about. But, the election has been emotionally draining, and may take some time to recharge from it. If Trump wins, I fear that things will just get worse, although maybe ancient DNA blogging could be a respite from that horror.
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