At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of
the twentieth, many Native American communities lost the land base that had
made self-sufficiency possible. In 1887, Congress passed the General Allotment
Act, also known as the Dawes Act, which dictated that reservation land had to
be divided into individual plots and allotted to Indians as private property
and whatever land remained after the allotment process would be made available
to white settlers. Native people were nearly universally opposed to allotment.
Most Native people then and now believe that land cannot be owned as property.
It is to them like dividing the sky into plots and owning those, an
impossibility. But white people be tripping, as you know, and they could not
understand other people’s view of the world as legitimate. But in this case what
white people thought should not have mattered because Native people had legal
documents, treaties, to ensure that their view of the land would be recognized
on lands they held.
White people have now mostly forgotten that treaties are
legally binding documents that the United States entered into with tribal
nations. England first, then the United States, recognized that the land belonged
“from time immemorial,” as the legal language puts it, to the Native
inhabitants. Thus in order to gain possession of the land, these governments
negotiated with tribes in order to extinguish Native title. That is, tribal
nations ceded land (what is now the continental territory that comprises the
U.S.) but reserved for themselves some territory and rights that were spelled
out in the treaties. So for all the territory they gave up, tribal nations
reserved the right to have their remaining lands administered in trust by the
federal government. The government agreed IN FUCKING WRITING WITH SIGNATURES
AND EVERYTHING to hold Native lands in common and for the benefit of Native
peoples. So when Indians objected to allotment, arguing rightly that allotment
would deprive communities of the resources that had always sustained them, that
should have been the end of it. The Indians were not counting on vague promises
made by white people (fuck that noise, Indians thought), they were depending on
documents that Presidents themselves had signed in solemn rituals. But by
passing allotment, then enforcing it, the federal government went back on its
legal obligations, not to say its moral ones, evil motherfuckers. Congress
declared it had plenary power over Native lands and thus could renege on the
very contracts it had made. Of course it wasn’t phrased that way. Congress argued
that it was trying to "help the Indian.” By turning Natives into property
owners, the argument went, they would magically give up their culture, their
history, their communities, and turn into permanently tanned white people.
Allotment had the result that white people who pushed for it
really envisioned: Indians lost 90 million of the 140 million acres they held
prior to the passing of the Dawes Act. The loss of this land did not turn
Indians into thriving white-ish people. What it did was impoverish Native
communities and turn Indians into dependent people. The endemic poverty found
on reservations today is the legacy of allotment.
But how many non-Indians think of this history today? How many
non-Indians think of Native people in specifically historical ways? If
non-Indians think about Native people it is usually as a symbol of something, a
symbol they, non-Indians, can identify with. I hear the song “Geronimo” on the
radio and wonder what it means for its audience. The song evokes Native
history as a kind of thrilling heroic resistance, as valor in the face of
impossible odds, as boldness. I’ve argued here before that it is very difficult
for popular music to represent history, but as this song illustrates it is quite easy for pop music to
obscure it.
