So, you’re just going to ignore everything that’s been written in this thread refuting the idea that the Dawes Act enforced property rights?
Clayton -
“Private property” alone didn’t kill the Native Americans, and it’s hard to talk about what kind of ownership they had without getting into specific tribes. Suffice to say that their sense of ownership differed from Anglican standards.
What the Dawes Act did was treat groups that had been until then treated as a soverign nations unto themselves as individuals. While over hunting, disease, and genocide left most First Nations without sustinence, splitting the groups into individuals legally set them at odds with each other and radically shifted how they were expected to survive. Instead of hunting and gathering, or doing the semi-domesticated agriculture they had been doing on their original land (the land that worked) they were expected to start as individuals anew on land that they could barely sustain working together and sharing resources.
No matter what our definitions or their definitions of private property were/are, the Dawes Act, amongst other things, was intended to destroy the way of life that Native Americans had been used to, and it pretty much did.
“Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” is a good first hand story from a Native American perspective of the Dawes era if you’re interested.
Please tell me how I have to spell it out- it seems that every time I’ve posted in this forum someone criticizes my semantics. The US Government took land from the community and redistributed a certain amount to each Indian. I’m not saying that the act defended private property rights- it obviously illegitimately manipulated, prearranged, property rights. I don’t support the act and I never once claimed that it was a legitimate method of enforcing property rights. I’m saying that it happened. I found it curious that an analogous action occured at another era in history to a different group of people and, in that instance at least, it led to drastically different results; my question is “why were there different results?”
Can you please cite and describe this other time in history when an entire class of people was forced off their property and then shoved into basically concentration camps where everything they did needed government bureaucratic approval? I must have missed it.
“Under the act, formally communal land from the reservations was distributed to individuals in 160-acre allotments…”
When Thomas Dale came to America, I think in 1607, under direction from the British government he distributed allotments of land to different colonists and asked them to do with it as they pleased. To me, at least, this seems somewhat similar to the scenario with the Dawes Act. I am not attempting to make any statement about the state of Indians today with respect to the US government, nor any other conceivable injustice ever committed upon them, if that is what you are pursuing.
PS. If I in any way insulted someone please let me know so I can apologize. I’m tired of constantly having to defend myself for asking a question, and then having to repeat the question.
I guess I’m just not seeing which part you’re confused about. I don’t see how you can still think those two things are the same.
I get the gist of what you are asking. Aside from the differences in time and place another significant factor would be the value scales of the individual actors.
I don’t know how you inferred this from the Dawes Act. I’m not asking about Indian Reservations in general or the abuse of Native Americans, by the federal government, over time; my question starts once the Native Americans were given “their” own property, rather than their prior system of property, as a result of this act.