"What Happened to Land Sovereignty?"

The Dawes Act, Dawes Rolls and 5 Dollar "Indians." That's What.

What happened to the sovereignty of the people, as guaranteed by tribal land holdings, on the land of the states united? How did the tribes lose their lands, names, standing, autonomy and estates? It was through a systematic, premeditated plot, codified by legislators of foreign descent, who gave it to their people. Millions of acres.

Whites, who had no Indian blood, or connection to the land, paid their foreign benefactors 5 dollars to be included on the Dawes Rolls. Once on the rolls, they could claim to be “Indian,” and receive land allotments and other benefits reserved for REAL Indians. It was collusion, designed and orchestrated and they have been reaping the benefits due to REAL Indians every since.

“Gregory Smithers, who’s an associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University explained another issue with the new law. He stated, “these were opportunistic white men who wanted access to land or food rations,” these were people who were more than happy to exploit the Dawes Commission, and government agents, for $5, were willing to turn a blind eye to the graft and corruption.”

“In translation, white men with a hunger for more land acquisition paid corrupt government agents $5 to register on the Dawes Rolls. They and their offspring therefore were fraudulently enrolled in Native American Tribes and got access to the land allotment and benefits that came with the designation. This is where the term $5 Indian comes from.”

https://mwmblog.com/2021/07/25/the-dawes-act-and-the-origin-of-the-term-5-indian/

The Dawes Rolls were created as a result of the Dawes Act and not only did it codify land theft, it created a record of Indian names, which ultimately was stolen, and the names given to foreigners. It was one of the original I.D. Thefts. Some of the descendants of those impostors still carry those names to this day.

“Henry Laurens Dawes (October 30, 1816– February 5, 1903) was an attorney and politician, a Republican United States Senator and United States Representative from Massachusetts. He is notable for the Dawes Act (1887), which was intended to stimulate the assimilation of Native Americans by ending the tribal government and control of communal lands. Especially directed at the tribes in Indian Territory, it provided for the allotment of tribal lands to individual households of tribal members, and for their being granted United States citizenship. This also made them subject to state and federal taxes. In addition, extinguishing tribal land claims in this territory later enabled the admission of Oklahoma as a state in 1907.

In the Senate, Dawes was chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs. He concentrated on enactment of laws that he believed were for the benefit of the Indians. In the late 19th century, after the Indian Wars, there were widespread fears that the Indians were disappearing and that their tribes would cease to exist. In the West, Indians had been forced onto reservations and were struggling with poor lands and too little area, as well as encroachment by white settlers. In the East, most Indians were landless and were largely believed to have entered or been marginal to majority culture. Well-meaning people such as Dawes believed that the Indians had to assimilate to majority culture to survive, and should take up subsistence farming, still dominant in agriculture.”

“His most prominent achievement in Congress was the passage in 1887 of the General Allotment Act of 1887 (Dawes Act), ch. 119, 24 Stat. 388, 25 U.S.C. § 331 et seq., which authorized the President of the United States to survey Indian tribal lands, and divide the area into allotments for the individual Indian or household. It was intended to assimilate Indians by breaking up their tribal governments and communal lands, and by encouraging them to undertake subsistence farming, then widespread in American society. It was enacted February 8, 1887, and named for Dawes, its sponsor. The Act was amended in 1891, 1898 by the Curtis Act, and in 1906, by the Burke Act.”

“The Dawes Commission, set up under an Indian Office appropriation bill in 1893, was created not to administer the Act but to attempt to persuade the tribes excluded from the Act by treaties to agree to the allotment plan. After gaining agreement from representatives of the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory, the commission appointed registrars to register members on rolls prior to allotment of lands. Many tribes have since based membership and citizen qualifications on descent from persons listed as Indians on theD awes Rolls. (Also listed were freedmen of each tribe, and intermarried whites.) The Curtis Act of 1898 extended the provisions of the Dawes Act to the Five Civilized Tribes, abolishing tribal jurisdiction of their communal lands.”

“On leaving the Senate in 1893, Dawes became chairman of the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes, also known as the Dawes Commission, and served for ten years. He negotiated with the tribes for the extinction of the communal title to their land and for the dissolution of the tribal governments. The goal was to make tribal members a constituent part of the United States. In the process, Native American tribes lost about 90 million acres (360,000 km²) of treaty land, or about two thirds of their 1887 land base, over the life of the Dawes Act. About 90,000 Indians were made landless. The Act forced Native people onto small tracts of land, distant from their kin relations. The allotment policy depleted the land base and ended hunting as a means of subsistence, creating a crisis for many tribes.”

“The Coolidge administration studied the effects of the Dawes Act and the current conditions for Indians in what is known as the Meriam Report, completed in 1928. It found that the Dawes Act had been used illegally to deprive Native Americans of their land rights.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_L._Dawes (shallow dive)

“There's surprisingly little information on Senator Henry Dawes. Other than the fact that he sponsored legislation that irrevocably changed the lives of Native Americans in our country, we don't know a whole lot about him except the basic facts. One thing it tells us for sure is that he was very preoccupied with solving the "Indian Problem."

“Almost his entire career was focused on the relocation of tribes and negotiating with them to accept the terms of various agreements. But what was his motivation?”

“Warren G. Sayre, one of the commissioners of the Jerome Commission (a group dedicated to figuring out "legal" ways of buying off the lands belonging to the Native Americans for non-indigenous settlers), thought that Dawes had the purest of intentions...”

“The U.S. government had already had a pretty dismal track record of predicting what was in the Native Americans' best interest. President Andrew Jackson, whose nickname was "Indian Killer," thought that forcibly relocating the tribes in the southern U.S. from their homes to the western territories would be the best thing that ever happened to them. So in 1830, that's what he did. For their own good, of course. So the Dawes Act of 1887 was one in a long line of U.S. government actions against the tribes and their culture, disguised as benevolent gestures. Tribal lands held communally were allotted to individual Native Americans with the incentive of U.S. citizenship if they could become successful farmers and assimilate into American culture. They'd even be given priority for government jobs. Land not allotted was the property of—you guessed it—the U.S. guv'mint, who sold it to white settlers...”

“After leaving the Senate in 1893, he became the chairman of the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes (aka the Dawes Commission). For ten years he negotiated with the tribes to accept the Dawes Act. Sure, this meant that the tribes had to accept the extinction of communal farming, and they had to give up their tribal governments and sovereignty, and oh, about two-thirds of their land, but it was giving them a chance to assimilate and become U.S. citizens.

https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/historical-texts/dawes-act/henry-dawes

“In 1887, Senator Dawes authored the landmark (pun intended) legislation of allotment to Indians across the nation with the exception of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Musecogee (Creek), Seminole and Osage Nations of Indian Territory (Oklahoma). For tribes such as the Sioux, Cheyenne, Klamath or Poncas, the loss of tribal lands through allotment was an alien concept to understand as tribes had held land in common for many generations. In Oklahoma, more than twenty tribal entities were forced to take up allotments between 1887 and 1895. Included were Sauk and Fox, Potawatomi, Absentee Shawnee, Arapahoes, Tonkawas, Wyandots, Modocs, Cheyennes, Pawnee, Poncas, Otoes-Missourias, and a host of others.”

https://www.researchhistory.org/2011/02/26/henry-l-dawes/

ANNA LAURENS DAWES

“Anna Laurens Dawes (May 14, 1851 – September 25, 1938) was an American author and anti-suffragist. She was the daughter of Henry Laurens Dawes (October 30, 1816 – February 5, 1903), a Republican United States Senator and Representative of Massachusetts. Dawes served on the board of the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1892–1894, as well as the St. Louis Exposition of 1902–1904.”

“Notable works include How We are Governed (1885), The Modern Jew: His Present and his Future (1886), A United States Prison (1886), An Unknown Nation (1888), Charles Sumner (1892), and The Indian as Citizen (1917).” WIKI (SHALLOW DIVE)

Anne laurens Dawes book, The Modern Jew: His Present and his Future (1886)

https://ia800209.us.archive.org/11/items/modernjewhispres00daweuoft/modernjewhispres00daweuoft.pdf

CHEROKEE COMMISSION

“The Cherokee Commission, was a three-person bi-partisan body created by President Benjamin Harrison to operate under the direction of the Secretary of the Interior, as empowered by Section 14 of the Indian Appropriations Act of March 2, 1889. Section 15 of the same Act empowered the President to open land for settlement. The Commission's purpose was to legally acquire land occupied by the Cherokee Nation and other tribes in the Oklahoma Territory for non-indigenous homestead acreage.”

“Eleven agreements involving nineteen tribes were signed over the period of May 1890 through November 1892. The tribes resisted cession. Not all understood the terms of the agreements. The Commission tried to dissuade tribes from retaining the services of attorneys. Not all interpreters were literate. Agreement terms varied by tribe. As negotiations with the Cherokee Nation snagged, the United States House Committee on Territories recommended bypassing negotiations and annexing the Cherokee Outlet.”

“The Commission continued to function until August 1893. Lawsuits, Supreme Court rulings, investigations and mandated compensation for irregularities ensued through the end of the 20th Century. Congress failed to respond to a legal protest from the Tonkawa, or to an Indian Rights Association investigation that condemned the Commission's actions with the Cheyenne and Arapaho. Commission attempts to negotiate signed agreements produced no results with the Osage, Kaw, Otoe and Ponca.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_Commission

“The Jerome Commission was set up to negotiate the cession of Indian lands west of the 96th meridian and to open those lands to white settlement. The commission got off on the wrong foot when the commissioners told the assembled tribes that the "government wants nothing from you."

“Indians had long since realized that the white man viewed them as complete fools.”

“The late legendary legal scholar, David Getches, has argued that the commission came to the bargaining table with fixed conceptions regarding private property. Privately held land had a higher status than commons in white society. The commission was still eager to press the Indians into programs of assimilation, and to abandon its communal ways. To that extent, members of the Jerome Commission were intent on declaring tribal governments as being invalid institutions. This was the same argument made ninety years earlier by southern states - one that would resurface in the Termination Era in the 1950s.”

“The Kiowa, who were present at these talks, wanted nothing more than the government to honor the agreements in the 1867 treaty. The government refused, but the negotiations went back and forth for 12 years, stalling the implementation of the Allotment Era until 1900.”

“A Kiowa Chief named Lone Wolf then sued the government to enjoin it from opening Kiowa lands to allotment. His lawyer filed a request for an injunction, asking the court to prevent the Interior Department from implementing the General Allotment Act. Lone Wolf argued that this unilateral federal action would deprive the tribe of its treaty-protected lands, but his request was denied. The judge explained that it was Congress's prerogative to allot any Indian reservation regardless of the alleged misunderstandings or deceptions perpetrated by treaty commissioners. Only Congress had the power to decide this issue, therefore, Lone Wolf's due process objections to the forced allotment and the sale of his lands should be dealt with by the body that could balance the competing public interest against the rights of the tribes.”

“The legalities were made moot by the fact that while the case was making its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, more than 150,000 homesteads were marked out in what had been Kiowa and Comanche territory. It came as no surprise when the highest court of appeals in the land affirmed the lower court's ruling.”

http://savagesandscoundrels.org/events-landmarks/1889-jerome-commission-convenes/

MERIAM REPORT

“Authorized by the Institute for Government Research on June 12, 1926, at the request of the Secretary of the Interior, the Meriam Commission was charged with investigating the affairs of Indians in the United States. The team conducted seven months of field work to gather its information. It conducted field work in 23 states, selected based on a report by the Bureau of Indian Affairs that arranged states in order of number of Native American inhabitants. The report showed 23 states having more than 1,000 Native American inhabitants, the top three being Oklahoma, Arizona, and South Dakota. The most significant and influential effect of the Meriam Report was from its strong criticism of the Dawes Act and analysis of its failings. Also known as the General Allotment Act, the Dawes Act of 1887 had sought to break up the communal Indian land by allocating allotments to individual Indian households, encouraging families to undertake subsistence farming, the model of European-American culture.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meriam_Report

“When the treaty-making era came to an end in the 1870s, the federal government decided to renew an old approach to solving its ongoing 'Indian problem.' Much encouraged by the fervor of Methodists and Congregationalist missionaries, lawmakers in Washington allowed religious groups to co-opt federal Indian policy with a new policy of 'assimilation.' This approach was based on the theory that one could 'kill the Indian and save the man,' and by so doing, at long last assimilate the Indians into mainstream society.”

“Indian children, abducted from their parents homes on their reservations, were brought to the Carlisle Indian School, in Pennsylvania, in hopes of 'killing the Indian to save the man,' the phrase used to explain the policy of 'assimilation.' Thousands of children died at these school, or ran away never to be heard from again. The federal government has never apologized to Native American tribes, or families, for abducting and incarcerating their children against their will - a particularly odious form of racism which is still a source of deeply held bitterness in Native American tribes. But killing the Indian, even by forcibly sending Indian children to Christian schools thousands of miles from their families, failed to accomplish its desired end of assimilation.”

“Nevertheless, assimilation would be the hallmark of federal Indian policy until the Nixon administration denounced it as barbaric and sponsored the Indian Self-Determination Act in 1972.”

http://savagesandscoundrels.org/flashpoints-conflicts/1882-assimilation-policy/

The foreigners were not satisfied to steal our land, steal our names, and thus our estates, they wanted our children too for their trafficking and perverse pleasure. Let's keep it real. Those children were sexually abused and often killed afterward..it was genocide by foreigners who claimed to be, “Christian People of the Book.”

Lord have Mercy