Dawes Act

The Dawes Act of 1887, also known as the General Allotment Act, authorized the President of the United States to break up the communally held land of Native American reservations into individual allotments intended to convert Native Americans to individual, European-style farming, with any reservation land left over after allotment declared "surplus" and opened to purchase and settlement by non-Native homesteaders. The policy resulted in a massive loss of Native American landholding, from roughly 138 million acres held by Native nations before the Act to about 48 million acres by the time the policy was repudiated in 1934, and much of the farmland actually allotted to individual Native Americans was subsequently lost through sale, taxation or fraud, making the Act one of the most consequential and destructive pieces of US agricultural land policy of the era.