The Dawes Act The Dawes Act, or General Allotment Act of 1887, was a law that allowed the U.S. government to take Native American tribal lands and divide them into 40 acre lots for individual Native Americans. The goal was to break up communal tribal lands and speed the assimilation of...
topolitical participation, Indian policy turned from segregation to assimila-tion.1As applied to land, the ideal of assimilation took the form of theGeneral Allotment Act, or Dawes Act, of 1887, which envisioned carvingup the Indian reservations into fee simple plots owned by individualsand ...