Using Assimilationist Tools to Refashion Cultural Landscapes: Allotment on the Grand Ronde Reservation

Summary

The General Allotment (Dawes) Act of 1887 was passed amid mounting criticism that the federal reservation system was failing to assimilate Native Americans into Euro-American society. On reservations, Native communities grappled with the traumas of dispossession, violence, and food shortages, but they also possessed a degree of freedom to maintain cultural practices and identities. The Dawes Act was designed to terminate these lifeways by tethering Native families to privately owned plots, thereby encouraging Euro-American gendered divisions of labor, sedentism, and agricultural output. Among the first reservations to be selected for allotment was the Grand Ronde Reservation in northwestern Oregon. This paper discusses research by the Grand Ronde Tribal Historic Preservation Office to track the impact of allotment on reservation land tenure. Results suggest that allotment was guided by longstanding social ties between extended families, leading to a spatial distribution of reservation groups akin to that in pre-reservation western Oregon.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018   •
• Reservation Archaeology: Culture Change, Historical Trauma, and Community Resilience in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Native North America

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 442