About

The principal goal of US government American Indian policy has been the transfer of land from American Indian ownership to non-Indian ownership. This has been achieved through a variety of means - treaties, for example. But beginning in 1887 with the passage of the Dawes Allotment Act a new era began. Policymakers designed the Allotment Act for several purposes: to break up Indian reservations to make land more available to white farmers, ranchers and settlers; to turn Native people into private property owners; and to "detribalize" Native people (via private property ownership). Allotment had both material goals: acquire more land for settlement, and cultural goals: destroy Indian identity and assimilate Native people into the American mainstream. One of the architects of the allotment plan, John Wesley Powell, argued that because American Indians' land held "everything most sacred to them" taking that land away from them would destroy their tribal identity, thus making it easier for them to assimilate. Allotment reduced American Indian tribal land holdings from 148 million to 38 million acres.

But when allotment was thought to be taking too long, the next phase of land loss began: the sale of individual Indian allotments.

The sale of individual Indian land happened on a large scale all across Indian country wherever allotment had occurred. Much of this was illegal. Especially egregious was the practice whereby the US government issued, without consent, fee patents to individual Indian people to replace their trust patents. Indian agents gave out fee patent land titles to anyone they deemed "competent" to manage their own affairs. The process, though diffuse and scattered across multiple sources, is well documented in the archival record. A Coeur D'Alene woman was described as "fairly well educated, healthy, speaks English and should be given her patent although she does not want it." And one young man was "fully capable of caring for himself and should be forced to do so."

Having a fee patent opened land to sale and subjected it to taxes. Millions of acres were lost. The economic and cultural hardship this wrought was incalculable. The large-scale conversion of trust patents to fee patents was also an affront to many Native people. The trust relationship between tribes and the US government was a mark of tribal sovereignty; a trust patent was also a hard-earned property right gained during the process of allotment. In 1925, the Nez Perce business council put it this way: the trust patent is "one of our tangible property-rights. For this and other considerations, we exchanged our lands, our independence, and our whole method of living, our economic system, and our national (tribal) identity." Having their land held in trust was thus deeply important.

McMillen's project spans the 20th century history of Indian land sales, and a major component of that project is the digitization of historic, publicly available government data heretofore only available in analog form, in combination with General Land Office patent data. Once digitized the data will be utilized to understand, among other things, where and under what conditions land sales were more or less prevalent. The digitized materials will also allow the mapping of land loss and retention. McMillen would like to develop a methodology that would allow for other data sets, of which there are untold numbers in archives and government documents, related to American Indians, to be similarly unlocked and made available for research.