“Our spiritual leaders are opposed to the privatization of our lands, which means the commoditization of the nature, water, air we hold sacred,” said Tom Goldtooth, a member of both the Navajo and the Dakota tribes who runs the Indigenous Environmental Network. “Privatization has been the goal since colonization—to strip Native Nations of their sovereignty.” While its advocates say protections would be built in, previous efforts—the allotment system begun near the end of the Indian wars, and the termination of reservations and tribes from 1953 to 1964—show how such promises supposedly designed to help Indians were a snare and delusion quickly taken advantage of by non-Indians eager to grab Native land and devour its resources. This outcome was not an unintended byproduct of well-meaning reformers. It was the inevitable consequence of laws that Indians were not asked their opinions of in advance. The 21st-century privatization scheme makes it imperative to revisit past such efforts. In fact, 2017 marks the 130th anniversary of President Grover Cleveland's signing of the Dawes Act. That single piece of legislation had a more devastating impact on Native Americans than anything other than the century-long Indian wars themselves. And it was initiated by people who claimed, and some who actually believed, that they had Indians' best interests at heart. Alice Fletcher, one of its architects, called the Dawes Act the Indian Magna Carta, though not a single Indian had had a hand in its drafting.

The act allotted each participating Indian head-of-household 160 acres of farm land or 320 acres of grazing land, with 80 acres going to single Indians. The remaining “surplus” was sold to non-Indians, mostly whites. Tribal ownership and the tribes themselves were simply meant to disappear. Three Sioux boys appear in an 1883 photo when they arrived at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and three years later, showing one aspect of what the dominant culture had in mind for them. They are, left to right, Wounded Yellow Robe, Henry Standing Bear, and Chauncy Yellow Robe. As in many cases of scores of before and after photos of Indian children, these boys attired in their uniforms with their hair cut were photographed with more intense lighting to make their skin look less dark than it actually was. It was all part of forced assimilation, a profoundly racist policy dedicated to “killing the Indian to save the man” in the notorious terminology of Captain Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The school was designed along prison lines. There, and at dozens of militaristic boarding schools across the nation, Indian children—many forcibly taken from their parents—had their names changed, their hair cut, their languages forbidden, their culture and customs denigrated, and their tribal ties destroyed, only to be sneered at by the dominant society when they actually tried to adopt white ways once they left the schools. There is a name for this: cultural genocide. This isn’t just ancient history. Modern American Indians, whether they live on reservations, on private agricultural land, or in urban centers, still suffer from the consequences of these policies. Before the Dawes Act and follow-up acts were effectively repealed after 47 years by the Indian Reorganization Act, 90 million acres had been wrenched from communally-owned Indian lands held in trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, leaving just one-third of what the tribes had held in 1886, the year Geronimo (Goyaałé), the Chiricahua Apache, surrendered and was shipped off to prison. Named after Sen. Henry L. Dawes, who headed the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs at the time, the law was the culmination of practices toward Indians that had begun within a decade of the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth in 1620. Boiled down to their essence, those policies said to Indians: Get out of our way, or else. However, getting out of the way often wasn't enough to prevent the "or else." The Dawes Act arose at least partly out of the influence of a book written by Helen Hunt Jackson in 1881, A Century of Dishonor. It was the Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee of the 19th century, documenting the bloodthirsty avarice, corruption, and slaughter that had suffused Indian-U.S. relations all those decades since the first U.S. war against Indians in 1788. Jackson didn't live to see the Dawes Act passed, but she would no doubt have approved, just as so many of her readers did. A modern reprint of Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1881 best-seller. The intent was assimilation. Killing the Indian and saving the man meant turning Indians into farmers of acreage they held individually, altering gender roles, shattering kinship connections, breaking up communal land and tribal government, and, ultimately, wiping out reservations altogether. Officials thought this would be better for everyone as Indians adopted norms of the dominant culture. It would certainly prove valuable for transferring prime real estate out of Native hands.